The Camelion Poet
'The poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence:' said Keats. What can we learn from Keats's incredibly suggestive ideas in writing our 21st Century poems?
Decades ago, when I was an undergraduate at St Andrews, I first came across Keats’s letter to Richard Woodhouse, most probably in an anthology, as part of a Romanticism module on my degree course. More than any other prose writing about poetry, it immediately did something to me. No, ‘did something’ is far from adequate. It was like becoming the wave that approaches you. The way the rhythm of the sea will stay in your body if you have been in it all day. The waves are remembered in the inner chambers of the ear, in your flesh, your balance, when you lie down. At this moment, I am remembering jumping waves in the sea off the coast of Cornwall sometime in my teens: a rare English summer day when it was warm enough to stay in for hours. I don’t remember the date, and I’m shaky about which beach, but the sensation stayed with me all through my sleep that night, and, all these years later, I can feel it, or the ghost of that sensation, now. This is in some way related to the way I still feel about Keats’s letter: it was a wave that washed over me and through me, through my thinking and feeling mind.
This is why I have chosen to call this Substack newsletter TheCamelion. To honour Keats, who spells the word ‘chameleon’ this way when writing to Woodhouse in 1818: to honour his ideas, and the feeling they created in me, and to share the kind of poetry writing I do and want to do. To write to you and encourage you to explore the ‘poetical character’ in whatever ways are fruitful to you. Here, I will share thoughts about the creative process, essays on poems that I am currently reading, poetic obsessions, thoughts on prosody, ecopoetics, ecofeminism, journal entries, new work I find exciting, and so on. I will want your help: recommendations of recent finds in magazines, for instance, suggestions about poetic ‘Imogens’ and ‘Iagos’ you want to explore further.
The point is to create a community of Camelions, shapeshifters, who love the finished product —the poem— but also the process, the continuum. The trance that produces the first draft and the seemingly rational ordering that goes into ‘finishing’ the poem. The rough edges and the polished remembering machine. To write about our decade and the far past of poetry as if it were one and the same thing. Zaffar Kunial and John Keats and Jay Bernard, for instance, all exist in the poetic present, haunting it, making it more alive.
