Voice of the Hoover: Review of The Process of Poetry
ed Rosanne McGlone
Fly on the Wall Press, £10.99

FOR budding left poets and interested readers, I recommend The Process of Poetry, a rare and relatively cheap book (£10.99). It comprises interviews with 15 award-winning poets discussing how their initial drafts became the finished poem. Both draft and final version are given, thus allowing the reader to look virtually over the shoulder of the poet through the whole process of composition.

This returned me to the 1990s and the half-dozen Arvon week-long residential writing courses I attended myself tutored by the likes of Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Fred D’Aguiar, Brendan Kennelly, Mimi Khalvati, Brian McCabe — poet laureates, gold medal-winners et al.

This convinced me that poets are not born but made, mostly by reading better poets and poems and then experimenting with sound, sense, visuals, rhythm, rhyme (half or internal but seldom end-rhyme), assonance and dissonance, prosody not prose.

This meant rejecting/replacing the logic, grammar and unconscious tyranny and staleness of prose for something quite different: the melodic rather than the metrical line as advocated by Ezra Pound along with “less rhetorical din” and “fewer painted adjectives” while aiming for something “austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”

All this can be taught like an apprentice footballer can be shown how to bend a ball round a “wall.”

Published poets teach apprentice poets by setting them writing exercises while often participating themselves, such as: “Imagine you are a hoover in a second-hand shop window, write a poem in the voice of the hoover.” This forces you to write (a) not in your own personal “voice” but (b) in someone else’s imagined “voice.”

For people who think poetry is writing down one’s own thoughts and opinions in regular end-rhyme scheme this should be a game-changer, otherwise they will not get anything published anywhere let alone in the coveted Thursday Poem slot of the Morning Star.

Some 30 years ago I sat in a room with a dozen other poetic hopefuls writing down furiously for about three minutes, without “thinking,” everything I could see, hear, touch, taste or smell inside those particular rooms.

Tom Leonard read his notes out afterwards: it took six minutes. The tutors read and criticised your own poems in private and in class. Liz Lochhead, a former art teacher, spoke of “initial spills” and of shoving the stuff around the page until an idea, a shape, anything remotely interesting, appeared, and if not, start again, another “spill.”

She’d look at your efforts and say loudly: “The poem doesn’t start till verse three: it’s been clearing its throat till then.” Note that the “it” mentioned is the poem’s “persona” or “voice” not the personal “I” of the poet. Lochhead, a playwright, I think saw poets as “characters” in our own poems — if they had to be in them at all, that is.

We wrote mostly free-verse, rarely with end-rhyme. We learned poems were not written by the intellect (“the front of the head”) but from the back (the “unconscious”) and you had to watch and listen to what was coming out of you as if you were a stranger to it yourself, while keeping your savagely censorious intellect away from all that unintelligible stuff until it was “out” and you could let your critical mind get at it.

This often meant realising that you were writing three poems in the same poem and had to cut the interlopers out. It meant making your own poem seem “unfamiliar” to you, “defamiliarisation,” as described and practised by Bertolt Brecht, the left modernist supreme.

I did something like this in a poem I wrote on what it is like to play as a young professional footballer under floodlights for the first time in front of a crowd, Flood-lit: “Nobody tells you about the lights, how a ball travelling towards you,/ from gloom to glare, now you see it, now you don’t,/ fascinates; how the dark beyond the arc of light makes the park/ a stage / tighter than a midge’s arse in a sandstorm…” I was telling truths through lies, because the poem (me, the poet) contradicted its opening by telling you, the reader, all about “the lights,” without once mentioning the personal “I.”

Lochhead is one of the famous voices in this fascinating collection discussing the virtually endless process of composition, redrafting, weighing, discovering and testing the “voice” of the poems she and her colleagues found themselves writing rather than the ones they thought they were writing or had set out to write.

As it happens, none of the 15 poems featured in this book warrant selection as today’s Thursday Poem compared to the poem I have chosen from a collection also published by Fly on the Wall Press, Manchester, namely Julian Bishop’s Fatberg from We Saw It All Happen, 2023.

The writing techniques discussed by all these top poets apply to poems written across the political spectrum, but whether poems appeal to left audiences or art audiences has little to do with literary technique but the audiences being written for.

Andy Croft’s anthology Smokestack Lightning, 2021, has 200 such poems, one each taken from the collections that Smokestack published since 2004 to “keep open a space for what is left of the radical tradition in the 21st century.”

This remains the purpose of the Morning Star’s Thursday Poem and monthly poetry book reviews too, so it is encouraging to see new labels like Fly on the Wall Press seeking since its inception in 2018 to combine social activism with literary endeavours across all genres on behalf of Mind, Shelter, Climate Coalition and the like, and now contributing steadily to left cultural publications.