The O:JA&L Masters Series
POETRY: All forms & styles
An Essay on Craft
Bruce McRae
My Craft and Sullen Art…
Click HERE to explore or download Bruce McRae’s free PDF chapbook MY CRAFT AND SULLEN ART…
Part memoir, part ars poetica, this essay introduces Bruce McRae’s chapbook My Craft and Sullen Art by tracing the habits, accidents, and convictions that shaped its ten poems. Writing born of insomnia, performance, and long apprenticeship moves from the intimate hours before dawn to the largest questions poetry can bear. McRae reflects on method without mystique, skepticism without cynicism, and feeling without melodrama, offering brief commentaries that illuminate each piece’s origin and intent. Taken together, these notes map a journey from restless sleeplessness to apocalyptic humor, charting a poet’s lifelong commitment to listening, witnessing, and holding fast to language itself.
Click HERE to explore or download Bruce McRae’s free PDF chapbook MY CRAFT AND SULLEN ART…
An autodidact, I’ve never considered writing as a science and have approached it organically, over a period of decades. A songwriter initially, and still, I didn’t begin to write ‘or the page until I was in my mid 40s, after several years in the ‘90s treading the boards on London stages attempting what they call performance poetry. I screwed up my courage and began submitting poems in ’97 and received immediate positive feedback, and then have spent the past 30 years reading, writing, revising, submitting and publishing poems. Over that time my homely methods have remained much the same, if not as involved now. Insomnia was a driving force.
Looking at the ceiling at 3 a.m. I began writing and reading poems, sometimes up to 10 hours a day, and for years. I now write only in the morning, nursing a coffee, the world still in bed and keeping quiet, which is a requirement for me, utter silence, even when typing. I write freehand then type the poems, revising over time. Now I only write 3-4 months a year, but every morning during that stint. And it’s as straightforward as that, for me. So, let’s talk about the ten poems I’ve chosen for this series.
We start at the beginning, “Accidental Nocturne,” a poem addressing my chronic sleeplessness, which is the source of all my inklings, that phrase ‘you can sleep when you’re dead’ reverberating in my inner ear. Living under Heathrow’s flight path in the 90s, cheek by jowl with the masses, I began writing in the night, the wee hours the only time the majority of London was asleep. It soon became a habit, and then a fruitful practice. Even as I write this it’s 5:30 a.m. You do find yourself asking some Big Questions in the dark, the voices of the angels urging you to examine every and any thing which comes to mind.
The second poem, “All In,” attempts just that, with me trying to jam the whole world into one poem and of course, falling short. There aren’t enough words for places to put them, apparently. I do recall this poem being much shorter the first time round, but yours truly needed more world, more words, more time. A list in disguise, I’m not sure where the term ‘great chain of being’ came from, but I’m just a single link, and my purpose is to hold fast.
“A List of Shadows” is a list of shadows, somewhat surreptitious, but a list, nonetheless. Anything about shadows is rife with cliché, but try you must, and the shadows listed are not what usually comes to mind, perhaps influenced by the song lyrics ‘the shadow of your smile’. I begin the poem with an epigram from Shakespeare. You can’t go wrong quoting the bard of Stratford, and it seemed quite suitable.
The next poem up is “The Wretched Heart,” a slight comment on the over-sensationalising of emotions. Once upon a time emoting was a thing to be avoided in poetry, and ‘the heart’ is the height of a hackneyed allusion especially so in songwriting. Poets are a handwringing lot, but I’ve been desensitized to confessional poetry and tales of families and love affairs et cetera. Kitchen sink melodrama, I feel, is cloying. One can write about such issues, but I prefer to skirt around ‘the self’.
With “Visitants” I’ve employed a favourite trope, the dialogue, to entertain the supernatural. It’s an inner conversation between one who wants to believe in the otherness of things, and the skeptic who pursues a more pragmatic approach to existence. When it comes to the unknown, surely there is much the senses miss, the spaces between realities vast. It’s what we don’t know we don’t know that encourages curiosity.
“Listen To My Voice” was supposed to be in my latest collection of poems but the editor asked me to remove it lest it offend. It’s a montage of statements made by various North American natives despairing and angered by the white man and his treatment of the indigenous peoples, a piece I feel is both harrowing and poetic. I do wish I’d kept track of the individuals quoted, but I wasn’t as thorough when I compiled the quotes as I am nowadays. So, none of the words are mine, I’m just the messenger, the curator of this poem.
The next poem up is “This Poem is Banned,” a response, in a way, to the previous piece, and a backhanded comment on censorship and being silenced. Many younger editors are quite nervous about publishing anything remotely controversial. However well-meaning and often anti-censorial they purport to be, the end result is much the same as that which they claim to resist. It’s not a surprise this poem has been rejected again and again.
“Death Sentences” wants to have a little fun with death and dying, each line a statement about or skirting around the non-act of being not-alive. Other than poetic ennui, Death has to be the most popular of subject matters, if ‘popular’ is the right word. And that’s the thing about us so-called poets; we’re always in search of the right word, even in the darkest of rooms.
In “Tools of the Trade” I reflect upon the implements of labour. A mendicant poet, I’ve had more jobs than hot dinners, whatever work I could get to pay the rent. I’ve wasted my life doing jobs even a robot would want to forego, all in pursuit of I-don’t-know-what-anymore. So, I’m a deft hand with a broom and am put in mind if Seamus Heany’s poems where he refers to his pen as a tool for digging potatoes. Alas, all my pen has ever dug is my own shallow grave.
The last poem is “The Last Day of the World,” a tragicomedy skit, the protagonist apparently acquainted with the Devil himself and fed up with his deviltry. Still living at home, his poor mother is the go-between for good and evil, an onerous task on the best of days. If only the narrator had spoken with his pal, we could have avoided this whole apocalypse thing being foisted upon us.
So, in ten poems we’ve gone from a rough night’s sleep to the end of humankind. Not too shabby, for a man armed only with a pen in the dark of night.
About the writer:
BRUCE MCRAE, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle, and North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.
Image: Surveillance (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creator. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
This project was made possible, in part, through support from
Grayling and Wraith, a growth marketing company.
O:JA&L’S BUTTONHOOK PRESS MASTERS SERIES
Click on the titles below to explore or download the free PDF chapbooks in the O:JA&L Masters Series.
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Brian Clements on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Mark Budman on Flash Discourse
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Ray Gonzalez on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Michael Martone on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Roberta Allen on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Peter Conners on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Maxine Chernoff on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Pedro Ponce on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Tom Hazuka on Flash Fiction
With an interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Kent Dixon on Flash Fiction & Nonfiction
With an interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
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