Rosanna McGlone (ed.), "The Process of Poetry"

 

About The Process of Poetry: From First Draft to Final Poem, ed. Rosanna McGlone

The Process of Poetry is a unique collection of interviews with contemporary poets at the height of their craft. How does a subconscious thought become an award-winning poem? Journalist Rosanna McGlone speaks to some of the country's leading poets to find out. Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Gillian Clarke, Pascale Petit, Hannah Lowe, Regi Claire, Joelle Taylor, Victoria Kennefick and others explore the development of a single poem from rough notes to a final version to provide invaluable insights for writers and poetry enthusiasts alike.

You can read more about The Process of Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read about the editor and from the Preface to the book. 

Rosanna McGlone is a journalist, writer and poetry tutor. She has written more than a 100 features for both national, and international, publications including: The Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Weekend Australian and Salon.com. Rosanna has lived in Australia and El Salvador. Her first radio play, based on the massacre at El Mozote, was shortlisted for the BBC’s Alfred Bradley Bursary Award. Her work has been supported by, amongst others, Arts Council England, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Hull Truck Theatre, Vault Festival, Green Curtain Theatre and The Old Vic New Voices Programme. Writing residencies include Capricorn Hill, NSW, Australia and The Hosking Houses Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

From The Process of Poetry

From the Preface, by Rosanna McGlone

No poet publishes a first draft, at least, not until now. Invariably, what you see are carefully honed words, nurtured into being, but what goes on before those words reach the printed page? From my own experience as a poetry tutor for many years, it is clear that most writers have little awareness of the skill and stamina involved in crafting a poem. This was the motivation behind what you are about to read. The Process of Poetry offers an opportunity to explore early drafts by fifteen of the nation’s leading poets and to hear the reasoning behind their development.

These poets have been the recipients of numerous awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, The Forward Prize for Poetry, The Costa Book of The Year, The Eric Gregory Award, The Creative Scotland Award, The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Foyle Young Poet of the Year and The Wilfred Owen Award. 

One has been the Scottish Makar and one has been The National Poet for Wales. Several poets have work on school syllabi. Moreover, their expertise extends beyond poetry and includes editing, publishing, judging, translating, lecturing, and overseeing spoken word events. 

How was the project undertaken? I approached a number of poets whose work I admired, poets who come from highly diverse backgrounds and represent us all. I was aware from the start that they would need a willingness to make themselves vulnerable in order to share their expertise. 

Initially, each contributor sent several poems, from which one was selected which best exemplified their craft. Some poets offered very early drafts, or even journal notes, whilst others provided later versions still in need of improvement. The aim was to showcase a wide range of writing styles and redrafting techniques.

A series of interviews was conducted, enabling each poet to discuss the development of their work, some of which is based on traumatic events. Whilst a few writers have given a broad overview of their working methods, others have chosen to focus on the minutiae. Some have analysed single words, others a change to title, subject or form. It is these interviews which form the basis of this book. 

The aim of this project is not to identify and scrutinise every single alteration in each poem. The book raises a number of questions. Where does a poem originate? How do you decide on a title? When do you choose the form for your poem? What are the best approaches to editing your work? When would additional input help? How do you know when a poem is finally finished? What should you consider when assembling a collection? What is a publisher seeking? 

Contributors have offered their guidance on the skills that a working poet requires, entering competitions, translating and writing for performance. Whilst often their advice concurs, I love that it is, occasionally, contradictory. I trust that, as a reader, you will respond to the variation that is presented and take away with you what is most helpful. 

My hope is that this book will preserve the unique insights and materials of living poets for the next generation. Better still, that the value of this undertaking will be recognised and that there will be an opportunity to expand it more widely in the future ...

Viv Fogel, "Imperfect Beginnings"

  

Viv Fogel’s poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies since the mid-70s. She has a collection Without Question 2006 and two pamphlets (Witness 2013 and How it is … 2018). Her poems and her work are influenced by having been adopted by refugee Holocaust survivors. London based, once an art teacher, she is involved with community, social housing and education projects, and since the mid-80’s has worked as a psychotherapist. She is a grandmother to three dual-heritage grandchildren. Her website is here.

 

About Imperfect Beginnings, by Viv Fogel

Imperfect Beginnings lays its poems out to rest on uncertain terrain. Visa paperwork deadlines hang in the air. New-borns, torn too early from their mother’s breast, learn to adapt to harsh guardianship. 

Belonging and exile are mirrored in the stories of having to leave one’s birthmother—or motherland. 

From narrative poems such as ‘My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis,’ Fogel takes us on a journey throughout history, spanning ancestry, wartime, adoption and peacetime, as life settles. Family, work, love and the natural world provide purpose, meaning and a sense of coming ‘home.’

