My wife Siobhan Keenan provided wonderful support, ideas and criticism. I thank my colleagues at the University of Warwick – above all, Jeremy Treglown, who took on all of my administrative and managerial duties during the period of composition; and my friend Peter Blegvad, whose drawings are a muchneeded parallel world for the reader. Peter Blegvad, with Maureen Freely, led me towards authors I simply would not have come across, left to my own devices. Thanks are due to the University of Warwick for research leave, and for a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence, the proceeds of which were spent researching this book. Thanks to those who made life easier during the time of writing this book, especially Peter Mack and Thomas Docherty.
My thanks to those who discussed some of these ideas, or who, over the years, were teachers or co-teachers: Anne Ashworth, Susan Bassnett, Jonathan Bate, Richard Beard, Mike Bell, Jay Boyer, Zoe Brigley, Andy Brown, Elizabeth Cameron, Ron Carlson, Peter Carpenter, Nina Cassian, Jonathan Coe, Peter Davidson, Douglas Dunn, Brian Follett, Maureen Freely, Dana Gioia, Jon Glover, David Hart, Miroslav Holub, Ted Hughes, Russell Celyn Jones, Stephen Knight, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Emma McCormack, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Bernard O’Donoghue, Maggie O’Farrell, Melissa Pritchard, Al Purdy, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Jane Rogers, Carol Chillington Rutter, William Scammell, Michael Schmidt, Jane Stevenson, George Szirtes, Michelene Wandor; and to the following institutions where thinking took place: the Arvon Foundation, the University of Warwick, National Association of Writers in Education and the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. I fieldtested many of the Writing Games in the United States, Europe and China. I thank the thousands of members of the public, students, school pupils, medical workers, teachers – and writers – who let me play. Finally, thanks to my former teacher, Charles Tomlinson, who taught me that the first cause of creative writing is creative reading.
Extracts and versions of this text appeared in a slightly altered form in Anon Magazine (Edinburgh), the Guardian and Poetry Review (London).
IN YOUR END IS YOUR BEGINNING
Write a 500-word introduction to your own imaginary collected poems or complete stories. Assume your working life has undergone a struggle, from obscurity to hard-won fame. This is your final opportunity to say something wise to your readers and critics. What were your strengths; and why did your audience first ignore your writing, then welcome it? Do you have any literary or personal debts outstanding? Now you can settle them publicly. State what you think the future holds for your work.
AIM: Writers feel intense dissatisfaction. Learn to wait, and work at it; get used to that feeling of being perpetually dissatisfied with your abilities, achievements and the mercury-movement of language as you try to control it:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say
T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (1943)