July

Like a well-loved book, the year falls open at its centre. Half the pages read; the remainder still waiting. The longest day is over and now the light will begin its gradual contraction; its slow fade into darkness. The middle of things seems like an indrawn breath, waiting for the next thing. We are at the fulcrum, the tipping point. And anything is possible.

I felt like this at my piano lesson, sitting at middle C, the music evenly divided between my hands. Anything WAS possible. I had all the notes. But, as yet, not much idea of what to do with them.

This creative balance of left and right hand, treble and bass clef, is how, as a poet, I must approach my craft. Like the chiaroscuro of painting, poetry must also have its light and shadow, its contrasts. In drawing, there is an exercise where the student attempts to draw not what the shape is, but rather the negative space around it. Because neither would exist without the other. Both need equal attention. The challenge with poetry is to attempt this using only words and the white space of the page.

Our culture now prioritises ‘left’-brain learning: the pursuit of logic, the detail. Iain McGilchrist, in his book The Master and his Emissary - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, suggested this had gone too far and that the balance in Western education is now dangerously skewed because humans are designed to use the information from both sides of their asymmetric brains.

And there is much to be said for the shadow side of things; the unsaid; the negative capability of which Keats was so fond. The poet Louise Gluck wishes an entire poem could be made with the vocabulary of the ‘unsaid’ and this has always informed my own poetry. What is imagined is often far more interesting than what is explicit: James Longenbach, in his book The Virtues of Poetry, talks of the ‘irresistible seduction of restraint’.

We must always allow for the possibility that we may be mistaken; that our failure to look beneath the shallows into the unlit depths may cut off part of the inspiration we need. As poets we must play life with both hands. With light and shade. And with the obvious and the obscure; the said and the unsaid. For our creative brain is designed for both.