Where has all the Slush gone?

I feel almost as though I should apologize for my tardiness in failing to post poems regularly onto the Slush Poetry site. Having written and shared over 150 poems in 2012, observant followers could be forgiven for thinking I had lost my creative drive in 2013. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, I have been very busy this year, both writing new poems and rewriting a completed novel which I hope to get into print next year if I can persuade an agent to run with it. On top of that I have been running a poetry group (the Original Poets of Clapham, London) and been very busy promoting my first poetry collection, A Limited Season.

So where has all the poetry gone? It is true there is less of it. But if last year's frenetic production rate did anything, it allowed my poetry, through experimentation and practice, to find my poetic voice, something that would otherwise have taken far longer. And now I am able to write poems that say much more efficiently what I want to say, and say it in a voice that those closest to me would recognize at once as mine. The result is a steady flow of poems of, I think, a good and improving quality. I can take my time with them because I am confident they will mature slowly into what I want. And I am finding that the editors of literary journals recognize in the latest poems something distinctive - that is, they are accepting them much more readily than before.

Which is why I am posting far fewer on the Slush Poetry site: quite simply, I want to keep my poems under wraps so that they are all the more attractive to journals and, in time, to publishers. So I apologize for sharing less, but here's what I will do: I will share all published poems once the publication they are in has been sent out. Fewer poems, but all the best ones.

In the meantime, here is a small sample of my latest poem:

In snow

Much is explained

by the propensity of men

to sign their names

in snow

All that lay

en lettres anglaises

the dexterity of fletchers

and other trades

or the pleasures

men know...

A year of wringing hands (Part 2)

In part one I said that 'Missing the match in McDonald's', while exploring child abuse in the wake of the Jimmy Savile affair, drew on my experience of losing two daughters in a rancorous divorce. Here I want to draw your attention to a few of the other poems in A Limited Season that draw on my own story.

We need turn no further than page 14, to 'Declaration of war'. Notice how most (the middle four couplets) of this tiny poem, which is all one sentence, are a parenthetical aside. Strip down the poem's syntax and you get a very simple statement:

‘Can either of you tell me,’ 
the conciliator said, 

‘when you first noticed 
your marriage was failing?’

This came from several events combined into one painful memory, times when my ex and I came into contact with social workers, counsellors and doctors. Of course, none of them actually said what I wrote in the poem, except by omission. It was the proverbial elephant in the consulting room for a while. And the mortgage advice? Well, we had money troubles too, back then, which no doubt played a part in our break up. But then doesn't every cloud have a silver lining?

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And those money troubles once brought me to the edge of madness. (Or mental illness, as we are supposed to refer to it now.) I was twenty-four and I walked into a doctor's surgery to complain of sleeplessness and irritability. I had been working very long hours, I was burdened with debt, my first child was on the way. The doctor asked me in his kindest tone, 'What is the trouble?', and I broke down in tears. I can attest to the efficacy of antidepressants. I didn't go back to work for three months after that, and when I did, it was to hand in my resignation.

Cue the poem 'Maiden flight'. For it was as if I had stepped back from a precipice, from which I had surveyed the abyss. Out of it hope had risen, hard to see from within a rut, but easy when you're staring out into oblivion. It showed me there was freedom in going with the flow, following the currents wherever they lead. Oh, I just realised we're back at faith again. Funny that.

Anyway, the 'take home', as snake oil peddling management consultants call it, is this: antidepressants only address symptoms, the cure for living hell is a life better lived.

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One should start, perhaps, with a clear conscience. But I say it would be easier if you could start out carrying in your heart all the pain you caused others in your previous life, metaphorically of course. But just knowing that we start out tainted would make it so much less painful to be good. How much finer it would be to win love than to lose it, and to look at oneself and say 'this does not have to be as it is, I can change me'. There is something in original sin.

Each of the three images portrayed in 'A quantum perspective on splitting the nuclear family' is an real and painful memory. (However, the cat is allegorical. No moggies were drowned in the making of this poem!) 

The beach was in Hastings. We had gone there after the disintegration of my first marriage, my mother having lost her daughter-in-law and lost contact with her grandchildren. The sea was frozen along the shore. It was 1987. A year later, having lost touch with my family, I walked out on someone I loved leaving a note asking her to be gone by the time I returned. And all through everything, my father acted as though I were the perfect son - and how that burned!

And, yes, at times I drank to forget.

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The cat, of course, was the one Schrodinger imagined leaving in a box, a cat that theoretically would be both dead and alive until the box was opened. (The title did state it was a quantum perspective - pay attention!) Observant readers will have noted the reappearance of that cat later in A Limited Season. He crops up in my favourite poem in the book, 'Letting the cat out'.

