Alan Morrison
Were there any particular traditional techniques you felt you needed to experiment with or draw on or master at that stage of your writing?
I will admit that rhyme has always been important to me, though it is something I have through the years started to move away from – depending on the mood and subject of what I am writing. But I do think rhyme still has a supreme resonance when done properly, and, as well as a memory-aid for recitation by heart, it also I think infuses a poem with a stronger sense of music and purpose than most free verse. I actually find free verse harder to write than rhyme – many poets I know say the opposite. But somehow for me, to have an imposed constraint on a poem only fuels its urgency and deliberateness of expression; gifts it a certain sense of precision which is much harder to sustain without it. Infinities within limits if you like – such is existence after all. I think rhyme schemes give a sense of crimping mortality to a poem; something to fight against but not resolve fully; a sort of inevitable imperfection wherein I feel the most powerful creativity is forged. Would Keats's great Odes be so memorable to us if they didn't stick to a rigid rhyming scheme? Surely some of the greatest challenge in poetry is to say and express what you mean within the restraints of meter and rhyme? But then having said that, I also recognise how challenging free verse can be as well, because then the rhythms are paramount in leavening the poem.
Did you face any personal challenges writing it?
It was I suppose an outpouring, a catharsis. I am a very emotional poet, rarely premeditative, only raggedly intellectual. I think much true creativity comes through accident – an interesting contradiction when I also defend a formalism of approach which arguably blunts such serendipities. But it is in the contradiction, the conflict, the struggle, that we express most powerfully I think. Such, after all, is the nature of our human condition. The actual writing of my first poem (assuming, from memory, that this was the first poem I wrote), would have passed through me rather like a sudden fever, an adrenalin rush, a sort of ecstatic solipsism, during which I would have probably been almost oblivious to everything around me, and tingling head to foot with complete stimulation, of the mind and emotions in particular. The drafting and editing of a poem is the more laborious part – and sometimes the most challenging.
When you finished -- when you said to yourself, 'Now, this is done' -- describe what that was like.
On completing it? A sense of euphoria, of complete self-purpose, of total fulfilment – but sadly a sensation only so powerful due to its brevity, like a sort of cerebral orgasm. That probably sounds ridiculous, and certainly not all my poems have evoked such a powerful response in me – least of all those pieces I have composed from a more abstracted, premeditated point of view – but definitely these earlier poems, ones gushing out through an early sense of expressive liberation, would have sent a flood of endorphins through me. And it is still in a sense that very heightened state of intensity and self-empowerment that, like a drug, keeps me addicted to writing poetry, or editing it, or re-drafting it, or even just thinking about it.
Poetry has become my drug I suppose. Even more than love and music; expressing myself through poetry remains the most invigorating and emancipating sensation I have ever experienced. It is, quite simply, my whole life, and everything else pales in comparison.