Tim Liardet

Dreaming the Triptych

Sometimes life events give you the time and space to consider what sort of poetry you might wish to write. And sometimes they dictate exactly the sort of poetry you have to write, as if the gap between them and artistic endeavour has evaporated and you have entered a new gravitational field. To the God of Rain grew out of such a cycle: a time of enlargement and acceleration during which everything seemed to be changing shape like liquid glass. In one sense the book attempts to hold on the page the taste, the smell, the atmosphere of that time. It was a time of self-discovery, of learning how to act, of transcending indecision. The train approaches us and things begin to shake. The train that courses through the whole book pauses at its many stations.

Some years before, I had come across the triptych by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni entitled States of Mind, the left panel devoted to Those Who Stay, the right to Those who Leave: the former left hanging in the reeds of their disconsolation, the latter thrusting on through a metaphysical wind without losing their hats. Something in the rhythm that existed between the two panels either side of the great departing train fascinated me. But it was dreamlike. The vague, unplaceable memory of it seemed to offer the prospect of supplying the visual language for exactly what I was trying to say. But where had I seen it? This became the mystery. I was my own shabby sleuth losing heart but never quite the obsession. Many websites yielded up a very distant relative of the painting, shuddering out of the printer like the radiation burns on the Turin shroud. I imagined the perfect reproduction waiting somewhere, folded in gorgeous nightfall.

The only book containing full plates of the triptych, I discovered, was out of print. Whatever other pretext I might have had for visiting this place or that, I always carried with me an insistent secret purpose. In bookshops in Dublin, Florence, Paris and London, amongst other cities, I searched for months. Slowly but definitely, the tracking down of this hefty volume became indistinguishable in my mind from the final unifying of my collection. Some two years later, more or less, when I located a mint condition copy through a book searchC having to pay five times the original mark-up price C not only was a curious madness appeased but I realised the painting was now inseparable from my precise imagining of the book I was in the process of completing. The overriding obsession crystallised. To the God of Rain both celebrates and explores that riskiest of experiences C the moment you step into the engine-room of your own life.

In 2001 I taught for a year at the second largest Young Offenders’ prison in Europe. As if a valve had opened, I produced more poems than ever before in a twelve month period. Though they were at first mere lightning-sketches of feeling and ideas they helped me to manage the scornful refusal of learning I encountered in each of five classrooms every day. When I attempted to turn them into fully grown poems, however, I made many false starts. How do you attempt to evoke the truths of imprisonment without appearing exploitative, voyeuristic or coy?

The presiding emotion was fear. Crude as those first efforts were, some had caught something of the chill of the prison. Attempts to develop them were discouraging, though: poems clumsily acknowledging the difficulty of approach without solving it or, worse still, failing to find their note. I was keen to excise all liberal cant, hubris and innocence, any notion that offering poetry to prisoners made a difference or improved the quality of their lives. It didn’t. I was more interested in exploring the nature of the distance that existed between us, mapping it in minute detail. This became the space in which they exercised their rituals of disparagement. I acclimatised slowly, realising equally slowly I’d alighted upon a serious subject. In a way, at this stage, I felt I was being nudged towards the writing of a book I had never planned on and which, to be honest, I was doubtful I wanted to write. While the inmates stayed put, I was free to write about them on the other side of the razor wire. I grew aware that the development of this collection—the moral freedom it seemed to represent—would stretch irony and tact to the limits. It would also mean heading, I knew, not only into the dark interior of the prison, but into the darkness of myself as well.

Having been writer in Residence at Wormwood Scrubs, working mainly with the life sentence inmates of D Wing, Ken Smith produced his celebrated collection of poems Wormwood in 1987. Perhaps more than any other this collection has come to define the very strange transactions that have for many years brought poets to work in prisons; it also put in place the first stages of the mythology that has grown up concerning precisely what it is professional poets might be able to offer prisoners. Smith’s two years at the prison, it seems, were an entirely positive experience for him, during which rich exchanges took place; reading the book might lead you to understand it was also a time during which he made new friends, men who are nameless only in his acknowledgements page. Think of Billy— his injunction to a predominantly white, middle class audience—think of John, think of Az, as if by mentioning their names they might be raised into political history for the first time and, in a sense, memorialised. “All this is prison,” he says.

