What I thought was – what if you could make a hole in the side of the pot and feed the thin bone half-through, build it up just a little so the bone could slide back and fore through the hole, but the thicker ends keep it from slipping out? I imagine a bulbous little pot, rounded and irregular, smooth and with a balanced violence or thrust, in the way of the rock I found later, thoroughly buttoned into a coat of lichen, flat waxy white warts, like the skin of an embryonic crocodile.

The problem is that organic matter burns away in the kiln. Of course it does. Would the ash be black or pale grey? A spoor of black or pale grey soot, like the shadow of the bone that pierced the pot…that excites me. I came back and looked at last week’s abandoned thumb-pots, swelling and sagging in a deep bowl of water. There’s no waste in clay. Wait, I tell myself. Wait and really mean it. At the moment, I can do one big, difficult thing (writing the novel-Story), and one quicker less weighted thing (make a pot, read, teach, research) on top of a bit of social and admin. Otherwise I get scattered and unhappy.

You start a thumb-pot by plunging your thumb (I like to trim the nail so it doesn’t bite) into a lump of clay small enough to hold in one palm. You thin it gradually in spirals by pressing your thumb on the inside of the pot against your index finger on the outside. If it’s not going to collapse, you have to let the clay stiffen a little between each thinning.

I’m at my most hopeful when I can see what I want to make, but haven’t yet started to make it. Every urge to make has its waxing and its waning.

Jen Hadfield’s most recent collection, Nigh-No-Place, published by Bloodaxe, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007 and won the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008. She lives in Shetland.

There are a number of people doing empirical research on poetry, particularly on how readers process and respond to poems. Whether or not you can access this kind of scholarly research freely (i.e. without a trip to the British Library or a university card) depends on whether the researchers have published or archived it online. The first series of links, then, are all from Prof. David Hanauer (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) who has made several of his articles available through open access archiving of post-prints.

Hanauer applies scientific inquiry techniques to issues around text processing, comprehension and classification. He believes that the empirical method can be used in literary studies “as a research tool for deepening our understanding of issues arising within a literary system”, and he is (or was) particularly interested in poetry – though he seems to have done more in the area of ESOL and multicultural literacy in the last few years.

Whether or not you agree with his methods or his conclusions, it’s pretty fascinating to see someone design and execute literary experiments, and to see empirical reference points for ongoing arguments about how readers approach poems and what makes a poem poetic.

Hanauer, D. (1996). ‘Integration of phonetic and graphic features in poetic text categorization judgements’. Poetics 23, 363-380. Experiment to test the extent to which the sound of a text (levels of rhyme, assonance, etc.) and the way it looks on the page (lines, stanzas, etc.) make readers judge it to be more or less poetic, and how their level of literary education/experience affects those judgements. A James Joyce poem was manipulated to enhance or suppress those qualities.

Hanauer, D. (1998). ‘The genre-specific hypothesis of reading: Reading poetry and encyclopaedic items’. Poetics 26, 63-80. Experiment to test whether there are significant differences in the ways that people read texts from different genres: in this case, a comparison between a poem and an entry from an encyclopaedia. Hanauer looks specifically at reading time (i.e. do people read poems more slowly than informative texts), comprehension judgements (do people feel less confident that they have understood a poem) and surface information recall (do people remember more about a poem’s language, form and structure).

Hanauer, D. (1998). ‘Reading Poetry: An Empirical Investigation of Formalist, Stylistic, and Conventionalist Claims’. Poetics Today, 19 (4), 565-580. Experiment to test the extent to which people’s approaches and responses to poems are determined more by the reading conventions associated with the genre than by the inherent linguistic or structural qualities of the poems themselves. This is perhaps the most complex and ambitious methodology of the lot, combining manipulation of a poetic text (James Joyce again) with a framing element (i.e. describing the text as either ‘text’ or ‘poem’) in the context of modelling and comparing two extremely detailed theoretical positions.

Hanauer, D. (1999). ‘Attention and Literary Education: A Model of Literary Knowledge Development’. Language Awareness, 8 (1), 15-29. Not an empirical study, but interesting for its focus on the development of a reader’s ‘awareness and attention’ in literary education. Although Hanauer is talking about people learning how to read poems, much of it could stand for people learning how to write poems as well.

Hanauer, D. (2003). ‘Multicultural Moments in Poetry: The Importance of the Unique’. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 60 (1), 69-87. Conceptual paper arguing that poetry’s emphasis on uniqueness, both in terms of language and perspective, make it a welcome advocate for the individual voice in a climate of collectivisation and generalisation, and that this has implications in the field of applied linguistics, particularly in relation to multicultural, multi-generic research.

Finally, a nod to other studies in this area, which unfortunately don’t seem to be available on the web without subscription, but are worth a look if you can find them, and find this kind of thing interesting.

Peskin, J. (1998). ‘Constructing Meaning When Reading Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study’. Cognition and Instruction, 16 (3), 235-263.

Warren, J. E. (2006). ‘Literary scholars processing poetry and constructing arguments’. Written Communication, 23 (2), 202-226.

I have been working on some poems for an event called ‘Vincent and Poetry’ which takes inspiration from the exhibition.  I have been writing sonnets – or, I should say, I had a mind to write sonnets for this event.  One reason was purely pragmatic; the form, with its traditional use of rhyme and metre, gives listeners something to hold on to. But a second reason was driven by the exhibition itself.  If Van Gogh worked so hard to master his art, then I should work equally hard to master mine. The event is in his honour after all; the poems must live up to that.  But also coming back to me as I shuffled around the packed exhibition was Yeats’s famous line ‘Irish poets, learn your trade’[3].  Yeats is another artist who worked hard.  In Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Helen Vendler fills a gap in scholarship which has largely neglected the immense efforts Yeats put into poetic form; she uses drafts of the poems to illustrate his frustrations, strains and exhaustions when writing, as well as the choices he made.  His motivation was, as Vendler writes, mastery of the ‘secret discipline’:

He singled out, with respect to painting, “that stern colour and that delicate line” – an emotional palette and structural draftmanship – as the ingredients of that “secret discipline”. In poetry, as in all the arts, “the gazing heart” remains the centre, but it doubles its might by its own proper means: diction, prosody, structural evolution, a sense of perfected shape.[4]

To me this resonates with another striking phrase from Van Gogh’s letters. Referring to the introduction of the first specks of colour into his Dutch landscapes, he wrote to Theo: ‘My palette is thawing.’ [5] Perhaps my own palette too was undergoing a similar change. The sonnets I was writing loosed themselves from their prescribed rigidity; they thawed, and became better.  The poems I admire – what I would consider good poems – exhibit this kind of development.  Underlying every poem should be the hard work that the writer has put into learning his trade. No matter how seemingly loose or effortlessly written a poem can be, to achieve the effect of what a truly polished poem can do it must come from the pen and mind of a grafter.

