From What Is Poetry?

In his poem ‘A Daylight Art’, dedicated to the poet Norman MacCaig, Seamus Heaney recounts the story of Socrates’ last day, where he tells his friends he has been putting Aesop’s fables into verse. A dream recurring throughout Socrates’ life kept repeating one instruction: practise the art. Which until his final day Socrates always took to be philosophy. Heaney concludes:

Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift

for practising the right one from the start –
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass

like daylight through the rod’s or the nib’s eye.

Like Heaney’s poem, one of the first pieces of my own writing that meant something to me was a sort of parable, in prose, called ‘A Use for Rumney’s’, and for years I took it as containing a secret instruction: to write fiction. It’s now lost, but the story, influenced by reading Kafka’s short pieces, involved an alien with five noses who wouldn’t go away. Eventually the narrator offers him a sniff of Dr Rumney’s snuff – in all ten nostrils at once – and this has the desired effect.

This short piece was a kind of story, and it paved the way for many more, and eventually for novels, such as tapestry, which after twelve years looking for a publisher went on to be shortlisted for the Goldsmiths’ Prize. I persisted with novels for many years, before eventually giving up due to my inability to find publishers or agents, and turning to poetry. Poetry I would now see as my natural home – it ...