There is in this book a sense of principled responsibility shown by Smith towards the objects of his affection and disquiet, and a sense of moral injustice always underpinning it: “Don’t say guilt, don’t say innocent. / Suspend disbelief. Say the convicted.” In all of his Wormwood poems, perhaps, there is also a sense that he is sitting among the prisoners, and is never standing up at the front acting the teacher since such theatre would automatically associate him with the larger conspiracy. Ensconced in this strange locale, amongst them, Smith becomes somewhat like a mirror image of them, enabled to speak on behalf of those who have not yet found a voice with which to articulate need: “ My footsteps come to the page edge. /I glimpse him again, my violent father, / knee deep in the landscape…” This also means he is forced to think his way into the cycles of crime by which so many inmates of Wormwood Scrubs are trapped: “Outside I was always / looking round for them— / chancers, dancers, addicts / of the dark…” The sort of tragic imagination required by Smith to pull this off is rarely wanting. One is left with the impression of the painful business of intimate observation that went into the making of these poems and which left with him a chilling apprehension of the realities of incarceration:

The language here serves a political purpose. It is shorn of portentousness. I suspect Smith would have suffered had he written a poem that the members of D Wing might not immediately respond to, approve or finally endorse. Even the loose, downbeat line-breaking is tailored to that end, it seems, the diction designed to match the cadences of every day gaolspeak. This leads Smith, in his most intense moments of utterance, to bid for the yearning spaces he imagines every prisoner craves without the remotest whiff of having come to need the restrictions of being inside: “What I want is trains, /and my face angled in the wind, my hat / blown away behind. I want to be / in other bars asking what’s this game / called Family Tissues, what to do / with these blank folded sheets? / I want rain, the lamefoot doves / crowding city pavements, the traffic / and the grainy flush of air in the tubes.”

Whenever Smith attempts to step into the prisoner’s shoes from which the laces have been removed (and to speak for the wearer in question) his purpose is empowerment. His acknowledgments page alone suggests that his residency was a successful establishing of relatability; he speaks of prisoners “…who opened their closed worlds to me” and the personae adopted always imply active collaboration. Even the title of one of the major poems in the collection ‘For the boys on the wing’ suggests perhaps he felt one of them.

The influence of Wormwood has been incalculable. In many ways, its success may be measured in the number of residences which continue to take place; the fact that poetry readings still are commissioned by prisons; and the fact that people still write poetry about the prison experience. Often the latter, however, can err towards the over deliberate. Roger McGough’s poem ‘The Terrible Outside’ is a case in point: the poet, having just run a Poetry Workshop in an unnamed prison, has to allow the inmates to shake his hand: “A hand that touches women, that lifts pints…” and a hand which, lifted between smugness and self-virtue, “is glad to be part of the terrible outside.” What the poem implies about the hand, but does not state, is that it’s also likely to be washed as quickly as possible. This is not remotely true of Simon Armitage’s brilliant ‘Feltham Sings’ which, though a musical documentary about Young Offenders and not a collection of poems, for which Armitage wrote the lyrics, shows how very exciting authentic collaborations can be. The results are simultaneously compelling and disturbing. And memorable. The galvanism of this work overshadows many of the scattered prison poems I’ve read which seem to have grown out of workshops themselves and which are rarely sequenced; McGough’s approach is often slightly modified, or rehashed; the result can feel a very long way from the pioneering, hybridised language of Smith. Much prison poetry traffics too many platitudes about the latent creativity of prisoners, and could learn much from Chris Jones’s Hard on the Knuckle, a pamphlet whose title sequence grew out of his residency inside Nottingham Prison; this central poem is a moving, elegiac, beautifully judged portrayal of the prisoner’s (and the writer’s) discomfort behind razor wire. Other scattered prison poems have not learned from the way in which Jones solves the problem of political sensitivity in such writing; how he confronts the world he is witnessing but still retains an essentially personal tone. Much prison poetry achieves neither of these: its shifts in scale are too easy, it lacks Ken Smith’s intense focus.

