When we write poetry, is improvisation better than hard slog and hammering? Hmmm, I can’t really see them as separable, and I think it’s more a matter of timing. I think any poem that arises purely from hard slog, if such a thing were possible, is a waste of time, though I suspect many poets around are working this way, using a sort of predictive text setting for their brains, working out a style and following its logic repeatedly, though aren’t we all trying to follow our own style? So what do I mean? I guess I mean method rather than style, I see a certain amount of poetry around, mostly but not only by men, wherein it seems a template has been established which can be applied to any thing or situation. This can be an intellectual template or a linguistic one, or any stage in between. I say this because the work of such writers is so consistent, every poem so similar in its range and attitudes, and improvisation doesn’t actually seem possible, only a repeating of a limited range of effects. If anything, this approach I think represents a rejection of the idea of improvisation, though I’d say mainly because those who take this approach are too dull to improvise.

But, a bit like editing a recording of music, I definitely believe an improvisation can be polished after the event, and I am constantly involved in this as a musician (in editing and mastering recordings, not in actually altering the notes or overdubbing), and I have always seen editing as part of writing, but too much is too dull for me. I hope that something will happen when I write, but I don’t try and animate subsequently things that haven’t pleased and involved me when they first arrived, so the key to the relationship between the two processes is I think the kind of preparation we make for writing, both in our lives generally and at the actual point of writing. What do we expect in that moment? What do we hope for?

But this reminds me of that thing that must have happened to you, that looking back over notes and drafts you find something you had completely disregarded or dismissed at the time which sings and shines, whether it be a line or a whole poem. I’d say what this indicates is that the disregarded thing was written without your full attention and probably seemed beside the point you were seeking to make at the time, and this has allowed your mind to wander into an unknown area of language you didn’t recognise, through a lack of conscious concentration, a kind of carelessness about any self-imposed rules, a loosening of intention. Also it may indicate that you have changed, that what you want to achieve has evolved to allow the disregarded thing to become comprehensible.

Improvisers have to be listeners, not conductors I think, and prepared to follow impulses and things that take their attention in the moment. This makes the achievement of a style a whole other proposition to labouring to get your sonnets to scan, and of course form is flexible and variable in improvisation and I think tries to set its own terms. This is where we get to what I mean by timing: as a musician, I listen a lot to my recorded improvisations to learn from them, and I have to have that time-based relationship to learn from them at all, I have to go back after the event to see what happened. And it’s the same for writing, I have to review each improvisation. This happens for me at all stages, during the writing and after, beginning the next day and occasionally lasting years, I work on things in the sense of trying to tune them. I almost never re-write large sections of anything, in that to me that would seem like faking it, like waking a sleepwalker, but I do alter words and phrases, mostly to get the sound of things right. If you find you are making wholesale changes to a poem to get it to where you want it to be, I would suggest starting a new poem, and not becoming Dr Frankenstein to your own failures.

Again and again, I think music offers guidance to poets, in that musicians, above all, practise! Better I think to improvise over and over again, rather than to bear down repeatedly on a single improvisation in order somehow to re-compose it. The process here is not purist: repetition always occurs, habits emerge to be adopted and improved or to be overcome, weaknesses of technique reveal themselves etc etc. Improvisation is itself the hard slog. The difference is that language unlike sound waits for us, invites our intervention in what it has recorded. So for me you need the same ear for what you are doing when you edit as when you improvise, again the idea of tuning represents this best for me, you are not operating on a body you are inviting it to run. Or fly. So it’s about what’s between the ears always, the soul’s ear. If you can’t hear the music trying to arrive in the first place, no amount of editing afterwards will bring it. Listening to others is paramount in learning to hear isn’t it? To learn from someone else’s work we have to intuit how they did something, we can’t simply copy their words or grammar to get the magic. It’s this I mean, the thing that can hear brilliance is the thing that can make brilliance into words. Without this it’s all hard slog and hammering. Where does it come from? Our parents, our ancestors, our experiences, the universe……mostly I suspect from our desire for it, our desire for inspiration, the seamless, thoughtless writing moment.

But even these can seem dull looking back, and we can fool ourselves with drunkenness. There’s no sure way to go at it, but I would always put improvisation, lots of it, in front of revising and labouring over a poem. Both can be hard work, but I think improvising opens us more and more, teaches us more and more, shows us more and more, makes us hungry for more and more.

