It may happen when you lift your collar, stepping through some truly bilious weather one Friday morning in November, watching pale commuters work the tough roads west. It may happen when you see your shit neighbours in hi-vis, honestly, the silent ones that never smile, scurrying back in horizontal rain, tugging bins behind them, to rest by the phlegm green door of No. 33 again, the dark windows, the curtains still drawn on something nobody wants; thy shut the door. And it happens when you meet those first steppers, hunched up, crammed into themselves, staying back from the kerbs and gutters, eyes to the ground, off to collect six rashers of back bacon, or that undelivered parcel, or perhaps an almond decaf latte before six hours of work in their mouldy bedroom. It may even happen fetching twenty quid from the hole-in-the-wall to next Donna’s-Tanning to pay for the last day’s first baggy.

You notice it when you’re catching up with your nan about that time with Nat and Ajay over cribbage at Nina’s, the broken matchstick, the really big slap, the slammed doors. Ajay crying, “He really did it, Nat. He absolutely fucking did it.” It may even happen on the 62, when you can’t see out for all the running condensation, the crowds and two cripples pressing you into your seat, and you nearly miss your stop amid the dark fumes of Ten Acres Lane. I mean, the more you think about it, the more you feel it, the more you see it. The everywhere-among-us-all of it, you know? The shared lofty and banal silt of it all. The stuff. Stuff the keeps us apart and brings us together. All the stuff between us.

And I want to mention all this because of the risk involved. The risk of writing it down for them. The risk of writing to them about all this stuff. For we all know the drill, you know, how it’s all about you forever; you come first, they don’t matter. They are irrelevant. Except, of course, they do matter. They matter because they are wholly in it, making it happen in the way it must. And while you might put them in it, as they’re in it in these paragraphs, it only occurs when they hear it and read it and form it, between you, between each of them, but especially between you and them.

Once, I heard this story about particles, and how small these pieces are, and the breaking apart, smaller and smaller, not infinitesimally smaller, but still, smaller, not fragments but whole things, almost inconceivably small. And then the naming of these little, little things, and imagining a sort of tiny universe of tiny things. Dark and meaningless. Without cause. Beyond origin. Except, of course, all things begin, as all things end. But I mention this because despite this desire to fragment and isolate, the power of all these tiny things is their relationships, the invisible thing that brings them together in, and in doing so, makes all things. And it’s not the particles; it’s the relationship between them that is the power in all things. Invisible, mysterious, connecting. Call it what you like. I call it love. The reason of love.

When I think of experimentation in form and content, I think of the forces that bring us together. You might consider this social cohesion is an evolutionary force. But particles don’t evolve, and the force that unites them, diverts them, misplaces, displaces and brings order – that is simply there, between them in the undiscovered world. Perhaps the experimental is the communitarian absolute. It resists the idea that we are alone in the fractured world, pieces of no whole, buying and producing what capitalism needs us too. It resists the literature of this world, isolating us in the fetishisation of solitary market forces, the myth of the exemplary life of the individual production unit, scouring the uninhabited language on behalf of the ravages of consumerism. There, I’ve said it now. A literature of communitarianism is the leading edge, the avant garde, the fighting edge of all the joy of being human. And the challenge, I guess, is finding what language, which languages, this aim necessitates. What forms of language – and I don’t discard complex language – allows access for everyone. For the real power of art doesn’t lie in what separates us into commodities – purchasers and providers – but what unites us into a people. All the gorgeous stuff between us.

Sometime back, when social media didn’t exist, when there were no creative writing courses, no prizes or competitions to speak of (well, not outside of London) – I set out to be more serious about my writing. Now at some point, all writers determine to be more serious, but in those days – we’re talking about the late eighties and early nineties – you could slip into being more serious relatively unnoticed. No one was emerging. No one was doing open mics. If you wanted to know what was happening you subscribed to magazines, haunted your local library, bought your books from the poetry shelves of bookstores. Amazon didn’t exist. Online didn’t exist.

Yes, you got down to business by reading, then reading some more, and then some more. Poetry wasn’t an academic topic, as much as a chthonic force, an undercurrent, a resistance. You were alone, adrift. There might have been a tiny local performance group connected to a provincial library, that met in the back rooms of a failing pub and where a group of men, it was mainly men, would circulate mimeographed copies of concrete poems about pylons and railways. Someone always mentioned the Mersey Poets, ‘You can’t beat them, really.’

When things began to change, they changed quickly. First up, we saw the emergence of email, later to become the diarrhoea of digital. Dial-up broadband brought about the opportunity to sign into bulletin boards, where the world began to expand – connecting all the progressive enthusiasts into a sort of interlinked fan club. It felt like you were discovering post-apocalyptic cells of poets, many of whom were jazz and real ale fanatics, many of whom loved the sixties, many of whom thought modernism was still modern. But it was enormous fun. Cranky and bewildering and eclectic and fussy and combative.