Before I explain my fondness for that poem, let me tell you about the epigram (included on the blog but omitted from A Limited Season). At the weekends I live in a delightful village in Cheshire. A short distance from my village lies the Ellesmere Port Vauxhall car plant (the UK brand of General Motors). In 2012 the plant was threatened with closure, and for several months no one knew if it would survive. It was completely out of everyone in the UK's hands - the management, the unions, the politicians. Everyone waited for a decision from Detroit. And meanwhile - you guessed it! - the plant was both dead and alive. Here, pussy!

I'm almost as fond of that cat as I am of this poem. I'm always much happier that the cat survives.

As I said, 'Letting the cat out' is one of my favourite poems. It ticks several boxes for me. First, it is a sonnet, and I am a sucker for sonnets. You only have to count up the fourteen-liners in A Limited Season to know that: there are - wait for it - fourteen of them (and I'm not going to claim that was an accident!). Second, it is so visceral. Can't you just feel - and hear - that 'slurping birthing squelch' as the box is brought up? Third, it is full of unobtrusive rhymes (my favourite being 'we rubbed oil of cloves / under our noses'. Finally, just read it aloud - savour its texture, its rhythms, its melody! Okay, so I sound like a comedian laughing at his own joke, but if I can't love my poems, can I really expect you to?

My faith in poetry

When I was in my early twenties I began searching for greater meaning to life. My wife, who had yet to turn into a witch, was expecting our first child, and it was the wonder of this above all else that convinced me there had to be more to life than was presented to the senses. And it was the birth of the child, my daughter Heather, and the heavy societal expectation she would be baptised, that delivered me into the hands of the Church of England.

I tried to be a Christian, I really did. I got up on Sunday mornings and attended mass, shook hands with other worshippers, wishing them the peace of the Lord with my sincerest smile, knelt for wafers and cloying wine, went to tea parties, invited all my friends and family to my confirmation. Jesus, I even tried bell ringing. I turned a blind eye while my parish priest got his bishop to sanction his marriage to a divorcee. (I was later, after my divorce from The Wicked One, denied the right to remarry in the Church of England.) And all the while I tried to persuade myself that, if I just persevered, I would come to believe there was a god.

My poem "The great key" tries to capture that burning schizoid desire to believe in things my senses told me were utterly false, to persevere with patterns of behaviour and speech that felt, even at the time, dishonest and debasing. Ironically my behaviour became more devout and evangelical the stronger my doubts grew. And if "schizoid" seems strong, let me tell you a year after I first walked into a church I was on medication for anxiety and depression, so it's not a million miles off the mark.

(Incidentally "The great key" is based on a true story. I recently decided to visit the parish church in the village I have lived in for sixteen years. I had never been inside it, but when I went I found the door locked.)

My recovery from Christianity was effected not by medicine, but by philosophy. Plato's Symposium was my starting point, but I was subsequently counselled by Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche  Marx, Mill, Sartre, Russell, Dennett. And Voltaire, oh Voltaire. I learned that there are no right answers, or at least there is no one right answer (but no unanswerable questions either), I learned to appreciate the rich and unfathomable complexity of the world, and I also learned to tolerate, even to embrace, ambiguity.

One day I read an article in New Scientist about the beneficial effects of Buddhist mindfulness meditation, which it claimed induced neurological changes that made practitioners happier and more focused. I didn't know how to meditate, but I live quite close to the headquarters of the Buddhist Society in London, so I decided to go to one of their courses to learn more. By the second week of the course I was so fascinated by Buddhism itself that I completely lost sight of my original aim, and by the end of the course was willing to call myself a Buddhist.

• I do not believe there is a god, nor that there being one would explain anything.
• I do not believe in an afterlife, nor do I feel any need to believe in one.
• If there is a heaven or a hell, I believe this is it.
• I believe we are reborn every moment we live, that everything that happens happens now.
• I feel no need to explain how this world came to be, nor how it will end.
• I believe that what we do is more important than what we believe.

This is not an exhaustive statement of my beliefs, but just enough, I hope, to explain how my predisposition to religion and immersion in philosophy and science perfectly readied me to accept the Buddhist view. For all of these "beliefs" are compatible with, if not fundamental to, Buddhism. I say "beliefs", but the it would be more accurate to say I considered them as propositions and found them to be either true, or at least helpful as heuristics, useful ways of dealing with the world. I put my faith in them in the same way as I put my faith in my senses.

And of course this new faith has found its way into my poems, too. A poem like "Waiting for the R Train", for instance, which deals with the real-life horror of facing imminent death, illustrates how it is the burdens our past regrets and hopes for an imagined future that prevent us living fully in the present. No one ever experiences their own death, of course, in the present, but only ever through anticipation. "Maiden flight" explores the same idea in a different way, its subject once again death but this time suicide, and once again we experience the liberation from casting off attachment - to mistakes from the past and to shattered hopes for the future. It's not quite nirvana, but doesn't suck.

