Watch out below, those might not be poems hatching!

I, the Slush Poet, am beginning to regret my decision to chronicle 2012 in verse. When I hatched the idea at the end of December, I failed to anticipate several factors: the voracity of my hatchlings, the paucity of inspiring news to feed to them and the fickleness of their eclectic appetites.

Writing a poem a day is easy (unless, like Niall O’Sullivan, you restrict yourself to terza rima). What is hard is varying the style and voice sufficiently to avert a suffocating boredom from afflicting both poet and reader alike. I think I have managed admirably so far, judging by the varied comments left on the Slush Poet blog or tweeted straight at me.

But it is becoming a strain. What occupies the world’s news media changes much more slowly than I ever imagined. There are only so many poems one can write about greedy bankers or royal arse kissing. And I don’t like to be too obvious in my responses to the news. Finding a tangential link that fertilizes my wordy organ is getting harder: I think it might be going numb from over-use. Each new day brings instead of fresh headlines a mounding urge to lay. I look for golden eggs, I find guano.

My dad's mushroom

I have never told my dad that I love him. I have never felt the need before now. I am sure he knows anyway. But now that he's been diagnosed, now that the prognosis has been handed down - now that he has his Macmillan nurse - I want him to know he means more than the world to me. But, like I said, he probably knows already.

See, Dad is a lorry driver, a trucker, a haulier - or at least he was until he retired a quarter of a century ago. You can't have a conversation like that with a lorry driver. The years of retirement haven't softened him. He's greyer and he's nearly deaf, but he still fills every cubic inch of space ever allotted him. Outside he's lost none of his stature; it's inside he's doing a vanishing trick.

He has a tumour growing round his oesophagus. He calls it his mushroom. At eighty-six, doctors can do little more than slow its growth, its theft of my father, with radiotherapy. He says he's going to beat it, kill the filthy fungus before it kills him.

If I turned up and blurted out my love for him he might reappraise his odds. I'll write a Sapphic ode instead.

This is not a protest

A friend contacted me yesterday (in fairness, he contacted quite a few other people too) and asked me whether I could provide a poem in support of Bradley Manning, the poor sod being put through the nail-studded wringer that is the US justice system for leaking military secrets via those sterling folk (he winks) at WikiLeaks. I said I'll see what I can do. After all, I don't like to say 'no' to friends who ask nicely, not even to ones who come over as rather too earnest on issues I care little about.

But why didn't I care, or at least not care a lot? I think it's a question of perspective. Bradley Manning is said to have leaked material that he knew was classified, and knew that by doing so he would be breaking the law, and that as a private in the US Army he would be prosecuted through a court martial, and given the nature of the material he supposedly leaked, that his prosecution would be dissimilar to, say, a six month sabbatical on Hawaii. So he did something unlawful, he knew it was unlawful, he was caught and he is paying the price. What's to care about?

That's one way of looking at it. There is another. Take he did something unlawful, and change the last word to wrong. See what I did there? Move from a legal viewpoint to a moral one and the Bradley Manning case looks very different. Suddenly we can see how someone in Private Manning's situation - who is exposed to the reality of a military-political campaign that differs markedly from that being shown to the citizens of the United States and Britain (Bradley is a citizen of both; he was born in Wales); who witnesses the suffering inflicted on, and endured, by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and who became horrified at the deliberate misinformation of the folks back home by both the military and their political masters - might feel morally obligated to expose what he sees as crimes against humanity.

It seems to me that there are many wrong reasons to protest about the treatment of Bradley Manning: because he's one of your own, because he stuck it to the pricks in uniform, because he struck a blow for liberty (and you happen to believe in the power of crystal healing), because other people are protesting about it, because democracy has had its day, or because you believe in a Utopia where there are no secrets, no wars, no rulers.

But there is also a right reason: that maybe what he did was right. And if so, he has been abysmally mistreated, vilified when in truth he is a hero. I do not know if this is true. But if it is, I hope justice eventually prevails.

And that is what the poem I submitted, I am not a protester, says.

I have fractured my creativity

I attended the T. S. Eliot memorial meeting of the Royal Society of Literature tonight at Somerset House in the Strand. Anne Chisolm introduced David Harsent, Lavinia Greenlaw, Emma Jones and Ahren Warner, who read poems and discussed what it is like to 'be' a poet.

David Harsent talked about how every poet is compelled to have a day job, a proper job that provides an income, and how the tyranny of the quotidian results in 'fractured creativity.' By 'day job,' he seemed to have in mind the hell of speaking engagements and writing residencies. He should try spending eight hours a day staring at a spreadsheet. Maybe it would inspire him.

It is London Fashion Week - dawn of the dud, the hip parade, top of the totty - and an event was in progress in another part of Somerset House during the poetry readings. It was like listening to Vivaldi when teenagers are playing Dubstep in the next room.

