writing in the journal by redcargurl, under a Creative Commons licence

In September of this year, Salt Publishing will be releasing In Their Own Words, an anthology edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes, and featuring short pieces from contemporary UK poets writing about their own poetics.  Here's what I had to say on the subject.

poetics

the gentle stringency of a daily routine; the power of even when you don't feel like it

the first mug of coffee; the wistful phantom of the first cigarette

the experience of flow: its on-fire unselfconscious exhilaration, its inherent challenge-you-were-born-to-meet, its promise of languid good-day's-work fatigue

the moment, on leaving the cinema, the gallery, the concert hall, the book, of stepping out into a new world, not back into the old one

the sharp quiet of an engaged audience; attentiveness becoming a tangible, breath-thieving presence in the room

the heisenberg uncertainty: the right sound, the right meaning, the struggle for the right measure of both

the two-ness of inspiration: emergent, heterodyne, bijective

the reminder of entrancement bestowed by a borrowed toy: the mirror-tumbling leggy beetle, the wooden tower of tilting, marble-passing cups, the twitchy new-hatched seamonkeys

the infinitely-superimposed guise of a single landscape: stacked snapshots assembled by season, weather, hour

the plain wooden cabin, the empty desk, the armchair

the momentary illusion that any mind is not, after all, wholly alone at the heart of its own circumscribing universe

the way, over years, the act of performing a poem and the act of performing a sonata begin to elide

the archaeology of constrained forms:  delicately paintbrushing the sand away from each anciently pre-ordained fragment

the line, maybe the last - hers/his/mine/yours - that parascends over the clenched lip of grey battlements, or eels in through green-slimed ancient drains, to unseal the fortress from the barricaded side

the creative muscles reaching fitness the way the body's muscles do: the mind suddenly free to wander, no longer willing and dwelling on every forward inch

the sometimes-cinematography, sometimes-mythography, sometimes-psychography of dreamlife

the sound of Australian birdsong warbling from a tiny corner speaker, a volubility so lost and so familiar; looking up in surprise, trying to locate the unexpected magpie

the way that submerged mot juste is not just on the tip of the tongue, but in the curve of the palms, the kelpy undulations of the feeling-for-it fingers

the lack of interruptions; rarely, but magically, the obliviousness to interruptions

the unshakeably sunny day heralded by fruitful morning writing

the little stuffed Beaker on the windowsill: his labcoated, stick-'em-upped arms; his helpless muppet terror - meee! - bleating the ultimate cautionary tale

the Magic Eye moment when it finally comes right: a random dot stereogram suddenly clicking into apparency

the ache: a lump under the tattered rug of consciousness, the inarticulate, incurable ache

the itchy ghost of an outdoor hat indoors

the way discarded words - fragments, variations, half-decided lines - pile up at file's bottom like strip-cut castings from a digital shredder

the butterfingeredness of picking out an old tune on a new instrument (the salutary reminder of incompetence);  the hyperawareness of learning a new tune on a well-known instrument (the salutary reminder of possibility)

the ascent, like much-spoofed ape-to-man, of pun to simile to metaphor to formless overarching intuition

the shed (in all its heterogeneous guises) as stalwart nurturer of creativity (in all its heterogeneous disguises)

the perfect couplet constituted from despair: forklift-prongs to elevate even the blackest tonnage of mood

the brilliant work of others, unenviously cherished because that's it exactly

the chasm - tantalizing, sickening, inevitable - between the work's intimation and its execution;  the lifetime's tightrope-walk above that unsealable breach

the last poem written; the one on the way

by Kona Macphee

Category: poems