'This article aims to reconstruct features of John Forbes’ compositional process in his first decade of serious practice, through analysing drafts and early versions of his poems. I compare early versions of ‘Here’, ‘The Joyful Mysteries’ and ‘Stalin’s Holidays’ to their final incarnations to show how Forbes was resistant to a fixed, or single, idea when writing a poem. In the context of such openness, Forbes’ poems often moved towards a sense of closure, through the pressure his use of form applied and through its more suggestive qualities. Following a comment Forbes made in an interview, I label this process ‘formal association’. I contend that Forbes sought a balance between closure and openness, while arguing that the dynamic interplay of this openness with formal association, during the composition, was crucial to his achievement.' (Publication abstract)