I mention all this because in the flash of an eye that world with its loose connections to English departments and the quaint Marxism and theory-driven stakes in the past, was catapulted into the big business of CW. We all have to earn a living, and CW with its American pre-packaged stakes in campus literature and meta-campus novels about creating campus poets all discussing tenure and marking and meetings with the Dean about shagging the students or budget savings – all that now familiar economic noise – was imported wholesale within a decade. The whole idea of having a poetry life outside of this machinery is almost unheard of now. How did this happen?

Well, I’m not best placed to explore that, I am of the generation that saw it happen but was already working elsewhere, in another profession. But I’m not writing a critique of this now universal world view of qualified poetic practice – I’m writing about not choosing it. Because you are perfectly free to not choose it.

It might seem crazy to say to someone in their late teens and early twenties, but being a CW undergrad really isn’t a career path, less still the route to publication you might think. Well, let’s face it, it is one route to publication, but I worry that the sort of poetry necessitated by this system, comes with a cost. The first assertion I’ll make is that this world focussed on self-assessed innovation is trapped in its own terms of reference – being a non-academic, I don’t need to support my assertion with evidence and references, I can just say that writing within this field (to use Bourdieu’s term) now has considerable structural force. Getting the right people to say the right thing about the right approach to a poem is a clear characteristic. Still, when I was growing up, poetry was something that opposed all this, actively resisted it, casting about for language that connected people to each other and not to vested interests in a manic system of self-reference. I can contradict myself here and say that CW can be massively beneficial. You can see I’m hotting up now. I can hear some bridle at the familiar accusation of questioning whom one writes for, and how, and questions of audience and engagement. To misquote Gore Vidal: these arguments are so old I’ve forgotten all the answers.

Still, I think it’s worth reminding writers that it’s a good thing to do it all wrong. To avoid the qualification route, to not teach, to leave uni as fast as one can, or not study CW at all. I mean, if you want to write poetry, you can just read it, privately without critical discussion or a workshop to murder it – you can walk past the Poetry Night with Open Mic at the Flea and Firkin (slots remaining), remember to assiduously not send six poems to Burnt Fingers Mag, or send your competition entries to some society on the theme of lice. You can just not take part. At all. And that’s okay. And this is to remind you that for a few centuries, this was the general way of it. Unapproved. Outside of stuff. Against most stuff. But for the reader, in fact rather desperately focussed on letting the reader into a secret, the deepest of secrets, well beyond the measure of ownership and control, system or outputs, torn from the dark interest of being human.

I want to consider a poem as a ‘bestowal’. I use that word in preference to ‘gift’ – though the exploration of poetry as gift-making is, naturally enough, a deeply fruitful idea, and one many have explored. However, there’s an obsolete use of the word ‘bestowal’ as ‘lodgement’ or ‘stowage’. In this sense, a poem is both a gift to the reader and a location in which something is contained, kept, or deposited. I rather like this double meaning, because it unites the pleasure of exchange within a community and a sense of something being contained, even withheld, or treasured. It creates the sense of a container, or wrapper – and it’s fun (honestly) to read a poem thinking about its edges, what it brushes up against. Try it.

Naturally, the risk here is the continuing advocacy of the poet as someone outside of a community whose bestowing is more like lobbing in grenades of social justice, ethical opposition, or political judgement (or the avoidance of these, say, anecdotal pleasure or sheer whimsy). I mean, this sense of the artist lying outside of the social system is a performative necessity in all capitalist cultures – having the role of a sort of moral weathervane, or worse, moral blowhard – in order to maintain a social order and class control, our system (thesystem) needs and designates someone who critiques our collective inadequacies and then establishes a value system to purchase and own such critique – the punk ethic becoming the punk t-shirt. It is a drama where social truths can be displayed, even realised, but then departed from – as we head out of the theatre, back to the car park, and into the system we have just paid to be refuted. It’s more stimulating to consider the poet as someone inside the system – and to consider their role within the community. And to think about the poem as the product of its community, having both powers and functions. Not merely Benthamite utility, not quite the language of the herd, but a language born out of stowage and bequest – holding and giving. Being together, more than idolising (and commercialising) difference.

Quite what all this might mean becomes a form of cultural exchange and interrogation over time. After all, many of our little treasures end by being bagged up and dispatched to the charity shops – their value simply sifting away. And poems are rather like this, well, some of them, they come to embody a specific set of connections and pleasures for the reader, drawing upon their life experiences, locating for each us a separate sense of purpose, agency and identity in a text. We remember where we read it, whom we were with, the gains and losses of the day; the landscape and weather. The poem resonates and reticulates. And we shimmer with it.

And here is another opening for us: the idea that what is stowed isn’t just the poet’s experience but all shared experience that comes to rest upon the artefact of the poem. In this sense, we all come to invest a tiny bit of ourselves with the poem if not within it – at least for a little while. Another wrapper so to speak.

