Discussing Pattern Poetry with Mark Wyatt

Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His pattern poetry has recently appeared in Artemis Journal, Borderless, Cosmic Daffodil, Dust Poetry, Exterminating Angel, Full Bleed, Greyhound Journal, Hyperbolic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Journal Of Mathematics And The Arts, Libre, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Neologism Poetry Journal, Osmosis, The Plentitudes, Re-Mediate, Shift, Sontag Mag, Streetcake Magazine, Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, Tap Into Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, and Typo.

Mark is the author of “Terrorist” and “Saudi Arabia” from Issue 11.

Q: What drew you into pattern poetry?

I came across John Hollander’s (1981) “Rhyme’s Reason,” which includes a brief discussion of pattern poetry and an example of such a poem (in a circular shape) using a monospaced font, in about 1984. While I was familiar with George Herbert’s "Easter Wings” and Dylan Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer,” I was as yet unaware (due to American magazines being less available then in the UK) of Hollander’s earlier experimentations with pattern poetry, including his iconic poem “Swan and Shadow,” first published in Poetry in 1966, which I recently paid tribute to.

However, I could see the potential of creating pattern poems on my monospaced typewriter (this was still the golden age of the typewriter) following Hollander’s (1981) example, and in 1985 I wrote 29 pattern poems. These included my map poem “Africa,” which I recently recorded myself reading.

Q: How were those early poems received?

Editors were often intrigued by the pattern poems, but efforts to get them published were challenged by technical constraints. The poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement really liked my rectangular-shaped poem “Green” and accepted it in 1986 on the proviso that the typesetters could handle it. He then wrote back a few weeks later to say that unfortunately they could not. The poem recently appeared in Borderless. (By the way, and this also concerns technical constraints but in a different channel and age, this poem “Green,” as published online in Borderless, would benefit from an Editor's Note: “Please view this poem on a PC to maintain its shape”).

Even when my 1985 pattern poems were accepted, they were rarely printed using a monospaced font. Sometimes this meant that the pattern completely disappeared or was only evident from the typesetter’s subsequent shaping and creative use of spacing and different font sizes. This was quite disappointing, as it was then impossible for the reader to see the workings.

I had far more success with the free verse poems I wrote in 1986, three of which appeared in the New Statesman. However, reflecting a few years later, while I was teaching overseas, by this time out of touch with the British poetry scene, I felt that my best work had been with the 1985 pattern poems. (Other examples published recently include “Yellow” and “White”). After I moved overseas to teach, I wrote very little poetry, but it was exclusively pattern poetry.

Q: How is your life different now that you live in the UK, after having taught abroad for so long?

When I lived overseas, my focus was fully on teaching and academic work. Between 2003 and 2023, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of academic text (articles, book chapters, edited books), but only three short pattern poems. The previous decade and a half (while living in Thailand, Nepal, and Oman) I had written more poetry, but still not much. I was caught up in the here-and-now, and I had no access to distant poetry markets during the 1990s (when the Internet was still in its infancy). So, I disappeared without an audience and without an opportunity to read much new work.

Returning to the UK in 2023 was quite liberating. I loved the countries I had lived in and the people I worked with, but when living overseas in some parts of the world, you are inevitably conscious of not quite having the same rights — for example, free speech — that you might have in your own country; even if you speak the local language and have assimilated culturally as far as possible, you might still be self-conscious of your foreigner status. To survive in such environments, it is wise to have some kind of filter regarding what you say, write and publish. So, there may be an element of self-censorship that might operate at a subliminal level. The first poem I wrote after I returned to live in the UK was “Saudi Arabia” (a country I have never been to), the map poem in Radon #11.

Q: Does the mantra in that poem — “I am a professional golfer” — represent that kind of self-censorship, or a person’s compartmentalization in the face of atrocity?

The poem’s persona is that of a professional golfer undergoing something of a crisis on a golf course in Saudi Arabia. The speaker is haunted by their knowledge of the country’s human rights abuses while trying to justify to themself being there for the money. So, the speaker is literally a working professional golfer with a guilty conscience trying to compartmentalize their professional role as conscience free. Of course, this is impossible. The speaker is complicit in supporting the regime by their very presence.