Early in 2001, when I went to teach poetry at the Second largest Young Offenders’ Prison in Europe, I quickly realised this was not going to be a Smith-like residency: I was hired as part of a compulsory programme of education administered to the inmates. I encountered a shell-shocked staff; men and women of various ages who seemed to be there for a vast range of reasons; an odd raft of misfits who found themselves booked into the Ice Hotel and couldn’t quite find a means of getting out. Prisons have a gravitational pull: the teaching staff was as institutionalised as the prisoners. All my preconceptions were to buckle. I was hired to teach poetry to young men who didn’t want me to, and who would actively sabotage every attempt I made, steal the register, steal my paper clips and pencils and transform them into primitive weaponry. Unlike Smith, who taught discrete workshops with life-sentenced men who presumably had had more than enough time to think and therefore turn themselves towards the possibility of writing-as-expression, I was to confront the violent rebuttal of learning by young men who had no choice but to attend my sessions. Poetry is shite, they said. How would poetry, they asked, help them steal a Subaru Impreza? Of course, human contact was made and perhaps I managed to establish something, but no one was interested in poetry.

On the other hand, in the year I taught there—as if a valve had opened—I produced more poems than ever before in a twelve month period. They were a sort of crash-programme of politicisation. They were frantic scribbles in a notebook but, I realised, helped me to manage the refusal I encountered in each of five classrooms every day. When I attempted to turn them into fully grown poems, however, I made many false starts. How do you attempt to evoke the truths of imprisonment while simultaneously avoiding a voyeuristic tone?

Crude as those first efforts were, some had caught something of the chill of the prison. Attempts to develop them were discouraging, though. While they acknowledged the sensitivity of approach they did not come up with solutions. I was keen to excise what I felt were the mythologies that had grown up since the time of Smith. I wanted to dispel the notion that offering poetry to prisoners made a difference or improved the quality of their lives. It didn’t. Whereas Smith hoped to open up possibilities for inmates—rather like certain prison officers who kept bibles in their desk-drawers—I was more interested in exploring the nature of the distance that existed between us, mapping it in minute detail:

Each classroom became a sort of exercise yard. Each classroom became the space in which the rituals of disparagement were enacted. I acclimatised slowly, realising equally slowly—even reluctantly—I’d alighted upon a serious subject. There was a sense of being nudged towards the writing of a book I had never planned on and which, to be honest, I was doubtful I wanted to write. But I did write it. Those hundred or more ragged poems with which I attempted to measure the creeping barrage of every day were distilled down to thirty eight and appear this summer as The Blood Choir.

I like to think this new book contains hommages to Smith’s, acknowledging what it achieved, but realise Wormwood and The Blood Choir could not be more different in tone and approach. There has been much prison-work, of a distinctly uneven nature, enacted between these two books but they do seem to represent two ends of a spectrum of interpretation. Wormwood seems to say that cultural barriers can be broken down; that it’s possible to sit among the inmates; that the voiceless can be spoken for. I felt this could no longer be the case. Almost nowhere in The Blood Choir do I attempt to make the main protagonists ‘speak’; the barriers Smith broke down are everywhere in evidence, still standing; one of my principal concerns is exploring the way in which the energy of inmates has been compressed and disfigured by imprisonment: “…Lock him up, and he /makes of his seven-by-seven cell / a gymnasium of rolling roads, a jogging machine / heading out in every direction.”

Whereas Ken Smith wades deep into causality, family history, individual guilt, in the context of the prison in which I taught I saw myself primarily as commentator, as far as possible letting the facts do the work; I learned of many tragic stories but found it difficult to risk the moral water of ventriloquising them. So the commentary describes the symptoms, trusting this might lead to revelation, maintaining a fidelity as close as possible to what I actually witnessed:

I think it might be fair to say the two books—spanning as they do nearly twenty years of British history, a time of massive change and social upheaval, of increasingly complex multi-cultural strains—reflect the steadily worsening degree of social breakdown that separates them. Almost all the young men I encountered were from the most infamous no-go areas of inner city living and, in terms of the urban street-wars, highly evolved. It might be true to say that Wormwood is, in some ways, certainly in tone, a more ‘optimistic’ book than The Blood Choir, and that the political context out of which it grew enabled it to be so. But maybe not. Twenty years later there is a need, perhaps, to articulate a different range of issues, a different set of dangers. The problem of the prisons is now even worse.