But the boundary of the text is permeable, too. The text is symbolic, it mutates over time (for words change). In fact, each reader brings a new sense of themselves to the text – quite the opposite of dissecting the syllabic components of the thing itself in a close-reading. In this respect, the poem is totemic and may come to represent something that does not lie inside its verbal artifice, but is transformed in one or other cultural moments, being read or owned by a cluster of readers with a common understanding or, in the absence of this, a shared mystery. And poems, like quantum physics, are mysteries, too. The poem is habitable.

Can it be said that the poem contained this possibility? Prefigured its use and interpretation? We know some forms of reading see the poem as a dead mass, trapped in its historic deterministic facts and processes, a corpus to be explored – of its time and not being enacted through time – but this fails to recognise the emotional and spiritual transference that is located along with the poem. Stowed, as it were, but not limited to itself. The poem is its reading in time, as well as its text in time.

Of course, the thing contained can be mutated in history – and we must reflect on the accidents of such potential meanings – where the art object comes to represent something else entirely – never mind our own misreading when words change or simply lose their currency. In fact, one might suggest that the poem contains all its own potential outcomes – and over time the reader, many readers, transfer and bestow such meanings.

It doesn’t happen in isolation, does it? It happens within a community of interpretation, and the theology of poetry is as disputatious as other flavours of theology.

It’s easy to see how a poem is also a contested space. Some readers, professional readers for sure, may prefer one usage, may claim it possesses the official meaning, or, more vaguely, the official approach to considering meaning itself. Others will argue the precise opposite – for example, that all North American poetry in English is colonial language, an emanation of exploitation from the British Isles. It could be argued that English is the preeminent colonial language, except for the fact that ‘Englishes’ are freely imported into each other around the world today and already form one strata of AI and its monolithic totalising nature. But this is a digression and another story…

Before we meditate on any of these meanings (i.e. gift, stowage and locus), and perhaps dispute them, I think it’s safe to say we can all agree that there are social, historical, political and spiritual dimensions to writing poems and making personal claims on the art. It seems obvious, doesn’t it – but it’s here that this essay finds its central concern – that poetry is synodal. And if it is, then its language, purpose and trajectory in history is derived from this consensual (if disputed) set of expectations and requirements. And that’s interesting to consider because it locates the poet not as an outsider developing discrete forms of critique about say identity and entitlement, rights and responsibilities, but as an insider articulating the purpose of the community for itself. Am I claiming that poetry is an insider art? Well, yes, in a way. At least, it’s worth thinking of it in this way.

Why should we care about any of these matters? Well, I think the idea of bestowal has one important impact. It means that the language of the poem needs to be communal, precise, and comprehensible, even if its ideas and contexts are highly complex and will naturally ramify. The more the language of a poem departs from this communal (shared) role – let’s say, for a moment, its liturgical role – the more depleted it will become. Or to expose this further, the more society will reject it; the more marginal it will become.

Art may be useless (i.e. beyond utility), but it isn’t purposeless. This isn’t a recidivist argument to establish a new prosody, but it opens poetry to a new consideration, that of its formal place as a liturgical language for its people. And here, we gain a new sense of what bestowal might mean for us all. And this is where my conjectures stop, and maybe yours begin.

📖 New Collection: Wonder

Published by Salt Publishing this November.

🌿 Discover more about the book here

“I bet they each turn all their feathers into a primal coat / of darkness close to wonder.”

— Wonder

What happens when a rook dies? The opening poem in my new collection, Wonder, asks this plainly enough. But beneath the question is another, quieter one: What remains? What is gathered up and carried forward, even through grief, even through loss?

The answer the poem offers is as simple as it is profound: wonder remains.

The word itself has been worn thin by years of use — pressed into service for fireworks and breakfast cereals, for tourist brochures and gadget launches. But at its root, wonder is neither sparkle nor spectacle. It is astonishment. It is the staying of breath. It is the human instinct to stop, to look again, to allow the world to act upon us.

The poems in Wonder grew out of this conviction. That there are things in the world which deserve not just to be seen, but to be attended to. Small, difficult, ordinary things: a rook’s dark coat, the rain song of the chaffinch, the foreshore’s salt air, the awkward hours lost on a petrol station forecourt.

It’s not the grandiose that calls for our attention, but the near-at-hand. The overlooked. The persistent. As one poem has it:

“Mother said, ‘Learn to love a small life,’ / between these weak rivers, ruptured fields…”

— The Small Life

The Mystery at the Heart of Things

There’s something I’ve come to understand — though not always easily — about wonder: it doesn’t offer answers. It asks that we stay with the questions.

This is where wonder and uncertainty become companions. To wonder is to accept that we do not fully know. And more than that — that we may never fully know.

