Making a poem: Fishing in a disused quarry
I don't know how anybody else reacts to an invitation to write about their process as a poet, but this is how I reacted:
1) feel terribly flattered
2) agree to do it
3) panic.
I mean, process? What process?
Imposter syndrome perhaps, but also a fear that applying too much critical analysis to my own way of working might choke it with self-consciousness. Like many people, I wrote poetry as a child and stopped writing it in my teens. Teenage angst, partly—the fear of being different in the wrong way—and that weird adolescent combination of pride and diffidence that says that if you can't shine at something straight away then it isn't worth bothering. But partly also, the onset of O-Grade English.
I loved English Literature (and Language when I came to it later), and I pursued these subjects through school and university, right up to Masters level. But treating poetry as a subject for study and analysis somehow prevented me from thinking of it as something I could do myself. That may not be everyone's experience, but it was mine. It wasn't until I had finished with the formal study of poetry that I was able to start writing again. I use what I learned—the literature and criticism, the ideas I've been exposed to, the side-alleys I've wandered down. And it's not that I don't think seriously about what I'm doing, or how to go about it. But I'm wary of putting those thoughts together into a framework for fear of building myself a barrier, or a trap.
So this is where I bring in one of the… er… less usual critical voices I've encountered over the years — Dorothy L Sayers. Writing about her experience as a translator of Dante she says,
… to tell you the truth, any translator is lucky if he can live up to a quarter of his own theory. What he usually does is to grapple with the task as best he can; then read up on the rival theories; and finally construct a theory of his own to explain and defend his practice. (1)
I find this a useful way to think about poetic practice too. So with that in mind, I'm going to look at three of my recent poems, and see if I can construct a theory to explain what I did.
i
I'll start with ‘A Visit to Braemar’. This poem had a fairly straightforward starting-point, a news story I saw on the BBC website in 2021 about a litter-picking exercise on the Mar Lodge Estate. It included a picture of a scrap of sandwich-wrapper that had been there, apparently not biodegrading, for almost 30 years.
2021 was the year when the environment went from an intermittent to a pretty much constant source of alarm, especially in the aftermath of the Australian bushfires and with the IPCC report and COP 26 still to come. But my mind fastened onto what it could immediately take in from the image: the sandwich label; the price. I looked the ‘Best Before’ date up and discovered it was a Monday, which suggested a weekend visitor. That took me into my own experiences as a weekend visitor to the Highlands, and from there to imagining the person who left that scrap of wrapper.
For poems with an element of narrative, I tend to use the second person, which lets me bring in things a first-person speaker wouldn't know. In this case I wanted to be able to talk about consequences, and I chose to address the imagined visitor explicitly, rather than a more general you. Although the last line can read more than one way (‘clear away’ could depend on ‘can't help itself’, or be an imperative addressed to the visitor), it can sound tonally quite didactic, and I embraced that – in fact the original lineation of the poem, which put a stanza break before this last line, emphasised it. But when Causeway accepted it for publication they suggested a couple of minor changes and one was to close up that last break. This was largely for practical reasons, so that the poem would fit on one page, but it also had the effect of restoring ambiguity to the last line and I think now that that's an improvement. Generally speaking I've found magazine editors are light-handed in suggesting changes, and when they do they're usually on to something.
ii
‘A Visit to Braemar’ had a fairly short line of development but my second example is more complicated, and maybe more typical of the way I work. ‘Apocalypse’ was first drafted in 2017 but its origin lies in 1989, when I was one of a party of students given a tour of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. We saw wonders that day and one thing that stayed with me was a group of illuminated Armenian manuscripts: the Book of Revelation, and commentaries on it. Even knowing the little I did about Armenian history, it didn't surprise me that the ‘Book of Revelation’ or the ‘Book of the Apocalypse’ (as it was often called) was a book with a particular resonance for the Armenian church. The ominous colours of the illuminations – black, blood-red, dark green and muted gold – left a strong impression, as did the almost-abstract design of some of the pages, the pattern of wings as the Heavenly Host descended. But I wasn't writing at that time, and the impression stored itself away somewhere.
