About that poem in Ink, Sweat and Tears

I was very pleased to have a poem, 'Lapse', chosen by Helen Ivory for the brilliant Ink, Sweat & Tears last week. If you haven't seen it, have a look here. In her brief intro, Helen describes it as 'a poem born of taking the time to truly unpick something to its roots.' And I've been thinking about that. What was going on in the making of this piece?

In the first place I try not to overthink what I'm about in any poem - I've learned the hard way that setting out with a purpose in mind will kill a poem dead. At the same time I tend to take ages working on a new thing - but 'Lapse' came together over the course of a couple of weeks, which is pretty instantaneous by my standards.

A number of ideas bobbed up to the surface and sank again while I worked on what started life as a throwaway meditation on one tag on a graffitied footbridge over the river Lagan that I cross on my way from the train to work.

The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,

declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.

In the background, as ever, was the miserable, disorienting state of the world, racism at home and abroad, the environmental catastrophe making itself felt in heatwave and wildfire - it felt like the high-energy chaos and verbal abstraction of the graffiti echoed the uncertainty of the world in its slogans and threats and swastikas.

And in balance with those negatives, high energy language and verbal abstraction are something the poetic imagination thrives on.

And I was walking to work. That old Cemetery Road. Back and forward, one day after another, I was looking at the same tags, and any actual sense or reference they had started to evaporate. I started thinking about the odd sensation, the kind of dizziness, that comes from repeating the same word over and over until it seems empty of meaning. The psychologist Leon Jakobovits James called it 'semantic satiation'.

as the morning drags itself towards noon the word

has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun

or verb?

Tangled in all of this of course was that phrase from Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

Everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air...

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the chaos, the evaporation of meaning, the reduction of language to its barest stuff, its skin and bones. But as I was coming to the end of my work on the poem (hah!) I also wondered if there wasn't something cleansing about it too, if not actually liberating.

I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:

brute air lip-shaped, world in a kind of freefall.

None of these ideas were there before words started coming together on the page (and this one did come together in the act of writing, not in my head). And I don't think any of them constitutes the meaning of the poem. But if there was unpicking being done, that's the way it went.