What I Do That's New is a series of articles in which poets share their trade secrets with the rest of us i.e. they describe aspects of what they do that is either innovative or just plain clever.

If you would like to feature in a future article in this series then contact feature editor Dermot Glennon dermot@writeoutloud.net

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The first time I took a pair of scissors to one of my poems was a revelation: a dead poem came to life. I was suddenly surprised by the poem, in a way I wasn’t before. It wasn’t some deliberate policy to subvert poetry, it was a matter of frustration. There was something wrong with the poem in front of me, and the only thing to do with it was either throw it into the failure pile or do something drastic.

I couldn’t believe what came out: a poem that had been struggling for breath suddenly started speaking. It was because I no longer had control of the poem that it began to speak back at me. Or, to put in more rational terms, I had discovered something that I’d missed by using more conventional methods of composition:

 By taking a pair of scissors to the poem, turning the pieces upside down, shuffling them and rearranging them in as random a way as possible, I’d rediscovered my inner avant garde, the part of me that says “I wonder what happens if I do that…” rather than “that worked, I’ll do it again”.

I don’t live in 19^th century Paris or the ‘20’s, or New York in the early ‘50’s (where most of my inspiration comes from: Ashbery, O’Hara, the New York poets gathered around St Mark’s Poetry Project…) All the terms: modernist, post-modernist, linguistically innovative, sound like academy speech What started me in poetry wasn’t just trying to get a message across innovative, experimental, don’t really get across the passion, the sheer joy of discovery, the love of the sound of language, the improvisation of phrases never before heard in English found in TS Eliot, in Dylan Thomas and WS Graham. It’s still what motivates me.

However, I’d not discovered a way to access that part of me. I’d mucked around with small scale experiments I never showed anyone; but the poems I’d published were usually conventional variations on mainstream free verse, with the occasional Muldoonesque rhyme scheme. Now I’d begun to write poems that were surprising to the writer as well as the reader, where I had no idea where I would end up when I began, free improvisations in language. And yes, I am a jazz fan, from bebop to free, a modernist in my musical as well as literary taste.

So now, the idea is to keep surprising myself, because hopefully that will keep the reader surprised, keep them on their toes as it were. Some people will follow my poetry there, just as they followed Charlie Parker and Gillespie into bebop, others will complain there is no tune. But I’m an improviser; if it sounds good, I’ll keep it. If it hits a wrong note, and that wrong note leads somewhere more interesting I’ll follow it.

I’m afraid I can’t help that; some people have the gift of being able to communicate in simple tunes (that are never that simple) to lots of people. The late Adrian Mitchell had it in spades, so does Ian MacMillan. I love their work; but they do something I can’t. I just keep following my own nose to see where it leads. You’re welcome to come along for the ride, if you like mystery trains.

http://www.writeoutloud.net/poets/stevenwaling