Crossing over the border
For several weeks now I have been traipsing through a new literary country. You see, earlier this year I dusted off a couple of books of my favourite poets and, feeling inspired to pen some of my own verse, decided to pack a small suitcase and cross over the border. I’ve been holding hands with prose for a long time now and had almost forgotten the old friend that had kept me company years ago. A re-acquaintance was well overdue.
I pitch up at immigration control at the prose-poetry border and the officer eyes me suspiciously:
“You look like someone who likes to explain things a bit too much” he sneers.
“I’m trying to curb that habit” I start to explain… “But I do have the occasional tendency to be unjustifiably impressed with myself whilst others look on nonplussed” I add, hopefully.
”Well, in that case” replies the officer, narrowing his eyes, “maybe I’ll let you in for a few weeks”….
First I need to get oriented in this new land. Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., advises that to become proficient as a poet you need to read poetry “for 10,000 hours”. Let me break that down for you: that’s reading poetry for eight hours straight, every single day, for about three and a half years. Unsurprisingly, I take his advice with a large pinch of salt. And when I say “pinch” I mean enough to destroy the entire slug population in the Northern Hemisphere.
I seek out poems of modern, contemporary poets, not necessarily well-known, to gauge where poetry is “at” these days. But it’s like fumbling through the racks of discounted clothes at a store, three days after the sale started – there’s a lot of weird-sized left-overs to rifle through before chancing upon a rare item that appeals.
Inscrutability of a lot of the poetry is a recurring frustration. I don’t need to be spoon-fed, but at least give me some cutlery. Reading some poems, I think more sense has been gleaned from patients coming round from general anesthetic.
It feels like accessibility is inversely proportional to the poet’s need to be taken seriously. Some poems are built like exclusive clubs and my name isn’t on the guest list. Maybe I do need to embark on those 10,000 hours of reading to earn my membership, but in the end I decide to graciously grant myself early parole and be let loose on my own writing efforts.
My cursory review has however revealed a key advantage of poetry over prose: whilst poetry requires an increase in the artistic quotient, the threshold of what is a “worthy” topic plummets. I can write about the mundane and the seemingly trivial without fear of being trite. So even that table lamp sitting on the dresser in front of me is verse-worthy, assuming I have some feelings about it. (I don’t).
Varsity verse
It will come as no surprise to you that I wrote some poetry at University, because if angst, pretention and solipsistic self-regard cannot be found there then, well…
It will also come as little surprise that, as far as I can remember, most of my poetry was thoroughly unremarkable. And I dare say some of it stank like an open dumpster in an alleyway behind a Chinese restaurant in Soho.
It was the kind of poetry that undergrads write for themselves as an exercise in private catharsis – or to show that one, uncritical friend.
I would love to read some of it again to compare with the lines that I’ve produced now, twenty years later, but, having lost it on one of those floppy disks beloved of the mid-1990s, I have to settle for patchy memories.
Metaphor and allegory are literary tropes I lean on a lot in my prose. And I did so back in University. Some things never change. I once wrote a poem about a person trying to create emotional connection with another. The poem described the challenges of laying down a long train track, piece by piece, across a changing environment: sometimes-favourable, sometimes-indifferent, sometimes-inhospitable. But the crucial last few metres of track never get put down: a case of so near and yet so very far. No-one can accuse me of being too esoteric with my metaphors…
I also remember during those halcyon seasons reading a poem bursting with vivid imagery (and, I suspect, gratuitous use of words like “halcyon”); a joyous ode to something or other that I can’t remember now, but I was taken with the language. I guess that’s the point of a lot of poetry: you may not remember the exact content, but you remember how it made you feel.
Of course there followed the doomed attempt to replicate the exuberance in my own concoction. To be fair to myself, at least I was trying to fire up the joy thrusters and escape the gravity of teenage angst. The resulting effort was some kind of abstract rumination addressing at some point, I think, the tactual qualities of paint…
It was instantly forgettable, proven rather literally by the fact that I can’t remember a single line from it. Except one. It read “drip-drip between grateful toes”. No, that is not a typo. I recall it was one of those “anti-intellectual” approaches, an attempt to embrace a childlike quality of writing that represented innocence and unaffectedness; the type of writing that thought it was taking banality and turning it full circle into perspicuity. In the end I think the poem was just “anti-quality”.
It seems that all of my so-so poetry was forgotten but, ironically, it’s the stench of the really bad stuff that permeated down through the ages. As with a lot of art, it seems the rule is: “meh ” dies, “eurggh ” survives.
