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“Refuse to be Politely Depressed”
C. J. Allen talks to Martin Stannard
By way of an introduction
Cards on the table: I know Martin Stannard. He’s a friend. We’re not exactly close; we’re more sort of poetry friends. We meet up from time to time to talk about poems, or we go along to readings. We’re that sort of friends. So you need to read what follows in the light of that, I guess.
Having confessed this much, I should also say that I’m a fan of Martin’s poetry, & I’m genuinely surprised that his work isn’t more widely known. It’s intelligent, funny, engaging & unsentimental, it’s serious without taking itself too seriously, it’s smart without making the reader feel stupid … in fact it’s a lot of things that a lot of contemporary British poetry definitely isn’t.
As the reviews editor for a UK literary magazine, I get to see far more new poetry than is actually good for a person, & it seems such a shame that so much of it is based around weak jokes (that you wouldn’t think were funny if you heard them in the pub or at work), shop-worn epiphanies & polite accounts of miserable things that have happened to the poet. So if you asked me to give you one reason why you should take the time & trouble in your busy life to read Martin Stannard’s poetry then I’d have to say: because it refuses to be politely depressed. But more of that later.
Oh, & it’d be nice to tell you that the interview took place at the end of a late summer’s day, in an orchard, and that we both sat in nice cane chairs with drinks & a table covered with books of poems. So I will.
Now read on …
CJA: So where did it all begin, this whole writing poems thing?
MS: If we ignore the poem in the school magazine when I was 17, which I think we should, and if we ignore the so-called poems I wrote in my late teens and into my twenties which I think we should, because the idea of poetry that is sub-Marc Bolan is pretty appalling, then the proper thing sort of kicks in around 1977 or 1978. I’m never sure of the exact year. But, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I went along to the newly-formed Ipswich Poetry Workshop one evening. There I met Rupert Mallin, who with John Row and Frank Wood was one of the organisers; each of these guys had had poems in little magazines. Frank was a pal of Jim Burns, the editor of Palantir, and John Row was, I recall, quite friendly with Nick Toczek, who was pretty active in small press poetry circles at that time. And Keith Dersley was there, too, and I seem to remember he had poems in Samphire. So these guys knew things, and had poems in places which were among the best magazines of their day, for sure. Plus there were about twenty other people there of every age, shape and size, and the chemistry was wonderful.
I went there clutching my sad little poems, poems which were an ignorant mix of vague symbolist-like rubbish and supposed important statements, and within no time at all I’d learned that you could write poems with things in them which sounded like they might have actually come out of your mouth. It was very educational, and very liberating. And within weeks I was reading poems out loud, to audiences in pubs.
But best of all was the fact that Mallin and Dersley became two of my best ever friends, and they’re still there, at my shoulder all the time. I owe them so much.
CJA: I’ve recently had the pleasure (& I do mean pleasure, & I am strongly resisting the temptation to make some wise-crack in parentheses) of reading through your Collected Works, & I noticed I was laughing (in a good way) more than I usually do when I read poetry. Could you say something about humour in your writing?
MS: It’s there because it’s an ever-present in my life. By which I mean to say that my poems are, and I don’t want to sound pompous but I really mean this, my poems are very much me…. by which I mean they are a mixture of all the traits (well, perhaps not all; I’d better be careful what I say) that go to make up me. So the crappy bits of life, as they occur, are confronted as they must be, but also regularly deflected or hidden or dealt with by humour. Which as soon as I’ve said it sounds so much bullshit, because I know from bitter experience that there are times in life when the last thing you can see is the funny side. But, in the normal run of things, I can be serious and laughing more or less at the same time, and so poems should have funny in them. I don’t try and be funny in poems to make people laugh. If I wanted to do that I’d be a comedian. I just say something I want to say, and sometimes it happens to be funny. Or at least, I think so. But the important thing here is that I say what I want to say. Whether it’s funny or serious or stupid or whatever it’s what I want to say. It’s up to you if you laugh. It also occurs to me to mention, and I don’t know if this is relevant or not, but I only write poems when I’m in a good, strong, generally happy mood. I’m not one of those people who when they have a bad time write about it from the bottom of the pit. When I have a bad time I curl up in a ball and shut the world out, or get drunk. The last thing I want to do when I have a bad time, and I’ve had some storming bad times, some real belters, the last thing I want to do then is write a poem about it. So, perhaps because I have to be “up” to write a poem, that accounts for the humour, such as it is.
