Introduction

What happens when you read a poem? Sometimes the writing washes over you, sometimes it puts up a bit of a fight, sometimes it reaches out to you and sometimes it comes over a little shy. It can be the simplest thing in the world, and it can also feel like an exercise in cerebral multi-tasking. It shimmers, it changes, it is a fundamentally fickle form. Thousands of fine thinkers have devoted themselves to deciphering the poetic act, deciding what it is to write, and perhaps more importantly, what it is to read.

For me, poems start a conversation that I rarely want to finish. I love the intricacies and possibilities that can be found in a single, finely-wrought poem, and I want to respond to it, to whisper back. I am interested in ways of seeing, in the perceptual process of reading, the patterns in language, and the importance of poetry in modern society.  

This project is a way of keeping my hand in a world of words - it's important to me to continue interacting with poetry as a 9 to 5 graduate in the real world. Every Sunday I will write five hundred words or so on a piece of poetry in a bid to keep the conversation going. The Spotless Mirror is a phrase lovingly borrowed from a 17th century writer named Thomas Traherne. Like a poem, a mirror is an impossible surface - we look at it, we look through it, we step into it, and what we see is entirely our own. 

My name is Alexandra Sutton, and I am a reader, writer and researcher based in Manchester. If you have any requests or thoughts, I'd love you to get in touch.