"It's entirely conceivable that life's splendour surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies - not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls." — Franz Kafka

I'm planning a three-session Sunday morning poetry course exploring Keats' notion of Negative Capability, which for my money lies at the very heart of writing. And certainly of poetry. It’s not about ‘negativity’ as in ‘a downer’; the way I conceptualise it, it’s more about kind of hollowing yourself out, or turning yourself inside out, so that external impressions go straight into the creative core without having to fight their way past ego, opinions, social expectations, and so on. Keats said Shakespeare had it in spades, and that’s a clue. Shakespeare let each of his characters inhabit their world, their way of being in it, their character — funny, beautiful, tragic, evil, but never only one of those — without telling us what to think about it, and that encapsulates what Negative Capability is. It’s to do with receptors.

I've run these workshops before, both online and in person, and participants reported that it had really opened things up for them and got them writing in new, rich ways. I expanded my lesson notes into an essay that was published in my book of essays, Forgive the Language; and now I have some new ideas for things to do with it. My old friend (& fellow Salt poet) John Clegg and I were planning to have a little essay war about our conceptions of what Negative Capability means, but one way and another it fell by the wayside of life. I have his first salvo pinned to the little cork board over my desk, so I'm planning to get that down and fire a return shot. I expect he was right, anyway, but we won’t tell him that!

But I’ll be re-designing this mini-course this time. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the first ones, and I think Negative Capability can be a real tool for helping us deal creatively with 2020/2021. Right now, half in, half out — with who-knows-what right around the corner and the world around us changing in ways we haven’t even seen yet (because we’ve been staying in, or because they haven’t quite happened yet) — there are far less clarity and control in most people’s daily lives than we’re used to. It seems to me a great moment for letting your creativity latch onto ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’ - ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, as Keats put it.

I collected the quote at the top back when I was originally designing the course. Another one, from Derek Walcott, takes a specifically writerly and practical approach:

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what’s coming next. A lot of poets historically have described a kind of trance. It’s not like a Vedic trance where your eyes cross, and you float. It’s a process not of knowing, but of unknowing, of learning again. The next word or phrase that’s written has to feel as if it’s being written for the first time, that you are discovering the meaning of the word as you put it down.

As you can see, this is less about content than about how you use your mind, and I can’t teach that. But we can explore what Keats was getting at, and invite you to think about poetry and writing in a different way, and I can put some things in front of you that can help you to see things in a new way.

I've also ordered something exciting that I think is going to make fantastic inside-out prompts for us: Sophie Herxheimer’s box set of 78 witty, dreamy index-card collage poems, INDEX.

I'm planning to start on 20th June, 11am-1pm, and run fortnightly for three sessions, but I need people to sign up! £60 for the course. Check it out, and drop me a line if you’re interested.