It’s often easier to define what poetry is by adducing examples of what it isn’t, or what one believes it isn’t. According to Oxbridge MAs who taught the critic Hugh Kenner when he was a schoolboy in Ontario, any ‘poetry’ written after Tennyson was incomprehensible peculiarity. It’s a term that may or may not have been deliberately Alexandrine.

The great schisms opened up in literary, visual, and musical art when traditional became modern overnight in the 20^th century (though to describe the period 1914-1918 as ‘overnight’ would be an insult to the victims of its mechanised slaughter) offered freedom without responsibility. In what did irresponsibility consist? Well, maybe the abrogation of the duty to connect with readers, viewers, and listeners. Maybe.

When I’m writing poetry or prose, I feel no obligation to the reader. Even if it’s an essay commissioned by a magazine editor, my only concern is that the magazine will get what it requested, not what I expect its readers will want. Anyone who had asked Dylan Thomas to write them a poem would, without surprise, have expected hopefully-profound emotional depth and a certain amount of oracular nonsense, hoping that the latter might be curtailed.

Poetry is just one of the things I write. That may have something to do with my time as a daily-newspaper journalist, when I had no choice of subject unless I asked for it and my wish was granted. So, I might be reporting on local authority finances in the morning, a Mahler symphony at a concert in the evening, and a few days hence a rugby match of such muddy indiscipline that it would be difficult to keep tabs on the score, let alone identify who kicked a goal or crossed the line for a try. Regular readers might have been able to identify me from anonymous pieces I wrote, but in theory it could have been anyone’s work.

Those years writing mostly unidentifiable newspaper copy set me against so-called ‘confessional’ poetry. If I saw the first-person pronoun in the opening stanza of a poem, I turned to something else. Writing about those close to you and beyond is not the same as stumbling around in the half-lit caverns of your own psyche. The ironically-titled  ‘Death Studies’ was a poem included in my first collection, Miners At the Quarry Pool. It’s narrated by an imaginary neighbour of Robert Lowell, the arch-confessor. The neighbour is trying to keep the poet at bay, lest he turns up unannounced for yet another session of breast-beating. The neighbour, almost needless to say, has her / his own problems, not to be mentioned again in front of the anxious self-flagellator but communicated briefly to the reader at the end. Modest self-effacement is, I hope, typical of my latest book, Never Lost for Words: Selected Essays, even though, and by definition, its views are mine alone. That may enable the reader to guess what sort of person I am but it doesn’t proclaim any kind of delineated and definitive self-portrait of someone consumed by anxiety.

Of course, the best confessional poets – and, I suppose, Lowell is one – can imply extrapolations to the world beyond their rigorous self-examinations, whether or not at base they care little about anyone or anything outside themselves. For me as a poet, however, the self is but a small component of the waiting world – waiting to be discovered and considered; that is, the discovery and consideration of the self as an important element but not necessarily destined for immortalising in verse. The Great War, and war in general as something in which one hasn’t had to take part, crops up a lot in my writing. My poem ‘Reel Time’ meditates on the odd cinematic spectacle of exaggerated movement in film of the time. I jokingly comment that it was a wonder the war wasn’t over by Christmas considering the speed at which everyone moved. (I now understand that when displayed on the projection equipment for which it was intended, everyone moved at normal pace; but most of us have only witnessed the Great War as a spectacle chronicled by TV documentaries, which used videotapes of the original film. Such tapes could not project the action in a synchronised number of frames-per-second, hence the trotting. That, like most early technology, has improved.) A poem called ‘There’s a Break in the Treeline’ is the closest I get to confessing, because it’s about my father and his disclosure to me that he’d suffered what I interpreted as a nervous breakdown while, as a car mechanic, he’d spent the second world war teaching servicewomen how to maintain army vehicles. Neither my father nor my grandfathers fought in a war. My grandfathers were at one time coalminers. All three were in reserved occupations. I’ve never got round to exploring the possible accumulated guilt of that. My paternal grandfather was also saturnine and a depressive.

But I’ve explored guilt – and shame – most notably in my poem ‘Semper ad Melioram’, about a blind music teacher and how he’s savagely ridiculed in class by pupils who booby-trap his piano and routinely make fun of him. ‘He’ was Professor Alfred Thompson (‘Pa’ Thompson – I don’t know if he was a real professor, whatever that would have been) and his wife (‘Ma’ Thompson) led him in and out of the music room at my alma mater: West Mon School, Pontypool. I was one of those boys, a post-war, eleven-plussed ‘grammar’ smart-arse, who seemed to be engaged in the momentum of a war that had officially ended but was being continued in another form by a tribe of sadistic teachers.

The foregoing suggests, justifiably, that most of the poems I write have narratives, even though what their story lines embody is more important than what is unfolding; I mean, what they suggest to me, which is where any confessional note is sounded. The final poem in MATQP is called ‘The Last Tattoo’, about someone on the cusp of being completely covered  in body art. Of course, it’s really about self-effacement, which I guess is a comment on the confessional self in terms of obliterating any chance of a confession.