Poems tend to fail, I think, because the thaw has set in too early or, indeed, if, rather than waiting for the thaw, the poet has taken a hammer to the ice.  The increase in poems that scatter across the page, line breaks that don’t fall naturally, unintentional lack of scansion, or poems that are no more than broken bits of prose, is in my mind a noticeable development in published poetry in the last ten years. A possible reason for this is that many poets (myself included) find themselves writing directly onto the computer screen. It can lead to line breaks being created not rhythmically, as the thinking-hand connecting with the page would do, but aesthetically, as to the look of Times New Roman on a white screen. Change the font, and often ones feelings towards a poem changes, which is a risky business.

Don’t get me wrong, I have certainly been guilty of all of these things when writing poems and realize, sometimes too late, the mistakes they have led to. I am also not advocating poetic conservatism, for lyric formalism or otherwise. My point is this, when formal and free verse experiments work it is clear – always clear – that the poet has first learnt and understood what Yeats called the ‘trade’ of lyric form.  There are countless examples of poets who exercise these word-movements to the desired effect, an effect which builds on that background of well-practiced form and rhythm but moves skillfully beyond it, where the placing of the words on the page actually works with the rhythm and assonance of the poem, and is done for more than arbitrary or zeitgeisty reasons. John Burnside is one example from contemporary Britain. His latest book The Hunt in the Forest[6] is the most accomplished example of the trade he has been perfecting all his writing life, demonstrating his understanding that rhythms start in the head and heart, not on the page.

Yeats’s mantra lives on, beyond the limits of its national implications: learn your trade. It is learned through practice and effort, and also through studying the work of others, as Van Gogh studied Durer, Millet and Goya. I would add my own simple mantra, lifted from reading Vincent’s letters and viewing his life of effort: I must try harder.

‘Vincent and Poetry’ is at the Royal Academy on April 9^th

Michael McKimm won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007.  His poetry appears in Best Irish Poetry in English 2010 (Matthew Sweeney, ed.) and his first collection is Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009). www.michaelmckimm.co.uk

This is a text I accidentally came across as I was opening boxes a few weeks ago, trying to put order to my papers, after I moved to a new flat in Berlin. I had written it twelve years ago and it had been, back then, part of the introduction for one of my readings. As the idea of looking back to the development of the Poena Damni trilogy through its various stages had already started to turn around in my mind, the piece struck me in its simplicity and relevance. I started the Poena Damni project  two decades ago, without literary ambitions as a priority; there were themes, a quasi-philosophical inclination towards some kind of order, and the goal of a structured text that could pin down ideas and allow an overview of their interrelation. Among a cluster of concepts, God and the religious experience was a prominent one: God, a far-fetched hypothesis in Nietzsche’s words[1], questioned by data of suffering and death; but still answering to a strong human need, and surfacing as a form of hope developed into various systems of religious belief. The image of a destitute, handicapped man, homeless, his flesh shining under the Athens sun, as if flayed, laid on the side of a street with a blanket at his side, was stuck in my mind for some time after I had seen it back then; that, and its literary equivalent in Sophocles’s Philoctetes, presented for me in a nutshell a commonsense challenge to faith by stressing the tension between hope and tragedy in life and art. I wanted to try and come up with a text in which this tension could be contained again, but I  had no intention to present things under a new perspective; the text should express the same old situation, only I wanted it structured my way; I had no claim to originality whatsoever. The term ‘Poena Damni’ I also had come across in that period, and it seemed to encapsulate my point of departure: it refers to privation of hope – God is inaccessible, he won’t be there for you, not now or ever. According to Dante and Thomas of Aquinas this was the ultimate condemnation. I decided to use a persona after the image of the handicapped man – a person that would really have use for hope and help from God. Like the man on the street, the protagonist of The First Death, the third book of the trilogy, strives for survival in the midst of an ongoing collision with the external world. His strife mattered to me the most, and as I started to write, images densely concatenated were falling in place one after the other; a process by which, the external world, hinging on the subject of experience, was tightening its grip on him. I had envisaged it to be a gradual conquest and elimination of the self, and thought it would work better from a first person perspective. Poetry came naturally as a medium for doing this, it helped me to swiftly lower or raise tension while keeping the text as compact as possible. A monologue form seemed suitable too, each one a snapshot of this gradual process – fourteen different “stations” stemming from the protagonist’s marooned stay on a seemingly deserted island. The opening part is a God’s eye view of the situation; a broken man alone on the shore and adverse conditions starting to take their toll. From that point on, the account of the protagonist’s situation would come through interconnected images that would proceed in a linear way and draw the reader flesh and blood into a sequence of blows coming from without and within. The reader, like the protagonist himself, would have to compose himself at the end of each round in order to be able to fight back in the next. Turning literary tropes on their head was necessary: a metaphor would not work as a way to expand on an image, it would not be a means of analogy or comparison; rather, it should become part of the events unfolding. This allowed different levels coming into the story. In the end, and despite the linear development of the fourteen stations, the reader should have the feeling that the story implodes; in the center stands the subject, reduced, to a point in space, as described in the last monologue, not being able to claim a future for himself anymore.

