Poetry Projects: Wrong On Every Level

          I don’t mind admitting the concept of ‘poetry projects’ was something that I had only been vaguely aware of and up until last week I had not devoted much thought to what it might mean.  I decided to investigate poetry projects and look at the process, production and the outcomes of them.

          So this last few days I have spent a little time looking into what it might mean.  I found, predictably perhaps, that opinions on definition, benefit and worth in terms of ‘value judgements’ vary.  Let me say sooner rather than later that my early opinion changed little as my investigations progressed.  That opinion is this; poetry is not a tap that can be turned on and off or like a conker forced unripe from its prickly, green shell. 

          Some might be aware of Tim Clare’s 100 poems in a day challenge might point to it as evidence to the contrary; however Clare himself accepted that very few of the 100 pieces that he wrote in a single day were any good and that many of them were utterly woeful.  None of them could have been considered ‘finished’ or sufficiently honed enough to be anywhere near a publishable level.  That the poems were generally of a poor standard seems in a way irrelevant to people who were drawn to it as a concept – the sheer number of poems and the ‘artistic endurance event’ was what caught the imagination.  Is this a project though?  Well in a way yes it is, an amphetamine powered one but a project nonetheless. 

          Now some may say that the Clare example is at best a poor marker for a poetry project and that a worthy project needs to have a lot of time invested in it and underpinned by painstaking research.  Here the stylistic approach (in terms of artisanship) is the opposite of the Tim Clare example yet this too falls short - it is the process not the product - that becomes the focus.  The very fact of the matter of a ‘project’ being ‘undertaken’ is the thing that is of interest and is most often communicated.  Even in the rare instance where the product ends up good, as in Simon Armitage’s Stanza Stones Project, it is the challenge of finding all the poems and completing the route that has fired the imagination – a sort of poetry-freaks Munro bagging – that is the star, the poetry itself is reduced to being merely the sideshow.

          So am I minded to ‘do’ a ‘poetry project’?  No.  I am however minded to try to set myself a broad theme and let poetry that evolves organically and naturally over time explore and investigate it.  Oh but wait a minute, isn’t that a collection?