CJA: …which is interesting to me, because it’s not often you hear writers talk about happiness as a sort of wellspring of creativity - what’s that Montherlant quote? I think it’s something like ‘Happiness writes white’. I do sense in your poems a sort of refusal to be politely depressed – which, for me at least, is one of its most admirable qualities. But isn’t it okay to be miserable in a poem?
MS: Oh, I’m often miserable in poems. I think. I’m not sure. I am sure I’ve never really thought about it in those terms. The terms I have thought about it in are that, if I’m miserable then I don’t feel as if I can or should burden the reader with it. They probably already have their own problems. Of course, I’m over-simplifying, because I have loads of poems, perhaps all my poems, which are filled with my own state of mind, my problems and my happinesses, or whatever. But, as a general rule, I endeavour not to be too specific about crappy stuff, that is, if my wife has just walked out on me with her suitcases to go live with her tennis coach, I won’t write a miserable “Damn that tennis coach!” poem. I may, however, at some point write a poem that includes the line “and the tennis coaches are all ugly”….. and that would, I suppose, qualify as humour. So, I get all mixed up. Which I rather like.
CJA: You’ve clearly a fondness (as I have too) for the list poem. What is it about lists that makes them so … poem-compatible, if you know what I mean?
MS: I don’t know. I really don’t. I discovered the list-poem” via the New York poets, and found it a pretty good way of doing some things. I can’t answer this question without thinking of how Paul Violi answered a similar question once, when he said that he was trying to give up list poems for the following reasons: (1)…..
I think they are a very readable way to get into the kind of poem that, perhaps, shuns or minimises the importance of narrative, and so you can get into words and ideas and let them begin to work out their own energies and interests …. personally, I think for me they’ve let me work my way into writing things that might conceivably be a pleasure to read rather than something you read with the notion of it being good for you. There’s a connection between the way a list poem reads, and the way I want poems to be.
CJA: Is there also something about the emotional-distancing effect of a list that allows you to confront bigger, higher-voltage issues …?
MS: Perhaps. I rarely think of myself as confronting “bigger, higher-voltage issues”….. what would they be, precisely?
CJA: Well, they’d be …, they’re … er … er … No, it’s no good, I can’t actually think of examples right now. I suppose I just meant that there’s something about lists which sort of flattens out emotional content – lists are usually about the prosaic & unspectacular, aren’t they? (you know, ‘collect dry-cleaning, buy bananas’ etc.) - & that allows the writer to imply an account of the terrible without going into all the gory &/ or hysterical detail. But I sense I’m staggering about in the ruins of my own question here, so before too many people notice, I’ll quickly move on & ask something else. Most of us … well, let’s be honest, I suppose I mean I … look back on early published work with a certain amount of embarrassment. What’s your take on your early poems? And would you say the stuff you’re doing now is better, or just different?
MS: Actually, I think you’re right in what you say about lists. They do flatten things out, and so sometimes they are absolutely the right kind of poem to write. Yes. Well done….. I kind of wish I’d thought of that. I could also say, perhaps, that list poems are tremendously dangerous, too, of course. I mean, they pretend to be easy, and so if you’re having a bit of trouble writing anything at all, a list is good to fall back on. But it’s not recommended, really. A good list poem is as hard to write as any other poem should be. Students take note…..
Anyway, moving on …… Well, I mentioned my very early stuff at the start of this. But if I look at some of the poems that were my first things in magazines it’s pretty startling but I’d not be embarrassed, particularly. That’s not to say they’re any good, but I can see where I was and what I was trying to do, albeit in the dark somewhat, and it’s not rocket science to see the start of what I’ve ended up doing. There is a definite line, I think. But, if it’s of any interest, I think some of the poems in “The Gracing of Days”, some of them, is when the penny dropped and I really began to get a handle on things. I don’t know about “better” or “different” – I mean, it’s 15 or 20 years later: ways of writing poems, of thinking about what you’re doing and then doing things, well, something must change, develop. I hope, anyway. But definitely something happened during some of those poems, like a door opening on to a process and a realisation that, yes, this could be good and fruitful.
CJA: You’ve published maybe a dozen collections of poems as well as a volume of selected reviews & critical writing, but as far as I’m aware no prose fiction of any sort. Why is that?
