So, am I like a postbox?
after Steve McCaffery.
What the Poet Says
I wrote this poem for my Master’s Dissertation, and a writer that greatly inspired me in my exploration of the purpose of a poem is Steve McCaffery. In his ‘Broken Mandala’ poems, he uses letters and words to create an image in a way that makes the poem almost unreadable—which I found refreshing to find in a book (a poem not concerned with being legible!) yet frustrating (what are the rules to decipher it?). Another one of my inspirations is EE Cummings, but for this poem I wanted the focus to be on images created not by linguistic devices, but by the letters themselves. ‘So, am I like a postbox?’ is inspired by McCaffery’s ‘Transitions to the Beast’, but while his work is mostly made using the letter E, this poem is a five-line text merged into one image. I feel very strongly about not sharing the actual written-out lines, because it would contradict the poem’s purpose: it is not meant to be read line by line, but looked at as a whole. Its letters are recognisable, like in McCaffery’s work, but I do not want it to be legible other than in this form, where all the information is given at once. What I can say about the contents is that the form reflects what the poem talks about: constrictions and a sense of uncertainty. The image of the postbox present in the title furthers the secretive theme of the poem—you can’t really know what’s in there unless you open it up.