Catherine Davidson asked me to think about this stuff. Does it makes sense? I’d love to hear what you think.

Sunny then cloudy then sunny then cloudy here, cloud winning at the moment. But the peas are going well, little hairy carrot seedlings are showing, also rocket and potatoes, and our strawberries are coming into flower, so regardless of the weather spring advances. Time to make dandelion wine, somewhat later than usual.

Like many people, I can see things are not exactly hunky dory at the moment, but I’m struck by the terms I’ve heard some people use to describe the state of things in England, especially culturally, as the result of ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ politics. I think of myself as a kind of slovenly anarcho-syndicalist (like the muddy villagers in Monty Python and The Holy Grail) so most people here would describe me as of the left, but I’m baffled that anyone thinks the likes of the BBC and New Labour are of the left too. From where I live they are far to the right. Why? And what is the point of saying so? It’s this: we need to point up, constantly and energetically, the absurd ignorance of themselves that our cultural gatekeepers frequently display in their language and attitudes (think of the ‘sincerity’ of a Tony Blair speech). But I believe we also need to point up that the effect of that ignorance is rightwing, however leftwing or liberal the rhetoric it uses to describe itself.

I hate these terms, they are merely shorthand we use when we don’t like to think too much, so I must come up with alternatives. Leftwing? I guess I’d call the left the site of liberationist (not liberal) ideas, that we are all equal and all have a right to share, equally but sanely, the fruits of the earth. These ideas did not emerge from the speculations of philosophers like Marx, but from the predicaments of peasant and serf classes worldwide, and were articulated long before Marx wrote. Rightwing? I think the key aspect of rightwing thinking is its defensive position with regard to the left, in that the articulation of core leftwing values in the 16^th and 17^th centuries brought into being an opposing political location which came to be called the right, but is really just a coalition of ruling classes resisting over centuries any change that might erode their positions of power. So the right evolved an ideology that places its greatest emphasis on control and on bureaucracies of control (or more simply on bureacracy itself) primarily, it seems, to maintain or conserve a ‘status quo’ in which social mobility is only facilitated for those who wish to conform to individualist and materialist concepts of aspiration. Control in this context seems usually concerned with delivering power and wealth to a governing class, whether this class be aristocratic, theological or merchantile, so that they can administer any system or society around them. The right too has a concept of freedom, but this seems to be something you must earn through your material efforts rather than as a given: you must contribute materially to society to gain the freedom it offers. I’ve no idea if these attempts at theory will chime with the thoughts of any experts on these matters, but it seems worthwhile attempting to define them for my own use here. And re-reading them now it seems, in my thinking at least, the left is hot on ideas but struggles to create effective systems, while the right prioritises efficient systems that deliver concrete, material goals regardless of the issue of rights. But this may be as much an assessment of my own brain functions as a political analysis.

But I think there’s a third term that’s hidden by current ideas of left and right, which many people who think of themselves as left or right would call extremist, the far left, but which could as easily be called people politics, or politics without authority. In this kind of thinking (I think) ideas are assessed for their utility not for their political origin, but this utility must include ways to deliver our human rights as well as our physical wellbeing. So I would say that in this context, the very concepts of right and left as used by most people, and especially by British politicians, are themselves seen as of the right, in that both right and left as we currently experience them favour nearly identical hierarchical, authoritarian systems, rather than truly participatory ones. So it comes back to the shorthand definitions, left and right, not necessarily expressing the ideas for which they were originally coined, but rather being used as a way of discouraging any analysis of their similarities. The competition between David Cameron and whoever leads the Labour Party at the next general election will not be a contest between right and left but between factions of the right.

Importantly for writers and other artists here, this false dichotomy between ‘left’ and ‘right’ has allowed the cultural establishment in England to move steadily to the right over the last twenty-five years. In the arts funding system, Thatcherite ideas thrived through the nineties and into the first years of this century, when there was an emphasis on business models for arts organisations and success was measured as much by market position as by artistic excellence. But now, after its round of cuts in 2011, Arts Council England has re-dedicated itself to the concept of excellence.

Excellence is, according to Arts Council England, “the bravest, most original, most innovative, most perfectly realised work of which people are capable – whether in the creation of art, its performance, its communication or its impact on audiences. It can be found in the classical canon or in wild anarchy, in elegant theatres or railway arches; it can be accessible or obscure, aimed at a tiny audience or millions. It can be costly or cheap to achieve, last half an hour or a hundred years. Be the work of an inspired teacher or a great diva, a radical outsider or an acclaimed genius. Work on a global scale or speak to a small community. It ticks no boxes but it is to be measured in its effect on both those who make it and those who experience it – and it is the opposite of the safe, routine and imitative.”

