Form is helpful for me as a way of orientating myself amongst the bric-a-brac (to gobble Frost’s nibble at Stevens) of words and sensation, providing a narrative and/or organisational template to adhere to, work against, or ignore. Many of these poems started life as mistakes – misheard or misunderstood words, sounds or images taken for others, gutted anecdotes, punchlines cut adrift from their jokes – so it often seems right to carry on from this first impetus. It’s a little cruel, maybe, to set an already dyspraxic thing hobbling across an old obstacle course, but after all the stress and amputations, by the end it can be gratifyingly unrecognisable. This estrapade reaches its logical extreme in ‘The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something’, which is a ‘found’ poem (a bad case of messiah-desire); I tried to be as absent-minded about my selections as possible, but, no matter how significant the disjunction between lines, narrative and identification always seemed to occur. So now I like to read this poem as part of a dialogue between two poems, the one included here, made up of definitions, and the one elsewhere, made of their words.