There’s a temptation, especially now, to seek clarity, to tidy the mess, to reduce the world into something explainable, measurable, resolvable. But wonder works against this. It doesn’t simplify. It invites us to stand before the mystery and remain there — not rushing to conclusions, not retreating into certainty.

If poetry has taught me anything, it is this: some things should remain unfinished. Some things are meant to remain strange.

In this sense, wonder is not just a feeling — it’s a practice. A way of living with complexity, with ambiguity, with the unresolved. It is, perhaps, a kind of faith: faith not only in the possibility that not knowing is enough, but in the sacredness of mystery itself.

The Work of Staying Awake

The American poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I’d like to think these poems ask the same of their readers — to begin with attention, and perhaps to find some form of devotion there. Not worship, but care. Not sentiment, but witness.

When I was writing these pieces, I kept returning to the same stubborn question: What does it mean to pay attention in an age of cynicism? What does it mean to stand still long enough to let the world catch up with you — without demanding that it explain itself?

The answer, if there is one, is not complicated. It’s there in the rook’s mourning, the seabird’s call, the idle glance between strangers, the shimmer of a coin caught in the curve of a pavement. It’s there in not rushing past these things.

An Invitation to Wonder

This collection is not a manifesto. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. But it does offer a small suggestion: that perhaps we might still find something to marvel at. That even now, even here, there is more than we can name.

It asks — gently — if we might live more comfortably with uncertainty, and find, in that space, not fear, but grace.

And if the poems have any blessing to give, perhaps it is this one, caught in the fierce, bright ending of another piece:

“Make haste, it sings, Brings us wonder, bring rain.”

— It’s Here Again

Thank you for reading. I hope you’ll stay with me for more reflections from Wonder in the weeks ahead.

Author’s Note

📖 New Collection: Wonder

Published by Salt Publishing this November.

🌿 Discover more about the book here

Chris Hamilton-Emery is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Modern Fog (Arc Publications, 2024). He is the founder of Salt, an independent literary press based in the UK. His work explores attention, memory, and the uneasy privilege of being alive.

You can follow Chris here:

📚 Instagram: @chamiltonemery

📚 Bluesky: @chrisemery.me

📚 Facebook: @chris.hamiltonemery

📚 TikTok: @chamiltonemery

📚 Substack & Newsletter: www.chrisemery.me

I’d be lying if I said I thought it could recover from that; it felt very much like the end of something. When things come to an end, it’s amazing how complex operational decisions become: how to stop, whether to stop, when to stop, how to afford the actual stopping. It’s full of financial ramifications – I shan’t attempt to list them all here, but it’s a mix of money and people and, in no small measure, very real hopes and dreams.

My entire business life has been spent building things: teams, services, products, companies. I absolutely hate dismantling stuff – yet stay long enough in business and you learn that one skill you absolutely must acquire is the skill around ending things. Ending the things that cannot recover.

There’s a whole separate article I could write on fashion, fluidity and fickleness in publishing, and how this affects the world of writers, providing the boundaries of what it is possible to sell – the actual occurrence of art within its readership – something that happens in time and with economic constraints. But this is another story for another time. Let’s just say that all things come to an end. But here comes the big However.

Despite these draining concerns, even worse was to come. Following the Covid collapse, the next three years showed zero growth. By the end of 2023, it felt like nothing we were publishing was finding a readership – we were treading water, covering the bills, but unable to pay ourselves. When faced with something that isn’tworking, it’s amazing how long it takes to understand that doing the same things repeatedly will not bring a change to your circumstances. After all, a business model is also about belief and faith as much as it is about balance sheets and commercial strategy. The figures tell the truth, but the heart is a stubborn muscle.

Change. Tenacity. Clearing a path. There’s a quote from Isaiah that I find especially useful in business –

¹⁸ “Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
¹⁹ Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.

I wish I had that printed on a card, pinned to my wall. Those forty words carry a lot of weight. To use a popular phrase, I leaned into my business, and took a good look around. Then I began commissioning and set about rebuilding things. Ther were some glimmers, but it became clear that what was needed was ‘a new thing’ I joined the IPG’s mentoring scheme and they provided two potential mentors for me, meetings came swiftly and while both offered quite brilliant visions of a new strategy, one mentor simply felt like a better fit for what we were going through. Looking back on this it was an emotional projection, as much as intellectual engagement with resources and capabilities. It was about vision, feeling and practical change.

I’ve come to the point of this text, for what has happened is two years of growth, the first year brought growth of 13.7% and this year has closed 11.1% up. If you’ve done the maths, you’ll know that we have a long way to go to recover from that 65.5% drop. Yet we can begin to see that changing what we publish (diversifying) and how we publish (developing) is beginning to pave the way. Somewhere in here is a reconnection with our readerships, and the discovery of new readers as others are tempted elsewhere. Is it sustainable? Well, we don’t know and the jury is out on 2025–2026 – but we have some astonishing books coming – novels that are bold, immersive, extravagant and hopeful. I think that feels like the right way to travel as we move through what is rapidly becoming a new wilderness, in the wake of extraordinary global economic change.