Having only O-level passes in English Literature and English Language, I’ve learned about poetry from reading it and reading about it. That Eng. Lit. pass required my studying ‘Morte d’ Arthur’ and ‘Gareth and Lynette’ by the comprehensible and unexceptional Tennyson – unexceptional, of course, only because he came before what those expat Oxbridge MAs in Canada regarded as modernistic nonsense. Hugh Kenner guided me through post-Tennysonian difficulties in the same way that David Daiches, in his book The Meaning of Poetry, had insisted that since its sentiments were carried by words and since words, euphonious or not, were essentially units of meaning, then a poem as something composed of words had, ipso facto, to be meaningful, as opposed I assume, to meaningless. I soon learnt that being difficult wasn’t the same as being meaningless. I also assume that ‘difficult’ for Daiches was the point beyond which it was fruitless to pursue meaning. If you see what I mean. It was his loss.

My second collection of poetry, the latest so far, is Gwyriad, which explores various kinds of instability. A Welsh poet who doesn’t speak Welsh, I employ gwyriad in the sense of the word seen on bilingual roadworks diversion signs, pointing to routes to be taken and implying others to be taken only at one’s peril. Its core poems are based on where I live – the former Penyfal Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum, now converted to apartments, in Abergavenny, and its sister building in Fishponds, Bristol, once the Bristol Pauper Lunatic Asylum and now a campus of the University of the West of England. Both were built in the 1850s. Narratives are everywhere: ‘Little Mal’ tells of of a Valleys boy committed to Penyfal at 13 and dying there at 63; and a set of poems about how the Bristol asylum’s patients were ‘re-housed’ to accommodate injured soldiers returning in numbers from the European battlefields – later on, at night and by train, so as not to disturb sleeping Bristolians. The painter Stanley Spencer was an orderly there.

I’m not like writers who call themselves poets, write nothing but poetry, and are reasonably prolific. For me, writing a poem is not so much a matter of extracting blood from a stone as suspecting that the stone might be bloodless. And whereas I can see the virtues of what is widely regarded as a half-decent slab of prose, the qualities of a poem, especially a prizewinner, are often lost on me. Thus, I have had more prose published than poetry. But MATQP and Gwyriad (with scattered published poems waiting to be herded into a possible third collection) represent not so much laziness or want of inspiration as the consequence of a lack of self-esteem. That’s known today as imposter syndrome, though a syndrome is usually a group of associated symptoms and imposture suggests something wilfully deliberate rather than regretfully unavoidable. I am, therefore, more likely to accept that there’s something wrong with a rejected poem and, equally, quick to be convinced of an accepted poem’s worth.

I lived through the ordeals and rituals of poetry publication made in pre-computer days, when submission, acceptance and rejection belonged to a sensory age: the tapping and biteback of a typewriter, the licking of stamps and envelopes, the pinching of a returned self-addressed package which roughly indicated how many typed scripts had been accepted and how many returned. A thin envelope offered a reason for rejoicing, as it contained at best a promissory note from an editor who’d kept for publication the poems you’d submitted.

Writers take a while to recover from the disappointments of rejection. It still happens. Three months ago a pamphlet of my poems was returned with a standardised written apology. I sent them elsewhere, this time for some reason refusing to believe there was anything amiss. I’m waiting for a reply – again. Writers do a lot of that. It’s a useful time to look at their poetry and wonder whether or not it’s poetry at all. I’m well aware that much narrative poetry today is, in a cliché-d description, ‘chopped-up prose’ made to look like a poem, but dismembered none the less; equally, I’m conscious of poems that can assume a poetic ‘mode’ by admitting the banality often associated with lack of detail, a fault displayed often by the Georgians but not by ‘light verse’ and its sometimes comic inventories. Raymond Williams once characterised poetry in the popular consciousness as addressing ‘mist, mystery, nightingales, and the bower’, though the last, presumably a reference to Spenser’s ‘bower of bliss’, is hardly poetasting fare.

The three poems accompanying this essay are examples of unconscious similarity of theme. They each explore some form of marital fracture but were neither written at the same time nor envisaged as a related group. The first two portray one partner as casualty; the third, ‘Hypogamy’, sees both as unequal victims of circumstance.

Autobiographical elements contributed to all three but as observation, not confession. When I was a boy, my maternal grandfather showed me how to slip china ‘decoy’ eggs into the chicken coop so that the hens would be encouraged to lay. But the man in ‘Deluding the Hens’ is not he, and the woman watching this subterfuge from the bedroom window is not his wife, my grandmother. Thus is the ‘I’ effaced and its gaze directed outwards to fictional narratives conceived as poetry, or what I understand poetry to be. The resemblances, however, might denote some form of fixation on a truth more widespread than that exemplified by personal experience.

What’s certain is that if I’ve written a poem about something, its subject has found a congenial vessel, its appropriate mode of delivery. No poem of mine has ever suggested itself as having been sent forth in ill-considered dress, nor has any short story of mine presented itself as a ruthlessly truncated novel. The form fits the subject, to my satisfaction at least.

Miners at the Quarry Pool was re-printed last year. As poetry re-prints are about as fugitive as an uncontested punctuation mark in Ulysses, I was asked to write an accompanying feature on Nation.Cymru. You can read the piece here.

Writing about poetry, even one’s own, is far less difficult than writing it. And that’s as confessional as I’m prepared to be.

Nigel Jarrett has published two collections of poetry: Miners at the Quarry Pool and Gwyriad. The first was described by Agenda magazine as ‘a virtuoso performance’ and the latter by Acumen magazine as ‘an engrossing window on to family relationships…but also ranging farther afield with perceptive meditations on many of the key moments in human existence expressed with humour and insight’. He has also published four collections of stories, a novel, and a fictional memoir. Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies prize and the inaugural Templar Shorts prize, both for short fiction. He lives in Abergavenny.