A Writing Tip from Matt Broomfield
WRITE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Revoke the tired shibboleth, and write what you don’t know. But first, come to know it, as though it were your own. Live as you read and read as you live: avidly, with catholic interest, above all vicariously. Delve into profoundly conservative Regency biography in the same frenzied spirit with which you breathe tear-gas at Belgrade Pride.  

As a poet you perhaps find yourself standing awkwardly round the corner of your own life. No matter. Force yourself to do more than peer in through the window. Break in, fall in, fall in love, fall in war, be both internationalist and dilettante. Even if haunted by the fear of failing truly to live, you can run with the pack of the living, for a while. (Some part of you will always stay skulking round the corner, of course. This inner sanctum, too, must be preserved.)

The poet, no less than her cousin revolutionary, must be as organic as she is able. As Frantz Fanon conjures us in Wretched of the Earth, she must ‘collaborate on the physical plane.’ Linger on the picket-line, in the rave, at the bizarre tryst and the uncomfortable reunion, even and especially when you had much rather skulk home to your notebook. Write, instead, in your phone notes as the bailiffs hammer on the door below: sleep twined round the toilet-bowl, and awake gasping at 4AM to scribble yourself a note which seems, in that moment, to hold the key to all dreams.

The alchemy of turning any hardship into poetry should in itself justify that hardship. This process is no more certain than true alchemy, no more likely to belch up gold. But the hard-won understanding that life and suffering always hold the mysterious potential to become their opposite—permanent, lapidary beauty—constitutes, in itself, the true transfiguration of the poet’s life. 

Matt Broomfield is a British poet, essayist, and journalist. He has recently been published by the Tahoma Literary Review, Stand, Agenda, Glass, the North, and the Best New British and Irish Poets 2021, and won the 2022 Lucent Dreaming Prize. His debut collection, brave little sternums: poems from Rojava (Fly on the Wall, 2022) is based on the three years he spent living and working in Syrian Kurdistan in solidarity with the women-led, direct-democratic revolution there.

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