Poena Damni is a trilogy written in reverse order. The First Death was a book about survival, almost Darwinian in its subject’s continuous struggle for life. The man was embedded in the world, fighting meaninglessly perhaps. No hope for salvation, at least in the traditional sense. In the second book, Nyctivoe, I tried to go beyond that, to speak about somebody who does not seem to lie helpless anymore, but rather to be the subject of a tragedy that could be transcended. In an earlier version of the book I had written back in the 80’s I started with Legion, the demoniac of St. Mark’s Gospel who runs to Jesus and tries to make sense of his self-inflicted suffering. It was a drama of voices between him, a Narrator, a female Chorus, and Nyctivoe, a vampire-like female character that would eventually bring Legion to salvation through death. Back then I was researching the ritual origins of drama and a spiritual atmosphere was present in the outcome, but now it seemed deeply unsatisfying – more like a Heinrich Heine-like romantic poem. The drama structure, however, still seemed the best way to focus on something beyond nature, an enacted myth of transcendence. So I started again. The principle was still, not character in action, but action in character, and in the course of four years a sequence of alternating voices developed, characters in a state of trance, hardly listening to one another, almost fully absorbed in an inner world. The setting was Legion’s graveyard in the Bible and, stylistically, the monologues were closer now to something like Valery’s La jeune Parque – a post symbolism of some kind. That meant progress, but there were times when setting and style felt tangibly obsolete. I was writing from a council estate block in Brixton. I was going ahead in the charted direction but after long working hours it only seemed to become a little bit better – until someone broke into my flat and I needed to care about a grill on my front door window. I went down to Loughborough Junction. Mechanics shops under the arches, scrap metal, exhaust pipes, tyres all around. This setting struck me now as much more relevant than what I had come up with so far. I went back and started again. No more a Bible cemetery but a run down place under the arches; instead of characters invented, actual people in my vicinity would do the job; homeless people, or long term unemployed would set up a performance, a ritualistic and grotesque drama under the eyes of the Narrator, a Brixton street preacher. In the last six months I dismantled the book: the stylized visions of fictional characters gave way; fragments of those were still left, but the monologues were now consistently breaking, the actors were forgetting their lines every now and again, staying embarrassingly silent, and intermittent phrases were contributing to a new atmosphere of religiosity. There was a new sacred site, like the one in Werner Herzog’s Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen, where the Aborigines gather in a supermarket lane, by the detergents, to dream of their children. By the same token, in Nyctivoe, a metaphysical world is there, faith as well, depending on whether one is willing to enter that universe, take trance for real, or would rather prefer to sit back and take it in as nothing more than a performance among cement walls, old carburettors, rotting pipes and a lumpen-like audience[2].

Nyctivoe is a play put on paper in retrospect by a person that happened to have watched that performance – a lone train traveller incidentally running an errand for somebody he had met the day before. This is how far I had got in 2001 when the two books – Nyctivoe and The First Death – had come to completion. What was there still to be developed? The traveller’s journey. How did he get there? Where did he start from? What had happened to him before he became a part of the audience? Z213: Exit would be the text to answer these questions as well as bridge over to the other two books from a narrative point of view. The answers should of course be evinced by the account of the traveller himself – perhaps a sort of unreliable narrator; once again a first hand viewpoint mattered to me more than the objective description of a third person narrative. The protagonist would speak about what is important to him; this could be done in a journal; tropes could be allowed, but only because of the intention, or rather, the urge on behalf of the author/traveller to express as accurately as possible what had happened – to pin down an image, an experience, an emotion, or even mere sensory data, without any literary ambitions on his behalf. The journal would be a necessary tool for the man’s journey; a Bible-like book on the outside, with some pieces of the Old Testament inside it indeed, but with plenty of blank pages as well as some already filled by somebody else – it had been someone else’s journal before. From that moment on, this “Bible” became a book akin to a palimpsest, but not exactly: rather than scrub and rewrite, the two narrators follow each other – the one stops ahead of the text of the other and the sparse interpolations of the Scripture seem more like distant memories, or rather, phrases copied from a real Bible into this one. That was the basic structure that would define two different styles of writing as well as individuate each separate piece. The idea was that each entry should observably differ from the next: the traveller would change during the journey faster than one would expect; lacking a stable identity that would hold experiences together, the man travels ahead, in a state resembling short term memory loss – a kind of anterograde amnesia. The entries had to be detached from each other and loosely connect. But this is exactly why the journal is important to the author: it helps him place himself, it works like a spatiotemporal chart. For a stylistic purpose it was important to follow an easy but time-consuming rule: the parts should be written with some months’ interval in order to achieve a natural modulation in his way of writing; the reader should also be under the impression that the previous piece is forgotten as the current one is being taken down; each part should be independent in its recounting of a current experience. The end result could be a work of literature but only accidentally: in principle it should plausibly be only a journal, albeit less conventional than the ones I had come across during my background reading. The text could accommodate literary qualities too, but only from the reader’s viewpoint: take the first text in the book; it may probably prompt someone’s aesthetic sensibility. But is this text originally intended to do that? What if this, really, is a first person account of someone’s actual experience transcribed, word for word almost, into the book?  This happens, in fact, with that particular text. But if so, then this text, or perhaps other parts, introduced rather than composed, can prompt the reader’s sensibility by virtue of their “readymade” status, contextually only. Here, in a contrary movement to a “readymade” in Duschamp’s tradition, a linguistic entity is not introduced into a new space with the scope of unveiling its underlying aesthetic qualities. Here the reason, rather than aesthetic, lies in function: someone reads a diary entry as some kind of return: it is a kind of nostos; a place in a memory chart holding together an inner life of some self; a chain consolidating the past, and the meaning of it. It may be nothing new or original; yet, it shows the course of a voyage and a current position.

[2] Despite having now completed the trilogy, Nyctivoe still remains a work in progress. After it has been presented in different theatre-like as well as visual art versions there have been new ideas; my aim is to make now the necessary amendments for a full-blown theatrical performance.

Dimitris Lyacos is the author of Poena Damni (Z213: Exit, Nyctivoe, The First Death) written in reverse order over the past eighteen years. The trilogy has been translated into English, German, Italian and Spanish and has given rise to various performances, as well as visual art projects by artists around Europe. The English version of Z213: EXIT will be out next March by Shoestring Press. For more information visit www.lyacos.net

Ghost narratives present their own unique problem as they are intrinsically restricted by their subject matter:  ghosts may be scary spooks from the other side of other but they are creatures of teasingly brief appearance, proscribed habitat and gestural repetition.  They don’t do narratives they do events.  For all the brevity of my stories they seemed too  verbose so I gathered up my astonishing and terrifying events and laid them to rest in my limbo files to gather virtual cobwebs.  They would find a good home one day.

