Ian Humphreys (ed.), "Why I Write Poetry"

 

About Why I Write Poetry: Essays on Becoming a Poet, Keeping Going and Advice for the Writing Life, ed. Ian Humphreys

What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing? Why I Write Poetry, edited by Ian Humphreys, combines twenty-five lively and thought-provoking essays, along with individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry.

The book includes essays by Romalyn Ante, Khairani Barokka, Hafsah Aneela Bashir, Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Jo Clement, Sarah Corbett, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Jonathan Edwards, Rosie Garland, W. N. Herbert, Ian Humphreys, Keith Jarrett, Zaffar Kunial, Rachel Mann, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, Jacqueline Saphra, Clare Shaw, Daniel Sluman, Jean Sprackland, and Jennifer Wong.

Ian Humphreys, photograph by Sarah Turton

About the editor

Ian Humphreys’s debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was nominated for the Portico Prize. He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press, 2021) and the producer/ co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022). His work has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry and won first prize in the Hamish Canham Prize. A fellow of The Complete Works, Ian’s poems are showcased in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe).

You can read more about Why I Write Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, the editor Ian Humphreys shares an anecdote about an encounter and advice he received, and his own later instinct to "voice the unsayable." 

From the Introduction to Why I Write Poetry

The late poet John Ash once pleaded with me not to take up poetry. 

It was 1983. He had cornered me in the newly renovated kitchen of a house in Whalley Range. John rented the adjacent room. My friend Tarik rented a room on the second floor. Another friend Mark was pirouetting by the dishwasher when John stormed in to complain about the noise. 

We had been giddily fixing 3am snacks while attempting an off-key rendition of ‘Love Pains’ by Yvonne Elliman, so it was a fair cop. John didn’t stay angry for long. He asked what I was studying, what my plans were, and seemed relieved to hear they did not involve poetry. 

‘Good choice, very sensible. Whatever you do, please don’t become a poet! Stick to something where you can earn a bit of money.’ I remember laughing to myself. At that moment, I honestly could not think of anything I would enjoy less – an occupation that seemed duller – than writing poetry. 

While researching this book, I discovered that around the time we met, John had written a short essay about his collection The Goodbyes (Carcanet, 1982). The piece was republished two decades later in Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words (Picador). 

One part of the essay, in particular, caught my eye: ‘… many of the poems were written to the accompaniment of the kind of music you might hear at parties or in good nightclubs, that is to say, songs of August Darnell, Ashford and Simpson or the Chic Organisation, and on occasion the words of these songs have found their way into the poems.’ 

If only John had mentioned this during his pep talk. Perhaps I wouldn’t have waited thirty years before starting to write poetry myself. At school, we were taught the Romantics, nothing modern. After sitting my A-levels, I did not pick up a book of poems for two decades. I was unaware that contemporary poetry celebrated popular culture, that a ‘serious’ lyric poet could be inspired by August Darnell aka ‘Kid Creole’ of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. 

John and I hardly spoke again. Once, over burning toast, he recommended Prince’s overlooked early albums. A year or so later, I heard he had moved to New York where he became associated with the New York School of poets. 

Several poems in my debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) explore my coming of age in 1980s Manchester. The gay club I had frequented the night John advised against poetry as a vocation is a touchstone in the book. I began to write about those early days on and around Canal Street, I think, to try and work out something about my formative years. For sure, there was joy, exhilaration and freedom. But there was also fear; a background dread that we accepted back then as part of life’s rhythm, as relentless as the four-on-the-floor beat of those Hi-NRG hits we lived for. It was fear of the unknown. Fear of illness. Fear of society’s disapproval which at any moment could mutate into danger.

Such contradictory emotions can be difficult to articulate, as slippery as a lager-soaked dancefloor. What I longed to communicate was feeling not fact, and this seemed best conveyed through the shimmering medium of poetry. 

The need to voice the unsayable – reach for the ungraspable – is one of the main reasons I write poetry. It’s a motive I share with many of my peers. When I turned to social media to ask why poets do what they do, many replied with answers along the lines of: 

To make sense of life. 
To make sense of the world. 
To connect with my inner world. 
To say things I could not otherwise express.

Another response that came up, again and again, was compulsion: 

I write poetry because I must. 
It is a thing I do, like breathing. 
I wrote poetry before I could write. 
I can’t help myself. 

Over one hundred poets responded, with variations on these two themes accounting for around ninety percent of all answers put forward. This posed a question: how could we prevent our contributors from writing multiple versions of the same essay? 

