Poetry Domestic

Poetry Domestic Reading and listening to new poetry has recalled me to my own. I have written little this decade and shown none. I’ve now opened a folder for it, and posted two poems to it. Chip Delany wrote years ago that, for all the talk of the Golden Age of science fiction, there was little he could reread with pleasure. He was pleased to include his own, and I’m similarly pleased to find many of my own pieces endure — at least in my own ear.

Here’s a selection of my favourites. I’ve destroyed most of what I wrote in the 70s as adolescent mopery, a long indulgence in yearning and carrying torches. Letter from Prison and Odysseus’ Eyes show uncharacteristic flashes of insight into this. The Houses of the Rich was my first experience of ‘dictated’ poetry, the lines forming in my inner ear faster than I could write. A relentless reviser of verse, I scarcely touched this or the similarly dictated Tongues of Men and Angels, also from 1973, which would have got me into what was then the Anglo-Welsh Poetry Review had I been able to muster anything else that Gillian Clarke liked so well. The Snow, Now Fallen is a later dictated poem, which arrived whole and largely complete. Apart from the famous Villon quote, which I recall having on my mind at the time, I have little idea what inspired it. But my clear favourite from the whole decade is Chocolate and Stories, marking my flight abroad from a long self-immolation.

The 80s brought me the most extravagant compliment I have ever received for my poetry. My sister Joanne, who reads poetry not at all, wrote to me about Goodnight Girl — “It made me cry. How did you know?” A Golden Age started as another piece of dictation, which I had to finish myself. Much influenced by Marilyn Hacker, I considered writing sonnets an indispensable mark of competence. None of them now pleases me much, though Alba: Dreaming, and The Hermitage, written while moping for the lovely and vivacious Ilse Kelvin, nearly do it for me. Dylan Thomas is a dangerous influence, but I like best Sir John on the Cross, where some insight into my Romance-blinded condition starts to emerge.

I wrote nothing in the early 90s I wished to keep. Then three poems emerged from two characters in a dream, Bear and Scarecrow. Some more sonneteering at the end of the decade, from a hopeless but instructive romance, from which The Abandoned Children stills floats my boat. But misery loves poetry, and The Tender Wells is the better poem by a long shot.

An Introduction To My Father had been gestating from scraps ever since his suicide in 1972. Twelfth Night, Hampstead Heath is my most recent piece.