How strange this is coming from an organisation which required artists and arts organisations to tick, or put figures in, so many boxes over the last 15 years, in order to ascertain to what extent they were addressing issues of diversity, access, ethnicity and so on. Yet Arts Council England acknowledges that “A big challenge lies in addressing the disparities in levels of engagement [in or with the arts] between different sections of the population, as currently those that are most active tend to be from the most privileged parts of society.” So the box ticking didn’t really have that much effect.

But the idea that art should be open to anyone, anywhere, does not originate with culture bureaucrats, but in the steady growth in the seventies and eighties (and sudden flowering after the miners’strike) of community arts in Britain, a movement which came into being outside the subsidised sector, but which eventually came to shape that sector for a decade or more. This was undoubtedly a movement originating in the left, and equality of access to, and equal distribution of, resources for cultural activity were some of its core principles. I think one reason these principles subsequently became so urgent within the cultural establishment was fear, though then, as now, there were decent people inside the system who sought to change it. But it’s true to say that at that time a variety of communities were no longer content to remain passive and silent about the inequalities that the arts funding system seemed tacitly to accept, even to foster, and were bringing pressure to bear on it. Think of the reaction at all levels of the state to the riots at the beginning of the eighties: Black and some white working class communities rebelled violently against racism, police harrassment and inequality, and the state had to listen. In a smaller, quieter way, this rebellion took place in the arts too, and in a climate heated up by the intense divisions in society the Thatcher government had created, the arts funding system, like other offices of the state, made concessions to those seen as previously excluded from its activities.

But those days are over. Now, one of the Arts Council’s stated goals is to ensure ‘more people experience the arts’ (my italics) i.e. not participate in the arts, or create the arts, or, heaven forbid, take control of the arts. They acknowledge: “Participation in the arts can increase individual well-being, encourage active citizenship, and contribute to prosperity locally and nationally.” But they choose not to use the word participation in their list of goals, choosing instead the more passive and less specific experience. Their vocabulary represents real choices and discriminations, and they have the money to put these into practice. Their investment represents a clear attempt to control the arts and culture, in that they can exert no influence at all over these processes without this investment.

To cut all this short, I’m trying to point out that culture in England is controlled by powerful bureaucracies whose agenda is of the right, in that any attempt to control cultural processes and make them serve central government policy is, to me, of the right, is anti-liberationist. Plenty of people would I’m sure remind me of all the ‘leftwing’ governments in history whose sole aim seems to have been a form of vicious control. But I think that any sane person of the left would see such regimes as of the right, fascist, tyrannous, despite the labels they used to describe their delusional self-image. Now, I am not repeat not equating Arts Council England or the BBC with famous tyrannies from history, but I am trying to locate the idea of the control of culture, either through patronage or force, in a specific political location, and I am asserting that this is an idea of the right, not of the left, and the manners, habits and vocabulary of the bureaucrats who administer this control, however ‘liberal’ they may appear, have no bearing on that fundamental issue.

Essentially, it’s all talk. Arts Council England has a lofty charter and extensive plans, but what actually happens: “those that are most active tend to be from the most privileged parts of society.” When all’s said and done, it shouldn’t surprise us that these controllers of culture will not support any act or process that could offer a sustained negative critique of their record, or any group or organisation that would begin the process of establishing a genuine, funded, alternative to their policies. In fact: “All funded organisations will need to demonstrate how they help us to achieve the goals.” The state funding system does not support the goals of artists, it is the artists and arts organisations who support the Arts Council in achieving its goals, goals so generalised that they can be interpreted to suit their outcomes, or vice versa. So its past attempts at positive discrimination and redistribution of cultural resources are summed up by the Arts Council in the words “those that are most active tend to be from the most privileged parts of society.” Back to excellence then.