First Published in Hard Times, Number 80, Contemporary British Poetry, Berlin, December 2006, edited by John Hartley Williams

When Homer, like others before him, chose to evoke every physical detail of Achilles’s elaborately embossed shield in The Iliad he was indulging in the art of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is the description of an artwork, the distilling into words of a visual representation. It is poetry that continues the work of translation the artwork began. It is more common in poetry than in fiction; perhaps because poetry can formally recreate some of the properties of a work of art. Achilles’s shield locates the theoretical recognition of ekphrasis in ancient poetics and the history of rhetoric. The difficulty of ekphrasis, the inherent risk of so much lost in translation, is overcome in imagination when language achieves that hardest of tasks and helps us to see. Keats understood this when he wrote Ode to a Grecian Urn. His poem brings into view the narrative adorning the urn, and so the urn itself: “To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies.” Shelley went even further when he wrote On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery: not only are the physical details of Leonardo’s painting transcribed, but the atmosphere they combine to produce; “…and the midnight sky / Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.” Given that much Romantic poetry inclined naturally to protracted meditations on the visual, such ekphrastic techniques were constantly employed in the genre, Keats and Shelley assumed that the source of metaphor should be something beautiful; perception based upon a combination of spoken rhetoric and verbal cues.

But ekphrasis is also a problem. On one level it might be deemed impossible. A verbal translation cannot represent—that is, make present again—its object with the same degree of effectiveness a visual image can. Or perhaps in some ways it can do it better because it doesn’t pretend to reproduce so much as evoke it. However brilliantly a poem is devised, it will rarely have the immediacy a picture does: imagine trying to describe a view of Table Mountain over the radio. Something that is authentically breathtaking—pre-linguistic in the fact that it takes away the breath—might well be reduced to the status of the word ‘breathtaking.’ The describer might even resort to the job of ironising irony by using the phrase “it is beyond words.” In this sense, ekphrasis is a minor and rather obscure literary genre, and most writers who use it tacitly or consciously recognise that language is a lesser medium. It is difficult not to conclude that it grew out of a kind of envy of the visual, pointing up the extreme limitations of language; that it is the expression of a kind of blindness, fingering the braille of the visual.

Ekphrasis, for poets writing today, however, serves a more slippery purpose than the uses it was put to by Keats and Shelley. Visual culture shifts at breakneck speed. Speeded-up images refuse to settle for more than a nanosecond. The paintings no longer stand still. By the time you start describing them, they are whisked away, lost between a pole-vaulter hovering in mid air and a sperm whale about to plunge. Probably the vast majority of contemporary poets have had their sensibility shaped by television, cinema and the World Wide Web more than anything else. Everywhere the visual provokes, escapes and always returns. Achilles’s shield is buckled into a new and unrecognisable shape and Keats’s urn has been smashed and glued back together as the ur-urn, broken-lipped, beaten up by history. The visual dominates the popular consciousness as never before. Largely as a result of the Internet, image and text, pictures and poetic thought (or at least a species of poetic thought) have been brought together as never before, as if ekphrasis is finally honouring the pledges it has been making to rhetoric since the days of Homer. As a result, ekphrasis has become the transcription of the hyperactive imagination.

For me, as a practitioner, this is a very exciting time to be writing. One I would have chosen. The ultimate challenge is to bring some sort of order out of precisely that flux. Such emphasis on the visual has been the single most important influence on my attempts to harness meaning; from my earliest attempts to write, I have turned to modern cinema for “ekphrastic inspiration.” The malingering camera-angles of Tarkovsky, holding a single frame for what seems like a minute, an hour, a week; the visual grim irony of Scorsese; the single sweeping takes of Sokurov; the lake made of bin-bags, the switching points of view of Fellini; the non-linear narratives of Berlolucci; the life-changing, hauntingly visual images of Kieślowki. All of these, in their very different ways, have bled their way into my printer cartridge. All of these have taught me something about the machinery of image-making, how the best visual images thrust their moving pistons into a perfectly machined and well oiled bore-hole; how images must have sweep and rhythm and visual passion, majesty and authenticity. Cinema has taught me how a lifetime can be shown in a single frame. How consciousness can zoom from the fish-eyed vision of a desiccated landscape to the crack in the hero’s bottom lip. How it charts the rhythms of the imagination. The great movies, to paraphrase Truffaut, escape like trains in the night. The ekphrastic influences of the cinema and the manner in which its iconography lives in my imagination haunt my work—envy explored on the page.