MS: Oh, I’ve tried a couple of times in the past to write fiction. But I don’t seem to have the head for it. One, I can’t think up a plot. Two, I don’t have the discipline to sit down every day and work it out, and do it. Some of my best friends are novelists, and I can’t do what they do. But they can’t do what I do, more or less, so it evens out. Mind you, recently I’ve written a handful of very short prose things, which are narratives of a sort. They are very short, a page or so. I think writing for the website has brought that on. I don’t know if they are any good. They make me smile, which is either a good sign or a bad sign. I’m not sure at the moment.
CJA: On the back cover of your Selected Reviews – ‘Conversations with Myself’, your reviewing is described as ‘opinionated’ & ‘outspoken’ which is clearly meant to connote informed & intelligent. But it could also imply obstinate & argumentative. So which is it?
MS: I would have thought charming and entertaining and informative and whatever the adjective that goes with “debate” is. I’ve said on a number of occasions elsewhere that I regard reviews as a place for the reviewer to explore and debate and enquire, as well as to tell the reader what the book has in it. I know not every reviewer takes this position, but I do. I have opinions, but there’ve been a number of occasions where those opinions have changed or been moderated while a review was being written, and I usually say so in the review itself. I am outspoken, perhaps, but Jeez, these are only poems so please don’t anyone get too upset. I argue, but these days it’s mainly with myself. I am not obstinate. My take on my reviews is that No, I don’t allow poets who I think are posers or completely uninteresting to get away with it, and Yes, I say what I think. But I try to avoid talking from a position of ignorance, which I believe is the main sin a reviewer can commit. People who moan about my reviews are, as far as I can make out, usually people who have a corner to defend, and I don’t give a toss about the defending of corners.
CJA: So how do you respond to the ‘If you can’t bring good news then don’t bring any’ school of poetry reviewing?
MS: I would suggest that there is such a thing as an advertisement, which is not a review. In other words, if you’re going to run only reviews that say good things, you might as well simply run advertisements, if anyone would pay for them, and drop the pretence. And let’s face it, if everything is going to be “good” then where is the notion of selectivity, discrimination, difference, where is the variety, where is anything the least bit interesting….? Poetry, any art, is surely about questions and enquiry and some kind of engagement with things, be they certainties or uncertainties, beliefs or the lack of them, whatever…. To be publishing in a context of “everything is lovely” seems to me to be a betrayal of that fundamental premise.
CJA: Part of the fun of interviewing writers is taking stuff they’ve written in the past & forgotten all about, & then quoting it back at them. So … in an article about K. M. Dersley you say that ‘[P]oetry is the most important thing in the world, at the same time as it is the most unimportant thing …’ Would you care to explain that?
MS: I’ve never forgotten that statement, because it’s central to my relationship with poetry. All it means is that poetry is of the utmost importance to me. It’s there when I wake up in the morning, it’s there when I go to sleep at night, and it informs everything I do. It’s lurking, keeping an eye open, watching, breathing. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s not like I wander around thinking “I’m a poet”, but at one level, however subconsciously, I’m always working. I really believe that. If it makes me sound tremendously sad, so it goes. But I think it’s kind of interesting, to one minute be walking down the street comatose, then suddenly an overheard phrase, or a slogan on a van, or the sight of two dwarves chasing a squirrel wakes something in me up, so to speak. In other words, the poet was not asleep, he was simply resting. I trust you get my gist. There’s obvious things, like catching out of the corner of my eye an unfinished poem that’s on my desk, that would set a bit of my brain off on that track… But it’s like a bit of me is always quietly hunting a word or a phrase, not for any specific poem but purely because words and phrases are out there, waiting, and I’m not sure I could ever stop it. To me, this is just a natural part of the day. I doubt I’m unique in it.
But, there is a but. This omnipresence of poetry activity and thinking or whatever it is has to exist alongside the fact that I know that while I’m sat at my desk writing poems, or reading poems, or perhaps sat in a pub admiring the barmaid and thinking about poems, there is stuff in the world so dreadful and essential and important that it makes thinking about line breaks seem, well, ridiculous doesn’t even begin to go there. But of course, writing a poem, making music, it’s all vital to being human, a part of whatever all this life is. But one has to keep a sense of perspective. I don’t think this is a particularly original thought or insight, but I feel somewhat distant from many of the people I’ve encountered in poetry world, and perhaps this is a small part of the reason.
This sounds really precious, actually, like I’m some kind of genius functioning at a level unknown to other mortals. I don’t mean it to be that; perhaps if I said that I’m a poet and can’t conceive of not doing it, that it does run as a constant in my life, but I know that other things in the world are also kind of huge things….. Oh, tell me if this makes sense. There is a circle I’m going around in.
