Have you ever asked yourself "what's the point?"

On contemplating giving up...

a Laura Ford sculpture from her exhibition ‘Seen and Unseen’, photo taken in the grounds of ‘Backwell’, the Arts & Crafts house in Windermere, 2016.

I’m thinking of giving up writing poetry.

On a far too regular basis, a boiler-plated email drops into my inbox thanking me for a submission but regretting that my poem has not ‘won’ nor been accepted for publication. This is not an uncommon experience of course, but recently I received some unexpected and somewhat condescending comments akin to “your work shows promise”…

Recently I’ve been reading some contemporary poetry collections and have been generally underwhelmed. There’s a part of me that simply cannot fathom the qualitative difference between some of this published work and my own. Whether that’s down to arrogance or ignorance I’ve no idea. As always, it’s probably an amalgam of both. But more significantly it resurfaces the question as to how ‘good’ one’s own work is… Or maybe forces me to consider whether I’m writing the ‘wrong’ kind of poetry.

When you scan Substack, Wordpress, Social Media, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by just how much poetry (or work claiming to be poetry) there is in circulation. Not only overwhelmed, but also daunted by the thought of tens of thousands of poetry writers constantly producing, aspiring, chasing the same readers and prizes… The imbalance of supply & demand.

Facing such a barrage, “what’s the point?” seems like a perfectly reasonable question. And I’m a great fan of asking “why?” when it comes to writing. [So, you think you’re a Writer?]

However, there’s some irony in asking these questions of myself given I’ve just produced a new collection of poetry, Less, which is out at the beginning of April. Publication would seem to be evidence of the exact opposite of quitting, wouldn’t it? Yet what if I stopped writing poetry? What if Less was the last ever volume in my poetic canon? What if I dedicated myself to prose or something else? [And yes, I know similar issues of competition / supply & demand apply there too.]

What would I stop doing? What would I gain? And who would care? (By the way, that third question is almost entirely rhetorical…)

Stopping:

• I would stop hosting the poetry groups I run;.

• There would be no new editions of the New Contexts anthologies I’ve been putting together over the last few years — though Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now made the prospect of compiling any future volumes a potential nightmare;

• No more poetry publications of my own — though as a hybrid publisher I would still work on collections for others.

Gains:

• Time. Difficult to say exactly how much given the irregular nature of the New Contexts anthologies and my own collections but, averaged out, at least 20 hours per month — time that could be spent on other projects;

• Reduction in pressure. Okay, running poetry groups isn’t exactly stressful, but there is something in the organisational effort which is onerous, no matter how pleasurable the resulting events;

• Freedom. Not only freedom in the sense of time and pressure, but in smaller scale tangible things too: for example, I’d cease to have the icons on my computer desktop which nag me about incomplete poetry projects every time I switch my machine on.

But hang on, even though much of the above (in both lists) feels positive, drawing a definitive conclusion from them is surely a tad superficial. Indeed, when I mentioned the notion of giving up poetry to my wife she reacted with shock — which surprised me. “But you get so much out of it…”

And she’s usually right.

In that vein I need to recognise that I’d also lose the warmth of community, the joy to be had in reading / listening to / promoting others’ work. And maybe more significant than that, I’d be depriving myself of that priceless feeling of pride, achievement, boost to self-esteem when, standing back from my poems, I’m occasionally able to read a few lines and feel really proud that I wrote them.

Those are the moments you can’t make concrete…

So is it a zero-sum game?

Because it would be easy to argue that might be the case. It would also be perfectly valid not to disturb the current equilibrium, to decide ‘steady as you go’ — i.e. to keep up the pattern that’s been in play for a number of years now — especially as the decision (if there’s one to be made) feels increasingly binary…

But surely there’s a bigger issue underlying this internal debate. Why, for example, am I asking the ‘to write, or not to write poetry’ question now? What hides behind the “what’s the point?” challenge?

I think that partly comes down to time.

Being unexpectedly unwell makes you focus — on the ‘now’ of the ‘un-wellness’ and on the ticking clock — as does the recent death of a parent. Time is suddenly weighed in a different currency, made more precious; how one chooses to spend it becomes an equation which — perhaps counter-intuitively — is radically simplified. If poetry is really ‘your thing’ then such considerations might make you want to spend more of your precious time writing it. Does it say something that I don’t feel that pull?

In So, you think you’re a Writer? I promote the questions “why do you write?”, “who are your writing for?” and “what type of writer are you?”, all three helping to then focus on the appropriateness of “what” you are writing. Maybe I need to eat my own dog food and ask myself those three questions with specific reference to poetry — at least the “why? and “who?”.

All things being equal, I’m away on retreat for a week in early May. Between now and then feels like a decent period of time to allow answers to bubble up to the surface — or for me to decide to duck the core question altogether!

Does such a ‘crisis’ ring any bells with you, or have you resolved your relationship with your work in an entirely different way?

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