Curlews scatter now on a winter field, their calls
small alleluias of survival; I offer you
poems, here where there is suffering and joy,
evening, and morning, the first day.

It’s inviting to take “small alleluias of survival” as emblematic of the book. Similar phrases occur elsewhere: in ‘Late October Evening’, thrushes and blackbirds hurl “valiant songs against the gloom”, while the dedicatee of ‘Report from a Far Place’ is “witness to what a life saves out of the assault”. On the other hand, “small” is hardly the epithet to apply to lengthy sequences such as ‘Fugue’, ‘Madonna and Child’ or ‘Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill’.

The dead are an important presence throughout these poems, beginning with Deane’s wife, who died young. In the earlier pieces, he struggles to make sense of loss. ‘The Instruments of Art’ asks:

… What, now,
is the colour of God is love
when they draw the artificial grass over the hole …

By the close of ‘Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill’, there is more coherence. Deane’s dead father and grandfather kneel among his “eldering congregation” and the ghost of his late wife visits him amid a snowstorm with the benediction “live at peace in the rush / of arctic wind”.

Most of the living Deane writes about are in pain or hardship. ‘Fugue’ wrestles powerfully with the heartaches and beauties of Deane’s relationship with his daughter. Other people, such as the girl in ‘Acolyte’ who has a “mutilated brain” and rocks “in unmanageable distress”, arouse in Deane “the hopeless urge / to lay my hands in solace on the world.”

This is not to say the collection is bleak. Deane reaches for hope and renewal, often deftly balancing them against the agony and questioning. In part he achieves this by frequent recourse to the sheer life of the natural world, which “is whole, holy and unsoiled” (‘House Martins’), but it is primarily a product of the Catholic faith at the heart of his outlook.

For Deane, God’s presence seems oblique, furtive, often hidden in suffering; he comes, in a recurrent image that draws us once again to nature, “like a fox, magister of the subtlest arts / of being.” (‘Madonna and Child’) We are offered not a crisis of faith, but a faith of crisis. This lends the poems a broader palette than the personal. However, it feels insufficient justification for the blurb’s claim, “these poems … meditate on the relevance of Christian spirituality to our troubled times”. A handful address wider events but the focus remains on Deane’s inner life.

For instance take ‘The Apotheosis of Desire’, which intersperses a visit to Jerusalem with sections in the voice of Mary Magdalene. There are references to the conflict and the tourist kitsch of the city, but the conflict explored is the pilgrim’s: “I came seeking”, “I will be earthed”, “I have been handling / only my own desires”. For contrast take ‘Cedar’, an angry, urgent and raw snapshot from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 48-page title sequence, which closes the book, is anchored firmly in Deane’s “own / blithe and sorry histories”, combining these with musical references from Palestrina to Gorecki, the baptism of Christ, alongside mentions of 9/11 and Anne Frank. It is unmistakeably a work of later life, moving from childhood memories, towards a mature naivety:

… I am relearning
ignorance so I may write foolishly again and say
it will be all right …

and concluding with joy at a granddaughter’s birth: “Freude! / out of the bleak black soil of the earth”. Drawing together the book’s themes with fluidity, it provides an impressive capstone.

A body of work consistent in quality and vision emerges in this book. At his best, Deane makes a quiet, resonant music. As he says in ‘Fugue’: “Attend. Be faithful. Grow fluid. Be at peace.” For those open to that call, there is much to appreciate in this sound of a life deeply lived and generously given.

Andrew Philip
Andrew Philip’s second collection, The North End of the Possible, has just been published by Salt in April 2013.

Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet Press, 2012, £12.95

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

I used to be a bit of a fan of the Wilt books but I haven’t gone back to them in a long while. Does the withering comedy still stand up? What happens to satire when its targets move on? I was reminded of Wilt’s manner and voice while reading Death Comes for the Poets. While few of us had Nazi dads, the satiric muse springs from wanting to kick the pricks. Death Comes for the Poets takes a pot shot at the incestuous world of poetry and its British Council offshore holdings.

