SUNDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2024

I write a lot of my poems – perhaps even a majority of them – when I’m out walking. Living in Gozo, I’m very lucky to have quick access to the ‘countryside’. I’ve put the word in inverted commas because Gozo is so small that I’m never far from a residential area even when I’m somewhere with hardly any buildings and almost no cars. But because Gozo is so small, I can be in the middle of this ‘countryside’ in just a few minutes from my apartment. I love these moments in nature for they provide me with solitude and silence and a place where I can think, dream and be creative.

I’d like to make clear that I never go walking with the express purpose of forcing out a poem or set out with the intention of writing one – I just go on my daily walk of at least an hour or so and sometimes my imagination is fired and the shape of a poem takes form in my mind. If not, it’s no big deal. The moment of inspiration often comes as a first line and I know almost at once whether this line will become the beginning of a poem I’ll be happy with: something just rings true about it although I haven’t the slightest idea why. By the time I’ve finished my walk, I usually have the skeleton of a first draft. Then as soon as I get home I type it on my computer; if I don’t do this, it will disappear into the ether. Then I work on it.

Other poems take shape when I wake up in the middle of the night and I find a poem is writing itself in my head. Then I know I must get up immediately and put it down on paper; otherwise it will be lost. I find these middle-of-the-night poems come quickly and fluently and I can turn around and go back to sleep confident in the knowledge that I can begin the editing process on the following day. These nocturnal verses tend to change much less than most of my other work when they are edited. This may sound a bit pretentious but sometimes I honestly feel as if these poems are written by some sort of spirit and I am merely its shaman. Perhaps this is why I tend to be more satisfied with these works, since they feel fresher to me and less contrived, and compared to most of my poems they need less editing.

One thing I almost never do is set out with a goal to write a poem about a specific topic: the theme emerges from the words and not the other way around. What I must do is find the heart of the poem. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by this: it’s certainly not an idea nor anything directly related to the intellect. It’s often an image, or a flow of words that creates an image, and at this early stage of the work I’m not aware of what this image means. It’s largely mysterious and unconscious, a vague feeling or emotion or an empty, nebulous space with the potential to become a poem. Or in other ways it’s like a colour, and my task is to discover and express its exact hue and saturation and brightness.

The only time I do begin with a deliberate goal is when I write ekphrastic work. I see a painting I love, or listen to a piece of music that I have liked all of my life, and I decide I want to write a poem to explore it and pay tribute to it and to the artist who created it. All the same, I can’t force it into existence. I often know the works I want to use as a foundation for a poem – for example, I always knew I wanted to write poems based on Van Gogh’s The Night Café and Nico’s Frozen Warnings – and once I’ve made this decision I send a kind of message to my subconscious mind and tell it to get to work. If I’m patient, it almost always delivers the goods even if takes time.

I can’t speak for other poets but personally I can’t begin to write a poem when its heart or essence still eludes me: I can only wait for it to emerge. This is very different from the process of writing a novel, at least for me. During the writing of my three novels, if I had a day when I felt uninspired and I didn’t really want to write, I could compel myself to sit and work on the next chapter and eventually the words would start to flow. I think this was because I had a general idea where the novel was heading next even though I hadn’t formally set out the plotline on a piece of paper, as I know many novelists do. And even if my words often sounded less natural and successful on the following day than the stuff I wrote when I was in the zone, they still represented an advance that I could build on. In poetry, at least for me, this is not an option. If I’m not in the mood, I’m better off going to the beach and forgetting all about it until I am.

So much for what we might call the ‘inspirational’ part of writing a poem. Next comes the hard work, which is editing and further editing. In the early days, I visit the poem every day and sometimes make changes. This editing process can unfold over several months and even when I feel that a poem is finished and ready and I’m broadly happy with it, I still like to put it away for another six months before I even consider trying to get it published.

Unlike many writers I enjoy the editing process. I’m very fussy and I brood over every comma and full stop and capital letter, let alone every word or line. I suspect most poets are like this, even the ones who pretend not to be so punctilious. Although our modern preference is for naturalness rather than artifice, the concision of most poetry means that every single word must pull its weight and an infelicitous choice can ring as crude and ugly as a cracked bell. I’m not denying the part that inspiration plays in the creation of a poem, but the later editing is every bit as vital in my opinion.

Some of my early drafts are closer to being ready than others and any changes that I make to them are limited, and restricted mainly to vocabulary. Others are tougher meat and simply don’t feel right and need a lot more chewing: my instinct tells me there is a poem inside there somewhere but I haven’t found it yet. This sometimes requires wholesale changes or the moving around of stanzas or even a completely new structure in order for me to find that heart which I spoke about earlier. In a few cases I give up and surrender to the inevitable; the poem has eluded me and will be discarded and chalked up to experience.

Regarding more mundane issues, I’m not too proud to use a thesaurus – the real skill at the editing stage is choosing the ideal word and while browsing through synonyms in a thesaurus may sound rather laboured and prosaic, it’s the quickest way to bring to mind a list of possible alternatives, much better than simply sitting there and hoping that the right word will pop up magically from some mysterious corner of the mind. As for what I use to do my writing and editing, although I’m generally no fan of electronic technology and I used to struggle to write creatively on a screen, these days I find working on a computer much easier and more productive than on paper. (I still much prefer to read poems on paper, though.)

Despite writing all types of poems from haiku and sonnets to free verse, I personally find creating or editing a poem with a clear structure much easier than free verse, so the latter usually takes me much more time. This might sound overly formulaic, but simply counting up to seven, five and seven, or going through a list of words that rhyme, or following a regular metre narrows everything down very quickly. Fewer alternatives, greater focus. And as some of my other essays on here make clear, I generally welcome the discipline of a tight structure when I write (and read) poetry, even if this makes me rather unfashionable.

Once a poem feels finished, I tend to fall in love with it for a short time and it may even seem the best I’ve ever written. This is why I put it away for six months because later I’ll find that often it’s lost much of its early allure and I feel a bit embarrassed that I had such great hopes for it. Then it’s not exactly back to the drawing board but it may involve everything from a set of minor changes to major surgery. This is much truer of my free verse poems, which often seem fragmented and shapeless once I no longer have the feeling which I had at the time of their creation. I think this is because at that time, I unconsciously added those thoughts and emotions and buried links as I read the poem, something that the reader cannot do. Six months on, those submerged feelings and ideas have become much less present to me, which places me more closely to the position of the reader. I think a second reason why I find working in metre and rhyme easier than in free verse is that they instantly announce a clear structure that allows me to quickly enter a poem, get into its mood, and start working.

I’d never pretend that my personal approach to writing poetry is in any way typical or universal: why should it be and even if it was, how could I possibly know? And ultimately trying to identify how I create a poem is largely an intellectual exercise: interesting perhaps, but of no real use when I’m carving out a first draft or editing a poem. Writing is clearly less spontaneous than art forms such as dance or music which happen in the moment and must therefore largely take place at an unconscious, bodily, muscle-memory level because the conscious mind cannot operate at that speed. But even in writing, and especially in poetry, there remains an element of mystery which no amount of grey-cell analysis can ever begin to explain.