What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
After initial, experimental exploration of an image or cluster of images, comes the graft. The process of refining, shaping, rearranging, etc, is time consuming and hard. I have to think about the poem differently, critically. The process of challenging myself, being really tough on myself, can be exhausting. I often feel as if a poem can never be finished satisfactorily. Its faults and foolishness obscure everything else about it. The solution comes through leaving a poem alone for a few days, or even longer. Going back to it, I’ll often see it differently and realise what I need to do to complete it. Thereafter, the challenge is to not constantly tinker. My visual poems in particular are subjected to endless tinkering, and sometimes small adjustments add up to big changes, so that the revised visual poem is radically different from the original: effectively a different poem.
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