Poem 546

Mercifully I wrote few poems about writing poems and for the most part when I sat down ideas materialised out of the ether or out of making a start and following the breadcrumb trail of words … I had a curiosity to see what would come and to document the activity of my mind, a diary in a different way, my own festschrift of glimpses moments insights memories and cross-brain connections …

… and of course a core strategy was to reject the qualitative idea of waiting for inspiration in favour of the quantitative one of believing there was a constantly-brimming reservoir I just needed to tap into … I’ve always been fascinated by prolific artists and the first lesson you learn in examining them is that there is no diminution of quality just because they write a lot … the second lesson is that their oeuvre must be considered as a whole rather than through some narrow lens of the selected or the ‘best of’ – if someone wrote something (you think is) good then everything else they wrote is of interest too, follow the artist and trust the artist, they are the golden thread that stitches all their art together, don’t swallow the lie of the one-hit wonder or the myopic rush to judgement of thin Elvis vs. fat Elvis … that’s what ultimately defeated my attempts to connect my poetry to the world, the world wanted a few tips of an iceberg glinting in the sun, that’s what they thought poetry (and my poetry) should be whereas I couldn’t detach it from the iceberg or indeed the whole polar ice sheet …

… I also love an artist who writes faster than mortals can (properly) absorb (eg. Prince), whose managers run around squawking about the danger of ‘flooding the market’ – it’s the slow world’s problem if it can’t keep up even with a (relatively) modest 550 poems at the rate of one a day …

… and most of all don’t make the naive mistake of thinking where there is bulk there by necessity can’t be value … I’m open about how often I wrote and how I did it – and that should convince you of the massive amount of care I took with everything rather than the opposite, that I was somehow casual or lackadaisical  … if you’re serious about your work then you don’t just go in when you feel like it …

Hitting A Dry Patch

I thought writing poems
was like letting loose
one of those jittery
child's toys
                       a truck or train
that bangs into a chair leg
backs off
tries another angle

but the engine is broken

this poem for instance
is just spinning
unable to move forward
knocking only
against air