faster

I have always known that I work quickly. My work whether text, visual or sound poems, essays, or whatever else emerges in brief intense bursts. I simply assumed that this was a flaw, that high quality work could only be reached through laborious and extended processes. Education and other aspects of the culture tended to support this belief.

Poems, plays and novels are minutely analysed. Reviews and critiques talk about craft. We're told that genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration (I'll return to this). Poets and critics would talk about weeks, months or years to complete a poem, where I tended to think in minutes, hours or days at a stretch. Painters would take years over single paintings.

Evidently there was something wrong with me, some desire for instant gratification. While I was happy to edit pieces through four or five quickfire drafts even while a piece was being written, once it was complete I had no desire to put it in a drawer and come back to it later. Where I did return to a piece of work I'd inevitably find that I'd moved on. I didn't agree with anything in the poem, I had no desire to put it right, but it would often remain a compelling performance.

A similar process was at work when I was out walking. Ideas occurred to me that I would memorise or write in a notebook. But what started as vibrant, propulsive, convincing would deflate on the page. Any attempts to revive such a piece killed it all the quicker. It didn't occur to me at this stage that performance, site and situation specificity, and the exploration of ideas rather than their exposition were an important part of my aesthetic. That particular realisation came early in 2008 when I started exploring sound poetry. But I still didn't make the leap to accepting that a rapid work rate might be a strength elsewhere.

Which is not to say that I hadn't noticed the difference between work struggled through over weeks and large numbers of drafts and work dashed off in a few hours and maybe four drafts at most with only minor changes. I was well aware that the latter works had vitality that the more laborious pieces lacked. I was simply conditioned to believe that they were the product of a self-gratifying weakness, and that the flaws evident in them might be overcome by more application, further drafts.

This perhaps isn't very surprising, since I rarely took the time to polish work in this way I had no way of knowing if it might work. What's more surprising is that I was well aware that I worked well producing short sequences of pieces in a brief period. These would be complex and richly interrelated in a way that more painstakingly planned work never was. The more pre-planning went into a piece the more heavily its lifeless corpse would fall on the page. Structuring and editing produced leaden, linear work I felt no affection for, while more rapidly worked pieces managed to dance despite their faults.

Related to this I realised early on that I will never write a novel. My attention span simply isn't up to it. I get bored of the plot, or the situation, or the characters, or all of them after about twenty pages. Or I've changed my mind about the ideas I wanted to explore, I either disagree with them or they're just not interesting anymore.

But it's only in the last week that I've begun to think that this might not be a fault, it might just be the condition of my mind, the way that I work best. I think part of the reason is there's a kind of moral supposition that the more carefully thought-out something is the better it is. We distrust pleasure, are suspicious of fun and things that seem effortless.

And yet I always read for pleasure, my poetry has always drawn more from pop music and visual art than any literary tradition, my writing is more libidnal than cerebral, more frenetic than considered. But in a climate where there's a moral distrust of such an approach I tried to fit in. Partly I guess I wanted to achieve perfection, something lasting, and it was only in brief moments before the last five years I was able to not give a fuck about precision. The clues were there. My favourite work - Derek Jarman's films, the music of The Fall particularly - embrace their faults, foreground roughness and means of production. They make no claims to anything more than personal authority. I immediately took pleasure from these.

Overhanging all of this is that Edison quote that genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Forgetting that word genius and assuming that the dictum holds true for any worthwhile work it sounds very forbidding. 90% perspiration? Are you fucking kidding? That doesn't sound like much fun. It sounds like a long hard slog of effort. Except that if you're good at something, if you enjoy what you're doing, or feel compelled by what you might achieve then that effort can be crowded into a short space. And large parts of that labour can be pleasurable. And if effort expended really is the criteria for judging the value of a piece then a poem written in say six hours in a single day will probably have more effort in it than a piece written slowly across a week and then tweaked over the following month. Certainly the level of concentration devoted solely to that piece will be far greater.

And if my new acceptance of my natural way of working is wrong? If my work only remains convincing for a single iteration, if none of it will last after I die? Well why the fuck should I care? I've moved onto the next piece, and once I'm dead I won't give a shit about anything every again.