It's always a litmus test for how the trade is ‘feeling’ – the Big Five all (as ever) seem buoyant. Transworld (i.e. Penguin Random House) are busy promoting the new Dan Brown – with a figure dressed as death wandering about Olympia handing leaflets for ‘The Secret of Secrets’ to bewildered visitors – no hint of irony in this stunt.

News came in late today that Unbound has sadly gone into receivership – what a ride that has been – heralded as the future of publishing at one point, the masters of crowdfunding finally succumbed to a lack of cash. However, a phoenix business is emerging from the collapse – but one focussed on a ‘traditional publishing model’. Which goes to show how persistent the 600 year old model is.

Everywhere I went everyone I met, asked, ‘How's business?’ a gleam in their eyes. And I answered, honestly, ‘We're back in growth, but from a very low base.’

It's been a challenging time for just about everyone. Lots of people working for free, bobbing along after the knocks and confusion of the post-pandemic world. Yet it's not Covid or cost-of-living hitting publishers, it's the bewildering challenges of ... you guessed it, Brexit. Brexit is back, killing trade with self-inflicted red tape. Think GPSR. Think IOSS. Think EAA

Nevertheless, the fair is packed with developments in audio publishing, luxury products, and of course, AI. AI is *everywhere*, the fourth Industrial Revolution is here and it's unstoppable – from sales to authoring – no part of the book trade is untouched. Well, perhaps leather binderies can rest easy. What seemed distant and exotic is now mainstream publishing AI. Audio, translation, sales campaigns, automated marketing, publicity, comms, contact management, sales pitches, and, of course, content.

However, despite the technical revolution and the continuing challenges of bureaucracy, the trade remains deeply about people and their relationships.

As I was seated, between meetings, I watched friends, acquaintances and former colleagues wander past me – truly no one ever escapes publishing. Once you are in, you never ever seem to get out. On a toilet break, I stare into a mirror and realise it may well be the mirror I first stared into over 30 years ago at the same fair.

Still there was real joy in catching up with my own publisher, long time pals, and even our authors at our stand – some people I hadn't seen for perhaps 20 years. There was no end of enthusiasm for the mad business of it all. And more tomorrow as we begin considering further expansion and even translations.

This year, my own daughter, now a part-time Salt employee, joined Jen and me – it was wonderful to see her, at her first London Book Fair, grasping the enormous complexity of so many businesses in so many sectors all being brought together in the service of readers.

Learning to read is when you turn to books for that extraordinary sense of chaotic self-expansion or self-abandonment, I was almost going to write self-discovery, but literature, more than any other art, is about discovering others. It’s not about you. If you want to be returned to yourself, look some place else. I guess I came late to reading. I’d experienced my fair share of Mr. Meddles Muddles & co. but the real stuff kicked in when I entered the world of Camus, Satre, Malcolm Lowry, Hemingway, Larkin, Hughes, John Osborne (you can tell by this list that I don’t alphabetise my bookshelves). These are great teen writers. These are superb YA.

Everyone has a different route in, but the road to self-curating your reading is one that is always rather similar: idiosyncratic, labyrinthine, at the risk of raising the spectre of French theory, it is rhizomatic (look that one up, if you need to). It involves an element of risk and wantonness. It lacks historical and linear progression and whistles through centuries haphazardly. Each book drives in a climbing peg. Each book throws a rope across a crevasse. You swing out from passion to passion and, looking back, can often rapidly outgrow a minor obsession, replacing it with a love affair for something more turbulent and unsettling.

To steal a title of Auden’s, we are in yet another age of anxiety, indeed, anxiety is the great political force of our times: destabilizing, neutering, factionalising. It is kept afloat by mythologies of control and power, of indoctrination and assimilation and, perhaps, of abundance. How can we make sense of the sheer diversity of conflict and the abasement of so many peoples? Working together is just so hard, it’s undemocratic; it’s impossible. To be great we need to be separate. To withdraw is to be free. Simple solutions really can solve all our problems, especially if someone can be blamed. All this in an age where we stare down from space at the borderless earth in wonder and then, in horror; it’s so small and fragile. The world of books is the bloodstream of humanity, where news travels slowly, but sensibility spreads, connecting us to history and the future, connecting us to each other.

Literature is the opponent of most of our regressive impulses, that’s not to say it hasn’t had its moments being deployed as a weapon – but it is as infinite as space, an uncontrollable, limitless domain we can travel within going, literally, anywhere. What keeps it all afloat is the crazy engagement of the readers and, to bring things down to earth, their pocket money.