That day eventually came when Jeff Hilson asked if I had any poems for an anthology of sonnets he was editing.[1] Sonnets?  No. I had only ever written one sonnet and the experience was akin to doing a crossword puzzle but less satisfying.  Fitting words into a finite number of lines and subjecting them to complex rhyming schemes delivered through the futility of iambic pentameters.  The whole gridlocked artifice is then sprinkled liberally with conceits ending with the pith of rhyming couplets.  It really is the maddest poetic form ever devised.

Admittedly the anthology I was being invited to would extend and  challenge the very nature of the sonnet form while at the same time paying homage to it.  Central to the anthology was the inimitable American poet Ted Berrigan and his legendary sequence of sonnets.

In Jeff’s excellent introduction to the anthology he cites observations on the sonnet by William Carlos Williams who argues that its restrictive form closes down originality of movement and concludes   ‘all sonnets mean the same thing’.  I cannot agree that death, for instance, is the same as a bunch of broccoli but Williams certainly has a point that the development of  ideas within the sonnet’s strict template imposes an equality of sameness through identical treatment that can undermine subject matter.

The unforgiving rigidity of the sonnet form wasn’t the only reason I  steered clear of the sonnet.  Its elevated status due to Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton all lending their names to variation of the form has created an air of veneration around the sonnet which I find irksome. A sonnet is an arrangement not a sacred relic. More important though is the difficulty I find in reconciling this archaic construct as an ongoing and valid poetic form in the  21st century.

We have now entered countless centenary anniversaries of the  unprecedented artistic upheaval at the beginning of the last century. 1910’s alone saw the cataclysmic exploits of the Ballet Russe, Futurism, Dadaism and every kind of ism.  Innovators of the likes of Stein, Joyce, Pound, Tzara, Picasso, Stravinsky, Nijinsky and a cast of a thousand brilliants were taking the western world by its starched, high collared throat and shaking it till it screamed.  It screamed all the way to war and back again as the arts challenged every fabric and stratum of society, convention and unthinking tradition.

Artistic forms lay gasping for life in the aftermath of creative mayhem and two world wars.  The creative surges in literature, art and music in the first half of the last century  was almost without parallel. Looking at  much of today’s poetry in this country with its rather slight and polite aspirations it is hard to believe what was happening a hundred years ago.  Oh grandmothers what big sharp teeth you had!  Despite everything the little sonnet slid through, slightly bruised but intact.

After Jeff had asked me for some sonnets I never gave it a second thought but as we all know life comes at us from unexpected  angles tripping up our safe day and cocking a snook at our convictions.  And so it happened. I was innocently rummaging through the bottom drawer of my copious filing cabinet when I came across some old print-outs of my forgotten ghost stories. It was one of those mini epiphany moments that make us believe in the possibility of the supernatural:  sonnets!  That was what my ghost stories needed and that’s what they got.

Indeed the sonnet form fitted my ghost stories like a glove. Succinctness and immediacy with minimal syntax.  So not one sonnet but sixty two came tumbling out.  It was exhilarating.  Not that I did the rhyming schemes, finding the right word is not the word that rhymes, but I did the lines, the conceits and the couplets and I even capitalised each line because that’s always struck me as a convention of such utter arbitrary nonsense it interested me.  Even at my most ‘experimental’  I’ve never done anything so lacking purpose as to capitalise a word for no apparent reason.  And what a breeze to have the form all laid out for me with no agonising where every single word must be placed on the page –  half the job of writing a poem was already done.

So I began a love affair with the sonnet because it proved efficient for my need and unexpectedly fun to work with but I’m not totally starry-eyed as it’s still only an extended poetic device which can be disrupted at will and certainly not something I ever intend to venerate.

Advice can come with impeccable credentials: it can be detailed, perceptive, imaginative, and practical – and still, the best thing for the recipient may turn out to be to ignore it completely, to press on along the apparently wrong lines.  Maybe a dud poem has been sniffed out; but it’s probably not going to become anything other than a fixed dud, for all the corrective surgery that may be advised; and for a good young poet it’s sometimes important still to believe in the thing that hasn’t worked in order to create the next thing – which, indeed, might work.  For good or ill, any real poet risks everything in a new poem, and that process of risk doesn’t need or necessarily profit from the kinds of risk-limitation which good advice often proffers.  A real poem, that is, lives with the possibility that it might not be any good, and no amount of training, or canny targeting, can ever lessen that.

So, my little difficulty: people want me to say things about their poems, and I think I have useful things to say about their poems, but at the same time I don’t believe such things are ultimately all that useful; by the same token, I’m pretty sure that real poets aren’t going to use what I have to say in any very straightforward way.

Like many difficulties, that one can be solved by a measure of diligence and self-awareness, and by getting on with the job to the best of one’s abilities.  I’m still struck, though, by the way in which the rise of ‘creative writing’ has bolstered a belief in the authority of writers.  Now, there are certainly some kinds of authority which (say) an experienced poet might have:  she or he is probably in a good position to tell you about whether a certain rhyme earns its keep in a poem, whether a particular rhythm is handled effectively, or whether a sentence has been pushed past the term of its natural life over a number of lines.  Aspirant poets should listen to this kind of thing, and listen very carefully.  But it’s another, more general, sense of authority which seems to attach itself to the advising writer nowadays, where there’s a strong suggestion that this person can really help you by setting you on the right road, or even on some kind of inside track.  Often, the writer giving advice is doing so on the strength of her or his own track record, and there’s the suspicion, or the hope, somewhere in the room that maybe the magic of this kind of success will rub off… Here, I think, ‘creative writing’ – as a relationship (often indirectly a  business relationship) between a writer and pupils – carries a number of real dangers for both parties.