The poem deliberately echoes Kit Wright’s poem “I found South African breweries most hospitable” from his 1983 collection The Boys Bump-starting the Hearse.

The persona in Wright’s poem is a professional cricketer lured to South Africa for financial reasons during the Apartheid era (when such a career choice was rightly widely condemned in the sporting press in all the parts of the world where cricket is played). The refrain includes: “I am a professional cricketer. My only consideration is my family.”

Q: Regarding “Terrorist” (also in Radon 11), this poem can be read in a multitude of ways. Do you see the speaker as meant to be read sympathetically as a product of trauma, or critically as an example of how pain is weaponized into fanaticism?

The poem is an attempt to understand why someone would commit such an act. Of course, there might be many relevant factors, such as having experienced brutalizing repression and discrimination, powerlessness, lack of opportunity or alternative means of self-expression, humiliation, alienation from the state but kinship with a particular group, narrow ideological beliefs fed by toxic media, religious extremism, brainwashing, peer pressure, coercion.

There can also be an intellectual element, given that some terrorists (maybe particularly those who have been educated, for example to postgraduate level) are making what might seem to them a final logical but regrettable decision (sacrificing their own lives and often those of many entirely innocent people who simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), having given up hope in alternative political means but aware of the cumulative effects of terrorism in demoralizing populations.

So while terrorists are often dismissed as purely evil “human animals,” their psyches can be quite complex, and I think it’s important to try to understand the root causes of terrorism, as otherwise it will continue to be with us. The character in this poem is certainly complex and might come across as angry, haunted, calculated, determined, but is not asking for sympathy for themself, I don’t think.

The shape of the poem (the gaunt head in profile that will soon disintegrate) is intended to help bring the reality of the message home that terrorism cannot be fully defeated with guns and bombs (as more terrorists will inevitably spring up). Peace can only be achieved by addressing the root causes of terrorism and so by allowing people everywhere to live out their lives in peace and harmony focused on achieving their hopes and dreams.

Q: You refer to the shapes of these two poems: the map of a country, the head in profile. What motivates the choice of shape?

That’s an interesting question. Sometimes there is an assumption that a poem in the shape of an object is providing a kind of petit-bourgeois homage to that object, so offering an example of poor art seeking to imitate reality. However, even one of the earliest pattern poems in antiquity, “Egg” by the Hellenistic poet, Simias of Rhodes, is playing with the reader’s expectations through its shape, offering sophisticated allusions in recounting a nightingale’s efforts to produce the egg; the poem (written ca. 325 BCE) is far from a homage. 

Likewise, one of my earliest pattern poems, “Minuet,” published last year in Typo, is in the shape of a very dull suburban house (with windows and a front door), but is telling the story of a woman feeling psychologically trapped in the house and desperate to break free. There is black humor in the poem, and the confines of the shape contribute, I hope, to the comedy.

The key thing about pattern poetry is that the words and image interact, sometimes in surprising ways. The image should certainly not be taken at face value. 

Regarding map poems, these can work in different ways. The shape of “Saudi Arabia” would be more recognizable to readers familiar with the country, so the map shape is a way of calling out the human rights record to those more in the know. My map poem “Britain,” published in Ambit in the 1980s, recounts the comical jaunt of a drunken Scotsman down to the south coast of England, via various geographically referenced places. So, different kinds of things can be going on. Recently, as well, I completed a 60-poem sequence of pattern poems based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and many of the shapes represent different stages of the transformation process, for example as a head turns into coral or as someone becomes an owl.

Q: What inspires you so greatly about Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

Ovid has a wonderfully comic, deeply subversive intelligence in the way he grapples with acute forms of human suffering that tend to result in transformation. Through pattern poetry I tend to approach these transformations from alternative perspectives, for example, taking on the persona of Actaeon’s Diana (“In the Company of Strangers”) or the persona of Aglauros transformed into stone.