Jobbing in the service of poetry occurs in the small hours in Maidstone, above a pub, an audience you could count on two hands, including a child and the nuns and your arch enemy from the poetry wars in the back row. Scattered applause. One book signed, none sold.

Our puffed-up poet is Fergal Diver, wine buff, food writer, the kind of preener who uses the word ‘aficionado’. He repairs after his desultory reading for a solo Indian meal and a 2005 Rioja. Death Comes for the Poets is the product of decades in the poetry jungle, looking out for the undercover snakes and swatting at the mosquitoes. “Utterly Maidstone.” Maidstone is only the start of it: the booze, the bad meals, the trains fucked up, the books not sold and only a haiku to show for your troubles at the end of the month.

The fun is in the roman à clef aspect. The authors tongue-in-cheekily invite the reader to join up the dots, to match their fictional poets with real-life counterparts. They’re composite beings, you feel you might have met them at the backs of readings, or heard them wittering in Bloomsbury offices, or taking the steps three at a time at the South Bank, but you can’t quite put your finger on them. Tambi Kumar is the sub-continent gone fruity, with slightly off English. The Oirish poet Barnaby Brown is steeped in folk up to his oxters. Damian Krapp of Tavistock Square, who runs the big little magazine on a shoestring, is, well, crap as a poet. They’re all figures from central poetry casting.

It’s a satire of the state-sponsored poetry world, held up by pubs and little reviews and diminishing funding, teetering on the edge of collapse, with a few wild men poets wheeled in from the outer islands to give the poetry tea party its undercurrent of authenticity. One by one they fall.

Cut to Victor Priest, head honcho at Artcrimes, driving a Porsche and with plenty of readies. Priest’s stomping ground is Lambs Conduit Street, gentrified Hackney, and a cliff-top house where he indulges his culinary savvy. There’s a lot of eating and drinking in this who-done-it, and death does make us hungry. Priest is a private dick, a gentleman gumshoe derived from Conan Doyle crossed with the man from U.N.C.L.E. The poets are being done away with and it’s Priest’s job to get to the bottom of it.

Mrs Diver hires him. One of the delightful aspects of this noirish bard-slaying novel is the way it echoes, borrows from and sends up the characters, locations and tics of a slew of genres: tv cop programmes, Chinatown, The Third Man. Priest is assisted in his quest by two acolytes: wide-boy Joe Biggs and Naily, a Scottish punk with a stud through her tongue.

This is a view of Britain from vantage points off-shore; a state of the poetry nation. Not with the nostalgiform of lanes and choir stalls but an island whose poetry world operates like The Avengers: poetasters galore, Kumar wittering on about Tagore, Emma Peel lookalikes. There is a lot of micro-sociology in Death Comes For the Poets: you could rocket it out to space and the sages there could reconstruct the state of Britain’s poetry world from the novel’s details.

Much amusement, then, in this puncturing of poetic pretension. The flickering affirming flames are snuffed out like tea lights in front of the altar. Like all good satire, it is salutary. Yeats’ words preface Death Comes for the Poets: “None of us can say who will succeed or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.”

Next time you’re reading above the pub in Maidstone or Scunthorpe you would do well to look behind you. You never know who might stab you in the back with a well-honed stiletto or the business end of an icicle.

Padraig Rooney
Padraig Rooney’s In The Bonsai Garden won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1986. The Fever Wards was published by Salt in 2010. He lives in Basel, Switzerland.

Death Comes for the Poets by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams is published by Muswell Press, £12.

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

In the poem ‘Anguius Fragilis’, about a glass snake’s relationship with a garden, this violence is implied by the mention the narrator makes about nearly slaughtering the slow worm’s harmless young:

those small flickerings,
Silver gold esses, Saxon smith work,
that I almost killed for baby vipers

The poet combines appropriate Saxon alliteration with imagery to convey to the reader the sense of something beautiful that is nearly irretrievably lost. More than that, the poet uses the implication of violence to lend value to a creature that so many overlook as just another facet of the garden.