All quotations are from the Arts Council England document Achieving great art for everyone which can be read or downloaded here

something about the long path narrowing and widening, the old tree continuing to blossom

something about silence as an act that isn’t itself silent but is unheard, unread, something about witholding, seeking nothing, only to speak, for no reward and with no expectation

something about fortune and coincidence, about being found by those meant to find you and no effort is required in this other than the real and great effort of perfecting an utterance that can be found

something about relinquishing, of ceasing to hope but not being in a state of hopelessness, like a bird singing, fulfilling your role by knowing its limitations and ceasing to observe them,  ceasing even to consider them so as to sing fully as yourself

something about the hopelessness of our past that our hope of the future outlasted, the two things coexisting and parallel, but also something about survival, outlasting all those things and forces that simply interrupted our daydream

something about experience but also about not really having changed at all, the same simple facts of ourselves still there and not really altered, although added to by experience, refined, made deeper-rooted and stronger

something about speaking without expectation as if alone in a great though not unwelcoming night: if you like what you read here, tell somebody, it’s an experiment

something about no night being empty unless we attune ourselves to a single frequency, the human frequency that expects response in the form of language, but the night is full of listening things that speak no language we could know

something about solitude and the solitary voice, which this is, about attention and the song called from us by attention, a joining, a taking of our place among

something about how money will always falsify art and how art will always escape again, living on air, a beautiful beast the circus is always hunting

something about the long view, about rejuvenation and renaissance, how lucky we are to be here still making language that doesn’t fit into a bank, still baffled and fascinated and free

Definition and disassociation seem to be interchangeable in this context, where everyone is claiming they are unlike everybody else, and few are celebrating tradition, influence or connection. Yet, paradoxically, in a literary culture which fetishises originality, there is a lack of it, a disabling parochialism, an English voice which seems often to be about not communicating, about playing with the attempt to communicate, about failing. These ideas are both interesting and valid, but their study does not justify the exclusion of other processes, other kinds of attempt. Also, much of the language used by writers and editors attempting to differentiate themselves from the mainstream frequently seems, to me at least, to be part of the establishment from which they seek to distinguish themselves, the language of knowing best, of knowing what’s right and what should be done, what always should be done in order to qualify for membership and approval. Many critics and poets, of both right and left, appear to have no reservations about the modernist tyranny of the ‘original’, which nowadays seems frequently to be interpreted as a need for novelty, make it new, as Olson said, meaning, I think, make it work, make it effective, not seek at all costs to distinguish yourself from all other writers. This idea of originality also often seems to equate, in the so-called small and independent press sector, to the degree of difficulty in a writer’s work, leading to another modernist tyranny, that of experimentation, the compulsion placed upon poets to be ‘progressive’ or ‘cutting edge’. Speaking as a white male who grew up in the twentieth century, these seem very much white male twentieth century obsessions, and not shared by all cultures, nor much applied by white males to the cultural outputs of ethnic groups other than the Anglo-American/white Anglophone group among whom these ideas originated.

But I’m arguing against neither of these aspirations. I am arguing against the disabling effect of selling them as the only worthwhile pinnacles towards which to aim your writing. Not red but how you paint it makes you original and complex, and these qualities cannot be gained from listening to or reading the likes of me, but only through experience. Better for writers to enter the ‘political’ world, the world of material needs and material conflicts, than aim themselves towards a set of academic ‘standards’ mediated years ago by privileged professors hero-worshipping the big beasts of modernism, standards which much of the poetry world maintains unquestioningly.

In this context, originality and complexity are too often presented as if they were social accomplishments, a set of table manners for the intellect you can learn by imitation (or on a writing course), when they should be the fruits of work and living, found through commitment and research. So it’s as if the polarity has been reversed: the very thing you might, if you’re lucky, eventually find, is presented as axiomatic, something you must possess from the start in order for your journey as a writer to have any use or significance. So writers attempt a self-conscious originality in their use of language to compensate for a lack of originality in their experiences, and the connection between experience and expression is broken. But what use is an originality without roots or site, without time or tradition? Can such originality even exist? Can originality actually be separated from experience? Which is more useful? Which set of terms is the most useful in defining the idea of usefulness: the practical and material or the intellectual and philosophical? Ask a starving man.

If your motive for writing is your own success, or to effect some kind of refinement of your self-image, or to gain the attention of other people regardless of what you write, who are you writing for? My hunch is it’s not particularly fashionable among the middle-aged white males who dominate the editing and publishing of poetry in England to attempt political writing, by which I mean poetry that tries to speak for those who are not being listened to, that tries to speak truth to power. Why is that? Is it ok for the Syrian government to bombard its own cities? Is it ok for our government to sell-off one of the few free Health Services on the planet? Are such questions too boring for these men to listen to? Do they really prefer listening to the repetitive claims for their attention of alienated intellectuals revelling in their pessimistic view of language, and shunning any outward-looking aesthetic for fear it might disturb their bourgeois individualism?