I have always taken it for granted that a young poet is by definition ambitious, but I have understood that as being ambitious to write really good poems, and to keep doing so for as long as possible.  That is the only kind of success that should make sense to a committed writer.  Yet there are people who want to be successful poets, and imagine they can become these by learning how to write successful poetry.  I can understand this, up to a point; but of course I tend to misunderstand what might be meant by ‘successful’.  Here, ‘creative writing’ and the way it is marketed muddy the waters:  ‘success’ can mean the likelihood of being published, then published in the right places, then acclaimed and rewarded by the right people… It’s worth noticing, I often think, how in the last decade or so the phrase ‘established poet’ (beloved by course brochures and publishers’ catalogues alike) has taken on the aura and force of a ‘made man’ in Goodfellas.  What must I do, the ambitious pupil might ask of their established master, to be like you?

One answer is, You must write my poems – or, since you can’t actually achieve that, you must write the poems that are in accord with the kind of poems I write (and write successfully, remember).  A lot would be comprehended in that ‘accord’; not least, it would presuppose a hospitable attitude towards the master’s poems, and beyond that to the poems and poets favoured by the master.  In fact, I don’t believe this is what very many teachers of creative writing would ever sincerely think, let alone say; but there is a logic to the industry which requires this to be the strong, if subliminal, message that is conveyed.  I suspect, moreover, that a large number of ‘customers’ want to hear exactly this, and want to know where they are in relation to an apparently official world of esteem.

Does genuine talent play along with this kind of thing?  I doubt it; and I think that it’s precisely here that poetic gifts tend to cut loose, and not do what they’re told.  If anything is unfortunate in the contemporary history of British and Irish poetry, it is the death of irreverence: I sometimes fear that I will live to see a poetic gerontocracy suppress unsupervised young poets, and replace them with apprentices and clients.  That’s too gloomy, of course.  I’m well aware of some very sharp younger minds who regard a number of ‘established poets’ with the kind of scepticism that comes from acute and informed reading of their poems; but it’s concerning, all the same, that they feel they must watch what they say in public quite so carefully as they do.  One day, some of them will be ‘established poets’ themselves; and a test of their integrity will be the extent of their enthusiasm for such establishment.

Not taking advice, then, can be a vital part of learning to write poetry, as well as of (that much more nebulous and perilous subject) learning to be a poet.  It may well carry a cost, though: you may make mistakes in poems, or about poems, and do yourself no favours with the purveyors and enforcers of a contemporary taste.  But poems shouldn’t be written in order not to make mistakes; they shouldn’t be  produced to pass muster, to fit in with this, that, or the other set of expectations.  Proper poetry is, after all, a surprise – sometimes a shock, sometimes even an affront.  Gerard Hopkins, just turned twenty, discovered in the greatest contemporary poet of his day the mode of writing he called ‘Parnassian’, and wrote to a friend in terms that still have a powerful resonance:[1]

Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet.  Do not say that if you were Shakespear you can imagine yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you cannot conceive.  In a fine piece of inspiration every beauty takes you as it were by surprise […] every fresh beauty could not in any way be predicted or accounted for by what one has already read.  But in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with the difference that if you actually try, to find you cannot write his Parnassian.

I’m tempted to say – and can almost hear myself saying (with sniggers from the back) – that every young poet and critic should be made to recite these sentences weekly in public.  What I mean is that the thoughts here are fundamentally important ones, and they carry authority for the ways in which we admire poetry, as well as the ways in which we talk about and as writers act on that admiration.   In terms of ‘success’, it was perhaps his loss (though it is our gain) that Hopkins did not try to be Tennyson, and that he was so very bad at taking advice.  But in a way, it is Hopkins’s implicit advice in this letter which every intending poet needs to hear, and hear again at regular intervals.  As readers and as poets, we all learn to admire, and we go on with that long learning; with talent and with luck, as writers we will learn how to admire, and do otherwise.

In the city I miss star-thick winter nights. Something evocative remains in the first smoky weeks of the autumn: the bright-dark dusk as you notice the brake-lights stabbing on, the slow sulphurous warming up of streetlights. But soon it is all top-lit amber-grey which flattens the street and lids the sky.

The bright-dark encourages dreaming. The word “focus” is cognate with “fire”, the hearth which the family gathered round and stared into. Behind them, the flickering flames shifted the room’s perspectives. A little away from the family, a candle cast a cold halo over book or writing table. Imagine how that would seep into your writing. Now shadows are banished from corners. Central heating and screens in every room have left the grate unfocused. The gas fire may have retained some vestigial warmth, but, as Tony Harrison noted, sitting with his ex-coal miner father, it’s “Not as good for staring in, blue gas, / too regular each bud, each yellow spike.”[2] The coal-fire simulacra cowling some gas fires settle for a bed of lumpy warmth rather than spooky rainbow-plumed updrafts and shape-shifts, though even that effect is defeated by electric light.

Darkness and light. Liminal / luminal. You need darkness to see certain lights: stars, sparks, glow. Heaney tells us that all he knows is a “door into the dark”. Inside “The Forge” is an “altar” where, in an “unpredictable fantail of sparks”, the blacksmith “expends himself in shape and music”, beating “real iron out”. The dark is sacred, mythic, magical, but also somehow more authentic than the contemporary world of traffic “flashing in rows”. In the dark we see a vanished world, like the one in which the Bard Schools nightly set apprentices themes to work on “the whole next day in the Dark, till a certain Hour of the Night, Lights being brought in, they committed it to writing”.[3] The dark allows imagination to roam, feed on memory, conjure visions. Seeds grow in the dark earth, but they grow towards, and flower in, the light.

The archetypal poet Orpheus bears a name which is probably connected with “darkness” (Orphna). The Underworld is peopled with shades: these dead give wisdom which we can retrieve into the light. Following Orpheus, the Orphic Mysteries proclaimed a cycle of death and rebirth, darkness and light. The Orphics revered Phanes, the god of light, but also Persephone, seasonal goddess who wintered underground in Hades to be reborn each spring. In Hades, the dead may choose to drink from Lethe, forgetfulness,  or Mnemosyne, memory: the latter guarantees rebirth with the knowledge of past lives. Mnemosyne is also the Mother of the Muses. The descent is only part of it; we must learn from the shades then reascend into light; to wallow in darkness is eternal death.  Dante is guided through Hell by Virgil who had his hero Aeneas also descend. “Facilis descensus Averno”: it’s easy to slip into Hell, Virgil tells us: climbing out is what’s difficult. The inchoate and dreamlike beckons, but the gradus ad parnassum, the slow ascent to craft, requires perseverance and  guidance from the shades.