Incidentally, of course, the main reason I feel distant from a lot of people in poetry world is that poetry world is full of people I have nothing in common with at all….. I just thought I’d throw that in.
CJA: Yes, it makes sense to me, I think. Poetry is an important & vital part of life, but life comes first. I remember reading an interview with the painter R. B. Kitaj in which the interviewer prefaced a question with the remark, ‘But of course painting is your
life …’ & Kitaj replied, ‘Painting is NOT my life. My life is my life.’ Is that it?
MS: Absolutely. The more one tries to explain this feeling, what this means, the more rapidly you see them disappearing up their own backsides, but that is it, absolutely it. Poetry is not my life, my life is my life. By the way, I first came across Kitaj’s work as a result of his painting which is on the cover of John Ashbery’s “Houseboat Days”. Isn’t that interesting? Not that I know much or anything else about Kitaj, but …..
I notice, by the way, you ignored the “poetry world is full of people I have nothing in common with at all” thing. Okay….
CJA: … and now I’m trying to ignore your drawing everyone’s attention to the fact that I ignored it. Melvyn Bragg makes this sort of thing look so easy. I am attracted by the idea of Poetry World, though. I imagine some huge out-of-town warehouse, like Office World, but with less good deals on copier paper… Anyway, I digress …
Like the rest of us chronically afflicted with poetry (& I do mean us this time) you probably read more of it than is actually healthy for the average adult. Whose poetry do you find yourself returning to - for pleasure?
MS: The New York guys, obviously. It depends on my frame of mind which one, and which generation, because they are all different, but they all in some way remind me that it’s good to be alive and writing poems. Coleridge is a big hero. But I’m just as likely to dip into an anthology of 16th century poetry …. there’s something about that period that absolutely does my head in, and I love it. I’m no expert on the period, but one is absolutely certain of discovering a great poem in there…. I am also happy to dip into the just absolutely known wonderful, be it Shakespeare, Keats, Pound…. Actually, I probably don’t read anything like as much poetry as I should these days. I remain amazed to come across people who seem to have read everything. To me, reading a book for review is often as much as I can do. Then I usually need a holiday. My spare time is more likely to be taken up by music, or some other form of play.
CJA: Why is Coleridge such a big hero?
MS: The Conversation Poems, for starters. I know the world is full of other great poems, and perhaps even “better” poems, but I love them, and that has something to do with their genesis, which is usually from a particular instance, a moment in the poet’s somewhat messy life, and he writes something down and a poem starts. I knew little about Coleridge’s life until I read the Richard Holmes biography, and among the several poetry biographies I’ve read – not loads, admittedly, but several – there is something about Coleridge’s life struck a chord. Something about his inability to get things together, to fuck up, to neglect his writing career. Something of that sort. I also think he was a great bloke, a great person to know. He was obviously a walking and endlessly talking brain the size of a planet, but not remote. There’s an image Holmes paints somewhere, it’s after Coleridge and Wordsworth’s famous falling out, and they are both at a dinner, perhaps it’s at Lamb’s, I don’t remember, but they are sat at opposite ends of the table after the meal, and Coleridge is talking fifteen to the dozen surrounded by lots of people eagerly listening, and Wordsworth is down the other end, quiet and more or less alone. I may not have the detail exactly right, but you get the idea.
CJA: We’ve both been to poetry readings, as readers & audience members. Why do you think we do it?
MS: I give readings because I enjoy it, and people give me money. I really do enjoy giving readings. Some of the stuff around the edges of it, being sociable, being in a strange place with strangers, I sometimes find difficult. Other times it’s easy. But I love the actual process of reading a poem to an audience, and having that kind of live, vibrant connection. Of course, it’s not always vibrant. As for going to readings, well, I really only go to some local ones now, and even then not always. I will support reading series I feel deserving of it – so I’ll go to John Lucas’s things here in town, not because I always know I’m going to love the poetry, but because John is doing a brilliant job. But I won’t go to see, for example, a poet I have no real interest in, even if it’s a big deal at a big venue locally organised by a literature officer because they feel they have to, as part of their remit. I mean, I don’t go to see every big band that comes to town just because they’re big and sell lots of records. I go and see bands if I’m interested in them and like, or might like, what they do. The same with poets. Just because they’re poets doesn’t mean I have to go out and see them. And actually I am an awful poetry audience. I’m a hopeless listener. I’m more likely to be thinking about someone’s poor dress sense or bad hair than listening to their poems.