I think this sense of seeking and/or creating context is also a class matter when it comes to The Word Hoard. Essentially, though not exclusively, we were and are working class writers who found trust in each other partly because the literary contexts in which we had to work were not, in our view, trustworthy or sensitive to the needs of working class people. This is a truism about the arts that I think many still disregard. So our community often created around itself a not necessarily positive sense of exclusion and opposition, but mixed in with that was also a good, very necessary opposition to the ignorance we perceived, and still perceive, in a literary ’infrastructure’ administered in England by and large by a class of people we did not find responsive to art that expressed ideas outside their hegemony. How would I interpret that now? I think by saying that purposeless writing is purposeless writing, that writers who avoid political, moral or ethical issues in order merely to cultivate whatever career they think they deserve are ultimately not writers as we in The Word Hoard would understand the term. This applies regardless of class. I think The Word Hoard was a forum in which we could test political ideas as much as aesthetic ones, and these were as much refined by that sense of community as anything else. We did not see ourselves as lone voices, even though we never entirely agreed on anything politically, although, once again, our ideas were very close.

A further extension of these ideas I would say was that we sought to express through our approach the need to connect with your community in a larger sense, with where you lived and who you lived beside, though not in a passive or blandly tolerant way. All these ideas revolve around the idea of the writer as a necessary and natural part of society, and though they aren’t specifically technical I do think they influenced the form of our writing along with the content, that the ideas themselves presented a kind of challenge to our writing which coloured and shaped it, like fulfilling a commitment or a duty. This didn’t result in a kind of literary Stalinism or conformism in our work as writers, and over the years we have gone off on divergent paths into our own very particular aesthetics. But our romantic view of the writer as a kind of activist did have an effect on us, so I would say another thing I could identify retrospectively as part of our philosophy was a sense of aspiration as a necessary part of the writer’s life, and that merely material aspirations of the personal kind were not the proper foundation for that life.

To switch from ideological issues to other ideas, what struck me this morning walking back from my daughter’s school in the cold was what I learned from Robert Duncan of the poem as a field in which the poet searches and researches, of the work as ground in which the poet digs and mines. The key aspect of this I think is the starting point that the poet does not know from the outset what she or he is writing, that while the poet carries ideas, intentions, wishes, dreams, ambitions and inheritances into the field, it is a territory that must be travelled, not a preconceived or predefined thing. The Word Hoard interpreted this practically by developing an approach in which the work is discovered and defined through the process of composition, and often through the process of collaboration. This last is an important corollorary I think, in that it is (or should be) impossible to know what the outcome of a true collaboration will be before it begins, that by entering into each other’s practices, we relinquish control to the extent that the outcome becomes unpredictable, a consensual process, not a predesigned form.

Other ways in which I think we took on Duncan’s ideas were in the way we allowed what I can only call variousness into our collaborations, that nothing was disallowed or proscribed, but anything that arose was judged on its merits, what you might call its utility as part of the emerging work. Of course this begs a million questions about how we arrive at our judgements of utility, necessity and so on, but I think and hope that whatever conclusions we arrived at were themselves subject to further erosion, further fertilisation as part of what could be found in the field of the work. Another aspect of this field writing that I personally have always found inspiring is that it removes the necessity for a purely linear sense of the work, that a concept of direction that is spatial, 360 degrees, encourages the writer to think digressively, tangentially, in parallels, and can create depths and linked currents that are more humane than the typically English way of working to a learnt form within a restricted aesthetic. For Duncan this meant being able to associate all kinds of material, mythic, meteorological, personal, historical, topical, astrological, and to make instinctive rather than explanatory connections between this variety, or, importantly, not to attempt or need to acknowledge a neat connection at all between factors or events that can be found in the field of the work: they are connected merely by their contiguity, in the way events in the world on any given day are connected by happening in the world.

So Duncan’s ideas helped us to create forms that vary and swerve, that feel no need to follow a single consistent thread in a single consistent style. The result is a constantly challenging work process, in that I think it’s easier to write a poor sonnet than it is to write a poor open field poem: the challenges in Duncan’s approach are huge and rounded, they are challenges to us as people not simply as writers, and there are no formal devices that can disguise any thin ideas or ineffective technique. Each attempt is (or should be) anew.