Perhaps there’s something else. If you want to become fully human, then literature is your short cut. The brightest sun and the darkest star, its all in there. Reading allows you more lives than one and helps you value more lives than yours. Choose what you honestly believe to be the best, and let the discovery of the best be your life’s pursuit. You might also enjoy some of the worst. Expect disappointments and delays. Reading lives ebb and flow, they have intensity and they have periods of windless calm. Yet even in the clam, a poem can fit in the very edges of your life, yet tending that flower can lead to a field of blooms. One thing for sure, literature is always leisure shaped, and every one of us is an explorer.

If you have spotted weak poems in your Work-In-Progress (cf. SELF-EDITING in Section Twenty of this guide) – a great way to conceal them is in a carelessly-assembled Poem Sequence.

This is, most often, a successful strategy if any given text hasn’t yet made it to the fully-fledged poem state, or indeed any state at all. It could be said that the sequence poem is halfway to nowhere, unable to survive on its own, moribund – receiving oxygen from the overall sequence on which it depends.

The sequence poem is, as it were, abandoned to the wholly-unmemorable banal fragment stage, where you may now safely leave it, pretending it has Great Significance, e.g.:

iv.

I feed
echoes in black hall
black house blood shakes
I am in me

If the complete sequence is filled with such pieces (and you are desperate to move on to your next hybridised twenty-six-line sonnet: see Section Thirty), it is useful to attach a strident, abstract poem title – and add sonic abstract texture to the lines themselves, for good measure. For example:

The Witch of Knifelessness is Eating My Mother

i.

Petrol glamour fused
in socket I puppet in
trance on trance or in
gloopy naked body
move to paradiddle

However, it’s not uncommon to find that such highly-coloured abstract language can become accidentally (if comically) suggestive, even emotive, which, while being particularly suited to procured criticism (cf. COMMUNITY POETRY, in appendix 2), may well need further editing to make it less memorable, less potent, providing less traction for the reader:

iv.

cooking something
outside
it’s so easy
that’s it really

The sequence has the additional advantage of making truly awful poems seem like they have extra weight and potency, even glamour. In fact, one may write pages of such fragmentary incoherent material and house it in that other great structure for bad poems: the ‘Part’. Putting sequences of bad poems into Parts has the added effect of introducing even more white space and thus length to your manuscript. Additionally, it offers the great pleasure of introducing portentous unconnected epigraphs, e.g.:

“Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

In fact, supplying multiple epigraphs to a Part Title can imply that there is truly huge significance to the weak poems following in the sequence – wrong-footing critics and readers alike.

Don’t forget to number every aspect of your sequences and, where possible, provide a sub-sequence stanza title, as illustrated below:

PART SEVENTY-THREE

PART 73

‘Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.’
―G.I. Gurdjieff

‘EPS, commonly recognised as Styrofoam, is characterised by its cellular structure, making it an excellent choice for packaging, insulation, and disposable food containers.’
—Everything you need to know about polystyrene

SECTION ONE

The Witch of Knifelessness is Eating My Mother

i. Evil Shadow of the Styrofoam Mouse

Petrol glamour fused
in socket I puppet in
trance on trance or in
gloopy naked body
move to paradiddle

In the next section of this advanced user’s guide, we shall turn our attention to another important consideration – How To Make It All About Me. For now, please go to Exercise Fifteen on page 435 and prepare your first Poem Sequence. Good luck.

I want plants that simper with ochre blotches
and a fish that sinks like the last scrap of soap.
Carpets that in a week release their pile
to unleash baneful continents of hessian.

But mostly I want the fusty seats
of a matinee in 1974 with hours of Flash Gordon
or Beau Geste and your stinky hand in mine,
cold popcorn filled with kernels like teeth
all loaded with burnt butter and
our wet noses filled with an joyful ocean
of bad cologne.

Poets are often frightened of being funny on the page given jokes grow stale, age badly like root vegetables or bags of salad, yet whimsy is the mother of 20^th century absurdism, where French writing has twisted whimsy into the philosophical bathos around destiny and agency and left us with some sense of gravitas and haute culture, in English letters it is often used to explore the monstrous with a lightness of touch often in highly-tangential language. Whimsy is, of course, central to surrealism as well as to existentialism. In terms of caprice, it is an elegant engine of lyric expansiveness.

Whimsy is also the best friend of satire and Mark Waldron’s poetry uses it to significant effect, poking fun at our obsessions, banality and sense of purpose. But before I go there, I want to set out my store and contrast Waldron with two other poets — Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith. You might find these strange bedfellows but both poets are sui generis writers and developed a linguistic world: percussive, postulatory and in thrall to the syntactic music of the poem — that inner structure that builds its sonic world and into which we as readers enter and make of it what we can. It’s a high wire act.

Take a look at this from Edith Sitwell’s poem ‘Metamorphosis’:

The coral-cold snow seemed the Parthenon,
Huge peristyle of temples that are gone,
And dark as Asia, now, is Beauty’s daughter
The rose, once clear as music is o’er deep water.

