Q. What is the best advice you can give a new reader of poetry?
A. Try to be still, silent, undistracted. Try to be open and receptive, like royal ferns (osmunda regalis) in waiting elegance, awash with early spring light and completely present. Try to leave any notions of ‘meaning’ at the door.
The sound of a poem is a living, direct, unmediated communication of something we can never describe. It’s intuitive, not an intellectual exercise. To paraphrase DH Lawrence: the imaginative experience is a movement of vivid association which involves the whole body and soul. So, it’s important to read the poem aloud, hear the poem, memorise poems that speak to you. Engage with all the poets from the past.
Q. Similarly, do you have a top tip for new writers of poetry?
A. I have never written a single poem – and poems always arrive joyfully unexpected – by sitting in front of a blank page with the intention of writing. They find me. I’m always surprised – they’re gifts. I think that’s important. As Derek Mahon said ‘the poems flow from the hand unbidden, and the hidden source is the watchful heart.’
Go outside. Try to pay undeflected attention to where you are. Try to listen to the music of wildness, the music of silence. We’re part of them; they’re part of us. Real poetry is born of this relationship. As Thoreau said, ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’, and I’d add that poetry is part of the preservation of wildness. When I pay attention enough to see goldfinches playing in marsh thistles, or if I am clothed in quietness enough to hear sea wind passing through the foliage of Tasmanian Blue Gum or Whitebeam trees, then wildness is encountered. The appearance, in all its mystery and wildness, of poetry, is a similar kind of encounter. I think the poetry that comes out of this is an immediate response to unknown, beautiful moments, a way of revering the intimacy of their mysteries, and of saying thank you.
There’s a line in Thoreau where he says that for all of our pretence of ‘knowing’ things, places, selves, others, most of the time our engagement is superficial. Poetry, on the contrary, deepens, allows a space in which mystery may cultivate this attentive way of looking which enables one to recognise the poetry of place, and ultimately the beauty of being alive. Try to follow ‘the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen’ (Thoreau).
Learn from other poets, from their lives and poems. Read poems every day. Be devoted to your own personal vocation or calling. Try not to have any intentions or preconceptions about what you’ll write. Try to keep faith all day with the incomprehensible demand of poetry, as Jane Hirshfield says. Remember what Robert Graves said about examining your conscience in relation to the White Goddess who demands, after all, full-time, not part time service.
Q. Do you read your poems aloud to yourself? Must poetry be read aloud?
A. Always. I memorise some of them. I carry them with me all the time. When reading poems I think the living sound, the personal voice, is crucial in experiencing each poem. It’s a meeting between our present and the present of the poem. It’s intimate. I’m moved when I hear the late W.S. Merwin talk about this. He said ‘I believe that poems begin with hearing and listening. One listens until one hears something.’
Q. Is there a contemporary poet you’d highly recommend reading, one-to-watch, so to speak? And is there an older, possibly departed poet who you feel has been overlooked, deserving of recognition and readership?
A. There are two contemporary poets in particular I’d like to mention. One is Lydia Fulleylove, another Island poet. I recently found a copy of her book Estuary. Much of it resonates. I love the last poem in that book, which imagines ‘if all days / might bring / long shining walks / in high places.’
Sam Davidson is the other one, he’s from Hythe. I was fortunate enough to read alongside him a few years ago now at Quarr Abbey. Like me, he’s a former intern there. His book Love’s Many Names is wonderful.
As for departed poets, I’d like to mention a holy trinity of mine: G.M. Hopkins, John Clare, Ivor Gurney. I love Hopkins for the intensity, the honesty, the spiritual integrity. Hearing Clare’s work aloud is among the most beautiful things in the language. And Gurney’s lyric passion for his native Cotswolds, his intimate sense of the skyscape and of looking through trees across the horizon – it’s inspiring.
Q. How does living on the Isle of Wight influence your work?
A. It was in Ventnor, beside a whitebeam tree, looking across the bay, that I first had an inkling of poetry as my vocation. My poems often sing of the sacramental beauty, as I experience it, of the Isle of Wight’s south-eastern corner. When I walk the Downs or the Landslip, the cliff paths or Chines, I find myself unexpectedly a guest at the wedding feast of its beauty. The ever-present wedding of the natural and the sacramental, it’s this that entered and granted almost all of the poems in my recent work The Shock of Silence.
Q. If you weren’t writing poetry, what might you be doing instead?
A. I don’t know. Working on a kiwi farm in southwestern France, perhaps. I did that during last year’s harvest. It was beautiful to be outdoors with the fruit-filled trees, the soapworts flowering on the river bank, and the spiked manes of daneworts shining in November rain and sunlight. I wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett and used to ‘teach’ literature in a university, so maybe something like that.
In these last few years poems have been finding me almost every day, and I’d rather not imagine my world without them. As it is, I am grateful that ‘what I do not understand leads me to wait / for the shy wildness of coltsfoots / trusting, trusting only / the miracles they have touched.’ It goes back to William Blake, who said: I know of ‘no other Gospel than the liberty both of mind and body to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.’
Blake Everitt was born in 1989 and lives on the Isle of Wight. His most recent book of poetry is The Shock of Silence and his work has also appeared in a range of periodicals, including Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Harbinger Asylum, The Dawntreader, The Poetry Village, and Drawn to the Light Press. His work has also appeared in Brevity Issues 4. & 7.
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