Drilling for Poetry

Writing poetry is both the easiest and the hardest thing I can imagine. Or maybe that should say "finding poetry". Yes, I have that familiar belief that producing poetry is like drilling for oil. Dip a pen deep enough into your soul, and you're sure to draw out the purest form of self-expression.

Some poems flow out so easily, it's as if they've been conjured from a Saudi oilfield. There, in those places that supply a quarter of the world's petroleum, the crude sits so close to the surface that the merest incursion sees it surging towards the sunlight. That's how poetry feels on the easiest of days; the joy or rage is so keen to emerge that all you have to do is press a pen against your feelings.

On the hardest of days, writing poetry is as tough as scouring Alberta's tar sands; you know there's oil there, but it's damned if it'll come cheaply. Poems like this announce themselves not line by line, but word by word, a fragment or so with every passing week or month. What's more, the speed at which a poem leaves you is no indication of its quality. Some of the best pieces I have produced were years in the extraction; some of the best also took mere hours, minutes.

Some poems, like the sludge you can dredge from the Earth, were hard to behold once I brought them out. I have written more than any other theme on the feeling of jealousy, which to me is the ugliest of all human emotions and therefore the one that I, as a poet, should address in my work at all costs. And each time I have published a piece on this topic, I am suddenly afraid that I will vanish from someone's address book, as they recoil from a friend who could harbour such bile. (But, worringyly or not, that's never happened.)

There are some days and places where drilling for poetry is more fruitful than others. Like now. Right now I'm on the top floor of the 26 bus, heading into Hackney, with a warm, slow day behind me. There's a pint or two of ale ahead of me if I want it, but more likely there's an evening of work on the last pages of my football manuscript. There's a tune by drum-and-bass outfit Atlantic Connection in my ears, mirroring my default mood, which is melancholic. Yes: there's a self-indulgence in gentle misery, which I think might be the greatest luxury in the world.

So this is the mood that I find best for poetry, when the sands that yield creativity are most pliant. The shuffle and rustle of drum and bass, and that awful hollowness in the lowest part of my gut, as my eyes look further into my head for images I haven't yet seen.

It's not the most beautiful process, but long ago I found it hard or arrogant to define what beauty even was. What I can say is that, for me, beauty is this: to express feeling in as raw and powerful a form in that which you feel it. In which case, I have achieved beauty only rarely; but all the same I can't wait until the next time that I drill.