… Write long poems from odd scraps of verse and take a long time to do it

 (This is a heavy reworking and updating of a blog first published in 2022)

What’s the big deal about writing long poems? Why do I go on about how long they take to produce? Are these mild eccentricities or is there some underlying point?

There is a point. And it’s motivated me, if anything has, for sixty years. This blog is one of several attempts I’ve made in that time to explain what it is and why it’s important to me – even though it’s rational basis is a little shaky.

Three new long Poems appeared on my website in February 2025. This is striking because, as the accompanying blog “40% more Poems NOW!” explains, it brings my lifetime total to a mere seven. For the first time, if I wanted to count them all I would, metaphorically, need two hands.

Some of the lines or at least the ideas which provoked them were scribbled on scraps of paper two or even three decades ago. Later they were assembled in notebooks, and finally later still stored with scores of other lumps of incomplete verse in a computer file called “Bits” for future reference. Then what?

A former poet laureate has described how he aims methodically to write one new poem on average every month. I’ve heard of another scribbler who aims to write a poem every day. Some people work on an idea as the inspiration takes them. It may be a while before the finished product emerges. But probably not twenty-odd years. My way of working is different, and here’s why.

          At the high point of Western Civilisation

The madness started at the high point of Western civilisation, about the time of Woodstock and the Summer of Love (when we all of us thought we could change the world).

As a student back in the late Sixties partly under the influence of the so-called Liverpool Poets I was churning out a new piece of trivial ephemera at a rate of more than one a week. They had less artistic merit than the average TV ad. Yet they were called “poems”. I was also absorbing the Penguin Modern Poets series which had reached Volume 20 or so in collections of admittedly superior, but equally short, terse and apparently dispensable poetry – fragments of experience shared and gone in a moment. Meanwhile, I was pursuing an Eng lit course that featured the work of the greatest writers in the language which had been around for centuries. And I noticed the mismatch.

This precipitated a couple of setbacks which a precocious young writer can do without. I had reached Peak-Verse. Mass produced verse to amuse my friends was more like a diary than literature. What’s worse, I simultaneously became aware that poetry was virtually obsolete.

          Poetry like opera, but with less ludicrous plots

It was not an unreasonable conclusion at the time. People read novels, watched TV drama, and found remarkable verbal pictures in the songs of Dylan and the Beatles. They weren’t reading poems very much. New collections of verse would sell only two or three hundred copies. “Real poetry” had been side-lined to university English departments where it survived in a kind of National Trust for the writing-we-no longer-have-a-use-for: the old, the obscure, the academic, the elite. Like opera, but with less ludicrous plots.

Unfortunately, other alternative writing formats didn’t suit me. I dashed off a play while revising for my final exams and then directed it at college. But that was as close as I wanted to come to a life in The Theatre. I planned novels endlessly, drafted a third of one of them, and stopped writing the rest at around page five.

Luckily, despite my doubts, I simply couldn’t stop scribbling verse. Anything that didn’t become a poem just filled notebooks with unfinished jottings.

          It should be more like The Novel: BIGGER

My objection to poetry is, admittedly, somewhat arbitrary. It can, indisputably, use language in beautiful and astonishing ways and provide scintillating insights. The problem is that it comes mostly in short, self-contained, single-themed packages which are easily read and easily dismissed (well, mine definitely were). Novels in contrast can be multi-faceted, exploratory, potentially limitless in their scope. I decided that if poetry was going to amount to more than a 30-second advert, it should more like The Novel. BIGGER.

This was not a silly aspiration to “save” poetry, but just to make the job of writing it feel more worthwhile. I should add here that I suffer from the intellectual disability of believing life should have a meaning while being well aware that we’re the random products of four billion years of evolution. There’s no use complaining like Bono that I can’t find what I was looking for because I know it isn’t there.

But perhaps I could use poetry to simulate meaning. Or dramatise the futile search for it. All that was needed was to connect together chunks of verse about different experiences and let them loose on big subjects like Life, Death and the Universe. This handy phrase derived from a joke with friends, and really did predate Douglas Adam’s “Life, The Universe and Everything” by a decade. The idea was hardly profound or original. But this writing approach became fixed.

Hence the grand themes of my seven long Poems – Weekend’s listless wanderings in an urban wasteland, Mountain’s messy escape from domesticity in search of anything at all that seems meaningful, the pre-Trumpian universal post-truth of Dark Matter Dark Energy, anda protest against death in What Makes Life Last.

Weekend actually has a narrative – what someone gets up to when he thinks the world is going to end next weekend. But it was hard to work within the constraints of a story. Mountain was only partly successful because it just welded together a huge number of existing or nearly-complete poems that I was writing anyway as the project evolved in the Seventies and Eighties. You have to stand back a very long way to recognise that it might be going somewhere.

          The 2000-piece puzzle without a box lid

Dark Matter, Dark Energy (finished in 2005 and revised endlessly since) provided a happy escape from the slog, and led the way to a ridiculous new way of writing. I still had those notebooks bursting with pithy lines collected over the course of many years, and it seemed a shame they were going to waste. So I just picked out the most scathing and irreverent of them to create an argument taking place in the dying days of the universe about who has been telling the truth. (Spoiler: only the Misanthrope.) I merely needed to put the bits into some sort of logical order. Dark Matter was a hoot to write, and contains a couple of my favourite full poem-lets.

The remainder of my long Poems have developed this crazy method of composition further – trawling the notebooks for any old snippets that might be usable, breaking them up, squashing lines together, juggling everything and endlessly  elaborating to build up self-contained sections (which equate to conventional short poems), and then combining, reordering and refining the sections to produce the whole Poem. It’s been rather like doing a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, with the added complication that the pieces have been painted separately without reference a picture on the box lid, and little indication which big-Poem box they belong to.

The upper case “P” for “Poems”, incidentally, is an arbitrary way to distinguish these composite projects from sorter poems, some of which also appear on the web site.

I’m a diffident sort of writer who is inhibited both by an continuing inability to see the point of it and by general indolence. I compose in intense bursts separated by extensive gaps for gardening and writing long emails. So it’s no wonder none of my long poems has been completed in less than 15 years.

          Poems within poems within poems like Russian dolls.

It’s difficult to keep track of all the initial scraps of verse, even before the hard work of melting them together to cast sections which can purposefully contribute to the theme of the full Poem. Having a poor memory hasn’t made it any easier. So from time to time I’ve actually turned the jigsaw analogy into physical reality by cutting out all the scrap of verses, laying them out individually on the floor and moving them about till I can see how they fit together.

Sometimes, and most obviously with the transformation of The Invention of Time Travel into the Reinvention, the completed sections can start out in the wrong order and also need to be moved around.

In the early in the 2000s I began to put together a flexible outline plan for my Biggest Ever Poem which would have a proper narrative, or so I thought at first. Unfortunately that plan has kept growing and evolving ever since, faster than I can possibly realise it. To cut my losses I’m now building this unfinishable megaPoem (called The Last Orchid) using my completed long Poems as the component parts.

That’s right. Scribbled lines are combined to become short poems, short poems are combined into long Poems, and as these are written they will become parts of a vast and so far imagined magnum opus. Poems within poems within poems like Russian dolls. What Makes Life Last was finished first in 2017. The Re-Invention of Time Travel, Where Power Lies and The Commodity News are all planned elements of The Last Orchid. I might speculate that when all these bits are finally stuck together into a unified whole I can expect to be propelled to the transcendental state which comes when “Meaning” has been created. On the other hand, they probably won’t be, I won’t be, and it definitely won’t be.