Now the full moon her fire and light doth spill
On turkey-plumaged leaves and window-sill.

Now look at this from Stevie Smith’s poem, ‘Will Ever?’

Will ever the stormy seas and the surges deep,
Swinging from left to right over the world,
Stay in their idiot pacing, silently sleep
In a memorial silence of precreation?

Alas for the crafty hand and the cunning brain
That took from silence and sleep the form of the world,
That bound eternity in a measuring chain
Of hours reduplicate and sequential days.

And now this from Mark Waldron’s poem ‘Uh-Oh Sweet Wife’.

So, you bust us in flagrante,
me and my other beloved, myself and my infinite
intimate, the world, my mistress world.

Forgive me, but when she lays down her glittery
and genteel fuselage softly in my lap
I find that I must ruffle and placate her immensity.

What we can see is the use of heightened language cheek-by-jowl with the jocular, the plain spoken and the portentous. The latter often used to comic effect as the personality of the poem collapses on its very gesture of exuberance and transcendence. In fact, this element of hubris is something that informs much of Waldron’s poetic landscape, it’s the pressure valve in many of his best poems, as the reader is spun a yarn about a decadent flâneur collapsing into an interior darkness and, very often, loucheness:

He was thinking, as he rocketed across the Tuileries,
top-hat steadied with one hand, can gripped in the other,
and with that coddled little smile still

[…]

perhaps he might remake himself from something already
half-mutated such as a hotel pool-soaked novel or something
whose extra weight, as he would explain to Gaston later,
would be promissory, such as the lavish body of a maggot.

This comes from the title poem of Waldron’s latest collection, Meanwhile, Trees — the last line of the first stanza delivering another component of Waldron’s whimsy, the grotesque, often deployed like a depth charge against some current of self-regard.

Like Sitwell and Smith, Waldron’s poems are often the result of their syntax, driven by it as much as controlling it, and this strategy contains risks. The poem in its wild tangents can struggle to hold its form or to maintain its trajectory and denouement. Yet it is something that can be delicious, bold and very funny, while reminding us of mortality:

The first emotion I entertain (as one might
entertain a shy and unassuming guest at tea)

was a mild embarrassment at his behaviour.
Then, as time went on, I became increasingly

more mortified, until, out of all that
itchy awkwardness

there sprang a fragile and unexpected shoot
of mirth as a silky stem

might rise proud from a stimulated bean.

Just as with Sitwell and Smith, Waldron’s poetic landscape is informed by the candour of the poet himself, and the eccentricity and extravagance of the persona he brings to bear. The precariousness of this deep relationship between performative persona and, let’s call it, portentously, Weltanschauung is also part of the work’s tremendous charm and wit, and wit is something Waldron has in abundance.

Meanwhile, Trees is published by Bloodaxe Books and is available now.

What ensues in that debut collection is a kind of travelogue of personas which interrogate, absorb, historicise, reflect and, ultimately, judge the prevailing conditions. The prism of the poems is both culturally exact yet acts as a veneer on contemporary society, driven less by aural syntactical compulsions than by a mitteleuropäisch sensibility. Sheard is never a flâneur, he participates in, even glamorises, the emotional frottage of the poem:

We eat. We make our sounds
of contempt, or of sorrow.

We pass towns, cross borders,
occupy one another somehow.

Despite the descriptive armoury in Sheard’s fire-cracker lyrics, and its occasionally risky male cadence tackling violence, sexual vagrancy, even mild self-disgust, the poet emerges as someone fundamentally adrift from their habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense):

Such lolling, monstrous mots-justes! Primed
with their one note, one sound –
the one I lack, the one that gives sense

to the where, the why, the being
amidst my gentle, if empty, horizons.

These hesitations, impersonations, detective-work and relocations in Sheard’s more textually dense lyrics finally unite in the dazzling long title poem, where he memorializes a victim of the Hamburg firestorms in the Second World War, taking multiple narrative positions as lover, commentator, historian, and historical reenactor, slowly drawing the reader into a profound moral catastrophe –

I always know how to triangulate
my women –

Täter, Opfer, Retter.

(Perpetrator, Victim, Rescuer.)

In Sheard’s second collection, Dammtor, he changes gear offering a new voice, more open and accommodating, but no less severe in its transgressions, regrets and sexual frankness. Sheard, like so many other confessional poets, gets in all in – the dirty, combustible material of life. If Scattering Eva was a brilliant positioning of this remarkable talent, Dammtor allows for fewer personas, less history to dress its wounds. Here, the poet is speaking directly about the personal, the political and the profligate. If that judgemental eye had been cast elsewhere in Europe, now it is firmly cast upon himself.

I am not a man
for even light.
I like it broken,
my shadow partial.