You can read more about Imperfect Beginnings on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Imperfect Beginnings

My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis 

          for Itzaak Weinreich b.1903 - d.1988

blue-eyed and handsome, he nodded and grinned 
at them through the coffee houses of Berlin, the cakes
and cabaret, a sweet tooth and an eye for women. 

He wrote funny verse, made his friends laugh,
turned horror into humour, played the joker,
protected me from the truth.

My father loved to polish: wooden banisters, 
brass door handles, candlesticks - our boots; 
always polishing. 

Buchenwald was his camp: ‘but Butlins it was not!’
I wasn’t meant to hear about the officer’s 
leather belt, his polished boots,

of the baby tossed 
into the air, skull 
cracking beneath the boot.

And once, he upturned the kitchen table, 
mouth foaming, as plates slid 
cracking to the floor. 

He died a year before the Wall came down,
the year my baby was born.
I sat by his bed and fed him, 

as once he fed me. I stroked his baby head, 
made him smile at my jokes,
as his watery eyes were fading. 

I traced his burnt-scarred arm, tapped 
my fingers along numbers the same blue-grey 
as his veins, longing to unlock his story. 

He held my baby in his arms, just once, 
a little awkward, a little shy, 
a big man   grown small.

 
Mr Rockwell

There are no photos but I imagine you sucking on a cigar,
your stubby nails manicured, a gold diamond ring maybe.

I found the faded list of things you paid for: bonnet and bootees,
a knitted coat, a blanket for the cot, formula milk, adoption fees.

My bewildered mother was made to leave, her breasts full
and aching, and a new home was found for me.

They told me you were fat—a wandering 
hand that patted, groped and squeezed—

but you were their boss and the girls were malleable.
No expectations you told them so nothing lost! 

Your accent thick as the lies you told your wife.
Years later I track you down, call your home. 

A curt voice informs me that you’re dead. 
Click—the contact is cut.  But Father,  

I need your eyes, your smell, your look—
to see how akin the echo 
 

Julian Bishop, "We Saw It All Happen"

 

Julian Bishop has had a lifelong interest in ecology thanks largely to a childhood in rural Wiltshire. He’s a former television journalist and apart from poetry has a passion for gardens, running and dogs although not necessarily in that order. He’s been widely published and was a runner up in the International Ginkgo Prize For Eco-Poetry. He lives with his family in North London. His website is here. 

About We Saw It All Happen

The poems in this first collection were written over seven or so years at a time when daily headlines brought more evidence of climate change and our increasing disconnection with nature. Bishop, a journalist who once worked as an environment reporter, talks in the preface about how he feels he failed in raising awareness about the seriousness of the crisis by reporting on the alarming data and hopes the more emotional engagement offered by a poem might have more impact. His approach is often formal, there are villanelles, sonnets and a lipogram among other forms. The book itself is divided into three sections which look at the impact of climate change on the natural world, a second more political and satirical section followed by a third more forward-looking section which offers some more hopeful poems. 

From We Saw It All Happen

At The Ice House

(An 18th century ice house was discovered during work on Regent’s Crescent in London)

Polished mahogany tables heaved
under the weight of Regency treats -
calves’ foot jellies, sweetmeats,
wobbling flummery poised on concealed 

ice-beds, hand-harvested
from Norwegian fjords. Numb-thumbed
cutters, slicing through rime, fashioned
brieze-blocks of ice to fit

into steamships, sawdust-stuffed
to stave off melt, cargoes stowed
between beams of deal below,
cubes cracked big enough

for an igloo the size of the O2. 
Staring now into the brick-lined 
void unearthed in grounds behind 
a stuccoed row, it hits you

how a division of spoils is where it begins: 
with the convivial aristocratic clack
of a vintage hock or an Escubac 
on the rocks, how tickling a gentleman's 

gins counts more to those in power
than the cost of a frosted bourbon, 
those who only ever reflect on 
melting ice when it is raised in a tumbler.

Dung Beetles

(Could vanish within a century - Biological Conservation journal)

Strange that catastrophe should announce itself

on such small feet 

among such humble collectors of dirt, 

street-cleaners, shovellers of stools, 

tunnellers through filth.

Ancient Egyptians saw gods in them, suns in dung

shaped into spheres 

dragged into creepy-crawly underworlds;

guided by starry skies, they deep-cleaned fields,

deodorised cattle dumps.

Photographers fawned over tigers, meercats,

svelte giraffes 

while caddis flies withered in the wings - 

no lightbulbs exploded as spiders dived for cover 

beneath piles of calcified scat.

Globetrotting beetles wade through cesspits

teeming with tailings,

cowpats contaminated by worm controls.

Bugs that make the world go round push up

the daisies, while the planet goes to shit.