On Saturday I wrote what I thought was a pretty good poem, so I sent it off to a few friends to get their opinions. They all came up with different sources that parts of it evoked, as though it were some kind of poetic Rorschach test, probably because of its generic distinctiveness. Once I was playing an acoustic guitar that I'd borrowed from someone, and I did a rendition of She Left, by Led Zeppelin. Now this is a very difficult song to get hold of, only appearing on one or two bootlegs, but it's also immediately recognisable because it's very distinctive. Only avid fans would have heard it before, and they would know instantly what this gem is. The people listening to me play it, however, were all saying “I know that song... it's by [some artist], right?”, and I'd say nope, and they'd just keep guessing and guessing. They really thought that they knew what it was, and I knew that they'd definitely not heard it before.

The context of this poem became quite a sticking point for me, because it had taken only one and a half hours to write its fifty-one lines, but it took yet another one and a half hours for me to write out all the sources the next day. It's jam packed with allusions to things. But it also uses very simple words; it's straightforward enough to read with the exception of a few tricky bits (one word is very rare), such that it gets one into the mindset of archetypes, and so you immediately start seeing elements to it from your own experience.

Fragments and context are undervalued as poetic media. When someone asked me today what makes Coleridge interesting, the first three things that I thought of were as follows:

1) He was involved in a lot of different disciplines—poetry, philosophy, critcism, etc.—and somehow managed to excel at all of them even though he was insecure about it himself. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge characterises the Biographia Literaria, slightly unfairly in my opinion, as “the wholly unique expression of a brilliant but self-consciously flawed and neurotic mind, desperate for the sympathetic ear of an audience whose judgement it dreads”.

2) His output is profuse, but he was terrible at finishing things. So his prized works are his notebooks, his marginalia, things he wrote on the back of sugar packets. It's great. It also makes these works inaccessible in their publishing, however, and difficult to weave together.

3) He went through lots of different “phases” of being interested in things, so that anybody wanting to catch up with his whole life has a tunload of work to do: when he was in Germany, he studied philosophy because that's where all the philosophers were; when he was in the Lake District, he wrote beautiful descriptions of nature; and so on.

Kubla Khan, for example, is supposed to be a fragment. But the context of how it was written, the anodyne haze and the “person from Porlock”, are as much what gives it its charm as the poem itself: it's the combination of the two things which make it such a powerful poem, so tantalisingly just beyond the grasp of most critics. It's the massy whole about Coleridge which is interesting, and you can't anatomise it without in some measure destroying the overall picture. It's the normal problem that we face in literary history, and even science: it's the problem of the model cadence.

One thing that I've started to do, in an attempt to better my poetic expression, is to keep a kind of scrapbook or commonplace book of poetry, that is to say an anthology of poetry. It's not an anthology in the kind of sense of “paste in a poem by Dickinson, one by Browning” and so on, however; that'd be pointless. It's a collection of some of the best bits of poems, sure, but also general poetic phrases, words from dialect dictionaries, bits of folklore, and that order of thing, being an omnium gatherum of the miscellaneous trinkets of language. I've collected 3000 words in it so far, and I figure that if it gets about as big as 30,000 words then I'll have it printed off as a book. The intended use is that I should try to read it as much as possible so as to internalise the beauty of the phrases within, so that they spring up when I'm trying to write poems with a certain mode of expression.

On the one hand it might be true that this is just an extension of the kind of thing that I do generally, always tafting. But in that case it's a refinement of that process, in the sense of concentrating it and honing it.

I've also been researching a lot more about metatropes, my third nebulous concept. Two things that I realised further to the original essay is that there are quite a large number of them that I have, personally, but that some are much stronger than others so that I have perhaps 100 strong metatropes that I could give some definition to. I also thought about how I tend to give them definition: usually one is reminded of a metatrope by some reflection or reoccurrence of the situation that caused the metatrope in the first place. When I write them down, I usually take a list of them using a few words to describe the situation or context, which is usually adequate to remind me of it, but not enough to evoke it. Smells are quite good at evoking them, on which Wikipedia's article about emotional memory sheds some small light. In general I realised that like Coleridge's works, if you describe them atomically you lose their essence; but on the other hand you do come to understand them better if your descriptions are right. It's like the process of science: you generalise out the rules, the laws of nature. Well in the arts it's not so simple because we're often talking about very complex socio-dynamic processes and so on, but it's the same kind of principle. We make models and patterns only insofar as they help us. I think that a terminology of metatropes and the like would be helpful.

