The Release Valve
Where the poems came from, why they stopped, and why they came back
The poems that wrote themselves
I didn’t write poetry. I had poems.
There was no routine, no studied practice, no ambition to be a poet. Poems arrived in my head, largely complete, and I wrote them down. A bit of editing here and there, but the heavy lifting was already done by the time my pen touched the paper. There was no act of writing poetry, as such. The poems just turned up.
This happened on and off over several years in the late 1990s. I wasn’t particularly interested in sharing what I’d written - the subject matter was personal, and I didn’t think of the poems as especially significant. They were just something that happened, the way vivid dreams happen. Friends and family saw things differently and pushed me to publish. So I did. The result was Getting It Out of My System, the 1997 collection I’m now reissuing.
I felt chuffed to be a published poet. But if I’m honest with myself (and the whole point of the reissue is to be exactly that) it landed as one more item in a list of achievements. I had learned to juggle, to ride a unicycle, to ride a horse. Now I’d published a book. Tick, move on.
Looking at that now, I can see how glib it was. At the time, I had no understanding of what creating those poems meant, where they were coming from, or what my brain was doing when they arrived. The absence of that understanding is the real story of the collection’s first life.
The silence
After the book came out, the poems stopped. Not with any drama or ceremony. They just stopped.
I didn’t write poetry for roughly 25 years. I didn’t try, and I didn’t miss it. Poems didn’t come to me and I didn’t go looking for them. Life carried on - work, relationships, the ordinary accumulation of days - and the part of me that had been producing poems had switched itself off.
I didn’t think anything of it. There was no sense of loss, no creative block to push through, nor any moment where I noticed the well had run dry. It simply had, and I hadn’t noticed.
That indifference is, in hindsight, one of the strangest things about this whole period. Whatever had been driving those poems was doing its work below the surface, out of sight and out of mind. When it stopped, there was nothing above the surface to register the absence.
The return
A year or so ago, the poems came back. Again, without announcement and without plan.
They turned up the same way they always had - arriving in my head, largely formed, ready to be written down. The mechanism was identical. What was different was the person receiving them.
In the late 1990s I had the poems and very little idea what to do with that fact. Now I had a quarter-century of additional living, better self-knowledge, and the habit of paying attention to my own creative processes. This time, I could watch what was happening rather than just transcribe it.
Same phenomenon. Different observer.
The release valve
I now understand this: the poems are my way of dealing with the stresses of daily life.
When they first arrived, in the 1990s, the pressure was the stresses of my personal life - things I was carrying around but hadn’t found other ways to process. The poems were doing that processing for me, below the level where I could either see it or articulate it. When those pressures eased, the poems eased with them.
Recently, the pressure has been professional. Work builds up in ways that are hard to name while they’re building. And the poems have started turning up again, doing the same work they always did - taking in what can’t be said directly and finding a way to express it.
The poetry is a release valve on the pressures of life and work. I didn’t choose that mechanism; it chose itself. But understanding it changes the relationship. I can now see why the poems arrived when they did, why they stopped, and why they’re back. Three phases of the same mechanism, responding to three different configurations of the same underlying pressure.
That understanding is what I was reaching towards the whole time without knowing it, I think. Not publication, not an audience, not even the writing itself. Just relief. The pressure reduced; the poems expressed it; I moved on, without ever realising that’s what had happened.
From valve to practice
Knowing where the poems come from has changed how I write.
The release valve still operates but it’s no longer the only mechanism. I now write deliberately. I gather subject matter. I set time aside. The act of writing poetry has become something I actually do, not just something that happens to me.
Being more deliberate has improved the balance. Work and poetry and everything else sit in a healthier relationship than they did. I can see the valve working and work alongside it, rather than just waiting for the pressure to build high enough to force the next poem out.
This understanding is the foundation of the new introduction and reflections in the reissue - the book that started with an announcement and became, in the making, something I needed to write as much as anyone might need to read. The memorial and mirror framework I wrote about last time applies here too: the original poems are the memorial; the introduction and reflections are the mirror, looking back at all three phases with the eyes of someone who has finally worked out what was happening.
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An invitation
Where does your creative work come from? Not in the big theoretical sense, but practically - what’s actually driving it? Is it habit, discipline, ambition, something more like pressure, something else entirely?
And if you’ve ever had a practice go quiet - not end dramatically, but just stop - did you notice? Did you miss it?
Let me know in the comments. The reissue continues; I’ll share more excerpts as they develop.