Partial – being both incomplete, in another sense, favouring one side, and in another, having a liking for. A tiny, revealing word choice that has position, judgement and appetites.

These reflexive poems see Sheard’s gallows humour sometimes bitterly deployed at his own expense, sometimes, wistfully and collegially landed, like a blow to the poet’s own arm. Less self-congratulatory, more in recognition of faults and fault lines.

In the closing poems of his second collection, the birth of his son, Nathaniel, sees the poet transformed, in one, tellingly a witness account of the event after the fact, Sheard having left the hospital, addresses a pre-dawn drunk at a bus stop and finds:

In that hour after you were born,
I turned a key. And because a house
left vacant for the night is always strange
the space beyond the opening door
felt warmer, richer, changed.

The birth signalling another landscape to occupy after a raw abandonment, another shift of habitus, perhaps an escape from the cultural and historical pressures of those early European lyrics, or more plainly, the painful sexual politics and disintegration of Dammtor:

I found you, love, coiled
around a bar-stool and abandonment.
Your mouth made moues
of various kinds. For all that,
I heard only: Hate me.
Hate me.

In Sheard’s collection, The Abandoned Settlements, we are immediately signalled about new forms of exile, and the collection opens with the couplet:

We’re all pilgrims. We’re all
more or less aware of that.

However, there’s no need to brace yourself, Sheard has found a new sense of emplacement, and a sense of self-accommodation:

We wanted a land where we could watch the weather –
see how one hill drew down the drapes of rain, and how another
would flash its skin in a fall of sunlight.

Indeed, the terroir has provided a new climate for the poet. But not quite. Sheard still manages, in poems like ‘Rival’ and ‘Note for You’, to explore marital betrayal and breakdown with a sharp eye for the double self, being both participant and witness. Sometimes, this doppelgänger shows a savage wit:

He’s living it,
your shadow life.
He owns your flat
and fucks your wife.
He lives it loose,
but holds it tight.
He’s loving it,
your shadow life.

We have the sense that the poet is merely documenting an arrival elsewhere, sorting through the debris as a new home is being made, yet for a poet so profoundly distanced from any sense of Gemütlichkeit, Sheard can appear to be preparing for some transformation, and it arrives in the poem ‘Fallen’:

on the churned earth
the bulk of a fallen beast
its side torn open
still steaming

I am there
I am curled up
wet and stained

…

lift me up
into the air
into the light of you
take me into your
arms and home
and clean me

The bravado of some of the poet’s more rumbustious lyrics is itself cleaned out, unpunctuated, and filled with candour and vulnerability. These abandoned settlements can provide restitution, resolution and reoccupation.

I continued half-thinking of my sense of worthlessness in clubland, my irrelevance, my disregard. I thought a bit about self-pity – that glue of late middle age. Or was it anxiety about anxiety itself, worrying about worrying about ageing. Who knows or cares? Honestly, here in clubland, the screams persist and you want to be in them. Except in clubland I was of course the outsider, the ghost among the ghosts of youth. Lying in doorways, the other ghosts had other ideas. It was the great, no the grandiose joy of waste. The beauty of the waste-mission.

Anyway, as I wandered through the rocking crowds, heading back into the calmer darkness of the city centre, I was totally surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of children. It was disconcerting – what were all these children in clubwear doing? Some were sitting by walls, some were screaming and laughing, gossiping and throwing their heads back. Lines of blue-lit fast-food shops were choked with the glamorous and giddy. It all felt far away. And then I realised that they were't children at all, and this the whole ecstatic enterprise of drinking and dancing and desire was the world of young adults. Or nearly adults. Or possibly the end of something not quite adult. This is the very point of it. The furious sexy boundary.

I remembered Manchester in the 1980s. I remembered trying to talk in the chaotic flashing dark of subterranean clubs, the spilled drinks, the sticky vinyl seating, the swimming floors, feeling utterly confused that nothing could be heard above thumping chest-wrenching electronica. It seemed a lifetime ago. I remembered friends pressing their mouths into my ears that I might hear their shouts for more ... more drink, more dancing, just more. More and more.

In the end that short journey through the manic joy, and manic joylessness, of self-dissolution showed me something less morbidly reflective: that life wastes well.

It wastes through youth, and wastes through early adulthood, it wastes through mid-life: those bleary decades of parenting, juggling the narcissism and deflections and inevitable collapse of a career, until you come through. You come through. Something you built around you lies suddenly silent and vacant. Crowds of the deliriously beautiful, the panicked screaming laughter at the speed of their waste-mission, it's all gone. Almost everything is gone – thank heavens – except the mirror of your purpose. And in sooty blue-light in a deep room just before dawn, you glimpse your reflection, maybe, the person that survived into her/his own gorgeous absence – who has wakened to find what it was you were running to, or running from, who has ended up here. As we all end up somewhere. Purified, if we are lucky.