TITLES

Reading Emma Darwin’s book, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, and suddenly seeing my way of working in Chapter 3, which made me stop and think, picture it all. Creative Thinking is what I’ve been doing as I marry old poems together, join them in unholy matrimony...the most recent of which was just published in Strix magazine. The original poem was probably written in the 52 Project in 2014 and titled HELL. New title: I DECLINE THE INVITATION. I don’t know any other poets who do this, and some I’ve told think I’m mad, but if a poem isn’t working isn’t it better to cut out the nugget and blend it with another such? Sometimes a poem doesn’t work because it’s all emotion or description; it needs a plot, so poems lacking emotion or real life would make the perfect marriage with a softer slice of the world. I think I came to this way of working solely because of my Scottish upbringing (I was born nine years after the end of the war), in that I can’t see stuff go to waste. Discarded chunks of prose and poetry linger in corners of my life, notebooks and files. Every few years I attack them to investigate their worth. This year already I may have revived at least a dozen.

Poems that fall out of your head, those immediately finished creatures, only make up a small percentage of my output – the majority are allowed to stew, stagnate, freeze...disappear into a file until I catch sight of them again and cut off flapping bits, nip n tuck before sending them out into the literary wild world. If they’re rejected I periodically throw them to the lions a few times more then they’ll slip between Workfile and a desert. So when I’m in cleaning-mode I dip into all the old writing projects where documents are loaded with monthly or yearly bursts of daily scribbling; every time I leave with a small haul of unused nuggets to be zapped with new energy and perhaps a wedding/bedding to produce a brand new baby.

Tonight I am bringing to the marriage bed a poem written I think six years ago, and a recent piece that doesn’t have a title. The old poem came out of a September evening outside under a big tree, a group of fifteen writers who’d come from north, south, east and west of the country to spend a weekend together. We’d met ten years earlier in an online writing group, had worked and talked words from the inside out, and there we were sitting in the almost dark watching bats take over the air above us while we wondered if there was enough wine. That poem has been out in the world many times but no one wants it; it needs a wife. The nameless poem is missing a heart, ambient flutters to move a reader – make em laugh...smile at least. It will fit into a small pamphlet collection for a competition with a deadline in three days, so let’s wish it and its fellow poems Bon Voyage.