Answers to questions from Poet's Letter

Q. What made you produce your poetry on a blog?
The main reason was my discouragement at the process of trying to get the poems into print. I had been circulating small collections among my friends, but these were by their nature limited by duplication costs and whether people had expressed an interest in receiving them. I thought that if I put them on the Web then maybe more people would find them.

Q. Do you get feedback and does this help with the creative process?
I don't get a lot of feedback, and what there is tends to be praise or dispraise rather than analysis. I do a lot of reworking as part of the initial drafting process, so by the time it's on the blog I consider it near-finished. A more common effect of feedback is to inspire further poems in response to comments suggesting altenative approaches.

Q. Has it opened your poetry up to people across the world?

Well, the world, including Britain! Most of my readers come from the US, I am a member of Moontown Cafe, a US-based poetry forum, and my closest contacts are with some of their poets.


Q. Has it led to you changing the way you write (in terms of frequency) or think about your poetry?
The immediacy of writing online has led to my writing very short poems: a lot of haiku, for example. In an informal context, a poem doesn't have to be big or clever to be worth writing, so I write more often. Although this isn't quite what you asked, reading other poetry on the Internet has taught me to value brevity and clarity above all; there is an awful lot of awful poetry out there! I think that before I was more willing to embrace complexity and obscurity: now that I am writing for real readers I consider this discourteous.

A note on echo poems

The echo poem was a form popular in the 16th-17th centuries. It comprises a series of statements of questions followed by a response (or echo) which repeats part of the end of the question:

Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?

Echo: Light

From George Herbert (1593-1633), Heaven

Another example is Edward de Vere's echo verses (1588).

Given the limited options, it is usual to allow some laxity about the precision of the echo.

There is a modern ribald echo poem about poets of the past by Kinglsey Amis, included in his published Letters (p. 115):

Say what the realm of honey-tongued Pope is. Echo: Piss

What ails Wordsworth in Nature's mystic lap? Echo: Clap