Book Worm: If I can't hear the music it's not a poem
Poet David Harsent
Where do poems come from? That was the question asked of Philip Larkin by BBC radio on the occasion of his 50th birthday in 1972, to which he responded "I seem to have spent my life waiting for poems to turn up," before adding that "writing isn't an act of the will - all you can do is try to make sure that when something does arrive you aren't too tired or too busy or anything else to do it justice".
That, I imagine, would be the view of most real poets, and it's certainly the view of David Harsent, who has just won the prestigious TS Eliot prize for his 11th collection of verse, Fire Songs (Faber & Faber). "Poems fall to hand," he told the Observer last weekend. "If you are a poet, you are open to the notion of poems happening. Lines just occur. Yet poems also always have to be worked for."
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