The more I read poetry the more my appetite for reading poetry grows. So much so that this week I find myself thinking of wasted opportunities. Why don’t I know more about poetry, why I haven’t read more widely? This can of course be seen through another glass – there are still so many great poets waiting for me out there, still so much pleasure to be had in discovery and in the inspiration that new reading brings.
As my appetite grows and I taste new poets I’m also beginning to learn what I like and what I like less, which is not to say what is good or bad but simply that some poetry doesn’t quite work for me and realising why is as valuable to me as realising what does work and what I love.
In seeing what doesn’t work for me I begin to come to better understand myself as a writer and the kind of poetry I want to write. Likewise I’m beginning to understand the poetry I most admire and how this can feed into my own voice. The American poet Billy Collins says ‘Read widely. Read all the poetry you can get your hands on. And in your reading your searching for something. Not so much your voice. You’re searching for poets that make you jealous.’ Collins gives us the green light to go ahead and imitate these poets we are jealous of, allowing their voice and influence to seep into and enrich ours.
I’m enthusiastic about this approach. I feel it worked for me when writing prose, to the extent that sometimes when I felt my writing was becoming predictable and dull I would take a passage by a writer whose style I admired and imitate it, to force myself out of my own entrenched patterns. This exercise invariably brought something fresh to my writing.
This week it’s not so much a question of imitation as inspiration. I’m reading Marie Howe’s, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and as I read I find first lines have come into my head, as if from nowhere. These first lines have now been drafted into poems that I’m working on. It’s as if I hear her voice and mine responds. I’m still not quite sure why. I wouldn’t have predicted hers would be the poems to speak so loudly to me. But I know I admire their accessibility, their clarity, the room Howe creates for the reader, the way the ordinary and the spiritual sit side by side in the same poem. I’m not even jealous. I just bow down…
