Poetry Craft & Technique

Eleven years ago this month, the fire in the Redcar blast furnace went out. The town didn't go with it. That gap, between what a place loses and what it keeps, is one of the hardest things a poet can try to write. Lean one way and you get nostalgia: rusting gantries in soft golden light, and everything better back then. Lean the other and you get the holiday brochure, where all is well now because there is ice cream. Neither is fair to the people who live there. Below you wil

A curved cliff in the Yorkshire Dales, a grieving Victorian poet, and three habits for any writer trying to put on the page something that is no longer there. Stand at the foot of Malham Cove and you get a strange feeling. You are looking at a waterfall. It has the height, the width, and the curved lip at the top. It is only missing the water. In my last article, beneath the broken tower at Helmsley, I argued that most ruins have human hands behind them, but that sometimes th

Two ruins by water. Poe's drowned city fell silent; Whitby Abbey never did. A Whitby Abbey poem, Poe's The City in the Sea, and a craft question for anyone who writes about place.

Around a hundred and thirty lead tablets were dropped into the hot spring at Bath, asking a goddess for justice. She never answered. They survived anyway. The reason why is the most useful thing I know about writing loss. Two thousand years ago, someone stood at the edge of a steaming pool in Somerset, scratched a message into a thin sheet of lead, and dropped it into the water. The message wasn't a prayer of any grandeur. Somebody had taken their cloak from the bath-house. T

Two poems, both ending with a human structure underwater in the dark. Only one of them is still readable. The difference should change how you write. An artistic illustration of Glastonbury Lake Village In 1912, Thomas Hardy wrote about the wreck of the Titanic lying on the seabed — the jewels designed to dazzle now lying lightless, and the fish drifting past them asking what all this vanity could possibly have been for. It is one of the great poems in the language, and the w

Glastonbury Tor is the most mythologised hill in England. I wrote a poem about clay shrinkage instead — and I am still not certain I was right. A realistic wide landscape photograph of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, England, seen from across the flooded winter levels. Glastonbury Tor has been the Isle of Avalon since at least the twelfth century. It carries Arthur, Guinevere, Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, the ley lines and a great deal of living spiritual practice. Walk

On ruthless revision — and the one thing in a poem that must never move. A deep limestone cave chamber inside a British gorge, reminiscent of Cheddar Gorge You can revise a poem to death. I know, because I have done it. Not once. The usual advice is to be ruthless: kill your darlings, cut anything that isn't working. And there is real sense in that. Most first drafts are too long, too pleased with themselves, and carrying at least one line the writer loves for reasons that ha

Kirkstone Pass, from Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry An illustrated image of a dramatic single-lane mountain road climbing a steep one-in-four gradient through the Lake District fells, Kirkstone Pass, Cumbria. The gradient tightens to a one-in-four strain where the road binds the volcanic flank. Gravity drags the scree in a slow descent toward the valley floor, scoured by ice. At the saddle, the world contracts to a line. Dry-stone walls brace against the heavy fe

Some places give themselves up in an afternoon. Others withhold, and ask to be read the way we read a difficult poem — slowly, twice, out loud if no one is listening. Brampton is one of the withholding kind. I went looking for its official history and found four ledgers stacked one on top of another, and then I went looking for something the ledgers could never hold. Here, first, is the poem that came out of that looking. Read it before you read anything I have to say about i

Twice a day, for two hours either side of high water, the gates of Silloth's dock swing open. For the rest of the day, no ship can safely enter at all. I've come to think that this little harbour on the Solway is one of the best working metaphors I know for something every poet eventually has to reckon with: the difference between freedom and formlessness. The surprising truth is that constraint, properly understood, is not the enemy of good work. It is often the very thing t

Words by Alden Carrow Solitude is not a punishment; it is an instrument. We are social animals. We thrive on connection. Yet here is the paradox at the heart of every writer: we write about human connection, but we can only do it well once we have stepped far enough back to see it clearly. Think of a painter. To paint the mountain, they cannot be standing inside the mountain; they must stand some miles away. Solitude provides that distance. And the best place I know to find i