In fairness to Christians let's remember that Jesus' parable of the birds said much the same thing.

Peace to all beings!

(c) 2013 Andy Hickmott

The season for mushrooms

At the end of 2011 my father Archie was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He had put off visiting his doctor, suffering weeks of difficulty swallowing, until at last he was unable to swallow water. Even then he waited until he was severely dehydrated and suffering excruciating headaches. By then the cancer had taken a hold; a tumour had spread three quarters of the way around Archie's oesophagus. His doctors told him he might get another six months. Archie said he hoped for a year.

The doctors could do little more than patch him up. They inserted a stent to open his oesophagus so that he could swallow. They put him in touch with the Macmillan Trust, who allotted him a visiting nurse for palliative care. Eighteen months later he is still alive and, even if "well" is not the right word, mentally vigorous and independently mobile. Yesterday was Archie's birthday: he is eighty-eight years old, but let's have none of that "he's had a good innings" bullshit, he's no more desire to die than you or I have, and he's as much right to hold on to life, even if he smoked heavily until he was fifty and was overweight most of his life. Before he became ill he weighed over two hundred pounds, now he's down to a hundred and thirty.

Archie isn't "battling with cancer", he lets his doctors get on with that. What Archie is battling with is pain. He refuses to take higher doses of morphine because he fears it will dull his mind, and that is all he has. He endures frequent avalanches of pain. I don't think he dwells on dying, just treats it as a fact of life (as it is for us all) and tries to grab what he can of life between spasms.

He refers to his tumour as a mushroom.

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Archie isn't the only one who's had to come to terms with his terminal illness. My aunt, whom he has shared a house with since my mother died, has had to become his carer. But she is not in great health herself: before he fell ill, Archie used to take care of her. She has been very kind and has done all that anyone could have asked of her. My sister has been a rock, too, making sure that all Archie's affairs are properly in order to his liking. What little money Archie has accumulated in his life will go to my brother, who has advanced multiple sclerosis. If Archie could give his life to restore my brother's health, I'm sure he would.

But Archie's protracted enactment of the dying process has affected us all very deeply in other ways. We have been through mourning for a man who is still very much alive. I remember the shock I felt at first when my sister phone with the news of his illness. (I live two hundred miles away, so can only visit occasionally.) I walked downstairs, feeling numb, trying to make sense of the meaningless facts. I sat on a piano stool, closed my eyes, and, because I am a Buddhist, tried to think of Archie, my suffering father, in terms of loving kindness, and to think about the impermanence of all things, which gave his dying some proper context. It helped, but I think the passing of time has had as much to do with my acceptance of what is happening.

During those first grieving months I also channeled my feelings into my poetry, and several of the poems in my first collection, A Limited Season, arise from my dealing with my father's illness. The two that were most directly influenced were "Deadly Nightshade" (previously unpublished, but discussed below) and "Steak and mushroom pie", which was featured in the April 2013 edition of Popshot (the "Imagination Issue"). Another poem that was affected by my grieving for my still living father was "After disconnection", which, although it makes no direct references to Archie, I am unable to read without visualizing my childhood home.

Here is the first of the six stanzas of "Deadly Nightshade":

A mushroom lodged in the damp

stump of your throat. It smelled

like the inside of an old shoe

and now your breath smells of brie,

or athlete’s foot. It grew fat

and got greedy; the more you fed it,

the less it left for you. You shrivelled

as your pipeline silted up.


You can see how Archie's tumor humour became a central motif in the poem, one that is carried through the other five stanzas, and is revisited in "Steak and mushroom pie". The motif will occur in another poem, which must remain under wraps, for one of the consequences, for a poet at any rate, of witnessing the drawn out death of a loved one is that there is more than enough time to work on a worthy elegy.

The making of a born writer

I'm a natural, me,
a born writer. No,
that's a lie. Let me, then,
atone with the truth...

I think I'm becoming a good writer within the bounds of my repertoire. That is, I am pleased with some of my writing when I later go back and read it afresh. This is an accomplishment.

It is, however, only a start. And it has come at the expense of much time and effort: the dozens of how-to books, books on viewpoint, on style, on characterization, on editing, on dramatization, on genre, on grammar; the prize-winning or short-listed novels, poems and short stories I have read and taken as my benchmark; the hundreds of pieces of writing I have reviewed on YouWriteOn in return for sometimes invaluable feedback from other writers and, occasionally, from editors (several of my works have made the coveted No 1 spot); the hours spent with fellow writers at Original Writers and with fellow members of the Poetry Society at Stanza Groups or in performance at the Poetry Cafe, and all the support and encouragement they have given me; the writing courses - Open University, Faber Academy, Arvon Foundation - that have brought me into contact with successful writers who have generously shared their insights and encouragement; the bale of rejection letters that has helped me keep everything in perspective.

