In Form for Forty Years

A poet’s developing practice

The critical year in the establishment of my writing methods was 1968. Elsewhere other events of more than passing interest in Australian poetry were apparently occurring in that year too, but I knew nothing of them. My practice up till then had been to come home from school in the afternoon and, sprawling on the bed propped on my left elbow, dash off a few amorphous masterpieces before tea. I was sufficiently au fait with contemporary poetry to know that free verse was the go and, since I had begun writing in mid-1967, that was what I produced — quantities of the stuff, which poured from my unconscious to the page without forethought, or indeed thought, and certainly without let or hindrance by whatever critical faculties I had.

But well before 1967 came to an end I had begun to hanker for some more structured way of composing poems. After the intoxication of the first few months when just to put pen to paper and let the images flow seemed the most exhilarating thing one could do (which in many ways it still does), I became more and more drawn to the idea of writing formal verse. But of course I lacked the skills to do that. I knew nothing about the art of versification, and the classroom was certainly not the place where I was going to find out. In early 1968, however, while browsing the not very extensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in the library of Sydney Technical High School, I made the most amazing discovery: a first edition of Dylan Thomas’s first book, Eighteen Poems. (The librarian that year, by the way, was Julie Fraser, now Chevalier, who is now a poet herself; and she was followed by Barry Donlon, who also went on to write poetry.) Now, as is obvious with hindsight, in view of developments occurring in Australian poetry at that time, Dylan Thomas was not the ideal model for a young poet hoping to break into the big time. As I have already said, though, I knew nothing of those things then. I opened that book and read and was immediately hooked. I couldn’t understand a word, but the rhythms and verbal music were spellbinding. And the poems were formal. More to the point, as I discovered when I began reading, which I immediately did, everything by and about Thomas that I could lay my hands on, his poems were mostly syllabic rather than metrical. I may not have known yet how to write a competent iambic pentameter but I could count syllables on my fingers.

So it was that I embarked on the late-adolescent adventure of pretending to be Dylan Thomas — not, I hasten to add, in my public persona (though my naturally wavy hair was not unlike his, and grew to resemble the hair of a certain other Dylan who I was equally obsessed by), but in the privacy of my bedroom where, graduating now from the horizontal to the vertical, I spent my afternoons at the desk trying to imitate every aspect of Thomas’s poetry, from the complex syllabic patterns and rhyme schemes, to the rich and extravagant language and, most important of all, the wilful obscurity. From a technical point of view, at least, the transformation was astonishing. Within a matter of six months or so I taught myself by this method how to write fluently in the most elaborate forms, first in syllabics and gradually in metre. Of course, the content of these poems was still adolescent, they were largely rubbish, but I was well on the way to learning the craft of poetry.

I was, then, committed to the writing of closed forms from that time on. Why that should be so I can’t really say. In view of the widespread resistance, and even outright hostility, that formal verse often elicits these days, which might put off a person less determined than I, it was hardly a sensible career move, and it remains, I believe, a reason for some people to discount my work. It must answer to some aspect of my temperament; it may be a way of channelling with more control and precision a tendency towards verbal incontinence which (for me) free verse might encourage. That, though, may be putting the matter too negatively, since I find that the disciplines of formal verse, far from being a constraint, are a positive stimulus to the imagination — to my imagination. Also I see poetry as not only the transmission of meaning and experience but as the creation of an object. Art is after all artificial and I delight in the artifice. I like to create these “verbal contraptions”, as Auden called them, these elaborately structured linguistic sculptures and, as it were, hold them up to see their facets catch the light. And the musical element in poetry, which seems to have been sacrificed in much contemporary poetry, is also important to me.

The particular principle, however, by which I write closed forms has changed over the years. For quite a long time, long after I had begun to slough off the worst excesses of my Dylan Thomas infatuation, I persisted with mainly syllabic verse. But eventually, and quite suddenly, I came to the conclusion that syllabic verse only really works in English if it is divorced from a strong rhythmic impulse, because otherwise it tends to become metrical by default. But the effects achieved in syllabics by, say, Marianne Moore, were not the effects I wished to achieve, and at that time I did not want to go down the metrical route, or not all the time, at any rate. So at the beginning of 1980 I abruptly stopped writing syllabics and began writing in a kind of sprung rhythm, I suppose, or accentual verse, in which only the stressed syllables counted in determining line length and the number of unstressed syllables could stretch or contract according to the varying rhythms one wanted to achieve. However, within a few years that mode too struck me as unsatisfactory, for two reasons: first, this kind of verse is not self-evident and transparent, in that the number of stresses that I wrote in might not match the number of stresses that the reader read out; and secondly, I began to be dissatisfied with the rather jagged, contrapuntal effects these poems produced. By the mid-1980s I made the decision to commit myself to metrical verse, which I have persisted with ever since. I was quite wrong, though, if I thought that this might make the formal framework of my poetry self-evident and transparent because it is unfortunately the case that many contemporary readers have no ear for metres and are none the wiser, and there are still people, poets among them, who are under the impression that my poetry is syllabic to this day. A rather disheartening discovery.

