Over the years I’ve become aware of a range of different editorial styles, from the fully engaged ‘hands on’ editor who wants to get in there and mess about, to the totally accepting and unchallenging. Both these extremes can be equally unnerving in their own ways. The former risks undermining confidence in the work, while the latter can leave you feeling vulnerable without any critical screening. The ideal is somewhere in between, of course, with helpful input but the ultimate decisions remaining with the poet.

My own input varies. Sometimes it’s just a matter of ensuring design and typographic consistency. On other occasions when I have definite suggestions to make about the poems themselves, there’s often a tension between between the need to say something and not wanting to impose my own taste on someone else’s work.

Two main issues exercise me. Firstly there’s the tendency we can all have to make a poem conform to a current orthodoxy, or at least to our own ideas of what a poem should be like. While this is often done with the intention of helping the poem succeed in the wider world, it also carries the risk of putting it in a straightjacket. The old ‘show don’t tell’ mantra is often wheeled out, for instance, as if it’s cast in stone; but it’s only advice that applies to a particular and current way of looking at poetry and is by no means a universal rule. In fact, I find the whole business of taste too subjective for any one approach to seem right or wrong.

In workshop groups I’ve participated in over the years, comments and suggestions have sometimes been more about the sort of poem we ourselves would like to write than helping the poet make their own poem as good as it can be. I know I can be guilty of this myself, at which point I try to sit back and shut up. So what I’m after is a balance between respecting the integrity of the writing – and the poet’s individual voice – while making it as hospitable as possible for the reader.

The second of my concerns is the matter of accessibility, the need or not for clarity, or for literal cogency. Often we make a plea for a poem to give us more of a clue as to what it or some part of it is about. While not making a case for wilful obscurity, I would make a case for not deadening a poem by incorporating add-on explanatory bits and pieces. The actual writing, sound, imagery, rhythm can at times be sufficent in itself and any understanding on the part of the reader may reveal itself over time. I think of a comment once made about August Kleinzhaler to the effect that he never ‘condescends’ to the reader. And I’ve noticed, with myself and others, that a failure to understand is frequently a limitation on the part of the listener/reader rather than the poem. So I ask myself, when something’s not clear, is this my problem or the poem’s? I remember Michael Donaghy on an Arvon course saying that if in a group of seventeen one person ‘gets’ a poem, that means it works.

So editing’s a balancing act. I’m on the poem’s side, but in relation to its reader perhaps more than the poet, conscious of trying to inhabit some internalised version of the reader to see how the poem will be received and understood. But of course my notion of the reader is as subjective as anything else in this game. So, there we go, it’s down to the tyranny of an editor’s taste again.