Mass Production

This year, the beginning of National Poetry Writing Month coincided with my reading Ian Hamilton's collected poems. In his preface to 1988's Fifty Poems, reproduced in Alan Jenkins' informatively presented edition of Hamilton's work, the poet wryly addressed his own lack of productivity: 'Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a life-time, you might think. And, in certain moods, I would agree.' But, Hamilton concludes, 'Why push and strain?'
Hamilton published seventy-odd poems in his lifetime, of which he only thought sixty worth preserving. That's about two year's worth of NaPoWriMo, as it has become known. I wonder what he would have made of it? This was a poet who was all about concision and distillation, who was clearly only writing those poems he felt needed to be written, or that he needed to write. The idea of producing drafts of thirty poems in thirty days, on the other hand, arguably speaks of a desire simply to write, rather than of a need to write something in particular. I think those impulses are probably more evenly balanced in the work of most poets, since writing in itself is (or should be) a pleasurable activity.
Of course, Hamilton was hardly a lazy man: he wrote literary biography, edited magazines, wrote for literary journals, and so on. But he was never a 'professional' poet. Like his contemporary, Larkin, who also published a relatively slim body of work in his own lifetime, he had plenty of other bread-and-butter stuff to be getting on with.
I'm not against NaPoWriMo at all. Firstly, there are enough people in the world who spend their time disapproving of things that other people do (the opinion columns of our press are full of such sounding-off). Secondly, I would have to admit a certain jealousy. April is not the cruelest month for me, but certainly one of the busier ones in the year. I don't have the time or the excess mental energy to be churning out thirty poems, but I am envious of those who do. However, I would also say that it does concern me sometimes that our poetry writing culture (on-line and elsewhere) is so very fixed on production: workshops, residential courses, writing prompts. The injunction seems to be that we must write more and ever more poems. While it is a marvelous thing when people are given the confidence to write, while nobody should be discouraging anyone from doing so, I would also want to say that it is okay to write more slowly, to be less productive, to revisit, revise, to stop writing for a while, to spend more time reading than you ever do with a pen and notebook (especially that!). Is this a suggestion for National Not Writing Poetry Month (NaNoPoWriMo)? Well, hardly. I have plenty of those anyhow. But in this culture of productivity, poets also need permission to go slow, or at least find their own pace.