‘Rabbit in Leamington’ combines brutality, (both literal and implied), close observation and the free play of association to explore the relationships between individual people and the larger world. The speaker, addressing the reader from the present, is reminded of another trip she took years ago when she catches sight of a rabbit from the window of a train. It reminds her of the creature she saw soon after she and her boyfriend were attacked by a drunken homeless person. The man “battered the phone box…” and the boyfriend immediately falls into the role of protector:

And my boyfriend put his arms around me
and blocked the opening door with his back.
And still the drunk kept hammering,

The speaker mentally merges the drunk man with the rabbit, possibly because he lived a wild outdoors life, but once she makes that association others follow and the roles of all the players shift:

Somehow the rabbit was the tramp
the tramp the rabbit, but the good boyfriend

was still the good boyfriend
holding the heavy door shut,
and I thought of him at home

in his garden, gently preparing a rabbit,
undoing its skin with a knife,
and turning it inside out.

Associating the drunk with a wild thing, a rabbit, transforms him to prey, and implies the shift in the speaker’s perception of the ‘good boyfriend’ from protector to predator.

The boyfriend’s action is transformed, the roles of victim and victimizer are implacably altered. The story stops being about the survival of a couple attacked by a madman, and becomes a question of how the man ran mad to begin with. The person preserving the mores of civilization is, after all, the one who has hold of the knife.

The poem which lends its title to this book, ‘The Blue Den’, is in many ways connected to the previous poem. It features a man who has chosen the edges, “This is him now. / A bunch of old doors for walls.”

He lives on the beach in a house made of old doors, with only one that still serves the purpose it was meant for, symbolizing the number of choices the man has left, “He can choose from several horizons./ The electricity lines. The sea.”

What those two choices really are, and which one he has chosen, becomes much clearer as the poem progresses. There are two things that the poem makes very clear: one is that the sea and the sky can look very similar, but they are not; the other is that there are two routes to death: one rambles, the other is quicker

The poem implies that the sea, the quick death, is not the one that he has chosen. The narrator says this of the man who found the blue paint he uses to camouflage his shelter the day ‘the girls’ abandoned him, “It’s harder to fade into the sky than into the sea, / however many blue coats he puts on.”

It is safe to say that the poems in this book will not fade quickly in your memory. This is Norgate’s second full collection; it is worth a deep read, a long contemplation.

Bethany W Pope
Bethany W Pope’s first poetry collection, A Radiance was published by Cultured Llama Press in June. Her second collection, Persephone in the Underworld has been accepted by Rufus Books and will be released in 2016.

The Blue Den by Stephanie Norgate is published by Bloodaxe Books (£8.95)

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

Seamus Heaney has spoken of the sonnet form as a body, with a waist and a need for the right number of limbs in order to function. That kind of shapeliness is not obvious in the layout of text (although perhaps readers can register a block of fourteen lines as a single gestalt, just as we recognise  as a face). So we certainly do not insist on unconventional layouts, unconventional layouts, in fact

we                                                             do                                                NoT wa

NT             the kind of                        poe                        try

That  s c a t    t    e    r    s  i  t s       elf r and      om   ly

in the vague

hope                                                 of adding interest to prose observations. On the other hand unconventional layouts which serve formal and poetic purposes are welcomed. Reflexive poems that muse on their own shape will have to be best-in-class to be admitted!

We hope to see some unashamedly concrete poetry. We hope to see some beautiful formal verse in stanzas of unequal lines – think Donne (‘The Message’ or ‘The Triple Fool’ for example) or George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’. We hope to see some dramatic use of the page. We hope to see many things we have never imagined.

As usual we’ll choose many of the poems for the magazine without particular regard to our theme, just because we admire them as poems – although perhaps this theme is hard to escape: even (especially?) prose poetry talks through its distinctive visual form, the body evident on the page.

The event will be full of contributors who’ll be coming to read, and we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Penelope Shuttle and Clare Pollard who have both contributed poems to this issue.

