There was a time when I thought the “writers can't be sober” hypothesis was a complete load. Writing requires a certain amount of mental clarity, I reasoned, and you can't expect that from someone vomiting in the gutter. And since everything after the first draft is a frustrating, mechanical process involving lots of rewrites and edits, it also requires time and diligence (two things your average junkie can barely comprehend, let alone put to good use). Yessir, I put that old chestnut to bed long ago...

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Suparna had woken up, gone to the bathroom and had seen it from the bathroom window. It was early in the morning; there was not a streak of sunlight anywhere. Only ten or fifteen metres away from her backyard, on the slope of the road towards New Incline, stood a yellow truck of the coal company. In the middle of the road five or six men in police uniform sat on the chatrs. There was little to be curious about...

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The search for meaning in poetry is a tricky journey to undertake, often involving an analysis of reoccurring themes and images, coupled with an understanding of the poet’s previous works and the reader’s own experiences, all the while considering the specific form, diction and syntax. From this amalgam, what a poem means is going to be greatly subjective and flexible; yet the actual reading process is usually fairly linear and consistent from person to person: we read left to right, top to bottom...

 

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