Authenticity, the poet’s most plausible con trick: sine qua non.
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The spirit, rather than the letter, of authenticity is what marks out good poetry. Those who achieve both, or appear to achieve both, are gods.
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Don’t waste time on compromise. Even a botch job is better than a failure of nerve.
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The act of writing poetry is, by its very nature, ironic.
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‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ (John Keats) What could be more authentic? Or more calculated?
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Belief in authenticity is the gateway to Blake’s road of excess (and we all know where that leads).
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The Fool opens the Major Arcana: innocence and an openness to failure breed creativity.
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Good poetry can be written by an idiot. All things considered, it’s probably better to be an idiot and save yourself the burden of knowledge.
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Federico García Lorca: ‘The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.’
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Lorca and the duende. Arsenic lobsters. The raw and the cooked. What flies in one language may fall flat in another.
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Trust yourself. You don’t have to believe in angels to hear a bell ring. And vice versa.
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Still, poetry is hard; it demands energy. There must be an energy to the poem that propels each line toward and beyond the waterfall of the line-break: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (Dylan Thomas).
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Home is where the stress falls.
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The more authentic the idea, the more natural and unstrained the line, even when rhythm cuts across sense.
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The line that calls attention to its own idiosyncratic hiccups can be as authentic as the line that speaks of elegance and tradition: intention is everything.
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Rhythm that springs direct from the personality – however contrary and antipoetic – is authentic. Everything else is based on the way we think we ought to be writing.
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Mina Loy: ‘Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.’
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An adopted persona is still true to the self if chosen by the self.
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The truly authentic is never the other, only the self – even when disguised, lying, psychotic.
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You cannot steal or borrow or learn authenticity. It’s either there in the work or it isn’t. Sometimes the only way to find it is to stop looking.
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The poem made up of undigested influences is to poetry what the plastic flower is to fresh blossom.
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The rules change over time, but one constant remains: the poet must believe authenticity to be possible, whilst faking it like crazy.
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The poet’s truest voice is an amalgam of second-hand fictions.
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If poetry is a fiction, how can it ever be true?
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Truth is perception, and typically includes at least one leap over error-infested waters.
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There is more authenticity in the dullest moment of our lives than there is in the greatest poetry. But that is no excuse for writing dull poetry in the name of authenticity.
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Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist and editor. Her latest full-length collection is Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing). She is the editor-in-chief of Horizon Review.
