Beyond the Comfort Zone

Image: Minn, Unplash

‘A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer, a ticket.’
— Edward Hirsch

Back in the autumn I had the pleasure of teaching Caroline Bird’s collection The Air Year with my Wise Women poetry group in Stroud. We loved the poems’ breathless, inventive leaps into unknown territory, the surreal imagery and the slapstick, often self-deprecating humour. In the author interviews I gathered to share with the group, I was struck by the poet’s description of her process, particularly her emphasis on ‘getting lost’:

With each first draft, no matter how long or short the finished draft would end up becoming, I deliberately wrote and wrote until the poem ‘got lost’. I wanted to truly write into the nothingness: if I reached what felt like the conclusion I deliberately carried on, overshooting the finale to find the ‘unexpected clearing’, the dark untamed place where the poem stops obeying the poet and instead starts speaking back.

You can read the full interview here on the Forward Arts Foundation website.

In my own work, and in my teaching and mentoring, I’m constantly preoccupied by the tension between safety and exploration. We might stretch ourselves beyond our habits through prompts, provocations, or by reading the work of braver poets, but, especially if we’ve reached the stage where we know we can craft a competent poem, an instinct towards closure and neatness often kicks in. We do what we know works well: a basket of beautiful, shiny images, for example; a fast-paced joke with a killer punchline; a graceful epiphany at the end…

This is not necessarily always a bad thing: there are poets who spend their entire careers doing almost the same thing wonderfully well. But I’m interested in the possibilities of risk-taking and messiness, and of poetry writing as a process of discovery and adventure. As Anne Carson says, ‘Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.’ The ‘ickiness’ the workshop participant is concerned about in their draft might be the very thing the poem needs to lean into and explore.

A decade or so ago, probably longer, I co-organised a night called ‘Discomfort Zone’ for poet and mentor Roddy Lumsden’s Broadcast event series at the Betsey Trotwood in London. Each poet was asked to write a new poem on an allocated subject believed to be outside their comfort zone. Roddy gave me ‘electronica’ — not exactly uncomfortable, but not something I knew much about — and I spent hours writing along to The Future Sound of London’s Environment Five. At the time, I was also trying to write a radio play as part of my PhD. I felt so lost I struggled to find a foothold. In one meeting, a potential supervisor had given me a concise summary of my work and its stylistic tics: the unusual words, the piled-up adjectives listed in groups of three. She cautioned me, though, against trying too hard to depart from my own style. ‘The trick is to go deeper,’ she said. ‘The trick is to do what you do but take it further.’

I think of my early published work as being quite ‘jazz hands,’ by which I mean I was performing for the reader, somehow afraid of losing their attention or respect. I worried about being a ‘proper poet’ with the kind of learned authority I felt that entailed. In ‘Against Decoration’ Mary Karr speaks about poetry she feels avoids genuine feeling through ornament and difficulty as ‘opaque, emotionless highbrow doily-making.’ I don’t think all of my early work fits this description – there are poems I’m still proud of – but the impulse towards evasion and dictionary-waving was definitely there. Many of my poems were dramatic monologues, written in imagined voices. Again: nothing inherently wrong with this. But, I’d mistaken difficulty for daring. In reality, some of my habits — the obscure words, the performed cleverness, the ventriloquised voices — were forms of control. As Roddy Lumsden once asked me in those early years: what would happen if I wrote a completely honest poem? I didn’t know what that meant, or where to begin.

I began to think about crutches and fall-backs, and diction. I wanted to shift something in my work – which is how I came to attempt the radio play. In a workshop on syntax with Mimi Khalvati I began to think about how sentence structure and rhythm work to shape thought and feeling on the page. What happens if the poem is all end-stopped lines, or all one long, meandering sentence? I thought about Frank O’Hara’s direct, conversational style. Was it ever possible to just to say the thing, plainly? What does ‘poetry’ add to the utterance?

I think these questions around heightened poetic diction and plain speech, and who gets to speak and be heard, are part of what led to my use of verbatim interview voices in Pretenders. It’s not an experiment I’ll repeat again, exactly, but I’m still fascinated by different voices, interview and archive material, and the fault lines and archaeology of the past. I’ve pushed my work in different directions, but it’s still recognisably mine. I’m getting closer, I hope, to making work that does what it needs to do – and I hope the journey is interesting for others, as well as for me. Again and again in my teaching, I’m struck by how often, with the right support and encouragement, the poem begins to deepen and find direction at the exact point where the writer feels least certain of what they’re doing.

In a recent Zoom workshop, after the usual helpful comments had been made about my draft – the image that wasn’t quite working, the shape of the poem on the page – a friend said, ‘There’s something missing from this poem.’ I knew I’d finished the draft too early. I needed to overshoot the finale, go further to find the ‘unexpected clearing’ where the poem might start speaking back.

These questions around uncertainty, voice and poetic discovery continue to shape the workshops I teach for Writers.com and in Poetical Workshop, my online poetry community, which will open again to new members in June.