CJA: For several years you edited the magazine Joe Soap’s Canoe. As anyone who’s done that sort of thing knows, it takes up an awful lot of time – time that a person might feel was more profitably spent writing his own poems. Do you agree?
MS: No. And yes. It can stop you writing poems, but maybe that’s good sometimes. I think the time I spent editing was time well spent. Of course, for a lot of the time I did nothing editing-wise at all, because the magazine became annual and so for nine months of the year I just opened brown envelopes, took the poems out of them and stuck them into the return envelope and sent them back to where they’d come from. That’s not editing, it’s damage limitation. But the good side of editing is finding poems and learning about poems and just learning, learning….. it’s not really quantifiable, but it’s very interesting and …. I remember also, when I told Rupert Mallin I was going to start a magazine, this was 1978 or so, he said something to the effect that I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. He was right. He ran his own magazine – “Stable” – and he knew what he was talking about. One’s take on poetry world changes when you’re an editor, and that’s definitely influenced my take on poetry in general.
CJA: In what ways did being the editor of JSC change your take on the poetry world?
MS: You try getting all those brown envelopes, and seeing all those poems. You try understanding why someone can get so upset at your not liking their poetry. You try working your balls off and publishing someone’s poems you like, and you never ever hear from them again because they just needed to be able to put your magazine on their list of credits and now they’ve done that they fuck off into wherever they fuck off to, and you’re left wondering if you’ve been had.
But actually all that comes down to is arriving at where you can put it all into some kind of perspective. Which we’ve already mentioned. But I think that editing experience, apart from enabling one to learn more about poetry itself, also helped me find a way to deal with all the good stuff and the bad stuff poetry world wanted to throw at me, and come to realise that Hey man, chill out. “These are only poems.” And that poet who just had a crack at you, he’s an idiot, so it doesn’t matter. Yes, quite.
CJA: These days you manage/oversee/virtually edit (I don’t know the right verb here) the web site Exultations & Difficulties. What made you decide to go in for that?
MS: I guess I had an itch that needed scratching. I’d thought about an online magazine for a while, but I didn’t want to go back to proper magazine editing, as such, simply because I didn’t feel like committing entirely to a project like that, and in a sense I’d done that, and got the t-shirt, and didn’t feel like going backwards. But the format I’ve hit on, somewhat by accident, which is a cross between a blog and an e-zine, suits me down to the ground. There’s virtually no pressure, no schedule, and it’s fun. And it seems to work. People say they like it.
CJA: You have had a long-ish association with contemporary American poetry. You are, for example, friends with Mark Halliday & Paul Violi (indeed you’ve collaborated with Mark on a number of projects). Do you think the contemporary poetry scene is healthier in the States than it is in Britain?
MS: It’s the same, I think, just bigger. I’m sorry, I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about this. I mean, everyone knows American poetry is heavily coloured and influenced by the numerous writing MFA things that there are, which is one thing, and so in that respect it’s different than here, and then there are the usual disputes and factions, and who knows? I don’t think the boundary lines and differences between us and them are so distinct now, though, which I suspect is somewhat down to the internet and the fact that the traffic between worlds now is easier and more constant. I think I’m on the verge of saying something interesting here, but I’m not sure what it is because I’m only just discovering it….. I mean, for one thing, I joined an online poets’ discussion list, an American one, and it turned out to be a bunch of poets who knew each other, as far as I could tell, and sometimes it was interesting, and a lot of the time it was obviously long-running feuds keep rearing their heads. Similar things happen on British inline discussion lists, at times.
CJA: Okay, here’s one for the technicians: Rhyme or no rhyme? Capital letters at the beginning of lines or not? Metrics or to hell with it? Punctuate it like you’d punctuate prose or not? Where do you stand on this lot?
MS: Yes to all of it. I mean, the technical stuff is there to use, rather than to be used by, and I think one should use it as and when one feels either it’s appropriate or it feels just kind of right, which I guess is the same thing. So, I’ve written maybe a small handful, barely that, of poems that have end-line rhymes, but that’s because apart from one or two occasions it’s never felt like the right thing for me to do. But I have loads of poems where there is blatant use of internal rhyme, and assonance and dissonance and all that stuff, although it’s so blatant it’s barely ever noticed. Still lots of people would say it was chopped up prose, but that marks them out as idiots, really. I do like it lots when a reviewer actually notices that the poems are really worked, and worked hard on. I do admit I like someone to point that out, say once every ten years or so. Otherwise, I’m happy if people think they are quick and easy when they’re absolutely not. I don’t want people to notice the work, I want them to enjoy the poem. I don’t do metrics. Again, I go along with Violi: if I find myself counting syllables I know I’m in trouble. I feel absolutely no compunction or desire to go down that road. It’s not that I can’t; I feel no need. Someone else can feel the opposite, and that’s fine if it’s right for them. Mind you, I can believe that one day I might feel inclined to do some formal poems, you know, sestinas or whatever, and see where the formalism takes me. But it’s not happened yet.
