Two helpful comments from poets on the process of poem:
At a recent meeting of SCoP (the Stirling Centre of Poetry)Kathleen Jamie said, “The hardest thing to teach students is that you have to let the shit fall onto the page”.
true, all too true. We have a tendency to censor what we are writing as we write it so a poem can be mummified before it is even born.
And I’ve just read this from W N Herbert’s book “Writing Poetry”;
“Most people — don’t read it (their draft) closely. What they see tends to be as much what they intended to write as much as what is actually on the page–Simply reading what you have actually written is by no means easy.”
That is probably the most helpful thing I have ever read.
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