A Patch of Sky: Poems talking

Human Comedy By John Davies

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Incy Wincy By John Davies

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Do watch the video or listen to the podcast for context, before you read the following…

When talking about workshop leaders I mentioned Don Paterson and Ros Barber3. It was remiss of me not to mention Brendan Cleary4 who led a brilliant series of workshops at the University of Sussex, and Jackie Wills5 who set up Brighton Poets in the nineties with Don and Eva Salzman, and who has recently published her own book on ‘reading, writing and working with poems.’6
Over the next few months I’ll send out some extra posts with my notes from workshops led by Brendan, Don and others.
I mention an academic who wrote about an author being ‘the best person they could be’ when writing, and the reader’s perception of this ‘implied author’. That was Wayne C. Booth who was a professor of English language and literature at the University of Chicago. He first proposed the idea of the ‘implied author’ (IA) in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). More recently Dan Shen has discussed Booth’s ideas in, What is the Implied Author?7 I’m planning to post a discussion paper about this.
Ciaran and I talked about the word ‘skidaddles’ as I wrote it originally, which, based on the definition in the OED was probably the original spelling from the Civil War period in the USA.
‘Said to be of Swedish and Danish origin, and to have been in common use for several years throughout the Northwest, in the vicinity of immigrants from those nations’ (Webster, 1864); but there are no forms in Swedish or Danish sufficiently near to be seriously taken into account. There is some slight evidence of the currency of the word in English and Scottish dialect use before it became prominent in America, but it is doubtful how far this is of importance for its origin.’
Ciaran mentions Paul Celan’s poem Todesfugue (Death Fugue).

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Black milk of mornings we drink you at night
we drink you at midday death is a Master from Deutschland
we drink you at dusk in mornings we drink and drink

You can find the whole poem here on the Poetry Foundation website in both the German original and in an English translation by Dean Rader

Thanks for coming along to Poems talking. Looking forward to the next time. Feel free to…

Although I say it myself, of my own work, it’s a classic John Davies draft, over-written, over-blown, self-important even. However, I’d be interested to know what you think. Please click on one answer or the other. I’ll let you know the results next time.

‘…We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, ‘admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose! Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the antients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them.—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular—Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be Eagles?’ On the Aims of Poetry: Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818

https://rosbarber.com/

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-26569_Cleary

https://jackiewillspoetry.blogspot.com/

https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/on-poetry-reading-and-writing-poems/

Style Vol. 45, No. 1, Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again (Spring 2011), pp. 80-98 Published by Penn State University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.45.1.80

Poems talking Episode #1

John Davies — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:00:51 GMT

After a couple of attempts, our pilots1, we now have the first proper episode of Poems talking where Ciaran O’Driscoll and I compare notes on a draft poem we each have written. In Ciaran’s case it’s his poem The Spelling of Autumn and in mine, it’s Getting on. Ciaran is allowed a longer poem in this episode since I had a long one in our second pilot! You can download the latest version of the poems below.

Here are the two poems that you can download to review while we discuss them.

The Spelling Of Autumn by Ciaran O'Driscoll

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Getting On by John Davies

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As you’ll hear this episode was recorded just before Ciaran went to Dublin for treatment to replace a valve in his aorta. I’m delighted to say that the operation went very well, Ciaran is now fully recovered and he is angina free!

We’ll be recording another Poems talking towards the end of February and we’ll aim to post regular monthly episodes on the same day each month.

The importance of drafting just can’t be stressed enough. I may have mentioned this before but I remember an academic saying (this may be an apocryphal story) that W.B.Yeats wife had kept some of the great poet’s working papers including some very early drafts. What surprised the academic was how ordinary those first drafts were, like anything any of us would produce. But over a long period, often after dozens of drafts, a masterpiece would be crafted by closely observing the role of each word, each image, each thought and editing in minute detail to achieve the final result.

If you would like to know more about the drafting process I noticed this book has been published by the British Library.

Thanks for visiting Poems talking! Feel free to:

We have another pilot that I may post in between times.

Poems talking Pilot 2

John Davies — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:02:24 GMT

Welcome…

to Poems talking with Irish poet Ciaran O’Driscoll and me, John Davies. After the first pilot episode we put together in November, this session, recorded in December, still feels like another pilot while we hone our approach.

Here you’ll find another discussion of our draft poems recorded on Zoom. I think we still have a way to go in getting the balance right between poems and people, but the audio is generally good quality. And below you’ll find transcripts of both poems and a recording of my draft, before Ciaran’s comments!

We’re planning on publishing Poems talking on a monthly basis, but we’ll see how it goes. Ciaran is taking some time out in January for some hospital treatment so sending him best wishes for a speedy recovery. We have another pilot in the can, so I may send that out before Ciaran returns in February.

In the meantime, sending everyone warmest wishes for 2026 and all success with your writing.

