Poet on Writing

Abstract

I’m either writing — physically making a creature of blackish marks on whitish paper — or I’m not. At such times I’m willing to admit that I’m a poet, but at others the persona doesn’t exist. It’s almost unthinkable for me to experience the arrival of what I recognise as the movement or form of a poem simply as a mental or a vocal thing. I have first to be setting words down and shifting them about in my inhibited, brain-wrenching, left-handed script. It may well be that when I write I use, as a formal constraint, the residue of the early difficulty I had over learning to hold a pen and move it across the paper in an unnatural direction. I’m a glib and garrulous talker, given to branching sentences that forget their own beginnings; but in order to get me to write them down, word-patterns have to have at least a claim on permanency. And it’s in the time of their being turned into marks that they make themselves audible to me: then I hear the chime of a phrase back and forth along its length. The muttering voice — which isn’t quite mine — in my head speaks them, and sometimes I’ll sound them aloud. Always, before passing a version as final.