Two of my poems, very different in nature, explore the range of extended meanings ekphrasis has for me in 2006. The first poem, A Futurist Looks at a Dog, comes from To the God of Rain and, in many ways, is a straightforward example of classical ekphrasis, an example of the written-visual wrestling with meaning on the page, a meaning that has already been established visually by a highly distinguished painting:

At first glance, this is an ekphrastic representation of Giacomo Bala’s painting Leash in Motion, painted in 1912, a light-hearted study of a dachshund trotting in a flurry of scampering legs and wagging tail alongside the swirls of its mistress’s skirt and knocking of her dainty boots, a painting that has come close to being a kitsch symbol for the Futurist principle of paths of movement. Whereas the poem evokes the painting in some detail, however, it also introduces an interlocutor and the faintest suggestion of narrative, as if this is merely a highly compressed trailer from a much longer story. But also, in ekphrastic terms, there are the ‘cactus of wags’, ‘the carwash brush’, ‘two bleary propellers rotating’, ‘flung silver net’ and ‘a soundwave’ all of which, it seems to me, reach for visual images beyond the painting, separating it firmly from its pre-Flanders historical context and placing it in 2003, re-presenting a range of highly familiar visual objects that are only defamiliarised when placed in the service of a little dog in motion. These are precisely the sorts of otherwise commonplace objects that fly at us daily, subliminally in advertisements, flashed with so much velocity into our minds that we are unable to trace them back to their origin, much less trace the workings of the process that have made them part of our ars poetica. At best, to paraphrase Robert Graves, the original flash of a poem—the first shiver of inspiration—lasts for less than a second, and we may spend years trying to scratch and write our way back to that original, usually falling short but having to make do. The transitions between images, the shifts which seem nakedly cinematic techniques, the same process that has led me to trust on the big screen the transformation of a kimono’s moon into the real moon, hold the poem together. The poem, in the longer arc of the book, pays homage to Futurism for having provided precisely the visual language required for what it was trying to say; the poem is an attempt to draw ekphrastic influences from many different sources at once into a unique and dynamic visual crucible, it is to be hoped. This is not to say I set out deliberately to achieve this per se, but the influences came together to make up the ‘trance’ out of which the poem grew, out of which poems grow.

‘Description is revelation’ said Michael McLaverty to a young Seamus Heaney in 1962, and ever since I read the phrase for the first time some considerable time later, it has stayed with me. Were I to draw up some sort of poetic mission-statement such an aphorism would appear in it somewhere. I might even replace the word ‘revelation’ with ‘liturgy’. In my poems, I tend not to go for the symbolical afflatus that grows out of every day experience; I tend to invest more in the transforming nature of physical description, trusting in the fact that if you describe physical qualities with enough precision they will collect into something approaching liturgy. And this is what ekphrasis most means to me now.

As a technique, as a tactic and a strategy, as a process, all that I have described above has been put to the test in my new book The Blood Choir, published this summer. I taught for most of the year 2001 in the second largest Young Offenders’ prison in Europe. Trying to write about this was fraught with sensibilities, pitfalls, political correctnesses. I wrote more poems in the course of that year than during any previous twelve month period and struggled—to say the least—to find the most appropriate approach. After much prolonged agonising and soul-searching I put my trust in the innate powers of description, implicitly leaving the rest to the ellipsis of the whole volume, the unspoken elsewheres which, it is to be hoped, are drawn into earshot and imagination via ekphrastic description.

Take the title poem, for example. This is a sequence of five sections which evokes the terrifying speed with which a classroom of bored and restless prisoners are drawn up into what can only be described as a mob or, as the poem puts it later, an ‘organism’, glued together by shared assumptions, shared deprivation, shared hunger. Of course, the visual antecedent of this is Francisco Goya, whose painting Pilgrimage of St Isidore, painted 1821-3,

captures the moment that individuals seem to be drawn up into one being, bound together by the common experience of what might be awe, fear or potential violence. This sort of ‘event’ recurs in many of his paintings, but is perhaps most effectively achieved in this one. This is the poem’s opening section of five:

