Why commentaries?
As of September 2009, I’ve decided to start providing a commentary to accompany each poem that I post. The general idea is that I add a few remarks about the poem – for example, why I chose particular words or phrases, or a particular form, and what I think might have inspired the poem. I might also discuss the ideas or phrases that I chose, in the end, to leave out. Finally, I rate the poem as a probably (I’ll probably keep it), no (I’ll definitely discard it) or maybe (I’m not sure yet) – a rating that may well change as the poem makes its twelve week journey from the first slot to the last slot on the site.
Other people sometimes interpret my poems differently than I do, and I don’t think that’s wrong; any piece of work takes on a life of its own once it leaves the nest. In adding a commentary, I’m not trying to set down some “canonical interpretation” of a poem. In fact, I’m quite happy for people to ignore the commentaries (by default, they’re hidden); readers are, and should be, free to form their own interpretations of the poems.
There are three reasons why I’m supplying the commentaries. The selfish motivation is that they form a kind of quasi-diary, capturing something of the processes involved in creating the poems, which it might be fun to look back on one day. More generally, I hope the commentaries will be helpful to those readers who want to know a little bit more about what a poem might mean, and where it came from. For readers who are themselves beginning writers, I hope that seeing the misgivings, uncertainties and sheer stuff-ups of that sacred cow, a “published poet”, will be reassuring. Finally, and most importantly, the commentaries are my own small attempt to help poetry build its readership.
When I started fundraising for UNICEF by selling the remaining copies of my first collection Tails, I badgered a lot of people into buying the book – including many people who would never normally choose to read poetry. After they read it, quite a few people said something along the lines of “well, I don’t like poetry, but I really liked your poems”. They said this sincerely enough – sometimes citing examples – that I don’t think it can all have been politeness. Nor, I hasten to add, do I think my own poems have any uniquely magical properties for converting the masses. Instead, I think this reaction aptly demonstrates the quandary that poetry finds itself in today: namely, that plenty of people are non-readers of poetry simply because they don’t realise that they like it.
I remember the first time I tried to do a cryptic crossword. I’d only ever done ordinary crosswords before, and I had no idea about all the rules and conventions that applied to cryptic ones. I barely solved a single clue, and ended up feeling frustrated, irritated and stupid – none of which left me feeling inclined to persist with the genre. Months later, I somehow acquired a little paperback book of cryptic crosswords which included an introductory chapter explaining how they worked. Having read it, and absorbed its many examples, I suddenly “got” what those cryptics were on about. I found I could tackle them much more successfully – and that, forearmed with a little knowledge, they were both satisfying and fun.
Just like cryptic crosswords, poetry has rules and conventions which become obvious and intuitive with time, but which can be opaque to the beginner. Reading a poem without that background knowledge can make the poem seem “difficult”, and leave the beginner feeling frustrated, irritated and stupid. Who likes being made to feel stupid? It’s not surprising that people in these circumstances rapidly decide that they “don’t like poetry”.
I’m a great believer in learning by example. There are plenty of books and articles on the subject of “How to read poetry”, and I don’t want to write another one. Instead, I hope that my poem-commentaries can provide a series of “worked examples” – partial in both senses – of how one person is thinking about about one particular poem. I hope that these examples can help, in a non-didactic way, to build the “background knowledge” that lets people come to understand poetry more easily, and thus to discover how much they can enjoy it.
How to find the commentaries
To read the commentaries, simply click on the “Read author commentary” link at the bottom left below each poem:
