Ian Duhig

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Beginning with a Line from John Ashbery

The room I entered was a dream of this room:
two dimensions, no window, wallpaper white
with black designs which moved when I slept.
The room I entered was a dream of this room.

There is another room but it is inside that one,
a tomb inside another, stanzas in more stanzas,
poets inside more poets. A matryoshka matrix,
there is another room but it is inside that one.

The theme of this room is stanza’s meaning,
if meaning is more than a stain on my dream.
Old yellowed paper meant a scream of pain.
The theme of this room is stanzas dreaming.

I stayed in one room when I broke my mind.
My face grew as lined as my notebook pages.
I didn’t know the man whose name I signed.
I thought not just days but poems were cages.

The night of pens was my soul’s white night:
the poems I wrote took all and more to write;
these words are only shadows of electric light.
The night of pens was my soul’s white night.

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
That poem’s dreamer lies in his not this tomb.
My name still seems to me my nom-de-plume.
The room I entered is now my costume room.

Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer and he is still actively involved with minority and marginalised groups on artistic projects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize four times.

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