Bazylika Mariacka – St Mary’s Basilica, Kraków

Composition process

At the risk of being accused of liking the sound of my own voice too much, and at an even higher risk of exposing the rather faulty machinery of my own composition process, this episode of Poems talking features the first draft of my long poem, Anaphora, The Crying of Kraków. In writing it, I try to understand the reasons I burst into tears in the Basilica of St Mary in that wonderful Polish city, one Sunday in late September.

We also take a look at Ciaran’s – you’ll be glad to know – much shorter poem entitled Words for a World, which has a Cuban context.

Draft poems

Here’s Ciaran’s draft of Words for the World:

Words For A World

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And here’s a draft and a recording of my poem. This is the version Ciaran discusses.

Anaphora

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And here’s the recording:

You can also read a brief record of how the poem came about in the note I sent to Ciaran about the context of the poem.

The Crying Of Kraków Notes

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I’ll post a final version of the poem once it has gone through my editing mill, which might be in a year or two! There’s a way to go and there’s no shortage of poetic blunders, faux pas and clangers in my early version.

But that’s the point really. From the start our aim in Poems talking has been to show and discuss our work so that other poets – whether just beginning or justly famous – can see how we make decisions about writing and editing our poems. We hope that pointing out missteps and gaffes may prove helpful to others.

Although still something of a pilot, we hope you enjoy this edition of Poems talking...

PS. Curiously and coincidentally, in the time since we recorded this, President Trump has removed Nicolas Maduro and his wife to New York, making Ciaran’s poem pointedly and rather prophetically relevant.

Some notes

Anaphora: The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. OED - ‘repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses,’ 1580s, from Latin, from Greek ‘anaphora’, literally ‘a carrying back,’ from anapherein ‘to carry back, to bring up,’ from ana ‘back’ (see ana-) + pherein ‘to bear’.

Ciaran mentions a phrase ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, which he attributed to Coleridge but is in fact from a letter written by Keats, who does mention Coleridge immediately after the phrase.

Excerpt from John Keats letter to his ‘dear brothers’

Sunday [21st December 1817]
Hampstead
…Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Ciaran mentions the line ‘Black milk of morning we drink you’ from Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue, which you can find here in an English translation by Pierre Joris together with the German original.
You can find the original poem Guantanamera by José Martí here with an English translation - the version sung by Pete Seeger.

Thank you for visiting Poems talking. Feel free to…

Poems talking pilot

John Davies — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 19:01:33 GMT

As a pilot for a series, Ciaran O’Driscoll talks about his poem The Spelling of Autumn, and John Davies talks about his poem Reading Moby Dick. In passing, they also refer to poems by T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Jennings, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and W.S Merwin.

Poems discussed by Ciaran and John in this pilot episode including their own drafts.

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The Spelling of Autumn 
by Ciaran O'Driscoll

When I said that it was Autumn
I could sense the soft departure
of my deity and calling
as they left me to the wasteland.
This occurred as I was moving
from the failure of my harvest
in ’25, though pausing
to admire the elegant spelling
of Autumn and its bonding
of m and n that made
a tacit kind of music.
“What a lovely word,” I mumbled
to myself as I was sitting
vocationless and godless 
at my computer screen.
‘The rest of this existence
may flounder into nothing,
but the graceful spelling of Autumn
has what it takes to stay.’

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Reading Moby Dick
by John Davies

He’s reminded of the boy he was
riding his mother’s garden fork
embedded in the turf near the rose bed
as a harpooneer ready to strike a whale. 

The garden was his sea, all around
white horses reared and bucked
as he steadied for his throw 
lurching on his storm-tossed mount

The iron spline his foothold 
in the ocean against his prey
the great Leviathan. 
In a distant window a curtain twitched

and all the boy’s bravado and pretence
dissolved into a stupid game
much like the industry he now knows
turned whales into light.

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Song at the Beginning of Autumn
by Elizabeth Jennings

Now watch this Autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like Summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this –
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that Autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names –
Autumn and Summer, Winter, Spring –
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said Autumn, Autumn broke.

From Collected Poems 1953-1985, Carcanet, 1987. P21.

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Harm’s Way
by W. S. Merwin

How did someone come at last to the word for patience
and know that it was the right word or patience

the sounds had come such a distance from the will to give pain
which that person kept like a word for patience

the word came on in its own time like a star
at such a distance from either pain or patience

it echoed someone in a mirror who threatened with fire
an immortal with no bounds of hatred or patience

the syllables were uttered out of the sound of fire
but in silence they become the word for patience

it is not what the hawk hangs on or the hushed fox
waits with who do not need a word for patience

passing through the sound of another’s pain
it brings with it something of that pain or patience

but how did whoever first came to it convey
to anyone else that it was the word for patience

they must have arrived at other words by then
to be able to use something from pain for patience

there is no such word in the ages of the leaves
in the days of the grass there is no name for patience

many must have traveled the whole way without knowing
that what they wanted was the word for patience

it is as far from patience as William is from me
and yet known to be patience the word for patience
 
Recently received by email from Paris Review (published in Issue no. 143 Summer 1997) With acknowledgements.

Thanks for reading Poems talking! Feel free to…