Long Poem Magazine

At some point in my Creative Writing teaching career, I decided to practice what I preach by permitting myself to continue, by writing every day. Around 2012 I decided I would write most mornings, in lines, double-spaced on A4 lined paper, first in rough, then revising the text into in a loose-leaf file that I christened ‘Ark and Archive’. I would simply add the day’s writing to the previous entry, no section breaks. It’s good to experience the pulse and flow of uninhibited material practice.

This morning, for example, I added a short passage – most additions are around ten lines – to page 1079. The purpose at its most basic is to simply keep writing – exercise – but at its most extensive it is designed to amass material, either deliberately, premeditatedly, or by accident or caprice, that might form the first draft of a poem, short or long, or provide materials that will need further processing. Collage is a common technique of my work, ‘creative linkage’ as I’ve called it in my critical writing. Whether it is an ‘ark’ of live material or an ‘archive’ of dead text depends on what I do with the results. After each writing, I read back over the previous three pages (that might be up to ten sessions’ work), and revise in the usual fashion.

I don’t create ex nihilo: I habitually ‘write-through’ photographs or visual images, though occasionally I vary this. In the early days I made use of an anthology of found photographs collected by the photographer Hans-Peter Feldmann called Voyeur. The method – not my only method it should be stressed (I still occasionally write a whole poem, or its draft, at one sitting) – has been particularly productive, and it has played a crucial part in writing long poems, including the two I have published in Long Poem Magazine, that necessary and unique periodical that is dedicated to those of us who extend far beyond 14 lines. I salute the brilliant work of the editors.

The entire text of ‘The Area’ was published in LPM 30 in Autumn 2023. The ‘writing through’ had utilised the images in a catalogue for an exhibition at the Bluecoat in Liverpool that I had seen in 2015, Tricia Porter: Liverpool Photographs 1972-74. The photographs, as material often does, awaited the apposite moment, and that moment was post-Covid 2022. Porter’s images of quotidian experience caught aspects of vanished Liverpool life, the pre-Toxteth Liverpool 8, and pre-gentrification of ‘the area’, which we – Liverpool friends and I – had returned to frequenting in the estrangement after lockdowns. Tricia’s photographs, of this area I knew well in the present, but not in the past, are tender black and white images. I enjoyed the process of concentrating on each of them in the booklet and looking and writing what I saw, what I didn’t see, and what I imagined, in daily chunks. This Liverpool was populated by quite different people (though some children were identified, now adults, during the exhibition). I wasn’t sure that the ‘writing through’ would yield a single text, let alone a long one. I might have ignored it. I might have used it as ‘interfering material’ in a more collaged impacted piece. But I didn’t. I determined at some point that I wanted to make use of short lines with capital letters at the start of each, arranged in couplets that bounce off of one another (a form or formal device that I had used before, but not at such length). I also wanted to not simply produce a section per image. Despite my techniques I remain sceptical of direct ‘ekphrastic’ writing (with a clear one to one relationship between object and poem). Most sections of the poem re-function (predominantly) visual data from several photographs. Abrupt editing of the writing produced jump rather than smoothness, jagged edges rather than flat planes, disruptions of time, all of which seemed appropriate to Porter’s artifice. I subtitled the poem ‘thinking with the photographs of Tricia Porter’ to emphasise this attitude.

A little girl washes

Watercolours

Into the gulping Coriolis

Kaleidoscope of the plughole

Only she can see this centre

Of her world what’s round

The corner the tall

Blind corner where brick meets

Brick meets paving

Against the gauze of mist

That fades new flats

Where three vanishing lads

Haul mum’s washing on rattling wheels

A pier head

Jump into the wash of time

Thus the poem ends with this image (is it an image?) of both plunging into time and of the erasure of time, which is how I see the piece now. (A ‘pier head jump’ meant joining the merchant navy.) One of the delights of writing and publishing this poem was that I contacted Tricia Porter and sent it to her. She approved.

‘From The Palisade Ditch’ is published in LPM 35 in May 2026. This showing constitutes the first half of the poem. In contrast to my commentary on ‘The Area’, I propose not to disclose the material I used, since I believe I have distorted it more than with the Tricia Porter images, and the original is almost irrelevant. Suffice it to say that the material was maps: lots of maps, arranged chronologically from ancient to modern (including the future, actually). The daily ‘writing through’ method was the same, but it must have gone on for much longer than for ‘The Area’. Again, during the writing I had no clear idea of where the project would go, and again, it might have been disrupted or re-distributed as ‘interfering material’, but it wasn’t. Somehow, I maintained a uniformity of tone as I narrated the history of the mapped world (something preposterously egregious that I wouldn’t normally attempt!). The text required a great deal of editing but not re-ordering. Passages were deleted, others were re-written, vocabulary was honed (I tried not to repeat geographical or architectural terms), but the ‘wash of time’ of ‘The Area’ is transformed into the slow viscous slug of history. The title refers to a feature on an early map of New York. Wall St. was built on a ditch, and I couldn’t resist that detail about the origins of Capitalism. But mostly no place is identified. The world unfolds at its own pace and its slow linguistic cartography charts change. Here a particularised world (space) seems oddly detached from the poem’s flow (time):

Space, inside the buildings, spaces

between, and beyond, the buildings,

fill with light but, outside, also

with rain or snow, as we dash

from the lush luncheonette

between the exclusive polo club

and the faux-Hellenic university,

to our own stylish concrete block,

to find nowhere to hang our dripping cagoules 

in the grey vestibule, chill echoic void.

I have enjoyed writing this account, even as it offends my ‘principle’ that writers should not, or even cannot, interpret their own work. It is one of the foundations of my commitment to writerly poetics as an anticipatory and speculative discourse (about which I have perhaps written far too much elsewhere, in my Shearsman volume The Necessity of Poetics). Writing about my own processes, which on its own need not involve interpretation, has me questioning that principle – but then poetics is an inevitably ever-changing discourse. To return to my past teaching career, I did for a short period adopt another of our Creative Writing requirements: that of writing a self-assessment for each work. Although I haven’t quite achieved that here, I’ve sailed close to that pedagogic wind, and I’ve creased the sails of my pristine poetics (again). Perhaps I should resume that writerly custom.

I have a blogpost of my own that commemorates my reaching page 1000 of ‘Ark and Archive’: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 – keeping a daily practice of writing going. It mentions other poems, both short and long, that I have written using this method.

Tricia Porter has a website here: Tricia Porter Photography.