A lot of the poems I’ve written owe a debt
to the work of others. We all write as part of a tradition, as Eliot pointed
out. It seeps into us by osmosis . . . but I’m talking about specific debts to specific poets, and even specific poems of theirs. And this
seems to me a perfectly healthy way to work.
In
my first collection Letting in the Carnival,
‘The Professor of Physics’ was a subject that was agonizing until I found what
to cast it in: the ballad form favoured by Charles Causley, deceptively light
treatment for serious subjects. The choice of words in ‘English Rain’ is
directly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon euphonies in the work of Harold
Massingham, of whom I’ll have more to say in a later blog. ‘Manchester’
demanded to be written after reading sonnets by Michael Longley.
In Henry’s
Bridge, my second collection, the debts pile up.
‘Another Fronrhydd November’ is simply a version of ‘L’Hiver’ by Jules
Laforgue. ’ ‘Horizon’ is a direct response to ‘Hamatreya’ by Emerson. ‘Great
Uncle Charlie’s Golden Treasury’ steals a chunk
from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sudden Light’ and carries on in the same
verse-form. In ‘Ynys Meicel’ I had to wrestle with a painful subject and dealt
with it (to my satisfaction if no-one else’s) by taking a structure from
W.S.Graham.
The title poem
was another struggle. I got nowhere with it until I read ‘Questions of the
Woman Who Fell’ by Robert Minhinnick and imitated the voice, in the first few
lines at least, enough to get me started. ‘Harmonious’ sounds to me like a
distant echo of Stevie Smith. And finally, anyone familiar with Wallace Stevens
will recognize the tone and content of ‘The Allegri String Quartet at Fishguard
Festival’ (though once again, only a distant echo.) Wishing to combine the
abstract with the specific, I even stole the form of the title from ‘An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven.’
So how about
that? Does anyone else work the same way? If anyone stole a form from me, let
me tell you, I’d be delighted.