In no sense is this an attempt to evoke the painting, but is haunted by the rhythmic ghost of Goya’s vision; it is haunted by the darkness of his vision and the manner in which human flesh seems to flare out of that darkness, Rembrandt-like; the way each of his protagonists is part hero, part ball-bearing of history. The poem is first and foremost a kind of homage to the young men sucked up into one another almost against their own will; it is also an attempt to represent visually the fearful potential of an estranged and resentful sector of young men subjected to medieval punishment. This is the moment when ekphrasis attempts to overcome the fact of otherness; that ekphrastic moment when the text encounters its semiotic ‘others’. The webbed fingers, the melting down of bone-marrow, the rhythm of oars, the spirit replica, the terrible binding agent of ‘red glue’, all owe something important to the triumph of cinematic physicality, while building that otherness; the dream-like likenesses which are a shortcut to meanings they never quite disclose but nonetheless live out to the full. They draw hugely upon the cinema’s long history of ‘shown’ metamorphosis. But they also debunk the cult of the body thrown at us incessantly by the media, one minute invoking its needs, the next, offering itself as exemplar. The poem explores the manner in which the cult of the body is subverted by the darker forces of the collective unconscious. There is a kind of ‘madness’ running through it, as there is through many of Goya’s paintings. This is little more than the author’s projected fear, made visual, stared onto the air, as if the protagonists are part his own emotion, part independent existence. The moral questions concerning imprisonment, the question of the effectiveness of long-term sentencing, are not touched upon overtly in this poem but hover, I hope, around the visual representation, anchored precariously by ekphrasis.

The autodidact—the automath—is a self-taught practitioner. He or she is not taught, but teaches him/herself. He or she enthuses for self-education and is motivated seriously. He or she is driven. On occasion, he or she might achieve genius, without ever being taught how to be a genius. Indian mathematical wizard Srinivasa Ramanujan and Newton’s contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were largely self-taught in mathematics. Autodidactism, in literary terms, has something of a long tradition. Jane Austen, Milton and Dickens all were autodidacts and did rather well. This is to say nothing of Blake and Pope. Among contemporary British poets there is much autodidactism—fine poets, in other words, who do not possess degrees in the black arts of writing poetry and who have never attended a creative writing course. I often thank God heartily for the fact I am listed among them. Like many other poets I know, I stumbled from job to job; from cabinet making to Local Authority, from Local Authority to Further Education; from Further Education to Higher Education. Somewhere along the way I stumbled, almost by default, into being a poet. I don’t mean to imply I suddenly decided to be a poet and set up business, no more than a self-taught plumber or electrician could suddenly decide to paint his name on a van. I served a painful, introspective, private apprenticeship of self-learning, then painted my name on the van, well, at least on the inside of the van. This means I learned to write poetry simply by writing—and reading—the stuff. Perhaps subliminally I understood this was the best possible way of ensuring the survival of idiosyncrasy and, shall we say, a more ungroomed poetics. By that I mean the acuteness of the angle, the aesthetic refusal, the personal core which flourishes in spite of artistic fashion. Unorthodoxy, in other words. Somewhere I felt, and still feel, that a measure of a poet’s talent is his or her unorthodoxy. This is not to say autodidacts cannot be taught by others: there are many poets from whom I have learnt more than I can possibly acknowledge—Hughes is a kind of remote artistic father to me. But autodidacts have no piece of paper saying they have been taught how to write poetry. They have no Public Liability Insurance. No ticked Units of Competence.

Having said that, I am now deeply involved in an industry which argues that individuals can be taught to write poetry. There are autodidacts attempting to do for others what was never done for them: helping others to learn how to shape, extend and complete their poems, how to channel bottomless hunger into a mean mould on the page. In writing departments there are autodidacts attending the assembly line. Anyone with even the remotest taste for ironising irony would like this one. At poetry workshops up and down the country, in a range of highly distinguished university writing departments, poets are being taught how not to be autodidacts. To be taught, the gestalt of poetry needs to be broken down into its constituent grasps. The danger of this process is incalculable and possibly self-evident. What can survive, if the tutor is not vigilant, the excessive, often consensual pruning of the group? What can grow when the poem has been ruthlessly cut back to facilitate new growth?

There is something Darwinian in this process: the weaker parts must give way to the stronger and, because the poem’s destiny is shaped by the same judges who have been taught to speak the same critical language, the eighteen poems written by the eighteen members of the workshop might display an alarming uniformity of tone. Even uniformity of shape. Even uniformity of subject matter. At times, I fear I might be in the business of creating norms. Because so many undergraduate poems suffer from the same ailments, these are the elements that get most rigorously addressed: the imbalance between the provision and withholding of too much information, mystery and disclosure; the assumption on the part of the poet that the reader was present at the birth of his or her last thought; the wayward dowsing for the active verb, without finding it; the absence of any controlling perception at all; the setting up—and subsequent failure to achieve—resolution. All these have to be addressed so carefully that I am concerned at times that all we do is set up a sort of column of tick-boxes for the complete poem, entirely defined by the shortfall of work coursing through the system. This means, perhaps, the needs of individual poems and students are met, but at the expense of what? I do feel a range of newly published collections are the pressed-out product passing through the hands that wear rubber gloves before dropping into the deep baskets, bound for the public spaces.

