Content Warning: this essay makes references to sexual violence and abuse.
I haven’t written a new poem in months. Dozens of old notebooks squat on my shelves, blank space waiting for the poetry.
At my first Barbican Young Poets session fifteen years ago, we were each given a notebook and pen from the Japanese stationer MUJI. I’ve used those notebooks for drafting poems ever since. The notebooks are thin with broad pages, with cardboard-brown covers and spines bound in tasteful colours like ochre, oxblood and slate grey.
I haven’t written a new poem in months. To be honest, I’m afraid of what comes out of me now. In these days bedevilled with artificially generated slop, a pervading sense of doom lorded over us by authoritarians, genocidal regimes and omnipotent supercorporations, addicted as I am to tapping the glass I keep in my pocket, always within reach, poetry—that magnetic force that leads us into the dirt to bring up treasure, truth, or worms—feels distant.
I haven’t written a new poem in months.
This confession may prove false. Like maybe every other writer I have my places for the stuff that comes from my brain, late at night, the rag ends of my subconscious, material, possibly, for future projects. I call these my little scraps. Sometimes it’s the notorious notes app that receives them; mostly it’s these skinny notebooks which are defaced with my dreams, memories and inane rambling.
These days the scrawls are mostly artefacts from my haunted brain: an evolutionary trick, it shuffles what it knows and what it hides. I never have a full view of my own history. This is complex PTSD – this hide and seek game with our own memories and experiences. In protecting ourselves from what happened before, there’s slippage; it’s hard to hold onto anything long enough to write. Notebooks waiting on shelves like an archive of murmurs and half-sentences.
I spend months, years, returning to these fragments, waiting for them to resonate, to realise the full shape of their poem. I am practised enough now to sense that most of what I generate from these specifically troubled places has to go through this longer process, like seasoning a piece of wood, or some other neat metaphor – the work which time does in secret, the way we change and then look back at our own self later.
I wrote my poem ‘Appetit’ this way, before I realised that was what I was doing. The poem began during my A-Levels, when I studied Chaucer.
The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe begins with a much longer Prologe in which Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ character bespeaks vividly her robust sexual inclinations, that she “evere folwede myn appetit”over the course of numerous marriages. We were set a practice essay on the theme of ‘appetit’ in the work. My essay scored a mediocre mark; appetit, burrowed into me and waited.
It was only after graduating from university, returning to live in the place I had grown up and realising the events of what happened at uni had pursued me there, that appetit twitched into existence. I wrote the lines “press my foxglove eyes for poison / drain my golden blood”. I wasn’t sure where to go with these lines and images, felt they might just be ornamental, wordplay for the sake of it. I ‘scrapped’ them.
A year later, I took up the words again, spun them into a short poem. Steve Dearden of The Writing Squad sensed it wasn’t finished (he was right, as usual). He encouraged me to keep working on it.
Two years, several versions. In the same stretch of time, I received EMDR treatment on the NHS for what happened to me at university and from when I was very young—the kind of things which affect so many of us. I made a short film about what it’s like to have PTSD in a medical setting. I finished and submitted the poem ‘Appetit’ for the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, which it then won.
Our sixth form English teacher made the point that Chaucer was thought to have raped a woman called Cecily Chaumpaigne; evidence seemed to suggest that Chaumpaigne had received a private settlement by Chaucer’s friend John Grove to drop her case.[1] This has recently been complicated by new evidence, that this was a labour dispute rather than sexual misconduct. The fact remains that Chaucer’s work leans heavily on rape as punchline, footnote, fascination – conveniently fed, as Carissa Harris remarks, through “the mouths of his vividly-drawn characters” of the Canterbury Tales, and in so doing “escape[ing] accountability for the things contained in them”.[2]
In The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe, a knight is apprehended on the charge of sexual misconduct; he will be spared punishment if he can discover “what wommen love moost”. Within the Prologe the Wife says it is “Bet to be wedded than to brynne” (better to be married than to ‘burn’), a double-entendre on the dual benefit of marriage: better to be married and have sex, than burn with lust; and, better to be married and have sex in wedlock, than burn in Hell as punishment for extramarital relations.
