“Perhaps this is the playwriting side of my nature, but I want the poem to retain something of my present tense, my breath and body.”
I don’t know how I write a poem. Saying that poems come to me or through me—an image, a voice, the misty, muddy movement-without-form—may sound precious or pompous (and of course most of what I’m writing on any given day won’t strike me as particularly “good,” or good yet) but it’s honestly how I feel: I don’t know where they come from, I just know they’re not really mine.
I happen to be obsessive-compulsive, in a clinical sense, so it’s fair to say a poem starts for me as something like an intrusive spark, and the drafting and redrafting (etc.) becomes compulsive—and enjoyably so; though the source of the poem is often the pain of loneliness, grief, anger, joy. (And sometimes poetry comes as response to very physical pain, as was the case during my wife’s treatment for cancer in 2015, and mine in 2016.) Writing poems isn’t so much an attempt to control these experiences as to understand them, and to convey both the experience and the understanding to anybody who might listen.
I started writing poems as a kid in an abusive home where the truth could not be spoken. I found I could write as if eavesdropping, seeing with a kind of peripheral vision, and what appeared on the paper might tell me something crucial about myself and my surroundings. Something frightening but truthful and therefore liberating. I believe this practice has, on balance, saved me.
I write prose and plays too, and while playwriting is of course intrinsically about hearing voices, it’s poetry that’s remained my most unconscious mode of expression. In that sense I can say it feels most pure.
A finished poem that goes unheard will feel like a failure to me. So while I write I imagine them read—and read aloud. Perhaps this is the playwriting side of my nature, but I want the poem to retain something of my present tense, my breath and body.
Over time I’ve come to realise that the poems I write are conflicted: between private and public, page and stage, literature and performance. These are productive tensions for me, and anyway honest expressions of my nature. I don’t trust tidiness—of genre, of psychology, of any kind.