And who are Creative Writing students? Attempting to teach poetry to the inmates of the second largest Young Offenders’ Prison in Europe taught me they weren’t behind bars. It also taught me much about the perils inherent in the process. It also taught me that creative writing at universities is overwhelmingly aimed at those who come from the sort of socio-economic background which nurses a tradition of emotional transaction, self-interrogation and the pre-eminent importance of self. It also taught me that there are many conflicting Englishes: that the language pedalled in one sector may not even exist in another; or, if it does, an interpreter may well be needed. What are we doing this week, I was asked by the inmates of the prison? Poetry. Poetry? But we did that last week…This became an incantation repeated every week in an act of symbolic refusal. I became the object of ridicule, and knew they had chosen well. I had been hired to teach the gentle arts of self-expression to a range of young men whose emotional body, if scratched, was inclined to transmute very quickly into destructive violence. Once they had been driven beyond the outer limits of a staple boredom they’d “kick off.” Snow of screwed up paper. An enfilade of crashed desk lids. And echolalia—repeating every word I said. The conquest was entirely theirs. They were unteachable. I drove home, still trembling.

In theory, the prospect of such excesses seemed an opportunity of sorts. Such surplus was not lost on those prison guards who kept bibles in their desk-drawers. Teach these young men technique, control, and they’d supply the feeling, I reasoned: isn’t this how poetry had always been made? Trouble was the exercise was too tame, too irrelevant to all they held dear, and didn’t seem to offer any additional insight into the distinctive, already mastered expertise of filching a Subaru Impreza. It would not add in any significant way to the thousand-pound-a-day payroll to be gained from pushing drugs on Moss Side, and seemed, moreover, to smell of something, shall we say, which was rather less than masculine. This could have no bearing whatever on the red-and-blue snake crawling up the forearm; or the withered septum, or the cropped cranium hard as a helmet, the repeatedly broken nose. Add to this the average concentration span of a Cocker Spaniel. Add the hyperactivity compressed by years of incarceration, plus the interest all inmates had in sabotaging every new teacher who encroached on their territory, and you’ll realise the progress was on the slow side. This was a classic example of autodidact confronting autodidacts. But what the inmates had taught themselves—which seemed almost to x-ray the laws of evolution—had little to do with trochees and iambs. It was more concerned with bending iron around their tattooed necks. It was more to do with ram-raiding and the use of blunt needles. It was more concerned with creating a new morality to help live in a world which couldn’t offer space to the crime-raked.

Almost everything I tried was thwarted. One exercise in assonance never got beyond the indignant disappointment the words didn’t rhyme. In an act of futile innocence I was encouraging them to ‘permutate’ one word through the widest possible earshot of its sound, until the original word eventually lost acoustic contact with the last. This exercise degenerated into a competition as to who could provide the longest list of rhyming words. Moon. Spoon. Goon. Tune. Croon. The list began to sound like a single note on the xylophone struck over and over. On and on it went, for forty minutes. Even at this stage, it was the competition that was engaging, not the words; and the fierceness of this inevitably led to a near-brawl which, against all better advice and instruction, I broke up, standing between two young men at least eight inches taller than me. In time, the autodidact made peace of a kind, but felt he was taking slivers of mirror to the natives, sat among them; long since given up on the idea of teaching them anything, but realising trust had been invested. This was something. Perhaps it was even a gift.

For my crimes, I taught one young man who was kept in solitary confinement both for his own sake and the sake of others. Every time he made direct contact with another inmate there was spilt blood. I was forewarned that his crimes were terrible. Don’t touch the glass, don’t touch the glass, seemed to be the implication of all advice I was offered. In fact, when I met him—stood in his cell—he was a pale and freckled boy who bore a passing resemblance to every grandmother’s favourite grandson. What was most amazing about him was that he had been writing heroic couplets under his own steam, without encouragement, certainly without any formal training. They were mysteriously submerged, the couplets, in a field of prose, but could be picked out quite tangibly. For a moment they reminded me of Michelangelo’s Moses ‘asleep’ in the block of stone, but I quickly dismissed this thought and wished I had never had it. I recommended, tentatively, that the couplets might be liberated from the prose and the poem brought out towards the light. Autodidact teaching autodidact. One with two university degrees (…in the wrong subject) and steeped in literary tradition, full of assumption and presumption as a result; the other with not much more than the unlaced prison shoes he stood up in, having taught himself how to live among danger, how to walk appropriately, how to survive against the odds: who had happened upon this chance possibility of expression. Of the two autodidacts, I felt, he was the realer—having hardly ever read a poem on the page, indulging nonetheless in this most ancient form of hieroglyphic. At that stage, I might even have allowed for the outlandish possibility that the music of couplets might live in his inherited memory. Give me a classful of him, I thought. As it was, I got to visit him twice, before some interlude or other closed down all his privileges, and he was gone, whisked off to another prison, I heard.