The evening will start at 8pm at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £7/£6 concessions; doors open at 7.30pm. Come early for the best seats, to get yourself a drink, buy a copy of the magazine or chat to a member of the Magma team.

This issue, edited by Tim Kindberg and Karen McCarthy Woolf, is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops.

Tim and Karen have a great theme for the issue – The Soul and the Machine – which Tim elaborates on in this piece about Machinery and the imagination.

Hope you can make it. We’d love to see you there.

In Leighton’s world, every object and place is singing to the poet. There is the Scallop which “In words the sky looks through, this thing / assigns the wind its carved tune”, or the Chanterelle whose name and presence is “a top-string A pitched in thin air”, or the Ammonite which is “an ear to a star” – while in Crack-Willow the deepest sadness of the old trees are that “These broken shapes have lost their power to speak”.

Leighton’s messengers are sometimes artworks, as in a pair of ekphrastic pieces after Barbara Hepworth sculptures, but more often are part of the natural (or non-human) world. Leighton’s evident joy in receiving messages from rocks and hollyhocks – the celebratory descriptions, the rich patterns of sound – gives the collection an almost pantheistic bent.

Yet the poems are not always about these sparks of ecological empathy – equally often, as in Crack-Willow, they consider communication that is partial, mysterious, or wholly failed. In Wolf Note, for example, Leighton considers the jarring resonance of a stringed instrument, when “a forest howls / in the carved soundboard’s wooden memory” and runs “amok in your rules, / and out from true”. The collection’s most wrenching moment for me also came in such a poem, Kite in 4:4 Time, when the toy’s ecstatic, flowing flight is cut short by a tree and its owner “tries to dial / a love that’s dead and can’t reply”.

Leighton frequently makes these vertiginous leaps of metaphor, and these surprises keep the collection from settling into too easy a descriptive nature poetry – so just as in a paean to kite-flying we can find a jolt of heartbreak, so too can a garden Sprinkler become a priest (Aspeges me), or an industrial wasteland hide a true Wilderness. It often seems that Leighton’s messages consist of precisely this kind of moment – when an object or place is carried over, transformed through a well-timed volta into something entirely other – as though all communication between poet and world (or object and poem) occurs in unexpected connections and consonances.

Through discussing the collection’s strengths, I’ve begun to outline its inverse weaknesses. A few times too often a simple, delicate piece of descriptive poetry is asked to carry extra thematic weight: the collection’s title bears down on poems like Out, where a study of the night sky is forced to become a question about “how far / the silence lends an ear and answers / no-one, listening”, or like Gecko when the description of the lizard as “A sudden comma” feels like a grudging, unnecessary nod to messaging. These over-reachings make me glad of those less obviously-themed poems which allow the extended metaphor time to settle – while in a weaker collection they might seem like padding, here they are a breath.

Similarly, though those struggling, explorative messages are delightful, others just clunk. I found the truisms of A Mother Speaks rather cloying (“Self’s a finding”, “Earth will accept you”), while Obsidian‘s description of a rock in which we are “recast in a glass darkly” seems dully inevitable, given the context of the collection. In even these poems, however, there is still pleasure in Leighton’s confident style: every poem is well-made, with intricate internal rhymes, clever assonances, carefully-deployed forms. Perhaps it is their well-madeness which has allowed the occasional fizzle of a thought to slip through.

I was delighted to have so much in this collection to delight in – surprise came more often through a neatly-placed reveal or a shock of language than through an extended puzzle. The collection has thematic immediacy and transparency – but it’s the gorgeous, rich transparency of a blue hole. Murkier poems are frustrating when, once you’ve peered through the gloom, they turn out to be no more than a puddle; in Leighton’s poems you can often see all the way to the bottom, and the clarity allows you to understand just how much there is to see and enjoy there. Reading the collection, you can’t help but share in Leighton’s world, and continue to find new messages in the world she’s rewritten for you.

Harry Giles
Harry Giles is a poet and theatre-maker. His pamphlet Visa Wedding was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in November 2012. He’ll be performing at StAnza, Sprint and Buzzcut this March

The Messages by Angela Leighton is published by Shoestring Books, £9.