Darkness is, of course, also a metaphor for depression or mental torment, the time of ashes. Roethke writes: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see, / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade”.[4] This “darkness” is beyond seasons. Tennyson’s “dark and true and tender is the North”[5] contrasts with the “bright and fierce and fickle” south. But fierce bright Spain gives us Lorca’s death-haunted duende: “all that has dark sounds has duende”[6]– and St John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul. For Scott Fitzgerald “in the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in the morning”,[7] while for Nathaniel Tarn the terrible thing about la noche oscura is that it comes about in broad daylight.[8] A gloomy January afternoon, however, can make even “the long dark tea-time of the soul” seem more like Eliot than Douglas Adams.

Google “poetry and darkness” and you discover the vast goth subculture in which psychic darkness complements the subfusc dress-code. “Emo” poems peep out from behind stage-scenery that was already looking rackety by the time of Baudelaire and the druggier decadents. Some sites give tips on writing “dark poetry”: “think of dark things… death, blood, negative thoughts, depression, anger, hate, fear and the supernatural are good things to start off with. Add in anything else not listed here”; “If you cannot think of anything else, write about death.”[9] Black has always been the new black, since melancholy or “black bile” was the admired mode on Elizabethan page and stage. Though Robert Burton claimed to write his compendious The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in order to avoid the condition, later writers seem in love with it. “O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!” writes James Thompson in The City of Dreadful Night (1874), anticipating the ironically gregarious nature of the black-clad virtual brotherhood now baring their dark souls on the web. Dark fashion outlasts seasons by ignoring them.

Most of us spend our season in Hell and move on. “Darkness” is seasonal, or was. Traditionally haiku contained a season-word and were often grouped according to the four seasons. This system was robust enough to accommodate the bombing of Hiroshima [6 August] and Nagasaki [9 August], though the ancient lunar-based calendar meant that the first fell in summer and the second in the autumn. Since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by Japan in 1872, there have been problems reconciling lunar festivals with the solar calendar. This, and the diminishing influence of the seasons on modern urban life, have led to the growth of new categories: tsûki [“spreading through seasons”] and muki [“no season”]. Though western poetry traditionally mirrored the seasons and the ecclesiastical calendar, meaning has now effectively been banished from both. We have Kenyan green beans, Spanish strawberries, all seasons and none. Seasonal Affectless Disorder: our season-words become as incomprehensible as Shakespeare’s old measurements of rods, chains, furlongs, perches.

Darkness may signal the end of seasonality itself. From Biblical punishment to Milton’s “darkness visible” it has been also been retributive. In Byron’s “Darkness” “The bright sun was extinguished” and the world doomed to be “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless – / A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.” Not so long ago, the Cold War threatened us with a Nuclear Winter; today global warming seems more likely to banish seasons or twist them out of kilter.

In a way I’ve returned to where I began: dark skies. A bare-light bulb you can’t turn off is torture and now the American Medical Association warns of “light trespass”: “Many species, including humans need darkness to survive and thrive. Light trespass has been implicated in disruption of the human and animal circadian rhythms, and strongly suspected [of causing] depressed immune systems and increase in cancer rates…” Poetry adapts. Nick Laird, for example, has a poem called “Light Pollution”, but i[1]t’s difficult to imagine a genre growing out of the night-time glare and the buckled seasonal wheel bewildering man and beast. Slowly we recognise that “Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.”[10] It may also be essential to our poetry.

It is as if we were back at the Théâtre des Funambules, during the era of Les Enfants du Paradis, when pale-faced Pierrots walked a rope before stepping onto the stage. It was actually a tightrope set across the proscenium, in front of Harlequin’s coat (the stage curtain). Actors who were not acrobats or mimes fell off the rope and were sent to perform far up backstage. So the word ‘rope’ was banned from the theatre and its use subject to a fine. One had to say ‘line’.
- Marcel Marceau, Foreword to On the High Wire by Philippe Petit

A book fell into my hands on Christmas Eve: a loan, a great Christmas present, from a friend who used to be a circus performer and now has progressive MS. Long out of print, it’s almost as hard to obtain as the condition it describes: On the High Wire, by Philippe Petit, translated by Paul Auster, with a foreword by Marcel Marceau. The book doesn’t mention Petit’s famous walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, but focuses on the mysteries of the high wire itself: technique, great walkers who have mastered it, and the spiritual impulse and discipline of the walk.

As I read, I began to see – ahem – parallels. A writer, an acrobat of the page, can only aspire to the condition of the wire walker. But from a lifetime of reading poetry we know that its effect, the thing that touches the spectator, is the same: the poet is in his way a magician, a mime, a trapeze artist, and he must proceed just as carefully as these if his poems are to be successful. So it is pleasing to learn about how to approach the writing of poetry from these great silent masters.

Of course, if his line is slack or unsupported, or if he puts too much ego-awareness into his backward turns, a poet is not going to die. But his meaning will – and, for the duration of the poem, his meaning is his existence. The line has to be taut, and strong enough to hold, and the grease left over from production cannot be oozing out of its “soul.” (The wire walkers have an entire lore just about the construction of the rope: its materials, width, methods. The central core, often of a different substance from the rest, is called its “soul.” Petit buys huge lengths of cable and leaves them out in the garden “for several years” to become completely dry and weathered, then cleans them with gasoline. Elizabeth Bishop famously did this with her poems.)

“Whoever intends to master the art of walking on them,” writes Petit, “must take on the task of seeking them out. Of comparing them. Of keeping those whose properties correspond to his aspirations. Of learning how to knot them. Of knowing how to tighten them.

It is the work of a lifetime.”

Later in the book he writes, “If you want the High Wire to transform you into a high-wire walker you must discover the classic purity of this game. But first you must master its technique. Too bad for the one who turns it into a chore.”

