Articles

Posted by Free Word on 20/10/11

Poet Ian Duhig discovers the ‘sparks’ of inspiration come from the unexpected.

“Like a lot of other poets, I have a bit of difficulty with the exposure involved in writing about my procedures in this way. Will everyone think I am mad? People who live in glass houses shouldn't write poems as the Commentator says in 'Pale Fire'. More particularly, I have a problem with "sparks". Poems aren't sparked off - with luck, their audiences are. A poem is a spark, a meteor as Wallace Stevens more grandly writes. Because, in this view, the poem is less the thing itself than its passing, anything can fuel it. You only have to read around contemporary poetry a bit to see how extraordinarily various it is now, even in these small islands, with a huge variety of techniques, traditions and innovations to draw on. We seem to be surrounded by poetry made from anything and everything and in every style. All the more galling then when you're stuck for your own words. 
 
So what gets me going when all else fails, and what is my tip to the equally desperate? Luck, the sparks from a shot in the dark. Laurence Sterne calls this the most religious approach: jump in anywhere and hope to God something occurs to you, but it works for atheists too. Nevertheless, as Meno asked, How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Well, you can get lucky by getting lost.
 
Around the corner from my house now used to live Tony Earnshaw, boxmaker and thinker outside of them. He also made what he called 'Surrealist expeditions', random journeys on buses and trains, taken then changed blindly. I did this to get away from real builders at my house, and one of the first things I found out was that the road I was on had been made by a blind man, John Metcalf. A local told me he tested stones for the middle layer of his road-beds by rolling them around in his mouth, like new words. He seems to me like a Yeatsian antimask, blind but always knowing where he is going, like in the old song.
 
To cut a long story short, my last bus took me to the Wolds, where landed a meteor called the Wold Cottage Stone, which helped to shatter the glass houses of Ptolemy's crystal-onion model of our universe. The Wold Cottage Stone came to earth on the property of Captain Topham, hero of the Gordon Riots, winner of our right in law to libel the dead, owner of the champion black greyhound 'Snowball', whose father once got into a squabble with a local cleric who was propelled into bring his take on this squabble into print, got a taste for such things and embarked on his own literary career - I mentioned him earlier, Laurence Sterne, author of the great cock-and-Irish-bull tale 'Tristram Shandy'. Now that is a book for masks and getting lost in: if nothing else, read it for the denunciation of plagiarism copied out of Burton's 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'.
 
Anyway, what got it all going for him was that argument. Sparks flew, which are the interesting things, not the argument. Much of the fuel for this pale fire of an argument was paper - other poetry, books; words to bed the road. Research is like preparing the ground for the spark. But getting lucky when nothing else was working except our builders meant entertaining the unexpected as well as them. As the man said, If you always do what you've always done you'll always get what you've always got; if you want something different, do something different.”

Published by the Arvon Foundation