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On Writing Poems
DAVID MCLEAN
Perhaps the first thing I have found useful to me is to have a large amount of poems “inside” in the sense that you have incorporated them into your sense of words, an inheritance from which you have created a sense of what a poem is. In this sense I myself am very indebted to the first people I read, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Georg Trakl, Rilke, Baudelaire, Mallarme and a few others. Perhaps mostly the poems of Sexton and Thomas have influenced me. I often either react to a poem directly, in the sense that I want to express something related to it, as I wrote a poem called “accept that death with pride” after rereading “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
I myself first wrote when I was 34 years old, thirteen years ago, and did not write very much between 1995 and 2000, and did not write anything I am satisfied with until I met my fiancée about three years ago. I do not want to make it sound as though she were my “muse” since that would be unbearably pretentious and childish, but I do think that a certain degree of “in-loveness” is necessary for me to want to write. at least at first. And that is probably the main thing, the motivation. But you can be motivated by many things. You should perhaps want to write poems inspired by the poems that have influenced you in such a way that the people who wrote them would not have regretted the influence. I wouldn't want Thomas and Sexton to spin like tops in their graves.
And I find that I also try to shape an own use of language, own favourite words. Trakl for example has a supply of favoured nouns and adjectives. And I have a whole closet filled with words I use ad nauseam. You shouldn't go too far in this direction, I probably do and Trakl died before he had written too much, but some balance is necessary. One cannot love words promiscuously, all words, one must have favourites. A little repetition is a good thing within reason.
Many are motivated to write as catharsis, but, as somebody says of “suicide writing,” poems may be written as a consequence of a cathartic process, that is fine, Sexton's and Plath's were. But they may also be written as a cathartic exercise, and that's horrible, though I have done it myself. Many nowadays write poems that are designed as therapy, and that is a very bad excuse for writing. Therapy may be a pleasant side effect, but a poem written to console oneself for childhood abuse, experiences of bullying and so forth, is likely to be pure garbage. In fact, having read a great deal online, I can say that, empirically speaking it is always garbage. It's a question of priorities, there are internet communities for hobby poetry, where young people and others express their “deep” thoughts on life, usually on the basis of deep misunderstandings of what literature is, and there are magazines, like this one, that further the “craft and sullen art” of composing poems that others can relate to on an aesthetic level beyond mere personal recognition and so-called empathy. The problem is that one has to take those community sites for what they are, perhaps good for the children (of all ages) who use them, though they are an egregious boil on the backside of literature.
I should perhaps say what I think the poetic function is. I think, and I say this quite stipulatively without any argument, following Derrida more than somewhat, that the “essence” of poetry is a nostalgia for presence and the permanence of presence It is a desire for the permanent of a substantial instant, that the momentaneous should become enshrined in eternity's “golden ring of light” safe from the vagaries of time; the moment some girls hair moved and one imagined that one loved her immortalised in some “forever.” A poem is thus a way of saying “always.” It is, therefore, our attempt at a relation to death and finitude and would consist in an ultimate defeat of this finitude. It is, therefore, and thus like “man,” a “useless passion,” in Sartre's words.
These then are my first reactions. Respect for, relation to, and interaction with the canon of writing, I do not like to give advice to “younger” people, it makes me feel ancient, but I hope somebody may see some likeness to their own praxis at any rate. The poetic impulse, to reflect on and reuse words, leads to a lonely life, in some sense, and this is good, since existentially the human is isolated, we all die alone, composing a poem is always a dress rehearsal for that death and it should be composed as if one expected it to survive one's death and transgress by addressing the addressee, Everyman, in the absence of the speaker, who is you. That's what you have to do, they won't give you (much) money for it
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