The Most Satisfying Way of Embracing Contradictions

Rebecca Watts: The speaker in that poem approaches their bewilderment with wonderful authority. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Lightband. I am / lost—’. Aren’t we all. I love poems that lean into vulnerability, contradiction and complexity without trying to resolve them, and that embrace the many ways in which form lends robustness to our most fragile states of experience. Tara Bergin is my favourite contemporary in this regard. Her recent poem ‘Grief / Installation Piece’ (first published in PNR 281 and featured on The Verb, 1 March 2026) is a brilliant and delicately brutal example that’s stayed with me. ‘I mean some days // I think I might never get over it.’ What an ending.

RW: I agree it’s a tricky balance to pull off. A resolution that sounds like a “ta-da” kills a poem, just as a refusal to engage with any formal principles precludes poetry altogether. Look at the verse tools at work in Rory’s free-verse poem: the stanzaic structure, the internal rhyme and alliteration, the intermittent pulse of iambic lines… I dare say that for a writer steeped in poetry these acoustic and rhythmic elements arise instinctively during the drafting process. I prefer writing free verse precisely because it allows space for this kind of spontaneity and intuition. Only in the first draft, mind you; once the poem roughly exists, it’s all fair game for the poet-as-editor’s slashing pencil (I get through a lot of pencils).

RW: The villanelle’s forced repetitions make me feel queasy so I can assure you I will not be attempting any of those. I’ve always loved folk songs, and between books two and three I spent some focused time developing my own songs (music plus lyrics), which was mostly a lesson in simplicity – in prioritising symbol, image and emotion over analysis. When I returned to poems everything wanted to rhyme and repeat, which was fun but only as a counterpoint. Syllabics are a great antidote to song because they force metre out and shift the emphasis in unexpected ways.

I don’t think free verse is free of the risk of predictability. It’s always tempting to push home whatever insight may have triggered the poetic impulse, and I generally find it best to delete the last two lines (at least!) of any draft I’ve begun to feel pleased with. My students are probably fed up with me suggesting they do the same, but it’s a really instructive exercise in what’s meant by “showing not telling”. Good poems create space for readers to reach their own insights.

RW: I’m really enjoying our points of disagreement. Can you give us an example of an ambush poem? Plath’s ‘Daddy’ springs to mind as a poem of relentless conviction, though it doesn’t seem to require anything of us except that we damn well hear it. Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ is about as assertive as it gets, and seems aware even as it’s telling us what not to do that the empathy at its heart undermines its argument; it’s really an invitation to reflect on the many reasons we go ahead and do it anyway. Both poems succeed in keeping their truths alive and spinning, rather than pinning them like brittle specimens. I think that’s what I understand by “show don’t tell”.

RW: You remind me I should’ve cited Jon Silkin’s ‘Death of a Son’ as a poem that’ll leave you in bits – all those repetitions and monosyllables telling/tolling the facts, which can only be parsed as metaphor. Basically, evocation is what we’re after: not just stating that something is so, but forcing me, the reader, to know it in my veins.

I think the narrow range of poems represented in popular polls simply reflects educational policy and the general conservatism of British culture, rather than individual tastes. After all, most people don’t encounter poems after they leave school. Many of the apparent survivors both rhyme and console, but these aren’t necessary conditions for survival (in the 1995 poll I think you’re thinking of, D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’ was among the Nation’s Favourite Poems). Glyn Maxwell writes brilliantly on the fundamentals of why certain poems endure and the vast majority don’t, and I prescribe his book On Poetry to all my students.

RW: As well as Poetry School courses and freelance editing and mentoring, I’ve been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow helping university students and researchers with their academic writing, and I’ve come to see that my role in all these situations is to encourage people to pay attention. Pay attention to the world around you, to what others say and do, to the meanings and sounds of their words and your own. Ask yourself: what am I trying to achieve here? To whom am I speaking and what do I want them to think/feel/do when I’ve finished? Poetry, like all writing, is an act of communication, and effective communication requires awareness – of self and other, and of the uses and effects of a few simple tools. These things can be learnt and practised, and have benefits beyond the writing of poems. My interactions with students force me to articulate and constantly modify my thoughts and assumptions about how language works. This process gives me confidence and keeps me humble, and definitely broadens my reading palette, all of which aids my creativity.