I'm not sure what brought it back to the surface in 2017, but the notebook where I first wrote it down has a number of notes and drafts relating to paintings, mainly in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, and particularly paintings of saints. I was grappling with the loss of a friend who had died the previous year: her intense religious quest had eventually led her to the Orthodox Church, and we had become somewhat estranged—I was part of the world she was leaving behind, long before her last illness. Thinking of her, and seeing the Gallery's black-and-red-and-gold painting of St Michael Vanquishing the Devil, must have brought those Apocalypses back to mind.
Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil, Spanish, early 15th century; unknown artist (attributed to Gonçal Peris), National Galleries of Scotland.
They in turn brought back other things. The poem's opening image, of the sky cracked open and the angels looking down on terrified mortals, is from the Old English homily for Easter Day in the Blickling Manuscript (2), which I read as a Masters student. (‘Lots of strange things in Blickling’, the prof said at the time. ‘Irish Influence’. And the closing allusion to the Star Wormwood of ‘Revelation’ (3) dates to my upbringing at the tail end of the Cold War, when we all knew which target we were in the blast radius of (RAF Leuchars, in my case), and the rumour that the place-name ‘Chernobyl’ meant wormwood seemed all too believable. It was the context of the gallery, though, that made me picture the artist who made these detailed, meticulous illustrations of the end of the world.
Apocalypse of John. Armenian manuscript, 1368. Bible of Bologna Italy, completed in Crimea.
I addressed the poem, once again, to a second person, but a less definite person than in the Braemar poem. The second-person can be a cheat code, letting you come close to an ‘omniscient narrator’ viewpoint but retaining immediacy of voice. Over an extended piece it shows its limitations, but within the smaller confines of a poem you can usually get away with it
So I wrote it down and then… I went off down other tracks, and the poem stayed where it was. Until 2023, when I looked back through some of my old notebooks and the draft caught my eye. In the later stages of a pandemic, with forests and tundra on fire and the name Chernobyl back in the headlines, the questions of apocalypse seemed more personal. How do you continue to make art when it seems your world is ending? Is your dramatic pictured apocalypse just a way of distracting yourself from the banal, grinding destruction all around you? Sometimes a poem has to wait for you to catch up with it.
I relineated it—coming to a draft ‘cold’, and reading it aloud, gives me a clearer sense of where the pauses and emphases fall in a piece—and tightened up some of its longer sentences, but the succession of images was pretty much unchanged. Going back cold to the poem also made it easier to tell whether it could stand alone, and speak to readers who didn't know the source work—that independence is something I aim for in ekphrastic poems, and it's difficult to be sure you've achieved it without a cooling-off period (though 6 years is long even by my standards). All the same, submitting ekphrastic poems for publication needs a bit of thought—some editors just don't like them. But in this case, the poem was accepted by The Ekphrastic Review, which specialises in them.
iii
My third poem also developed slowly, but in this case it had to wait for time, not to give it context, but to make its subject writeable. ‘Flowers’ is about the funeral of my eldest niece, who died aged 13. It was first published in Northwords Now in 2014 but it had taken over a decade to emerge from a series of false starts and uncompleted drafts as I tried to write an elegy for her. I can't look back over the drafts now because I didn't keep them, but birds were a presence in many, and the business of trees and gardens re-emerging into summer a year, two years, more, after the cold early spring in which her funeral took place. But I felt I was writing at one remove: not talking directly about her, and not wanting to talk either, in a poem in memory of her, about the anger and the ugly emotions that attend on loss. Rituals and traditions around death, and how we speak of the dead, exist for reasons and interrogating them is difficult.