As you will know from having read the collected works, I have historically gone for the no capital letters at the beginning of lines option. But at the moment I’m doing the opposite: every poem has capital letters at the start of each line. Don’t ask me why. Again, it happens to feel right, and at the moment I think it looks good. At the moment. It’s an instinctive thing, which means it’s a very, very strong whim.
CJA: So you’d agree with the sainted John Ashbery that ‘Poetry is mostly hunches’?
MS: I’d disagree with the “sainted” tag, but whatever. Hunches? Yes. But that’s okay for him, and something along the same lines is obviously okay for a lot of other people, too. And I’d go along with it, in that I never really know what I’m going to write until I’ve written it. If that’s poetry on a hunch, yes. But obviously, too, it’s not how loads of other poets function, and there are lots of other ways to do it. But I’m happy to have a vague notion of a poem, a kind of empty vessel that’s waiting there for me, that I can see and hear, and all I have to do is fill it with the right words, to make that thing I think I kind of saw and heard before I set out.
CJA: I don’t know to what extent you go in for talking about yourself in your poems. I know the ‘I’ in a Martin Stannard poem isn’t reliably Martin Stannard. But I’ve been forcibly struck by what sounds & feels like a strong autobiographical element in much of your work. An example would be the title poem for your next collection, ‘A Relation of Years’; it definitely has a strong lyrical strain to it, it’s modern (in the sense of contemporary), for sure, but it seems to have veins of Romanticism swirled up into it as well. Do you know what I’m getting at here? Or am I just talking rubbish again?
MS: There is a lot of autobiography. There is also a lot that isn’t, I think. But pretty much everything comes from somewhere within my experience, or even from within earshot or eyeshot, which seems a pretty obvious kind of thing to say, but even the poem with the most made-up or, at least, the most non-autobiographical poem is likely to have something in it that is, even somewhat remotely, autobiographical. At least, I think so. That’s the way I think things are, but I’d have to look at specific poems and say what was in them to be precise about it. We could do a spreadsheet, and come up with a mathematical figure, a percentage of autobiographical, or none.
I prefer not to write “straight” autobiography, although I certainly have done so, because I think poems should be more interesting than that. By which I mean, if a poem is so obviously just about me I’d feel it was limited, in a sense, although of course I know that if it’s good it’s good and would, by virtue of its goodness, be about more than just the me of the poem. But still, I prefer to think I open things up a bit more by being not straight autobiographical, although the extent to which I do so is perhaps arguable if a poem sounds like it’s about me but really isn’t. For example, the poem you mentioned appears to be very autobiographical, but in fact it is so only in a few parts. All the time I’m saying this, and trying to distance myself from autobiography, I sense I may be fooling myself. It wouldn’t be the first time.
CJA: To what extent do you have a reader in mind when you’re writing poems, and who is it?
MS: To no extent, except me. It’s me. I do rather like, and often refer to, the notion of “the ideal reader” who sits at your shoulder as you write. Who will understand every nuance, every reference, every intonation, and even understand what you don’t say as well as what you do say. I like that notion, although I don’t really think a lot about it. Perhaps if I thought about it too much I’d realise it’s a nonsense.
I want a reader of my poems to enjoy the experience of reading. I want the poem to sound good, read well, move well, entertain, and provoke. I want readers to know I think, and I would like them to think also, so we all think, and thinking is good, although (as Ashbery has said) thinking isn’t always what we think it is…. But, to be honest, when I write I am writing to satisfy whatever the hell it is one writes to satisfy. I hesitate to call it “a need”. That sounds dreadful, to have some kind of need.
My criterion for finishing a poem and letting it stand, and to go out into the world, is that I have to think it’s more than okay, and does all that read well, move well stuff. I have to trust myself, of course, to be the judge of that. Anyway, I figure if it does these things, passes my test, then a reader somewhere will be happy to share it. I hope so, because I don’t know how else to do it. I doubt any of this marks me out as being any different from any other poet who works hard and does their best.
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