Back pain is not the best poetic inspiration

I arrived promptly at Faber & Faber's offices at 9:45am yesterday morning for day two of a three-day poetry workshop, keen as a whippet to draw inspiration from mere proximity to Jo Shapcott and Roger McGough. (Does that sound totally sycophantic? I do hope so.) I placed my books and pen on the table. I turned to place my satchel on a spare chair and - swore unpoetically as my lower back went into spasm.

I spent the rest of the day in a state somewhere between agony and what seemed like eternal damnation. I grimaced throughout Jo and Roger's sessions and left at the end of the day unsure whether I could make it as far as the Tube station, let alone whether I could make it back the next day.

Last night I barely slept. I deferred the terror of retiring to bed as long as I dared by playing a long session of online poker with a pillow stuffed behind my spine. I finally tumbled into the sack in the early hours for a night of wakeful tossing, yelping and unrepeatable cussing. By 6am I was back on the computer typing random characters which refused to coalesce into a meaningful poetic constellation. A good friend (you know who you are, Katia) pointed out that all the best poets live pained lives. However I can attest that back pain is not conducive to poetic inspiration.

At 9 o'clock I packed my pillow and a day's provision of ibuprofen into a rucksack and headed out nervously for day three of the workshop.

Oh, that Roger McGough

After lunch on Saturday our poetry workshop was led by Mr Roger McGough. There were several reasons why I should have been excited, perhaps even slightly awed, at this prospect. For one, Roger is the current president of the Poetry Society of which I am a member. (I should know this.) He is also the co-author of The Mersey Sound, the best (ever) selling poetry paperback in the UK. He presents Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4. (Where have I been?) He wrote big chunks of the dialogue for the Beatles' cartoon film Yellow Submarine. He was in the pop group The Scaffold which scored a number one UK chart hit in 1968 with Lily the Pink. He's a regular on Stephen Fry's QI television quiz show. He's got an effing CBE, for Christ's sake!

Oh, that Roger McGough.

Roger read to us several of his most celebrated (and some notorious) poems, including the stunningly satirical The Lesson about a schoolteacher who massacres his class, and the dark and disturbing Jogger's Song, as well as many of the playful and humourous poems for which he is best known. What a charming man, and what an honour to have sat at the same table.

What Jo Shapcott taught me

It's impossible not to learn from Jo Shapcott (On Mutability Costa Book of the Year 2010). Our workshop group at the offices of Faber & Faber in London worked through a series of exercises during Friday afternoon. These built on the work we had done with Daljit Nagra during the morning and continued to focus on specificity and concreteness, or as Jo put it, describing 'the cuppiness of this cup.' One consequence of this was that I wrote a poem, polished later in the evening and shared on my Poetrivia blog as 'In the mix,' that I could never otherwise have been conceived. A second poem, a sonnet called 'Getting into your pantry,' further stretched my poetic range; I had been challenged by Jo to write a poem about the 'Larder of ecstasy!' Job done.

The inspiration continued on Saturday morning (despite my acute backache which is a separate story) as Jo shared a couple of tips to get the poetic motor humming. The first tip is simply to assemble a group of unrelated words to be included in a poem. They might be chosen randomly from, say, a dictionary, or you could use Wikipedia's subject of the day as a theme to mix with a subject you already having mind - the odder the better. This forces you to look for unusual and often completely novel links. The seeded words can always be edited out later (after they have done their work). Jo's second tip is a way of expanding a poem that you feel ends too soon or fails to fully mine the seam of material available. She suggests putting the poem away overnight and taking it out the next day, covering all but the last line and then using that as the first line of a new poem. Again, the result can be edited later and might result in a longer, richer poem, in a sequence, or in two entirely separate poems. Go Jo!

What's to eat at Faber & Faber?

Plenty, that's what! It's half time on day one of this three-day poetry workshop and while we await the arrival of the poetry goddess that is Jo Shapcott (Of Mutability, Costa Book of the Year 2011), those nice people at Faber & Faber bring out lunch. At these workshop prices you'd expect more than cheese and pickle sandwiches. Surely there should be a mustard-cress garnish at the least.

But what is this I see? Could that really be a quiche the size of hat box? Sure is. And look, its packed with mushrooms and vegetables. And there's a green salad, a rice salad, a pasta salad, a potato salad, a salad salad. And how many chickens have given their limbs in the name of poetry? Okay, cancel tonight's dinner; I'm going in...

Hobnobbing with Daljit Nagra

As if taking a time off the day job isn't reward enough for a life well spent, I spent this morning at the London offices of Faber & Faber (T.S. Eliot's desk is downstairs!) rubbing up against the awesome Daljit Nagra (Look We Have Coming To Dover!) trying to get a faint smear of his success, if not his abundant talent, to rub off on me. Only time will tell whether that worked. My head is buzzing. I think that's probably good.

Daljit is a kind and generous teacher (even though I'm paying Faber a small fortune for this three-day workshop), but it is hard to imagine a poet further removed from the personae who narrate his poems. This is such a relief since I have no desire to write in Punglish.