In ‘Appetit’ I took this line to its logical extreme, sinking down into the Earth with the abducted Persephone, down to the hellfires of Hades, her uncle, who has been ‘gifted’ her by her father Zeus as his new bride.
ChatGPT is a pattern-recognition software developed by OpenAI (definitely do not look up the company’s founder/CEO Sam Altman, and the allegations against him by his own kin).
Altman’s software appropriates (a fancy word for ‘steals’) the language of authors, scientists, journalists and everyday people, and, trained on this information, responds to ‘prompts’ by end users to regurgitate a smoothed-out average of the content that fed it. Instantaneous results. Fake wood, no seasoning required. No need to wait, or work, or think, or even write.
Thank god, then, that poetry can’t be made like this. Theoretically, I could feed all my poems to one of these Large Language Models—undoubtedly also trained on words stolen from other writers—and subsequently generate a new ‘poem’ based on one of my ‘scraps’.
But that isn’t poesis (a Greek word literally meaning ‘doing’ or ‘making’, something wrought). It’s unfortunate and deeply ironic that the word ‘prompt’ – used in writing workshops to instigate deeper exploration, new territory – is now associated with the input that generates simulated text or imagery. Like many writers, and probably anyone still reading, I’m biased against these technologies for moral and environmental reasons.
But aside from all that, it’s just not how poetry works. At the Barbican, Jacob Sam-La Rose told us that the poem begins in the brain. It begins in the body.
Sometimes the poem emerges almost fully formed. Most of the time, for me, the poem is a humble scrap, a thought, an image, some concussed memory or sensation half-hidden by your own brain. Sometimes it lives in you for a very, very long time, grows into your hair and nails. Grows without you watching it, and you nourish it without realising, change it, change yourself: make new friends, read poetry, brush your teeth, run your hands along railings and tree bark, listen to music, eavesdropped conversations, devastating news or mundane accounts of lovers’ dreams.
The poem waits, and you change, and you scribble out scraps and scrabble inside the walls of your own anxieties and ego and self-doubt. And then, sometimes, you return to the poem, minutes, weeks, years later, ready both to look at what this scrap points to and determined, patient or skilled enough to coax it into an existence.
Outside your skull and skin it becomes something else entirely: not a Platonic, smooth, glowing, perfect object of the mind, but a gnarled, aching, knotted and real creature, marred with all the thumbprints and clawmarks of life lived.
During a lecture as part of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, Edward Docx described the act of writing as a spell that, as you are casting it, casts itself over you. It is the friction of our quotidian experience which generates sparks. Much magic lies dormant for us still.
My thoughts on artificial intelligence have been informed by Inigo Laguda and Karen Hao.
[1] Roger, Euan and Sobecki, Sebastian, “Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the Statute of Laborers: New Records and Old Evidence Reconsidered”, The Chaucer Review (2022) 57 (4): 407–437. https://doi.org/10.5325/chaucerrev.57.4.0407.
[2] Harris, Carissa, “For Chaucer, With Rage”, The Sundial (ACMRS). https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/for-chaucer-with-rage-05245e1da7bb.
Kit Byford won the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2024 and The Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize 2025. They are an alum of the Barbican Young Poets, The Writing Squad and The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, and they were a Britten Pears Young Artist 23-24. They were a co-founder of the Dead [Women] Poets Society and their pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, is published with ignitionpress. Their work has appeared in Magma, bath magg, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Wales and Propel, and in numerous anthologies, most recently A Midnight Treasury of Macabre and Weird Poems (Rizzoli UK) and Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury). Kit is writing their first collection of poems with the support of an Arts Council DYCP grant.
Instagram: @kitbyford
Web: www.kmrbyford.com