A remark by Michael Symmons Roberts in a radio talk about elegies (4), where he said that in the Western poetic tradition, an elegy will always have flowers in it, gave me a new line of approach. Some of my angrier drafts had taken stabs at funeral conventions like flowers, cards, death-notices—at one point the poem was called ‘Inscriptions’—but the poetic conventions around death and commemoration were a nearer focus. I wrote the poem in the first person—unusual for me unless I'm writing in a persona—but thinking about poetic convention gave me enough distance to talk both about the loss itself and about the need for, the inadequacy of, the ways we cope with it.
The focus on the flowers made it imperative to avoid ‘flowery’ language, and so the descriptions in the poem are deliberately sparse: no colours except the grey grass; ‘nothing weather’. The details from the earlier drafts are still apparent to me, but they are in shadow form—’pretty coloured flowers and little messages’ for all the funeral accoutrements, while the birds and new leaves are noted as an absence. This page intentionally left bleak. Celebrating the person we lost I kept for other poems.
The last alteration I made was to the last line, which originally ran 'that terrible waste of flowers'. I meant waste as in ‘wasteland’, but going back to it after a pause I could see the word was ambiguous in a way I didn't intend or like. Even when you feel pretty sure you've finished a poem it can be worth taking Basil Bunting's advice to put it away until you forget it, then go back and cut out every word you dare. In this case I didn't cut the word outright, but replaced it with ‘swathe’, which still has connotations of loss and destruction and which preserved the assonance of the long ‘a’.
iv
So what, if anything, can I conclude about what I do… from what I did with these poems?
Sometimes the process, if I can dignify it with the name, is a bit like crystal seeding—an image in a news item or a remark on the radio is enough to precipitate a poem out of the saturated mixture of thoughts and associations it drops into. At other times, it's more like fishing in a disused quarry: your line catches and you reel it in, and up comes a bicycle wheel, with the handle of an umbrella hooked through it, and you keep reeling and the umbrella spokes are caught in a fan belt, and so on, from one association to the next.
But what seems to be important, either way, is to let things—recent and long-past—come into contact, and snag on one another or react together. Sometimes a subject will suggest itself as soon as you encounter it, but often things you had forgotten or discarded will come up out of memory to meet it, and turn out to be what you were looking for. Important too, at least for me, is the feeling of being in conversation—with the work of other poets and artists, as well as with the audience and the immediate subject(s).
Which leads to another thought. Quite a lot of what passes for my process—and I suspect most people's—is the process of trying to make time and space to let these connections happen. It's hard to achieve in ordinary working life, and it hasn’t got less so in recent years, for anybody. Employers want more for less; home life and health are more of a struggle to maintain as the public resources we relied on are squeezed almost out of existence. And the shared resources so much of the creative life draws on—presses, magazines, festivals, libraries—are being cut to the bone, with what remains staggering on on minimal grants, crowdfunding, and the unpaid efforts of people whose own creative life suffers accordingly. More and more, it feels as if we're cutting into what little imaginative capital we were able to store up when times were less hard. Pacing a narrowed space. Eating the seed-corn.
How do we keep going? And how, in this denuded landscape, do we open ways for the poets and artists we need—whom the world needs, even if it doesn't know it—to come after us? I don’t have any answers: just more panicked questions.
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1. Sayers, Dorothy L , ‘On translating the Divina Commedia’ in The poetry of search and the poetry of statement : and other posthumous essays on literature, religion, and language (London: Gollancz, 1963)
2. Morris, Rev R (ed), The Blickling homilies of the tenth century London Early English Text Society 1876 https://archive.org/details/blicklinghomili00morr/page/n5/mode/2up
3. ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.’ (Revelation Ch 8: vv10-11)
4. Symmons Roberts, Michael, Elegy, Radio 3 feature (his website, https://symmonsroberts.com/broadcast/ has this listed as a 2008 work but I believe I heard a repeat, probably in association with his Radio 4 Drama Elegies, which was broadcast on Radio 4 in October 2020).