And now I am chronicling the year - this year, 2012, the year of the London Olympics, of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, of global recession - in rhyme as the Slush Poet, a project that is stretching my abilities and keeping me safe from the 'Shiny New Idea Syndrome' (thanks to Ryan Graudin for the diagnosis!) that has previously afflicted me.

And taking up nearly all of my time.

Yet when the poet Katrina Naomi, who is my tutor at the OU, recently recommended to her students a couple of books that she said had inspired her early in her career, I didn't hesitate to buy a copy of both. 'Writing Down the Bones' by Natalie Goldberg is about letting go of the inner critic and just creating; 'The Artist's Way' by Julia Cameron is a twelve week course on inspiration. They sit before me now like fresh margaritas on a parched man's garden table.

But when the heck am I going to find to savour them properly with all my other commitments?

Aha, I have a plan. On 31 December 2012, when the Slush Poet posts his final poem, I will be free sip those margaritas, pick up some of those shiny new ideas and give them a jolly good rub. And here's what I'm going to do: the first three months of 2013 will be given over to reading them both, in parallel, all other work put on a back-burner while a relight my inner furnace. And to make sure it happens I am going to set up a new Twitter account called 'MyLyingSelf ... hold on a second ... there, done it. Now I'm going to tweet at myself (using Hootsuite to pre-schedule tweets en masse), so that my best-laid plan is actually impressed freshly upon me on the 1st of January - like a waiter appearing out of nowhere with those lovely salt-rimmed drinks on a silver platter.

In the vale of Slush poetry

I am almost three months into this project, writing as the Slush Poet to chronicle 2012 through the medium of poetry, so now would seem a suitable moment to pause, to set down my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary and my fountain pen, and to take in the view. (That in itself is fanciful: I write almost exclusively on a computer using Google Docs, with frequent nods to Dictionary.com and B-Rhymes; but that's okay, we'll call it a metaphor.)

I am breathless. I keep falling behind; by the time I've wrung a poem out of my fickle muse, the world has moved on and there are new news events to versify. Today I am up to date, tomorrow I will begin once more to fall behind.

What can I see from my resting place? Poetry surrounds me, as does life itself; but what I'm most concerned about is the trail of poems I have left behind me. So far, I have written thirty-four poems, most of which I have published on the Slush Poet blog site. That's about one every two days. I've tried to vary the form, the timbre, the length, the voice. I want the poems to be enjoyable as a continuous sequence capturing the essence of, if not the year, at least my year, 2012 as I lived it and as it touched me.

But are the poems any good? I think some of them are. I've had a lot of encouragement from readers, not just from my friends but from people I previously didn't know. Some of the poems have had a better reception than others, but that doesn't mean the others should be omitted. Would you really want every day to be your birthday?

Who am I kidding? We all know it takes time to craft a good poem, a long time to craft a great one. It takes more than two days. So, why go on? Perhaps because the pressure to produce a poem every few days is what I need to make me grow. I'm realizing that deadlines (even self-imposed ones, maybe especially self-imposed ones) are a creative spur. Without that pressure to produce not just another poem but a different poem, would I really be so varied in what I write?

So where is the Slush Poet heading next? Like you, I'll have to open the papers tomorrow to find out.

The Zen art of literary Ex-Lax

We’ve all been there, squatted upon the same spot staring at the same blank space for hours on end while words and forms back up behind the strangulating sphincter of premature self-editing. Commonly known as writer’s block, straining to do the rewrite before the rough draft. It’s like trying to squeeze Mother Mary from your arse.

Last night I spent over three hours rearranging pairs of slant-rhyming words, trying to write a poem about, as it happens, the riots outside Bagram airbase. Result: flatulence. It stank. Every artefact I strained onto the page was a monstrosity. Eventually, more from frustration than from wisdom, I set about writing something completely different, a poem about my father, and this time the words flowed smoothly onto the page and then seemed to arrange themselves into lovely eight-line stanzas while I watched agog.

The difference, of course, was that I knew exactly what I wanted to say – and that I said it without a great deal of constipating thought. I won’t strain the metaphor as far as I might here, but be assured my writing was fluid. The lesson? It is so easy to criticize what you have written, but for heaven’s sake wait until you’ve seen what it is!

So relax. Now wait patiently, sculpting knife in hand, for the raw materials. Hail Mary!

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.

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.