The answer? Jane [Commane] and I identified what we most admired in the work of the selected poets. We then asked each of them to explore a theme reflecting this idiosyncratic quality as they riffed on their craft. 

As you will discover, the tactic worked wonders. The resulting twenty-five essays are fascinating and varied. There’s little repetition, and thankfully even less navel-gazing. 

Each piece is unique in its approach to the trials, tribulations and pleasures of writing poetry. The mix of styles is satisfyingly rich, from the informal to the academic, the lyric to the dreamlike. Together, the compositions stand as testament to the robust state of poetry in 21st century Britain. 

Had I not started writing eight years ago, I would have missed out on so much, including the chance to curate and edit this book. As such, I am delighted I listened to instinct rather than advice, and eventually shimmied my way towards a calling, of sorts, in poetry. 

Sally Evans, "Wildgoose"

Sally Evans is from the North of England but has lived in Scotland for much of her life, where she edited Poetry Scotland for twenty years and hosted poetry gatherings in Callander, at the bookshop she runs with her husband. A well-known poet, she has been studying for a PhD at  Lancaster University where she set out to write a novel about poetry in Scotland and the North of England. The result is Wildgoose: A Tale of Two Poets, now published by Red Squirrel Press.

About Wildgoose

Wildgoose takes fictional poet cousins, Maeve Cartier and Eric Grysewood, and follows them through their careers in a novel of episodes in various parts of the North. The wild geese inspire Maeve with poetry and take us around the country and into the realm of imagination.

Real poets, especially those from the second half of the 20th century, interact with fictional poets in the story. Following the cousins to their destinies, the book comments on a poetry world that many readers will be familiar with. Amid changing social norms they work within the poetry community as they aim for publication and seek satisfaction in their lives. We see Eric succeeding relatively effortlessly while Maeve struggles with the notion of a young woman becoming a poet. We see Maeve composing her work, with some of her poetry in progress, and we follow Eric's responses to his cousin's life..

What happens to them makes an exciting read as Edinburgh, Newcastle, Grasmere, St Andrews and other locations give a background to the poets' lives and work. Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman Nicholson, and, more remotely, Wordsworth and Plath feature in the narrative, which includes a wealth of historical detail of the time. 

From Wildgoose, by Sally Evans

Extract from Chapter 2: Maeve, 17, is eating with MacDiarmid and Bunting after a reading at Newcastle University Poetry Society:

The wine level went down in the carafes. More was supplied, along with dishes of vegetables. Maeve drank her wine very slowly. Basil was discussing a place called Briggflatts. ‘I took Sima there. She’s used to the northern wilds.’

‘Tom Pickard told me to go there,’ said the host, ‘but I still haven’t been.’

She’d heard Eric mention Tom Pickard. It all seemed so cliquey. She should earn her meal by contributing talk, but it wasn’t easy. She didn’t want to say anything stupid. The poets could be her grandfathers by age. The scholar, though younger, looked as if he was married. Unfussed, sensibly-dressed, he kept a benign eye on her, as he had first done when Eric abandoned her. Licking her ice-cream spoon, she caught a quick, scary glance from MacDiarmid as he finished his cheese.

She suddenly saw she might have been invited for decoration, for the flirt value. This shocked her so deeply that she launched into conversation.

‘I write poetry too!’

MacDiarmid’s face broke into a grin. ‘What did you think of my poems, then?’ 

‘What language are they in?’

She knew she shouldn’t have said that, but the poet had irritated her. 

She felt a frisson from the others.

‘I write in Scots!’ His face became animated, under his extraordinary hair that shot up from his forehead for all of three inches then fell away backwards in a tangle. He was still speaking English. He was in England after all.

She turned her attention to the less intimidating Basil.

‘Seriously, I write poems. I have a long way to go but – you have to start…’

‘Quite right, my lovely,’ said Basil.

‘It’s been so exciting hearing the poetry tonight, real northern poetry!’

‘Have you copies of poems you have written?’ Basil leaned closer to her. ‘You are right to note that it is northern poetry. We speak for our people, on their behalf. I believe you when you say poems excite you. Where are your poems?’

Maeve paused. This sounded like luck, but was it? She had no poems on her person. She didn’t have big pockets in her clothes like the men. 'My poems are in the room where I’m staying tonight. I must go home. I’m beyond tired.'

Chris was contemplating his whisky glass and had lapsed into silence.