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I first came to the poetry school in 1998, I think and went to Mimi Khalvati’s weekly course called Advanced Versification.   We met every Friday evening. I’d already done quite a bit writing, and published a couple of poetry books, and I was well into work on Letter to Patience. But it didn’t have a clear shape yet, and the writing was very rough in places. I wanted to talk to people about it, and about poetry. My motive at heart was a kind of loneliness. I also lacked self-confidence

I’d just been to an Arvon course where Mathew Sweeny and David Lynch had been helpful in knocking me out of my complacency over some of the rhymes in LTP then, some of them contrived with the deft use of hyphens, I recall. This was a time when I was learning how to do traditional forms. When I returned from Nigeria in '88 I set myself the task of learning to handle them, perhaps as a kind of self-reassurance, but also because I’d had time to reflect on free verse (free verses) while doing my part-time PhD on that subject. I’d grown fascinated with ‘taking poems to pieces’ and had learned some linguistics, which gave me a new way, different from the literary poetry textbook way, of looking at rhythm, and how metre works, and what the role of the physical aspects of language is in texts generally.   I’d absorbed Roman Jacobson’s insight that the poetic is one aspect of language used, at least to some degree, or negatively, in all kinds of speaking and writing; and I’d seen how ordinary conversational English in fact approximated quite closely to the so-called ‘iambic’ (I prefer to so alternating) rhythm, so that the alternating pulse of most poetry written in English, certainly before the twentieth century, was really quite close to ‘ordinary speech’.   And I was developing philosophical ideas about the ways in which metrical or otherwise formal poetry echoes the limits of the possible, defines the necessities (fates) within which we must, like gizo-gizo the Hausa spider trickster, must be inventive. I was also coming to the view that there is nothing magic about poetry, and that the devices poets use are rhetorical devises like any others, that poetry was not clearly different from prose, and I found poets who insisted too strongly on some such difference less and less interesting. Above all I was finding that the metre I was using, terza rima - and later others did the same – was prompting my imagination, and opening up what there seemed to be suddenly to say. The main thing about the form of Letter to Patience at that time was how liberating it was. I’d formed the view long ago, and this was deepened by my acquaintance with African poetry, that in poetry it does matter what you’re talking about.

I came to Mimi’s course, also, partly because I knew her work a little, but not at all well, and partly because she had experience of living in different cultures ‘at the same time’ as it were, and writing about it. Later I found myself in greater sympathy – and this as grown – with the view which she also held, that writing poetry is a was an expression of love. Now in the work I’m doing on a long love poem about a cross cultural relationship, I find that love in the western individualist ‘romantic’ sense is connected deeply to loneliness, mad (the word is just – juste – I hope) as that sounds, as Shakespeare notes.

I recall that the discussions of verse ranged pretty widely, and that as far as Letter to Patience was concerned, I benefited first of all from having a sense that the bit of rewriting or drafting I was doing would be carefully read and responded to, and that, in a sense, having confidence, as I did more and more, in the reader/teacher, is the most valuable thing as it ups concentration no end. I brought work of different kinds to the sessions and when it came to time to offering contributions to Tying the Song I sent work which I thought was finished, which Mimi didn’t like (she didn’t phrase it so bluntly) so much as the drafts of Letter to Patience she’d seen. So I sent her (and Pascale) the whole poem as it was then, and she had the choice of whatever cantos hadn’t been published, and not that many had. Mimi made many suggestions when I passed her my drafts. One I can remember is the wording of the last line of Canto XXII.

                                                       The Ancestors who call                                                                                   out jokes across that brilliance they swim. . .

What I learnt especially from Mimi’s sessions was to have greater courage to take a risk and write in a more open way about emotions, and the freedom which a strict form gives in rhetorical terms helped me to do this.   Up until then I’d been writing in free verse forms based on what I’d understood of organic form, based mainly on an early obsession with Herbert Read’s psychoanalytical theory. Then to find something to work against craftwise – and this I think all kinds of poets, if they are poets, feel - led me to an ‘imagist’ sort of writing which, as I hardly realised, was in fact suppressing the more philosophical and ‘expressive’ side of my nature. In looking at metrical forms I was finding a way of combining my interest in imagist like physical description (I’d been a devotee of Pound in earlier years) with an interest not so much in philosophy as a body of knowledge but in the philosophical way of thinking, something which has been linked to English poetry in earlier traditions. I had a huge admiration for Chaucer’s Troilus with passion mixed up with Boethius. But this connection between poetry and philosophy was, I thought, being replaced by an aesthetics (philosophical admittedly, but really philosophy of poetry) and poetics. I was getting interested in the linear forward movement of meaning in a poem, and moving away from the modernist and post-modernist concern with lateral relationships, with the way things can be connected chain-wise, rather than the spark-jumping-across-the-gap theories of juxtaposition and allusion. I was perhaps also coming out of the knee-jerk analysis that if you are being original in poetry it must be in the freeness of your verse, or at least in something non-metrical. But that needn't be so. I like the way the Russians talk about things like Pasternak’s ‘discoveries’ in metre etc. Letter to Patience shows some traces of the my admiration of Pound in its division into cantos which are related, often, in an imagistic way, juxtaposed rather than narratively sequenced.

Working with Mimi helped me to think for myself about such things, and what else can you ask of a teacher than that she help you to think for yourself?

I was also working on the ‘next thing’ I wanted to write, which was to develop the terza rima form I’d used in Letter to Patience into a kind of stanza of eighteen lines, which I wanted to use for some poems on the death of my mother some years previously.   These poems ended up - and I’m still revising them for a new book - as the sequence I called ‘Ashes’ which got a runner’s up prize in the Arvon Competition.   But by this time, on Mimi’s advice, I’d cut down the stanza length and turned them, as she suggested into sonnets, terza rima sonnets like the one Shelley uses in Ode to the West Wind. The compression required to get each stanza down from eighteen to fourteen lines was the making of these poems, I think. As always the necessity, the ‘real world’ which the physical acoustic shape of a poem represents opened up the strong feelings of grief, I had for someone who had never been able to express love very well except on stage. The limits of the form are mystical in the sense Wittgenstein meant when he talked about ‘the sense of life as a limited whole’, limited by language as such, the way a poem is limited by the physicality of sound, symbolised by metre or it’s equivalent as such, the way the time and space limits of life itself create the sense of love, whether of puzzles, nature, a person, a utopia. I am a Chekhovian in this.   I think of the young man sitting on the hotel bed at the end of The Lady with the Dog, willing himself to believe things will turn out alright, that there is a way, when also, at the same time, with his metrical self he knows they cannot. The point about the closure, form, is that it doesn’t happen in life, only in art. We don’t usually die when we’re all sorted out and organised and the band is playing.   To me Chekhov reaches a key tension, which is also reproduced in poetry, between that ‘Darwinian’ necessity of above all time, our brute animal nature, and now global warming and coming massacre - and another necessity set against that, the thing that still insists on singing out, longing and longing against all the odds and evidence,   a human necessity, as Mandelstam had it, for poetry.