So much for the big picture. How do I actually go about writing? It will be apparent already what my methods were at the very beginning. However, the Dylan Thomas phase not only inaugurated a new kind of poetry for me but a new approach to composition. I immediately became much more disciplined and scrupulous about the process of writing. Or to put it more simply, I began to revise. I write now, as I did then, with pen and paper, numbering the pages and numbering and dating the drafts. Except in the case of very long poems, I try to commit the whole of the first draft to paper in one sitting, generally, though not invariably, working through the stanzas in the order in which they appear in the finished poem. If I get stuck over something at some point in a stanza, I try to get at least some approximation down, knowing that I can come back later and rework the passage. When the first draft is complete, with all its crossings out and alternatives, I write out a fresh draft and work my way through again making changes or trying out variations, and so on until I feel I can do no more. I may on occasion add a stanza at some point in the poem where I feel more expansion is needed; or I may delete a stanza, or conflate two stanzas into one, where I feel that more concision is needed; or I may occasionally change the order of stanzas. Back in 1968 when I first started, I might work on a poem in this way for two, three or four weeks before finally regarding a poem as finished. Over the years I have contracted the period of composition. I have always been prepared to come back to a poem, though, if I suddenly saw a way to improve something — sometimes months, or even years, after the poem was first written, and even sometimes with poems that have never seen and never will see the light of day. Generally, however, I work on a poem in one continuous burst until it is done, and that is that; I do not, like, say, Elizabeth Bishop, keep numerous poems on the go for years on end. Nor do I write dozens and dozens of drafts, amounting to dozens and dozens of pages, as some poets do. A lot of work, of course, takes place in my head and never finds its way onto the page, so that, for all the deletions and additions and marginal notes and jottings, the manuscript pages do not reveal everything about the process of composition. (Indeed, the essential elements of that process are a mystery to us all.) What in fact constitutes a draft? A draft is when you write the poem out again, however many or few revisions you have made. What matters is the quality of the revisions between first and last draft, not the number of drafts.

In the old days of manual typewriters and carbon paper and Tipp-ex I would only type out a poem when it was definitely finished. My then laborious two-fingered typing and the frustration of errors, which sometimes saw me tearing the paper from the carriage with paint-stripping expletives, determined that I would do as little of it as possible. Now that there are PCs, and I can touch-type, I often key in the poem at an earlier stage; I still do the revisions, though, by hand with pen and paper and then make the alterations to the computer copy. When a poem is complete it has always been my practice to hand-write a fair copy in a copybook and scrupulously record the dates of composition. Consequently I have a complete record of my surviving poems (I conducted an auto-da-fé of most of my early work in 1971) in chronological order of composition. It has always struck me as extraordinary that most poets appear to have no interest at all in recording when they wrote what.

In 1978, at which time I had not yet published any poems, I had one of those unnerving years in which I wrote nothing at all. Early in 1979 this drought broke with a veritable torrent of ideas. (By an idea, I should make it clear, I mean whatever prompts the writing of a poem; I do not mean merely an intellectual idea. Usually the “idea” will be a complex of an image or images, a mood, and some connection between these and some more conscious notion of what they imply.) There are only so many potential poems you can keep in your head at one time, while trying to write the current poem. So I adopted the practice of jotting down ideas for poems in a notebook as they occurred to me. After that year of sterility I was keen to hang on to every poem I could. But as the ideas spawned at a much faster rate than I could write them, I gradually acquired a backlog of unwritten new poems which it took me first weeks, then months, then finally years to get round to. So whereas I had previously written a poem, as I suppose most poets do, as soon as it occurred to me, I now found myself writing not the latest idea I had entered into the notebook but the next note I had worked my way up to in the list, which would be many pages or notebooks (and hence months or years) earlier. This strikes some as a curious way to write. Perhaps it is. But if it works, it works. The only rules in art are the rules that work for you. Sometimes by the time I got around to a particular note it was dead on the page; in which case I would simply move on. In most cases, however, there was some vital element from which I could draw out the living poem. Sometimes too I have been prepared to jump the queue, from whatever pressure of urgency, and write a poem more or less immediately. That feverish proliferation of ideas has slackened in recent years and the backlog has become much shorter. You never know where the ideas will come from, or whether they will continue to come at all. You never know when 1978 might decide to revisit you and (absit omen) take up permanent residence. And as Auden said somewhere, you are only truly a poet during those moments when you are bringing a poem to completion. Before that you are a potential poet, and after that you are a former poet.

Stephen Edgar, 2008

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