If I have anything useful to say to writers of poetry, I can think of no better starting point for it than the theme of this issue: In the Flesh. Not that your poems must be visceral or bodily (although this is often, probably to a fault, the case with my own work), but rather that the reader must find opportunity to live within your words and worlds. They should feel your poems, and feel their own way through your work as a protagonist, rather than as a confidante hearing about it second-hand from a narrating speaker.

I’d like to cross-reference this thought with Henry Rollins’ account of an early meeting with his lifelong friend and mentor, Hubert Selby Jr (author of Requiem for a Dream and Last Exit to Brooklyn), which crystallises in Selby’s advice on writing, which is to “get your cock out of the way of the story”. Ego and anxiety drive us to clutter our work with signposts about what we’re saying, why we’re saying it and what this says about us as writers. But the poem has its own story to tell, its own thread, and the task in front of you is not to tie it up in a bow, but to let it unravel. To return momentarily to Selby, “get out of the way and let the writing happen.”

But what does this mean in practical terms? Perhaps it’s a way of looking, without judgement, a kind of mindfulness, a practice of being with, instead of mastering or taming. Let me back up a little…

For years as an enthusiastic writer of bad poetry, I laboured under lots of misapprehensions about what poetry ‘should be’. One of these was the belief that poetry should deliberately obscure its story or meaning, employing linguistic acrobatics, arcane words and disorientating word order to keep the reader at a distance. If the meaning was unclear and required several readings to unpack, this, I believed, was real poetry. With much more reading and listening and helpful advice from peers and mentors, I realised this was just a way of gatekeeping my own art from meaningful connection.

But the belief didn’t come from nowhere. There are a couple of things going on, which led me to my original, misguided, thesis. One is the canon, commonly taught in schools in nineties Britain: within those texts, the supremacy of literacy was far from universally accessible; it established a structural elitism on the page, including, but not limited to, the assumption of an unequivocal dichotomy of seer and seen, subject and object, in-group and out-group.

But there is a second, more useful thing—perhaps the truth hidden in the weeds of falsehood—which is the idea that poetry creates the opportunity for us to be honest in a way that precludes human intervention. By resisting the urge to narrativise and interpret, we can engage more truthfully with the real. Remember that the story in our heads is not reality, but a mirror of it, and let your writing be sensory, granular, experiential. Be a researcher uncovering the truth, the true language of things beyond the speaker. Taking in Loch Coire an Lochain, Nan Shepherd said in The Living Mountain, “Details are no longer a part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere… This is how the earth must see itself.”

Here’s Liz Berry’s ‘In The Pines’ from The Home Child:

—in the pink sky of dawn, wench’s sky,
—-the night lifting
——like a mourning veil,
—the dew trembling on the ferns
—so quiet, no one knowing
—–even the animals still snuffling in their straw.

When you write, and choose sensory over interpretative, you leave the reader with a job to do: but rather than a task that depends upon educational advantage or the knowledge of specific references, the job at hand is to make sense of the world of your poem, in the same way that we make sense of the world at large. Your readers can be children caught in the spell of your poem, clay in its kiln, feeling its feelings, sensing its body language.

Conversely, when you explain what you’re saying to the reader, you deprive them of this empowering act of cocreation, and instead make them a spectator to your experience.

**

This is an extract from Amy Acre’s “Words and Worlds: Writing Advice.”
Read the full article in Magma 91, In The Flesh 

 

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