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

Winners of the Magma Competition 2012 will be reading their poems alongside the National Poet of Wales and judge for the Magma Poetry Competition, Gillian Clarke, whose work Ice was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2012. You will also be able to enjoy readings from leading poets including Moniza Alvi, Simon Barraclough, Tom Chivers and Claire Crowther, who have been specially commissioned to write short poems in response to the competition.

Doors, and the cash bar, open at 6.30 with the reading starting at 7.30 pm. We’d be delighted if you could join us.

The boldness and lyrical language in these dramatic monologues articulate the coherence and transformative power of self-obsessions. The fragmented stories of marginalised individuals in London are imbued with a drowning sense of loneliness and anonymity, set against an urban landscape where affection and understanding are lacking: ‘words are gunned down by cars’ (p.8) and ‘birds sing up here, for no one.’ (p.53) In ‘Maurice’, the Jamaican recalls a history of failed relationships and yearns for sexual intimacy. Through the story and language of Maurice’s self-delusion, Read parodies the untruths in the propaganda of social inclusion and acceptance:

the rightest person in the rightest place.
                              London.
You got your Pakistanis and your
Bangladeshis and your Ghanaians
and your Indians, your Turks
and your Italians, your Poles
and Portuguese, all glitter…
                              after fifty years
who knows what home tastes like.           (p.29)

In ‘Agnieszka’, the Polish Jewish immigrant is asked repeatedly to share details of her personal life (e.g. her age, her marriage, her children) and tested for her general knowledge (e.g. name of the prime minister). Seeing these questions as intrusive and pointless, Agnieszka turns her attention to the vivid surroundings: ‘if they had asked about a broken plate/ on a red floor/ I could have told it’ (p.19). Her ability to observe and recall, in painstaking detail, distinct episodes from the past and the present – her disappointments with Benny Best, the death of her father, wartime Warsaw – gives her voice authenticity. Agnieszka misses her homeland, the ‘normal Warsaw’ misplaced as a ‘dislocation of bone’, and recollections of fragmented conversations in Polish suggest an impenetrable past. The ultimate escape she seeks is portrayed as a necessary escape from danger, and draws sympathy from the reader.

I find it slightly disconcerting, however, that the sensitivity and textured quality of language so adeptly expressed in her previous collections The Point of Splitting and Broken Sleep, is missing from this collection. Perhaps the dramatic characterisation of voices and the search for a more assertive, confessional language have tilted the balance.

The poignancy in Read’s poems lies in her observation and use of bold metaphors. In ‘Bridget’, Read captures the protagonist’s fear of losing volition and individuality with the refrain ‘the unlocked door is jammed with post/ Everything outside will come in’ (p.37), and with her symptomatic reactions against an intoxicating world of rituals and acts (‘the nip of Jameson’s’), while her heart remains as tender as ‘melted butter’ (p.36), ‘the loudest thing in this blasted flat’ (p38).

In Read’s Far-Near blog, she refers to her new book as a piece of ‘verse drama’ rather than a poetry collection, highlighting the ‘visceral engagement’ in it and how ‘the full blast of God seemed to come at me over and over again’. Her interview with The Tablet informs the reader how religion has changed her as a writer. From an atheist to a declared Catholic, Read experiences religion as a sudden, dramatic epiphany when writing The Day Hospital – an inner space filled with poetry and intense emotions. In ‘Theresa’, despite the protagonist’s devotion to Mother Mary, rude speech from the external, brutal world interrupts her thoughts: ‘Eat shit and die!/ Feck the lot of yez,/ Cock-sucking bastards…’ (p.15) This creates guilt and necessitates redemption: ‘So my hours are strung and even there the darkness collects like muck.’ (p.18) Despite his religious appearance, Father John is corrupted by affluence and power, and bears a stark contrast with the blurry faces of ‘poor/ foreigners with the sandwich-boards and banners’ (p.16).

Written with ambition and fueled by an intense and unpredictable language, The Day Hospital is an intriguing collection that explores the inescapability of personal past and questions superficial understanding in society, while revealing the complex, hidden voices of the marginalised.