Hubris : sounds nice, but isn’t
I get back to the internet, that bottomless pool of tutelage, looking for more writing tips. One poet suggests thinking of a word I like the sound of and building a stanza around that. I recall a lovely few lines from a 90s indie rock song, Shining Light:
The north star in the firmament
You shine the most bright
I’ve seen you draped in an electric veil
Shrouded in celestial light
So I think, firmament : I like that word. (Full disclosure: I also like the sound of the words bulimic, precipitant, profligate, castigate and frippery; but I suspect that would make for a pretty lugubrious poem. Come to think of it, I like the sound of lugubrious too, as a word not a concept…).
I kick-off with a poem about the invincibility and confidence of youth, and decide not to over-think it and just see what spills onto the page. I quickly knock out a stanza which ends with the following lines:
…. My right to live is permanent / Future paths numberless and enthralling / Like stars across the night firmament….
As I read back the lines, my brow furrows and three thoughts occur to me.
First off, these lines prove that if anything is going to make already-clunky verse clunk even louder, it’s flat-footed end-rhymes. They need to go.
Secondly, the content reads like the author of the founding Charter of the United Nations being commissioned to write a child’s bedtime story. As Trump would tweet: “Sad!”
Thirdly, I start feeling like an old school friend who, when writing a personal statement for his Uni application or a CV, would have a list to hand of the same half a dozen random words he felt he must crow-bar in every time. One of these words was “hubris”. I always found that one puzzling.
“Why hubris?” I once asked him, “I can’t see when you’d need to use that”.
“But I like the sound of it. It makes me sound clever”, he replied….
And there I was thinking he was being a Muppet, while all along he was displaying the heart of a poet. Who knew?
Chain-sawing the bonsai
Billy Collins said that when he embarks on writing a poem he can immediately tell the ones that won’t behave and he quickly abandons them: “they announce themselves as failures early on, four, five or six lines in”.
But I can’t tell that quickly, yet. So I end up trying to polish turds which should have been triple-flushed quicker than an emotional support hamster at an airport (Google it).
Mr. Collins also describes those abortive poems as “uncooperative”. That’s a description that resonates with me, implying that a poem has a will of its own. I’ve often thought of a moving piece of music, or an effortless piece of poetry, as exactly that: something that already existed somewhere and was merely found by the artist, rather than created. Like a hoard of mediaeval gold discovered by metal detector on a remote beach, the poet’s role is just to clean off the dirt and it will sparkle all on its own.
But I guess that’s the talent of the accomplished poet, making something look organic. Giving it life by crafting to within an inch of it.
So the better analogy is that the poems have their own life – that seed of a good idea – but they still need to be nurtured in the right way. It’s as if, with every poetic idea, I’m being presented with a raw bonsai tree and told to start pruning. Some of my results have looked like I was using a petrol-powered chainsaw, and wearing a blindfold.
Siamese poems
I find that ideas start to knock into each other within one poem but have to room to breathe when separated. Like cells dividing as a life form develops, one poem suddenly begets another. There I am hammering a stone to get something out of it and a spark flies off and distracts me by starting a fire elsewhere.
I’ve seen this in the demo versions of songs of famous artists. Songs I hold up as masterpieces, that seem to have a deliberate and defiantly individual identity, actually started out life as a musical Siamese twin.
Seeing the cogs and wheels
And then there is a kind of self-contamination that can kick in.
My wife, who has a natural culinary knack, sometimes says she tires of eating her own cooking, and would just prefer eating something “made by someone else’s hand” even if it is exactly the same cuisine. I guess she enjoys the finished product more when she hasn’t orchestrated how it got to her plate.
I start feeling the same way about my poetry. I can’t divorce the process from the result, so it can be difficult to enjoy the end result with fresh eyes. There is never the delight of discovering it.
So I let the poems rest, even if just for a few days, and then return to them to find, happily, that memory of the toil has faded sufficiently to bequeath new eyes.
Finding the poem’s soul
In my early attempts I was preoccupied with form, like symmetry of line length; I wrote notes about its structure all around it like poetic scaffolding. It was quite an engaging exercise, a kind of poet’s Sudoku. But when I took the scaffolding down, even though the poem had order and a defined cadence, it had no soul. The structure was suffocating rather than serving the message.
I decide to let the ideas breathe more. To just let them play around in the sand pit for longer and not be too hasty to put them in straitjackets. They start to reward me by settling into their own form with minimal herding on my part.
Now (and without trying to sound like a Jedi) I just let it come to me and try to feel it more than manufacture it. The lawyer in me is wrestled to the ground by the poet, the rule-book wrested from my grasp.
I now have half a dozen or so poems that, whether or not they speak to anyone else, speak with my voice.
And as for the content, that has evolved from my University days, unsurprisingly. Back then, I would write about whatever was in the present. Now I write more about reconciling with the past or facing the future.
So, I’m on my way. Re-acquaintance made. A veritable amateur poet back on his hands and knees scrabbling around in the dirt looking for something that glints. I guess I’m going to need a multiple entry visa to Poetry-land.