Often, it seems, teaching the southern bourgeoisie in the sunlit rooms of a southern university (…whose every square inch of tended grass and Bath stone is owned by the Duchy) poses problems not dramatically different. Every year a huge bank of youthful bristling energy is fed through the faculty. A small minority of undergraduates who go for the poetry option are already secretly unmoved by it and do not quite feel equal to the task of understanding it, let alone writing it. A similar percentage are also existentially unengaged, perhaps, even when doing something that might otherwise interest them. They might even regard a three hour seminar, in which they are expected to contribute intelligently, with appropriately mastered forms of critical language, as a certain sort of sentence. The poetry modules become a kind of soft option, preferable in many ways to the harsher disciplines, say, of history or politics. Glimpsed at a distance, there’d be no right or wrong answers—the poetry modules might seem to offer infinite scope for abundant subjectivity.

There are of course many serious students. A majority of these are, they argue, far too busy writing their own poems to have time to read the work of professional poets. A percentage of that majority clearly opts for Undergraduate Creative Writing to be ‘discovered’—the moment individuals realise this may not necessarily happen that quickly tests the mettle of their commitment. If they persevere at this point, promise can be sustained. Having been told of the eerie protocols of the poetry world and not been deterred, there may be some hope they might be tentatively guided, perhaps, to the fulfilment of their potential. What is striking at this stage is the handing over of trust into the hands of their tutor. In my case, this is the handing over of trust into the hands of the autodidact—trust is given in this way much more readily than it is given to the group as a whole. Many students assume their peers have not matured sufficiently to criticise their work. Conversely, there are those who flagrantly prefer to remain autodidacts—they stay at home, writing poems to themselves and duly hand in their coursework on submission day without once having attended a seminar. The obvious point about such students is that there is often a marked autodidactic element in their work—talent that doesn’t want to put itself at risk. The tutors mark it with impartiality, even when he or she has not been regarded as a source of help or inspiration.

What I look for in student work is originality. The flint-rasp of sparks, most likely to have flown in the prison. Tracers in the dark. Vocabulary that fizzes. Vision that is true, and language that can hold it still enough on the page. Bloom rejects the view, I recall, of a handing over from precursor to student poet. Trope reverses trope which reverses cause and effect. Originality is the moment of freedom which all would-be-poets must achieve by creating discontinuity and the illusion of origins. ‘Weak’ poets accept the handing over of tutorial advice and are silenced by it; ‘strong’ poets react against it, swerve away from the precursor, and rewrite the parent influence in such a way that, far from appearing influenced by the earlier, the later poet now appears to have created the earlier poet’s work. The moment all tutors look for in a student is what Bloom calls the moment of self-begetting: some regard this as the achievement of a distinctive voice, perhaps, the breakthrough into mastery of the line: the poet has to ‘overhear’ and work through the ghostly echoes or allusions which haunt him/her until the point at which quotation/plagiarism becomes self-begetting: the point at which the poet does not steal or synthesize but speaks for him/herself.

Even when teaching at postgraduate level this moment is not as frequent as most might hope. But when it is glimpsed, it is often associated with a newfound begrudging of the tutor’s ‘wisdom’. The ‘parental’ aspect of the creative relationship is never very far away. Often, as far as I can work out, something like the moment of begetting comes six months after the end of the course of study, when all new awarenesses of art and self have thoroughly distilled. Even when actively ‘taught’, a talented student only learns what he /she finally teaches him/herself. In a typical tutorial, perhaps, all we can hope for is intersubjectivity: the crucible of the student’s personal fear, resentment, self-doubt and growing confidence mixed in with the tutor’s attempted solicitude and deliberate interrogation; at which stage, perhaps, each person involved is an autodidact.