Jennifer Wong
Jennifer Wong’s works have appeared in Warwick Review, Frogmore Papers, Orbis, Lung Jazz and other publications. Her new collection, Goldfish, is forthcoming from Chameleon Press in 2013.

The Day Hospital by Sally Read is published by Bloodaxe Books, £8.95. Click to hear Sally Read reading from ‘Bridget’ and ‘Catherine’ from the collection

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

After snow and rock
to see things grow again
as they like growing:
enjoying sun and rain – that is a real joy.

Elsewhere, when Smith attempts to distance herself from unsurprising portrayals, it can be with a certain amount of trepidation. Take the poem ‘Cavatina’, for instance, which refuses to survive without the subtitle ‘a recurring dream’ as an explanation for its strangeness, yet would make just as much sense without this crutch:

This is where I always turn away from
what cannot be avoided – yours or mine –
the losing of our shadows, the loss of song,
the long leaving up Jacob’s ladder to home

On the other hand, Smith also goes to the other extreme with ‘Modern Fantasia’, a poem that seems written in a private language with references incomprehensible to an outsider:

‘Erica writes the sixtieth fable of rain.
Her token is bent clean, amazed by quota of haw.
With guile her sins stirs the gloom. Nun puns
on spires, ova or ale are wed to the writer.’

If these three statements, that Smith’s poetry is by turn too straightforward, not brave enough, and too alienating, seem contradictory, that is because the collection itself is contradictory. What is most frustrating about The Angel’s Share is its lack of cohesive identity, as the above examples illustrate, and then there are the poems which appear to belong to a different collection altogether, such as ‘Pair Bond’ and ‘Hexic’. ‘Pair Bond’, which recently appeared in Poems for Pussy Riot, is a playful tribute to Dolly Parton. Seen from the viewpoint of a barmaid, Smith lists an increasingly inventive list of synonyms for breasts as observed by an over-invasive customer:

he addresses
my full frontals, my baby buggy bumpers,
my Brad Pitts, my boulders, my billabongs.

While ‘Pair Bond’ reads like a poem that would benefit from being performed, ‘Hexic’ on the other hand is clearly bound to the page by virtue of its visual shape. Consisting of seven ‘stanzas’ in octagon shapes to mimic the shape of a beeswax sheet, as well as the video game Hexic, the poem rewards reading in different patterns and unlike much of the collection, it manages to be both inviting and intriguing.

At her best, Barbara Smith captures beautifully the exploration of evaporation evoked in the collection’s title, with poems such as ‘On Not Seeing Inside the Sistine Chapel’ and ‘The Doubt Ship’. The former begins thus:

You were a sky gazer, a cloud watcher,
seeing within those steamed puff-pillows
the forms of fabulous beings.

Just now I saw a fisherman, his white head
turned away, his finger flung
behind him, pointing at infinity.

It is a beautifully measured poem, engaging in a one-way dialogue with Michelangelo, that artist who ‘fixed a borderless sky inside // a broad high vault’. The title makes the poem, a reminder that sometimes not seeing a piece of art can be more interesting than the act of viewing it, a study of what cracks an earthquake can create far away from its epicentre.

Similarly, ‘The Doubt Ship’ also plays with this notion of unphysical physicality by attempting to put words to the incomprehensible with the image of a shipwreck buried in the narrator’s field, ‘waiting for a light’. Smith demonstrates her ability for juxtaposing smelly, noisy images firmly rooted in our world, with more existential questioning: ‘these were not as meaningful // as the broad masts, leaking resin, blank of sails.’ Should the collection have consisted solely of poems of this ilk, it would have been stronger and more cohesive.

Claire Trévien
Claire Trévien’s first pamphlet of poetry, Low-Tide Lottery, was published by Salt in 2011. Her first collection will be published by Penned in the Margins in 2013. She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and the co-organizer of Penning Perfumes.

The Angel’s Share by Barbara Smith is published by Doghouse Press, 2012, €12.