As I tried to summarise, perhaps not so well, in The Language of Doll Houses, it's also important to use language as an embodied thing if we're to describe metatropes properly. You can't invent new terminology without having it be grounded in the understanding of the people who speak the language that you're coining words in. The commonwealth of language is the only true commonwealth.

Another adjunct to the nebulous concepts is that the idea of transformative alchemy in poetry may be linked to the sublimity of phases. With Shakespeare, for example, biographers tend to divide his plays up into the early “finding your feet” plays, the great romantic and historical aggrandisements towards the turn of the century, the great tragedies, and then the romantic plays. It's a bit of a rough model, but it's been written about independently enough to have a kind of biographical primacy.

Now, with the exception of the early plays, it's dificult to say, for example, that Cymbeline is better than A Midsummer Night's Dream. Some people might argue so (Cymbeline was George Bernard Shaw's favourite play, I think), but it would be quite contentious. You don't really rank Shakespeare transitively: all of the plays have their interest. So it's not so much that Shakespeare just got better and better—even though the compositors of the First Folio did put his last great play, The Tempest, first in the collection—but that he changed and stayed the same in such a delicate balance as to give the world its finest collection of dramatic works.

When I go for walks, I often apply a similar alchemy to my environment. I mean I go for philosophical walks, generally unintentionally and just as a consequence of whatever I'm thinking about whilst I'm going for a walk for some other specific purpose. So the other day I was returning home from a meeting, walking along a road, and it was a bit dank but mild and acceptable. It was a fair spring day in some sense, on the crepuscular transition between the twilight of winter and spring's dawning. You know how it goes; there'll probably be a frost next week. There's a fence which is very tall and close knit so that the sun shines through, and walking at the speed that I do it tends to make an irritating blinking effect. This day I managed to get around that by walking at the side of the pavement, and this made me think about the angle of the sun. It was midday but the sun was still quite low, because the United Kingdom is at a very septentrional, I mean northerly, latitude. This got me thinking about the gulf stream and how it gives our clime a very temperate feel, and how this connects to some of the mythology of England and its feel and so on. And I got this vision of a temperate England being a great producing nation in not just its industry but in its kingship, Edward III and all that, and its literature, the Elizabethans, and so on. And then all of a sudden I noticed the cars and the park and wow, that was a shock. Philosophical walks are great.

William Loughborough, when I sent him my poem, suggested that we should set up a wiki for poetry and place up themes so that people can have a stuctured thing to contribute to. When this has been tried on wiki stories, generally nobody sets a plot or anything, so it just turns out to be a mess. With a dual structure of metre and theme it might work for wiki poetry. The context in which a poem was written, and the revisions of it, its textual history, are really fascinating. It's like my suggestion of coining words to be more poetic: all you're doing then is shifting the business of poetry from the arranging of words to the creation of words; you're making language itself be a poetic medium. Well the contexts of poems and their revisions are also a particular form of poetic medium. You can't really throw out the early drafts in the sense that if you didn't write those early drafts, you wouldn't have the finished version of the poem; even if they're very much not the kind of direction in which you wanted to take the poem.

So yes, you're only as poetic as your readers on the one hand, but on the other hand that's why you've got to shepherd so carefully that great mustered hoard of language. Being a poet is really difficult. One academic paper that I've seen asks the question: what's it like to read Milton's Il Penseroso and L'Allegro? You really get the sense that the poets can give you the sun at midnight feeling. As to how the rest of us are supposed to be able to do that, I still think that enabling a more easy expression of metatropes may be possible and a desirable thing to do.