I do not want to say too much about my poetry as I think the vast majority of it speaks for itself, however I am often asked about why I rarely use a title, especially in my later poetry.
It is a consequence of two things:
- The organisation and digitisation of all my work
- The personal meaninglessness of titles to me.
Even before I first received my cancer diagnosis I had set myself the task of turning all my poems into a digital form so I could manage them more easily. At that stage most of my work had been typed on an old portable type writer, some of it over fifty years old, on scraps of paper and anything I could find at the time. Later poems were printouts from early word processors or laptops all stored in an old lever arch file. The file had been kept in chronological order but in some cases there were no actual dates. As a consequence of this process all my poems received a number; as a result of this organisation my poems continue to be numbered. It is a form of curation of my life that continues today and fits into the way my life has been increasingly dependent on the medical logic that resides in the arithmetic of my life.
As I digitised the poems I realised that over the years my use of titles had diminished and eventually stopped altogether. It was when I joined the South Leicestershire poetry Stanza and I was asked why this was I realised that when I write poetry I write about emotional processes and their cognitive counterparts. I do not look at something and think I will write about that, what I write is my response to something in the here and now as I live it. Much of what I write is a surprise to me as I have very little idea, if any, of what is going to fall out of the end of my pen. I use the phrase “this pen this ink” quite a lot and it sums up for me part of the process. I pick up my pen and stuff falls onto the page, any title would be a spurious contrivance.
There are times when I know that something is forming inside me, it has no words only a sense that something has moved me in some way and that somewhere in my unconscious things are being worked through. Only when it is ready will it arrive and fall to the page. It never has a title attached, it arrives as just the next piece of me making meaning out of my condition or circumstances at any given time.
I hope I am able to write what I do in a direct manner so that readers will understand what I am writing about and make a connection with the experience that generated it. If not then I have probably failed. In the meantime I go on trying to capture personal meaning of things and to share that in the form of my poetry.