For me, this has fed into and relates very closely to my experience as a musician who improvises, and my work as a poet, and as a facilitator of poetry workshops, is about trying always to improvise, to find the statement rather than to prepare it. I believe writing is listening. Of course this means common sense paying attention to the world and to other writers, but more important for me it implies a sense of writing as a mediumistic process, or shamanistic if you like: that we have to learn to listen in a particular, subconscious, powerful, open way to write well. So ideas of instinct and intuition are bound closely together in all this for me, and discovering and trying to use Duncans’ terms gave me a way to articulate and describe this instinctive process. We dream our way into the work.

So as I write this I’m beginning to see the connection between The Word Hoard as a co-operative and collective, and the dreaming of poetry into completion, in that the social structures of our relationship, the consciously ethical and political attempt in the form of our assocation, sort of trained and grounded us in some profound human necessities, so that when we dreamed we did so kindly, we dreamed into a field where, as in Duncan’s work, we remained passionately aware of issues around human rights and social equality, but we exposed these ideas from the conscious mind to mysteries and instincts that gave them (in their best moments) the profound and timeless sense of connection we look for as readers of poetry. Of course, times when this didn’t work outnumbered (and continue to outnumber) a thousandfold times when it worked, nevertheless that beginning point I think has kept us whole.

I see I am circling around the idea of a life rather than of a poem, or that they are the same thing. What we do we see as a vocation, and we have tried to ground that sense of vocation humanely and generously, but also in a way that liberates us. In this area the work of many Americans has helped us, starting with William Carlos Williams and Pound (or for that matter Whitman) but including the Objectivists and of course Duncan, Olson and others like Gary Snyder. The key aspects of their work that have come into ours are two I think. One is the commitment to some form of social awareness and commentary as part of the work, and that this be seen as perfectly normal and as a right and duty of the poet. The Americans have interpreted this in so many ways that they helped us to avoid doctrinaire approaches. If you think of the contrast between Reznikoff’s early work about New York City as compared to Olson’s or Ginsberg’s very overt and very different attempts to generalise about their society, you can see that this idea isn’t restricting, and encourages us to look with more than our eyes. Which brings me to the second major influence on our work, as in Williams’ famous dictum, to begin with things, no ideas but in things, to look at society as a place not solely as an idea, to work towards conceptions through perceptions. An experiential poetry that tests itself in the world, the absolute opposite of a librarian sitting in Hull expressing a miserable and depressed sense of disconnection. This disconnection I would say is one danger of taking writing into the academy, that it codifies writing and separates it from its community in a town-versus-gown sort of scenario, it endangers writing with a falsely disconnected sense of its intellectuality (I think it also endangers it with conformism, but that’s another matter).

Yet as I write about all this Americana I find myself remembering Lorca and Neruda, and how their work has fed into this instinctive, improvisatory approach to composition. Also, I think in terms of any ideas of a Word Hoard philosophy, a big part of whatever evolved came from the Americans, and some Canadians, who actually visited and worked with us. This would mean, in a practical sense, that we have always sought new ideas through contact, seen our relationships as part of the work. For me personally, a number of writer friends have been hugely influential on how I work, yet they are not in the least alike: Duncan Bush, Peter Plate, John Harvey, Roland Flint who I studied under at Georgetown University, one of my lecturers at Warwick University Paul Merchant, Tom Pickard, and so on. Only their kindness and generosity connects them: peers, allies and mentors are necessary to us. Lately Catherine Davidson has been a huge help to me, and I miss terribly the day-to-day contact with other writers and artists that The Word Hoard in its prime facilitated. Only connect and all that…..

And now I’m thinking about the role of the self in poetry, where the poet is in the poem. One thing the self-consciously political aspect of The Word Hoard’s practice did I think was make us consider the value and utility of what we did, and the value of art in general. Our leftwing position by its nature led us to notions of the self versus selflessness, in that commonality is central to left politics of many kinds, and The Word Hoard’s practice reflected in part its attempt to be useful to more than its members. Also, again by its nature, trying to be a co-operative brings up notions of the individual in the collective, how is the individual served and fulfilled by collective and collaborative action? How does the individual ‘find’ his or her voice in a collective process? The answer is the experience itself, it’s not possible to know the answers without practical action. So I think all of us who have been involved with The Word Hoard have to a greater or lesser degree experienced moments of self-abnegation, of letting go, as a result of these conscious choices made over and over. The process is not always successful, but it can never be entirely unsuccessful either, in my experience at least.

