Why do I write poetry?

Because I'm a demented narcissist and I want you to love me. LOVE ME! 

No, the reason I continue to write poetry – despite the fact that it's generally derided, doesn't get read and makes no money – is because I think that reading and writing poetry has the capacity to refine and anneal our sense of what it is to be living moral beings in a savage and complicated world. The reason I think this is because I believe poetry gives us the chance, and the responsibility, to face ourselves in a way that we simply don't during our daily lives.   

Telling a story or writing an essay just isn't the same. The longer forms allow room for more fabulation, more self-justification, more unpacking of the idea. Poetry is not like that; it demands that we crysallise the shifting and contradictory sea of our thoughts and emotions in a single clear and concise image of the particular thought or emotion associated with the particular moment in time. To do this we must examine and re-examine the moment from every angle, explore all the possible avenues of interpretation, reject all the cliches and cant. In short, we must try and say something at once evocative and true. 

This is not easy, and it gets harder as you grow older. You get hurt, you give hurt, you realise the inherent difficulty in saying anything about those experiences. The insufferable fifteen year old you once were – who fell in love five times a day and imagined that all life would be a grand chivalric bed-hopping saga from which sonnets and venereal complexities would flow unending – gradually comprehends that being a human being is serious – and seriously impenetrable – business. The fact that I don't think I am alone in finding it increasingly difficult to orientate myself within this strange new landscape (which is always strange and always new, for nothing ever happens the same way twice) only persuades me that it's all the more important to try and speak when the feeling arises. We need clarity like we need love. Thank goodness they're both still out there. But love is encroached upon by the outside world and the need to make money and the myriad complexity of other people's changing feelings and sufferings, and all of those factors are of course pressing and relevant themes in their own right. 

I suppose that is why I like to think of poetry not in terms of poetic forms or movements, but as a state of mind – that heightened awareness in which you recognise that you can use language to pluck a single moment out from among the chaos and flow of phenomena, a state in which you feel something simple and true enough to write about. The poetry that I write is defined by this perception: my hope for it is that it retains and displays that clarity, eschewing complexity for complexity's sake or for the fascination of what's difficult. Life is difficult enough. Emotions are sufficiently inscrutable. 

I write poetry, then, not only because I love the discipline and practice of it but because I hope that, by transcribing these moments before they slip away again, I can clarify things a little, if only for myself. I don't believe in a substantive, objective truth which we can all grasp, and I would hate to live in such a world. The joy of poetry is that it partakes of the contradictory and ineffable. I have probably failed to reflect that myself, but if I could define the poetry that I would one day like to write, it would be a poetry that delineates the truth as I understand it: a fragmented, partial and relative thing, unstable and permeated with contradiction; a poetry of the ephemeral, which implies the whole via the accumulation of fragments and reflections, moments seen at one remove, out of the corner of one eye. Perhaps the record of such moments would ultimately make for little more than a stream of soap bubbles. But I like to think that by assembling these fragments of a poetry which is itself aware of and defined by the transient nature of consciousness, by our changeable attachment to ideas and emotions, something like the truth could be revealed. 

Also, I want you to love me. LOVE ME!