Other Lives

This morning I got out the hand-written drafts of four different poems written in the past few months, to type and save on my computer. (How disappointing they looked without the original excitement that accompanied their inception!) Reading through them I could see where they were influenced by my reading of Zbigniew Herbert at the time. Two were even unpunctuated and one was attempting an overt play of philosophical ideas which is pretty alien to my usual way of writing. Transferring them to hard drive, I started to make some changes and realised they were now beginning to look and sound more like something by Donald Hall whose selected poems I've been reading for a fortnight and finished just yesterday. The influence is probably less apparent to someone else, but it reminded me just how strongly newly-written poems can be shaped by poems that already exist. The solitary nature of writing can encourage one to imagine that poems are created in a vacuum. In reality, a very meaningf...

I've just ordered Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, and I'm waiting to receive Edward Hirsch's Wild Gratitude. Somewhere in the post is also The Best American Poetry 2001, edited by one of my favourite poets Robert Hass. On the go at home are The Best American Poetry 1991 and 2005, edited by Mark Strand and Paul Muldoon respectively. After those I think I'll probably want a break from big American anthologies and will hope to finish off Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems. There is a also a mounting stack of non-poetry books by my bed. At the very bottom is a slim book called Introduction to Zen which I have been intending to re-read for a while. The eschewal of language explored within is beginning to feel more attractive.

As well as learning to blog I have also written three poems in the past week. On Friday evening I was reading Zbigniew Herbert in the bath, feeling playful, unpunctuated and anti-poetic. The result was a mental draft of 'On Haemorrhoids' I had simply to commit to paper once I'd dried off. Sunday night I shifted a few words about for ease of reading, and finished it off. The style isn't typically mine but I think the humour and delight in linking a disparate bunch of sufferers definitely are. On an only marginally more meaningful level the poem is also about achievement being frustrated by physicality. I don't send poems off to magazines as regularly as I used to but I'd be interested to know which ones would consider such a poem. I suspect like many other poets I have squirreled away dozens of poems over the years because they appear at variance with most of the rest of my published work. Perhaps eventually they will make up a collection of their own. 'Undis...