What I think this has come to mean for me is something about not needing the self. Williams says somewhere in his writings on art and poetry something like the artist is always and forever painting a self-portrait, meaning I think that the self is unavoidable, and need not be the subject. If I look out of the window now and try to describe the landscape, and do nothing else, what is to say my poem will not be as useful as any poem I write attempting to express my, ahem, great and profound opinions on the state of the world, or even my slyly witty refusal to have opinions etc etc, or whatever version of things in which I am my own subject disguised as language.

It seems to me a worthwhile enterprise to refuse all consciously self-referential utterances, whether my own or other people’s. I want to piece poetry together, to piece significance together, from the colours, shapes, sounds and movements I can see from this window. Any pain or joy I feel can be expressed as easily that way, in fact better expressed than if I am fixed in my own mouth, my own obstacle forever.

And now looking out of the window again it occurs to me to think about how ideas from Chinese and Japanese poetry have filtered into our work via Americans such as Pound, Snyder, Rextroth: that sense of landscape and terrain, of detail encountered through the senses that can lead to an emotional complex of ideas……..

(By the way, I think it’s important to emphasise that all my opinions are only my opinions, not rules, and they have arisen from my own particular experiences, though I can credit The Word Hoard with creating the context for many of these experiences. But they are not intended as hard and fast limitations, they are just observations I have arrived at on considering the path things have taken. I do think what we have learnt from The Word Hoard is important, but I don’t think that finishes the subject.

Anyway, thinking of oneself as a poet doesn’t necessarily need qualification or preparation, and our writing can be strangled by too much theorising. This links me to the process of free jazz and composition (not a contradiction in terms for me) where you can act almost entirely on impulse. One of the huge differences in my writing now as compared to how I wrote say 20 years ago is there is less impulsiveness there these days, and I think that is a loss. When I was younger, I never thought twice about what I should write, only what I wanted to write, and over the years I learnt to edit the results. But as often as not I did not edit, because the impulse had carried the line through unbroken. This is like improvising in music, sometimes you find something pristine, sometimes you have to search around for it. This is where your technique supports you, when the dreaming is less clear, but a poem or improvisation that is all technique is dead.

Another way of putting that would be that this impulsive process is also a technique that can be learned through repetition, and I’d say it’s a preferable approach to trying to put someone else’s theories (or dogmas) into practice. All I’m describing is that inarticulate desire to write something that the poem tries to articulate, and of course this is not subjectless or without personality, but this state of desire and power is the beginning point of improvisation, what I prefer to call listening or dreaming. It’s vital to return to that state over and over, to renew the impulse, to commit to the impulse, or writing becomes too mannered and stiff. Easy for me to say, but I believe it even though I find it almost impossible to follow my own advice at the moment.

On another, I hope connected, subject, in thinking of all the great American writers from the forties, fifities and sixties who have influenced writers involved with The Word Hoard, we have to remember the context in which they wrote, of Communism and McArthyism and so forth. These were writers for whom looking at the ‘ordinary’ world was a kind of political act: Williams’ choice to write from the commonplace in commonplace language was at that time ‘anti-poetic’. The fascination with Japanese & Chinese writing was also, I think, part of a radical movement rather than a taste for the pretty and soothing, part in fact of a counter-cultural movement that was opposed to the Cold War conformism that predominated in America. For all their very specific historical context, I still think we can imagine our way into the work of these poets in a way that strengthens and refreshes our own work, and their lessons can be applied here in England, or anywhere else. The kind of writing that just plonks itself down on things is very English isn’t it? It’s the result of mediocre writers over-reaching their intellects I think, and to be ignored. Yet the very English Ted Hughes looked at a few things too and they didn’t seem too boring. As Pound the old fascist said: without character you will never play upon that instrument, nor execute music fit for the odes. Hughes’ character animated the things he looked at in much the same way that Williams animates things in his poetry, a very different character of course, but the power of the fascination is similar I think, and the perception that the senses are, or at least can be, the short circuits to understanding. Does that make sense? I like my friend Ellie’s idea of metaphor as the intermediary process between the world and ourselves as writers (though we are of course part of the world too).