'Poetic Deposition' by Joe White

Electron micrograph of the surface of a kidney stone

This week's blog is a bit of an unusual one.... our intern Joe White shares his thoughts on the relationship between writing poetry and kidney stones 

Duncan Montgomery

Duncan Montgomery once described to me the process of poetic deposition. ‘Deposition’ in the sense of something deposited. For example, ‘the continued deposition of calcium and oxalate at the renal papillae will lead to the growth of kidney stones.’ Poem as kidney stone. On a first airing, the metaphor may seem reactionary, a sufficiently grubby vehicle for, say, a fiercely-held but ultimately adolescent anti-Romanticism. The verbal equivalent of picking your nose and then wagging the finger in somebody else’s face. I think it’s pretty good. For starters, it’s surprisingly mobile. If you are inclined to think the intentional fallacy itself a fallacy, then you will be gratified by the private pain implicit in the production of such a stone; its proximity to its author. On the other hand, if you prefer to think of poetry as impersonal, you can substitute the metaphor of the kidney stone for Eliot’s experiments with platinum. If you look hard enough at a stone, it does possess a severe, crystalline beauty, quite apart from both its author and its peculiar means of production. Since we’re already on to kidney stones and poetry, would it be too fanciful to draw a relation between the crenellations on the surface of a kidney stone and the immaculate shape each poem cuts on the page? Probably.

But why stop there? To kidney stones we could add all other calculi the body is known to accrue. For satirists, gallstones; sialoliths for poets of desire; rhinoliths for the snob; for biographers and translators, enteroliths (these last are stomach stones, and when found in horses, can weigh as much as a pound). The poet who prefers to compose aloud will prefer the tonsolith to any other stone, arising as it does from an inflamed and purulent mouth. Hugh MacDiarmid surely suffered from halitosis. I think that’s about it. There may be other stones for other poets, but Wikipedia seems fairly exhaustive on the matter. None of this, of course, has anything to do with Duncan and what he really meant when he very briefly mentioned kidney stones to me one day on Facebook. It certainly had nothing to do with scotch-egg-sized enteroliths in the belly of Robert Graves.

He was talking against the unhelpful notion of poetic afflatus about the way a poem can accrue over time, gathering its matter through days, weeks, and sometimes years of deposition. You find out over time what sticks, and the process can be incredibly painful. A poem is absolutely not a piece of marble carved into coherence by divine lightning. To someone who has never tried to write a poem, this may appear disheartening. They may have hoped that if they read enough good poetry aloud often enough a day, then their own poetry would come to them like a voice on the air. However, for those of us who have tried, the picture is heartening. Stick with it. Let things stick to it.