Poetry nags at me. There is such a lot out there and I wonder whether the overall effect isn’t bedlam. Voices all jumbled up. My submission box tugs at me day and night with stuff – a lot of which makes me wonder why the poet wrote it. I wrote a poem over last night and this morning – about some black lambs that I was seeing into the world then fretting about. Special black lambs in their own way – because they are of a rare Scottish breed and have direct plug-ins to history and St Kilda and a host of other things which matter. I wrote it because I wanted to pin down some nagging thing about why these little creatures were bouncing around in the twilight and didn’t know either how fragile they were nor what a whole weight of history they carried on their outrageously over-long legs. One way or another the poem was written and eased the itch and was crafted with all the skill I have. Is it then a natural progression to think that the poem needs to go out into the world? Or is that a totally separate question for the poet? There seems to be a lot of people who see it as just a ‘given’ that, once written, a poem should be launched on the world – by a message in a bottle, an internet post or a manuscript. Is this like a bunch of people at a party all talking over each other? In a roundabout way I suppose I’m articulating what it is about poetry that will make us print it. It isn’t because a poet has gracefully, expertly scratched their itch in public. It is because their work can scratch everybody else’s itch. For sure, possibly itches they didn’t even know they had.
David
