a field note on poetry

Poems that ask what it means, in the face of the absurdities and shadowy things thrown up by life, to ‘risk delight’; and what that might mean when we are looking-out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world. Poems that are lyric moments of recognition of what happens when we stand up and speak in front of ourselves and others; you could say a way of ‘being re-storied’; a way of letting ‘words dream again’, so that making the ‘invisible, visible’ is at the heart of what I think of as the persistent imaginal. From this ‘the poem springs’.

And there are poems that come calling on and celebrate the ‘privilege of ordinary astonishments’ – so that one day ‘a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution’ (an echo from the painter Cézanne).

Poems that acknowledge and reflect on how it is always that the ‘light lies down with the dark’, however various the shuffling weathers of the heart turn up loss and death, time and memory, despair and delight; when ‘forgetting is always about remembering’. And on those occasions that poems return to that inevitable and archetypal mystérion: what is it ‘that love dares the self to do’?

A poetry that rests on and enacts the belief that we need to ‘see the sounds and hear the words’, so that despite every dark thing there is in the world, there will always be music. When ‘words sing’ poetry makes intimate everything that it touches (there is always the distinct possibility of romance’, and more); naturally, poetry wants to go to the heart of the matter.