RW: Touché. There are poets of faith/doubt who are important to me (Herbert, Hopkins, Jennings), but I lack the religious instinct. I like best those poets whose meditations on physical matter can lead to a blurring of the empirical and the spiritual (e.g. Alice Oswald, later W.S. Merwin, Louise Glück, Mary Oliver, Gillian Allnutt); poets who start with the actual world in view and remain open to wherever a focused contemplation of the observables may lead. But you are a priest. Has that vocation complemented or been at odds with your work as a poet and critic?

RW: You needn’t convince me, Graeme. ‘Shouldn’t’ is a problematic word, in the sense that poetry is not an inherently didactic pursuit or allied to any specific moral code. That’s surely part of its charm, as well as its potential. We could also come to terms with the fact that publishing deals and their associated marketing campaigns, sales figures and prizes correlate with many factors other than literary/artistic quality. In this context, the critic’s role as you define it seems to me more valuable than ever. The least a reviewer can do is equip their readers with enough insight into a piece of work that they can decide for themselves whether it’s worth their money and attention. Most poetry reviewers are reluctant to wade beyond the safe shallows of description into the deeper waters of analysis and judgement, and I can understand that: the poetry world is tiny, and many of us are conscientious individuals who work hard and hardly ever get paid. The best critics view criticism as an art in itself and aren’t afraid to challenge and entertain their readers. Think back to the great essay writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At its heart criticism is a generous and companionable activity, and as a reader and citizen I hope we never lose it.

That said, I don’t do much of it these days because it takes flippin’ ages and it doesn’t pay! Can I ask how you balance the competing temporal/financial demands of poetry, criticism and real life?

RW:  I always grin when a writer’s bio claims they live ‘between London and Devon’, or, indeed, ‘in Tuscany’. Good for them! I seem to be stuck in East Anglia, where in any one week, and sometimes in a single day, I switch between the identities of librarian, gardener, administrator, editor, tutor and poet. Variety is good for me because it prevents stagnation and I am often learning. On the other hand, life increasingly feels like a malfunctioning fairground ride. ‘Poet’ is the most difficult role to carve out time for, being the least in demand and without deadlines. I go through long phases of not reading or writing, then something nudges me back to the books and as soon as I start reading again I start having ideas. Like you, I compose in my head while moving between places and scribble first drafts in the middle of the night. The redrafting has to be done at a desk. My third collection wouldn’t have existed without a fortunately timed residency at Gladstone’s Library in 2022, which showed me that a fortnight of headspace can make the difference between doing it and not getting started at all.

How do you feel now you’re on the other side of your debut? Have you experienced any sense of limbo following its publication, or (dare I ask) had any thoughts in the direction of that difficult second album? 

RW: The inimitable John Clegg once said to me that when you start thinking in terms of a collection you start writing “corner poems” – the kind that fill a gap but could really do with being swept out. Project/concept collections rarely avoid this fate, because their scope is set before they’ve got off the ground. Surely that’s anathema to genuine creativity, which we still call “the Muse” for shorthand because it still takes us by surprise. We can foster conducive conditions, but the sources and workings of inspiration remain mysterious; we can’t control them.

I think the contemporary notion of the “poetry career” is damaging. “Poet” is not a profession, it’s a state of attention (see above) combined with a balance of linguistic/formal facility and practical application. The absorption of creative writing into academia has led people to believe there’s an instituted structure of progression in poetry as there is in law and medicine. There isn’t. A poet’s “trajectory” is something readers and critics discern in the body of work after the fact, not something a poet actively pursues (funders, please take note!). I greatly admire poets such as Alison Brackenbury and Miles Burrows, whose bibliographies reflect long phases of living without publishing and whose perceptions are sharpened by their engagement with the world. My only intention as far as poetry is concerned is to keep working at the equilibrium that leaves at least a part of me receptive and available should inspiration call.