Raking in the ashes

On November 5th it's Guy Fawkes Night here in the UK. When I was a kid it was something we used to get very excited about. Every community had their own bonfire. Ours used to be on a site behind Third Avenue before they built the industrial estate there; in fact my earliest memory is my dad come looking for me there while it was being constructed and it was safe for a four-year-old to wander the streets on his own. Nowadays, unless you live in Sussex, all that has stopped. Some of the local councils do fireworks displays but the whole community thing has died a death.

It's another Bonfire I remember fondly. It didn't have nearly as long a life but it burned bright and left a beautiful corpse.

It was a literary journal that wouldn't publish poetry without commentary. The reason? To try and provide some insight into the writing process, to help younger poets who were simply dumping raw emotions onto a page and thinking they were poems just because they said they were. There should be more magazines like that. I was sorry to see it go.

The only other one I knew of went by the unremarkable name of Poetry Information. It stopped publishing circa 1982 and I miss it still. It was a large format magazine (A4) about 120-odd pages in size. It didn't publish poems or stories. It focused on reviews of poetry books, lists of poetry magazines (which were legion back then) and articles discussing poetic technique. It was there I first read Tom Leonard's piece on William Carlos Williams, The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in Britain, a greatly abridged version of which can be found here.

The only time I'd had poetry broken down was at school and I never paid nearly enough attention. But isn't that always the case? Of course I'd never heard of Williams but I'd never heard of Ezra Pound or even Walt Whitman, let alone the likes of Allen Ginsberg. Mind you I do remember a young, bearded, soft-spoken trainee teacher trying his level best to introduce us to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Christ Climbed Down'. For God's sake I'd never even read any T S Eliot and he's British.

More poets should be willing to do this. I think it is a duty to pass on what we know. Poetry is not spilling out your guts and bunging in line breaks every now and then. That's a good starting place – get it down on paper while the fire is hot – but I like to return to that kind of outpouring later and rake through the ashes to see what's salvageable and I work with that.

Gustav Holst once observed a composer's most vital piece of equipment is an eraser. The same could be said about writers. I recently discarded 10,000 words. I've mentioned this before. It wasn't easy, but I would never have done that as a new writer. Every word was precious. When I look back at the poetry I churned out in my teens and it is all pretty awful, damp squibs and duds, BUT every now and then there was an idea, a spark or a couple of lines that deserve to be looked at again. Maybe one day I'll have a go at that.

In the meantime keep reading this blog. Every now and then I'll slip in a wee article explaining the hows and whys behind an old – or maybe a new – poem. They still crop up every now and then, like family, and you never turn family away.