In other words, the dedication is the thing seeping out of your soul. So what is the lore of a line of poetry? What is it?

A line of poetry is made – crudely – of two things, words and line endings. They are made to length, knotted together, constructed and tethered, tightened and tested, and need to be able to carry the poet’s intentions.

Of these, words are made of meaning and sound.

Meaning is made of dictionary definitions, association, history, etymology, word play, and even – to some extent – sound. The meaning in poetry flies higher than the meaning in prose: two sentences with identical “meanings” can mean vastly different things according to the choice of words and sounds, the provenance of the words, the consonants. Think about these soft sounds: ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’. Aside from the formal, almost archaic ‘arise’, and the repetition of the phrase ‘and go now’, let’s imagine what would differently be conveyed if we said, ‘I’ll get up and depart, and depart to Nantucket’.

Sound is made of waves, which produce both noise and a physical effect on the body. These waves make patterns: softness, hardness, openness and closedness, assonance and alliteration, rhyme, dissonance, rhythm. Rhythm is a patterning of relatively regular emphasis, of speed, pauses – which poets call caesurae – and of the length of the line itself. The “standard” line of English poetry, the iambic pentameter, is said to be the length of a breath.

We measure the most regular rhythms with a tool called metre. Metre is measured in feet of neatly-laid-out syllables, or by the number of syllables that are emphasised (“stressed”) in a line. Some irregularity is permissible in metre, but if it gets too irregular it becomes free verse, which may have a defined, if loose, rhythm of its own.

Line endings are, of course, the most problematical part of a line, because they define its shape, tension, and relation to adjoining lines. Many poetry tutors don’t like to discuss them at all; it’s almost as bad as crying “Rope!” in the Théatre des Funambules.

The end stop, the enjambment, the if, and or but, the clever trick. Michael Donaghy compared rhyme to tightrope walking, or stiltwalking, and I’d add line breaks in general to that comparison. According to Donaghy, if you use rhyme it’s like walking into the room on stilts or a rope, saying, look what I can do! If the rhymes are too obvious, if they fail, you fall on your face and they laugh instead of admiring your skill. I’d say if you use line endings clumsily you run the same risk. In the world of the high wire they call these the anchor points, and they utilise the most careful skill in deciding where they are to be placed.

Ending on a preposition or particle is, to my mind, an almost surefire way of falling down. Like the one-word line or the one-line stanza, it creates a particular nervy effect. It is difficult to do this really convincingly; it operates as part of a system whereby the line is weighted at its first word – so the dying fall of the ending is a ruse, the reader trips up slightly, and the first word of the next line picks it up and tautens the whole thing again, consistently along the whole line. In fact, the particle or preposition is the very thing that puts the weight on the start of the next line – so you’d better be sure it can bear it. If not, your reader will never regain footing.

The line that ends misleadingly halfway through a phrase, which completely changes in meaning once the reader reaches the second half, is another. There is a significant tension between the ending of one line and the start of the next, and this tension can be pleasurably heightened by adding to the previously deduced meaning suddenly. If the second half of the phrase alters, rather than adds to, the meaning of the first half, it breaks the link between the two lines.

I recently heard someone say they judged if the lines in a poem were working by how they looked on the page. If the poem “looks okay”, whatever that means, then the lines are working. This statement – and I honestly can’t remember who made it – goes against the entire principle of what you’re up there trying to accomplish. Sure, a poem should look okay on the page, but this will change – yes it will – even according to the proportions of the typeface used, the kerning and general page layout. It is more true to say that if a poem works, is held together by its own internal tension in a state of delicate yet tensile balance, it will tend to work on the page. The elements of this tension are listed above. Sound is absolutely critical and informs everything.

“Sound” means listening to your words as they really are, not according to syllable counts and not shutting your ear because you think the “meaning” is fine. Of course it is always a good idea to say your poem out loud, but you should really have been listening to the words in your mind’s ear as they occurred. Rejecting or choosing them in the twinkle of a soundwave. It means understanding the values of different sounds, If you really hear the sounds your words make, the feel of them in the mouth. If you have tuned your words as delicately as a violinist tunes his strings – another kind of “tight rope” – you will not end one metrical line with a crammed-in extra syllable, only to begin the next one with another. You won’t write free verse poems with inadvertent lines of perfect metre – say, rollicking dactylic tetrameter in a lean, hard poem about your dad’s death. And you’ll never stand in a venue reading out your own words with the stresses where they shouldn’t fall. “Now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT!” you will not say.

And yet at almost any reading you go to, you hear poets reading their own work like this.

But it’s not just poetry, although poets seem to have a sad tendency to think poetry stands apart from everything else. The novelist James M Cain reports an anecdote about the making of the film Double Indemnity, when the director, Billy Wilder, complained that the screenwriter – Raymond Chandler – was throwing away Cain’s original “nice, terse dialogue.” Cain told the Paris Review that Wilder “got some student actors from the Paramount school, coached them up, to let Chandler hear what it would be like if he would only put what was in the book in his screenplay. To his astonishment it sounded like holy hell…” It was “written to the eye.”

Harry Secombe had an anecdote about being in a “straight” radio play early in his career, before the pure comedy of the Goons. But comedy creeps in, and actors have lines too – and ‘rope’ to hang themselves. A young, inexperienced actor was cast by mistake, instead of a well-known performer with the same name. Attempting to read the line, “I’m going now, so help me on with my coat,” the poor fellow declaimed: “I’m going now, so help me – on with my coat!” The producers realised their mistake: as in les Funambules, he had fallen off the line. He was not seen again. It became a family catchphrase.

In other words, “looking okay” is a result, not a condition, of success.

A whole chapter of Petit’s book lists many exercises the high-wire walker will learn. The tricks the wire-walker can do on the wire. These include walking backward, doing comedy routines, wearing disguises and imitating characters or animals; incorporating other people or animals into the act; “tricks with a Chinese umbrella or an Indian fan,” dancing, jumping, taking tea, and lying down. ‘Resting’ is a most painful exercise and requires the walker to move through a whole internal landscape of pain and fear, before he reaches the point of stillness lying on the line.