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

Poetry is the book your boring aunt gives your sister, maybe, and maybe your sister hates it. She wants a giant Teletubbies make up set instead, and everyone agrees it’s really bo-oring. From this chance moment, perhaps – the moment you quietly take the book to your room, and know nobody will ever miss it – poetry is your secret.

At secondary school, poetry rears its head again, but very much in public. ‘What do you think the poet is really trying to say here?’ ‘Can you interpret the symbolism in the metaphor?’ ‘Analyse the influences of the Metaphysicals on the conceits of…’ oh, wait. ‘Where does the real message of ‘The Hitcher’ come out?’

It’s happening in public, but the real poem is still happening in secret. You write the stuff in secret. You read it and print it out and keep it in folders, and gradually you show some of your poems to your friends. They say nice things, but what do they know? And maybe they were the ones who laughed at your boring aunt’s book with your sister. So it’s still – the work that poetry is doing inside you and your conception of language as a medium through which to perceive the world – a big fat secret.

This post could be pages and pages long. But ultimately, there is a point for all of us where there is one big difference between our poems and the ones in books. They get read by people, and ours don’t. They are written TO be read. The poets who write them do so knowing that they are making something for other people to read, and we write ours both from and to the inside of our head.

Don Paterson talks about the various stages of ‘publication’, as being the biggest transformation in a poem. He says that in one sense a poem is ‘published’ – broadcast to the outside world – the minute we show it to someone else. Then there’s sharing it in a workshop or an email. Then maybe getting it in a magazine. At each remove, the poem becomes the property of (more) other people, not just us.

This of course changes the poem, because it becomes a public artefact, an object to be used, consumed, participated in, by anyone who finds it. And it changes you, because you now have a different relationship to your secret. It has a perfectly acceptable public side.

With this comes a change in how you write your poems. You need to learn to access both the side that’s secret within you, and the side that faces outwards: a strange mysterious element that makes your poem a Thing, Made for Other People. Your innermost thoughts aren’t much good to them unless framed in a way they can access, empathise their way into, relate back to the world THEY are perceiving, and – with luck – be surprised by.

This is the life cycle of a poet, maybe. The hidden life, that secret that made you steal your sister’s Christmas present, and the reason you alone ever noticed that it was not on the shelf where it got dumped, carries on. But the poems you make out of that self begin to have a life of their own, beyond you. They have relationships with other people you might think you have nothing in common with whatever. This is about being human.

A poem works on this level in proportion to what it gives to the reader. General reflections of sagacity, or complicated abstract metaphors about your inner turmoil, are not news; everybody has those. In making a poem for people to read, you are holding something up to the light and saying: ‘Look! Look at this!’ Make sure the reader can see what you’re holding up; make it come into their space a little, and touch them. Let it ask them something, not just tell them all about you. Let it sit there so they can just be with it.

This means making sure it’s clear what the poem is about. Putting specific images in, not just Big Ideas. Not bombarding them with how you feel, but creating a space where they can feel it with you. It means making sure the images all hang together, the examples all tell the same story, the language fits the mood, the rhymes aren’t overpowering.

For many people, the first step out of their hidden life – the first time their secret is aired outside their circle of friends – is sending a poem to a magazine: maybe a local one, or maybe a big important one, which they’ll never get in. For some, the first step is sending it to a competition. This feels safe, it’s all anonymous, you don’t have to have a name. Your secret identity is still safe!

The poem doesn’t get anywhere, of course, in this competition. Except that sometimes it does; because it’s about the poem, not the poet. But in any case, what it HAS done is, it’s gone and sat in the box with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other poems, all of them poems together, all coming out of the secret space and blinking into the sunshine of a real, unknown, real reader. And maybe, when you think of it sitting in there, you begin to really want your poem to be read by that reader, to be understood, to resonate with them the way other poems have resonated with you. To be, like Pinocchio, alive.

This is an important moment for your poem and for you. It’s the moment the lights come on, and shine into your hidden life. You find you are sitting at the beginning of a road…