Two poets at work on the OED

I started writing poetry a few years before coming to work at the OED, so it is only a coincidence that my first pamphlet (A to Yourself, 1989) is composed entirely of lines in alphabetical order. After I started working here I became intoxicated by the width and weight of the language, which seemed to connect with the sea and what the sea throws up for us. I took a long break and walked around the south-west coast of England, composing from this my first book-length poem (Littoral, 1996), in which language was scattered like flotsam over my path.

For many years my task was to sort through the OED's files of quotations, and this constant exposure to so many quotations from different contexts and sources made me feel that a long poem could be written composed entirely from other people's sentences. This thought was the starting-point for a long poem about the twentieth century (A Spy in the House of Years, 2001). This was a sequence of 100 sonnets, each made from 14 sentences that were written in a particular year. Almost without realizing it, I had duplicated the appearance of the OED's quotation paragraphs, as if each year was a subsense of the huge and complex word that is the last century. Enjoyable in a way, revisiting libraries, trying to assemble each year into a kind of wholeness, sometimes trying to find just one statement that would make a year come to life. But at the end of this process (and the labour of proof-reading the whole thing), I felt that I preferred to use my own words.

Now that I have become an Assistant Editor at the OED, I have less time to reflect on the connections between poetry and lexicography; most of my mental energy is devoted to editing itself. It has become clear to me that a poet can't simply cherry-pick the most elegant but obscure words. Either poetry comes organically into the mind (inspiration), or it is built from some formal architecture that is given by tradition or invented for the occasion. In either case, working in such proximity to the raw material of poetry can be a hindrance. Inspiration is blocked by the knowledge that there are so many possible words we could use. Formal ideas become snarled up in the trickiness and slipperiness of words. A person can become too familiar with a word, too aware of all that it might mean.

However, at times, in the evening, at home while trying to write, I can forget what my job is, and if I am lucky I can write with a greater awareness of how language can be used in a poem. But these moments are - as the OED might put it - rare, perhaps obsolete.

Like Giles, I had long had a sense of a conflict of interests between working on the OED and writing poetry. It was something I quite deliberately kept to the back of my mind, so when I was asked at a poetry reading last autumn whether writing and editing influenced one another at all, I was unprepared. 'Yes,' I found myself saying. 'It's my ambition to get the note "also with punning allusion" attached to every definition in the dictionary.'

Although I've probably added only half a dozen or so of these notes in the past eighteen months, I suspect the remark does pinpoint the difference between poet and editor. In writing poetry a word rarely means a single thing; just as it will have sound-associations with other words within the poem, it will have sense-associations that summon echoes of meanings other than the most immediate one. While I'm constantly aware of such echoes, I want to add to them, rather than draw on them passively; the final choice of words is an odd balancing act between ventriloquizing a number of existing senses and the implicit declaration, with Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, that a word means 'just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' Editing, by contrast, depends on a razor-blade separation of the senses, and on the definition of consensus usage.

Of course, both writing and editing depend on the ability to discriminate between senses. In editing, though, this is the end of the process; in writing it is a preliminary stage. This is why I'm delighted by any usage which challenges editorial principles, in particular by those recalcitrant words attested in figurative use before they appear in a literal sense. As an editor, I enjoy shaping such entries into an allowable form which nonetheless accounts for as many of the nuances of meaning as possible. As a writer, even in casting my net, all my sympathies are with the red herring.