Once he is an accomplished high-wire walker, the walker keeps his low wire for practicing these exercises and inventing new ones, making them perfect, discarding the ones that don’t work for him. You must drop an exercise from your act if it is distracting you in practice sessions. Once on the wire you need to feel comfortable and able to give yourself to the moment. “Silent and alone, he brings to the high cable everything he has learned down below. He discards the movements space will not support and gathers up the others into a group that he will polish, refine, lighten, and bring closer to himself.”

The list of tricks, or exercises, a poet can perform on his or her line is also nearly endless; some of them are even the same as above. They need to be learnt and practiced too. “Limits, traps, impossibilities are nothing to me,” writes Philippe Petit. “Every day I go out to look for them. I believe the whip is necessary only when it is held by the student, not the teacher.” He describes doing his practising in blizzards, in rain, on wobbly lines, in mismatched shoes, in wooden shoes, with people shaking the installation ropes, drunk, even naked. “You must struggle against the elements to learn that staying on a wire is nothing,” he writes. “Limits exist only in the souls of those who do not dream.”

Or write poetry, dear reader. Like Philippe Petit, we give a 12-minute performance even though our heads are stuffed full of the knowledge of centuries. So let’s go and practice our exercises and techniques, and strive to create the illusion based on reality, precision, breath, fluid movement, and the utter stillness of balance on the line.

Katy Evans-Bush is a freelance copywriter, editor, communications consultant, poet, critic and journalist. She blogs at Baroque in Hackney. Her first collection, Me and the Dead, is published by Salt, and a new pamphlet, Oscar & Henry, is published on 15 January by Rack Press.

Perhaps because of this I’ve always been fond of poets who throw (stretch? undermine?) their own voice through active engagement with the other – who seek to tackle otherness on its own terms or on terms which might conceivably belong to it. I don’t mean I’m interested in poems that ‘fight to speak for silenced voices’ – all those tedious efforts to dredge up mute historical lady-folk, or to fence the pc corner of the marginalised. Once you’ve heard one sassy woman talking back you’ve kind-of heard them all: Mrs Aesop is Mrs Midas is Mrs Lazarus, and most of them are actually Carol Ann Duffy, looming large behind an all-too-see-through veil. No: what I’m talking about is the poem which presents things from an alien perspective, and which struggles for a language which is someway adequate to and honestly expressive of that (inevitably imagined) perspective. These, too, will always be refractions of the self and the self’s own interests, but at least they grant us access to less formulaic (and less formula-friendly) zones.

I love, for example, William Carlos Williams’s freakishly evocative ‘The Sea-Elephant’,[2] with its interwoven refrains of ‘Blouaugh!’ and ‘Yes/ it’s wonderful but they/ ought to/ put it/ back into the sea where/ it came from’. This poem sounds out many voices, and many tones of voice:  the practicality of ‘that woman’s/ Yes/ it’s wonderful but’, the voice of the sea elephant itself (‘feed me’; ‘I/ am love’), the speaker’s own horrified, exalted fascination (‘O wallow/ of flesh’), the voice of the ring-master (‘Ladies and gentlemen!’), even quotations from other poems (‘Spring is icummen in’). It walks a line of almost-communication not only between human and animal, land and sea, but also between motley individuals who, gathered together round the same focal point, are not quite ‘getting’ it or, indeed, each other. ‘The Sea-Elephant’ dramatises a meeting between worlds, a cacaphonic clashing of perspectives which, bar that of the poem’s primary speaker, bounce back off the atmospheres of individual microcosms. The poem is all about voice – the absence of coherent voicing between creature and human, the poet’s pained desire to interpret creaturely sounds – but it eschews comfortable regions where the act of speaking sense to others happens easily. Williams gets the sea elephant convincingly precisely because he lacks the hubris to do so: it is a ‘too-heavy/ body/ the sea/ held playfully’ but which makes no demonstrable sense on land.

‘The Sea-Elephant’ is a troubled poem – as much as anything else it’s about the macabre nature of Victorian voyeurism – but it also, to my ear anyway, rings a note of renovatory triumph in lines like the relocated ‘Spring is icummen in’ and ‘Sick/ of April’s smallness/ the little/ leaves’. This is tradition reworked, sent in a new and bold direction. I can never read the poem without hearing in it a profound gust of defiance: I’m tired (Mr Eliot) of the kinds of things poetry deals in, I’m wending a different way, don’t you feel invigorated? The same spirit animates Edwin Morgan’s poems in the voices of computers, aliens and space modules; also Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World. In Morgan’s essay ‘Roof of Fireflies’ he talks about the multitude of interests he indulged in as a poet in the ’60s:

Looking back, I would find it hard to scrub any of these interests, or to say that whatever it was I had to do in poetry was harmed by the diversity. I knew that it was not my job to ‘find my own voice’ as reviewers are always encouraging young poets to do. That is one kind of poetry, which is not mine. Good luck to Seamus Heaney, but I pushed out, and continue to push out, a different kind of boat. What about a boat that is itself a shape-shifter: the nuclear-powered icebreaker is now a light white felucca triangle fading in the heat haze and then a bathyscape goggling at black smokers and it emerges as an oily junk on the contraband run and before you know it it is a ship of space out there up there riding the solar wind.[3]

The freewheeling analogies bespeak endless curiosity and a fierce desire to experiment: like Williams, Morgan is a poet of the world; he goggles at the whole of it; he holds a microscope in one hand, a telescope in the other, and he sees the vitality in and the vital importance of employing both tools imaginatively. Morgan’s poetry expands and critically alters readers’ views of the world they (and many other entities) live in. I like him so much because he sees no value in reaffirming the known; instead he is always probing away at the unknown, and this, for me, is what poetry is all about and why writing in voice is worth the effort. In an essay on early Auden, Seamus Heaney describes two types of poem – the one which ‘plays into the prepared expectations of our ear and our nature’ and the one which seeks ‘To avoid the consensus and settlement of a meaning which the audience fastens on like a security blanket’.[4] The latter, I think, is what good poems in voice achieve, and it’s why I go to them again and again: if I want to be told what I already know I will buy a newspaper.

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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.