I have had some success with these poems. Over 30 of the 60 poems in the sequence have been accepted by around 25 different magazines in the last 15 months. Ovid’s tales are wonderful, and it has been fun to re-story them through pattern poetry.

Q: What are you working on at present?

One of the great things about working with Ovid is that many people have some knowledge of the myths to draw upon when approaching the poems. That shared knowledge base is helpful. Recently, I started a sequence of pattern poems based on another famous book, the Bible, which is full of colorful stories, some well-known, some little-known, that affect our consciousness. Poems from this sequence have started to appear, for example in Ink Sweat and Tears, and in the retelling of Abel and Cain in Re-Mediate.

Since engaging with the Bible, one thing that has surprised me is how much genocide there is in the Old Testament. In many ways, the parallels between then and now are quite striking and disturbing, which offers the potential for political pattern poetry addressing contemporary issues.

Q: You’ve had some success with your poetry in the journal and magazine space. What is your process for submitting?

It’s very different from how it used to be! In the old days, pre-Internet, it was necessary to type or photocopy (probably at the library) the poems to be submitted, stick them in an envelope with a stamped self-addressed envelope, and then wait and hope. Generally, people only submitted to magazines within their own country (where their stamps would work) and could not consider submitting simultaneously, as it would have been very difficult to subsequently withdraw poems from consideration. Obviously, now the landscape is totally different with online submission systems.

A constant, though, is the need to understand the market. Very good practice is reading several issues of any magazines you are thinking of sending poems to, so as to get a feel for whether or not they would be right for your work. If your work looks totally different to anything else the magazine publishes, what is the editorial stance? Some editors are at pains to indicate that they are open to all forms of poetry, looking for quality in whatever shape or form they find it.

When I started sending things out to magazines again last year, I did think that it might be easier to get things published in magazines that indicate they publish “visual poetry,” but then I found that this was not necessarily always the case. Champions of “post-asemic writing” might be little interested in “pattern poetry,” for example, which I conceptualize as lying towards the verbal end of the visual poetry continuum (with concrete poetry influenced by movements in art such as dadaism towards the other end of the same continuum). Some champions of experimental writing have accepted my work, as have many editors who do not usually publish pattern poetry, which has been heartening. It’s been thrilling to engage with a range of magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere.

After identifying magazines I would like to submit to, I check whether or not they accept simultaneous submissions and then reflect on which as-yet unaccepted and available poems might best fit the call. I have a spreadsheet with a list of magazines, their submission deadlines, and an indication of where poems are currently under submission. It’s important, partly for ethical reasons, to keep precise records. Sometimes poems under consideration need to be withdrawn if accepted elsewhere. I am always delighted to write straight back with a "thank you" whenever I get an acceptance (and then immediately withdraw the poem from any other magazine considering it). I would hate to let anyone down.

Q: What do you think is the potential for pattern poetry and how would you suggest poets who have not tried pattern poetry to go about beginning?

Pattern poetry will probably always be a minority taste. There is a long history of critics throughout the centuries going out of their way to rubbish pattern poetry, as Dick Higgins’ volume Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (SUNY, 1987) emphasizes. Some editors find the forms distracting; they don’t appreciate the interaction between image and words. At the same time, pattern or shape poetry does have its contemporary champions, including Tishani Doshi, who has produced some delightful examples, such as “The Comeback of Speedos.”

For the poet thinking about trying pattern poetry, I would recommend first developing an image that would be central to the poem you would like to write. Some shapes can be found (e.g., simplified maps) or recycled. For example, the feline image in “Not a cat” is based on “Kitty” in John Hollander’s Types of Shape (Yale, 1991), though my version is plumper (36 characters with spaces across the tummy rather than 20).

Once you have an image, draw it on graph paper (to work out how many characters (letters plus spaces plus punctuation marks) you need for each line. Check the design on a monospaced font, such as Courier New. With a design ready to go, you may want to look for further inspiration and reflect a bit more. Then start writing. It can be fully engaging. Enjoy!