First, get the recipe from the author.
It will look much like a Contents list, but with no indication of quantities or baking temperature.
But at least it’s a place to start.
Here, for example, in Will Harris’s debut, are the ingredients:
Object
Mother’s Country
Halo 2
Self-Portrait in Front of a Small Mirror
Naming
Bee Glue
Justine
Identity
Yellow
With Cornflowers
From ‘The Ark’ I
Cured
From The Other Side of Shooter’s Hill
From ‘The Ark’ II
Something
Allegory
Imagine a Forest
But what’s the method? And will the ingredients work?
At least some of the contents promise a recognisable cake. First collections nearly always have something autobiographical that fits into the sense of ‘self’. Because when you publish, it’s a public statement – if not about who you are, at least about who you may be. It’s personal, even if the poems aren’t.
In Will Harris’s Contents, you can see, fourth in the list, a self-portrait. Almost all poets have one, though not always explicitly titled. This one is in prose; part of the mixture. You can see ‘Identity’ too, and ‘Mother’s Country’ which has to be a bit of heritage stuff. Most poetry cakes have some heritage.
And ‘Naming’ of course. Poetry gives things names, then sometimes takes them away again. I often think about Gill McEvoy’s poem ‘Difference’. It was in a pamphlet baked back in 2007, her first collection, Uncertain Days. The poet is in a plane, looking down at the grass at the edge of the runway – ‘white clover in the grass, / a bee, a clump of yellow bedstraw, / a small brown butterfly’. All at once, the airport itself is ‘a place where species are defined / by difference’. The poet wants ‘to be out there’, on her ‘hands and knees, / naming things’.
Poets name things. At first for themselves; later (sometimes) for other people.
The name of the publication is part of that. All This Is Implied. Great name. Doesn’t sound like anything I’ve baked (or consumed) before.
Having said which, when it comes to first collections, no two poetry cakes are ever the same. Each is radically different from the next. Sometimes difference is the defining ingredient.
‘Will Harris’? Not much difference there. It’s such an ordinary-sounding name. A white-caucasian-empire-building name. But he’s not. A Victoria Sponge this is not.
All This Is Implied took a good while. The author is a thinker and a craftsman. He’s been experimenting for years, putting things into words, trying them out, breaking them up, putting them back together again. And he’s been working on prose style as well. He writes excellent prose (not all poets do). Blogging about one of the ingredients (‘Justine‘), he says: ‘I think about writing as a way of addressing race, gender, history which might embrace mixedness and confusion ….’
Will Harris is a fellow of The Complete Works III. He self-defines as BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic). He doesn’t ‘play the race card’ lightly. As he says himself in an essay on this subject, ‘ the race card is not something the non-white person can choose to play. It is what is done to you’. Do read that whole essay, and watch the YouTube film at the end. There is a context here.
So yes – this debut pamphlet does ’embrace mixedness and confusion’, though the complete confection is anything but confused. Numbered among the ingredients are: games, humour, mischief, love, and form – even rhyme. It’s not confused: it’s fused.
The end product has come out pretty well, in fact. It’s hot off the press. Want to try a slice?
