Aspiring to be

How do you define yourself? What’s your nationality, job, class, ethnicity, religion,… your sexuality? But be careful, for in seeking a label for your group, you also define your peers, those you look to for support. Why? Because, they’re of your chosen tribe and it’s natural to seek protection in numbers. It’s natural to settle where we do not stand out because, throughout history, we have scorned the “other” and banished them to the wilderness.

Writers obsess over labels too. They ask at what point they can call themselves a writer, or a poet, or whatever. My view is that if you write, then you’re a writer, but then we hit this peer-group wall and wonder if we’re allowed in, we wonder if we’re to spend our whole lives dying of thirst in the desert of obscurity.

Will other writers and publishing types recognise us as birds of a feather? Well, don’t count on it, for among the literati, all writers who are not one’s self, are “the other”, all of us then by definition outsiders. Sure, we’re an odd bunch, our labelling systems are complicated, cryptic even. Is it any wonder then aspirants to the ranks obsess over the nuances of a writerly identity, and in doing so miss the point? And the point is this: in striving to be a writer, do we not risk closing ourselves off from the experience of life, from which the writing comes?

I remember sitting with a notebook while looking after my kids when they were small. They were having a great time in a playground, mucking about on the slides and swings. It was my job to keep an eye out, to prevent banged heads but without stifling their play. Now that’s an annoying thing to have to do when what you’re trying to do is be writerly,… when you’re trying to tease out the poetry from your soul while the kids are screaming:

“Dad, dad, look at me!”

“Yea, yea.”

Thinking of the mundanity of life as an impediment to one’s art, we risk resenting its intrusion. So then we seal ourselves off from life to better nurture the writer within us. But then we fail to see how the poetry is reflected in the lived experience. We do not find poetry on the blank page, or in the tweed jacket, or the fancy pen. It’s in the sunshine and the laughter, and the funny way people behave sometimes. It’s even in our quest for identity, but only if we have the presence of mind to question the question: how do I define myself? Because what we all are, regardless of the labels, is human, and the rest is merely the feathers we dress ourselves in.

So if you find yourself asking am I a writer yet, put down your pen and live a little. And while living ask the world how it sees itself through your eyes. What drama, what beauty, what lesson is imparted through the lived experience? Then the pages fill of their own accord and we miss nothing from having our head bent in writerly pose.

I dislike the politics of identity. I dislike labels for their limitation. For in striving so to label what one is we also define what we ignore of our potential to be. My labels tell me I’m a white, British cis male. I’m also a myopic, middle-class, introverted, lapsed Anglican. I’m a husband, a father, a Cappuccino socialist and, yes, a writer. I suspect there aren’t many who fit those exact parameters, and certainly not enough to put up a fight when oppressed by a bigger tribe. So it’s best to go about our business quietly, and be friendly with everyone.

What insights into the lived experience did that moment in the playground with my kids offer me? Well, you don’t always see it at the time. It might come decades later, when those same kids have gone through the wringer of college and university, when they’ve left the formative playground and are setting out on their first day at work. The poetry in that moment is a complex and giddy vortex of emotion. It’s all about time and one’s own mortality, and that can be a frightening thing. It’s like a clock ticking down, but only if you’re so bound up in the notion of your limited, mortal identity you fail to grasp the beauty at the heart of humanity which aspires to shed its labels and to simply be.

 

Read Full Post »

So you want to be a poet?

Well, if you’ve made it this far you probably already are a poet, though you may not know it. But wait, let’s check! Do you know what iambic pentameter is? How about an Italian quatrain? A Shakespearean sonnet? Yes, okay, they’re definitions of poetic structures; beats per line, order of rhyme, number of lines, that sort of thing. How about a foot? That’s the basic unit of measurement of accentual syllabic meter. Of course it is! There are different types of feet too: iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic, all to do with the stress on the syllables.

Still want to be a poet? A poet would be well up on all that stuff wouldn’t they? Except, I write poetry, which makes me a sort-of poet, but to be honest I had to look all that terminology up on Wikipedia. If I’d been a Lit student having to field questions on it, I’d surely have failed. Well, I did fail actually – not that I was ever asked those questions, specifically. Log tables made more sense to me, but I still liked writing poetry. Log tables are obsolete now, while poetry remains pretty much a constant throughout time. And do you really need to know about all that structural theory stuff anyway? Well, the poet Robert Frost thought so. He said: there can be no fair tennis without a net, that without proper structure, poetry seldom yields works of beauty.

And he may have a point:

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Reopened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey;

That’s W H Auden writing in 1940. Plenty structure and rhyme there, and a silken beauty in the flow of it.

But then how about:

A shattered army, Thames’ filthy tonnage, tumbrils of carrion,
Not a beautiful spectacle
For the drinkers of history, or for me
Or my friends, this island’s parallel issues.

That’s Ted Hughes, writing in 1963. No structure, no rhyme, like being hit in the face with a plank of wood, leaving you with multiple splinters to pick at, which I presume is what he intended. So, maybe Frost was just an old fuddy duddy traditionalist and you can play tennis without a net after all, that indeed certain poetic themes demand a freer form if they’re to achieve their desired impact.

I used to strive for structure in my own poetry, but sometimes the struggle took over from what I was trying to say. Rhyme and structure are satisfying to achieve, like completing a literary puzzle, but they can also cheapen a poem, so why push for rhyme if you don’t have to?

How about this:

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine

That’s Phoebe Hesketh. No structure, no rhyme except for that last poignant hook between “shoe” and “you”. A friend of Herbert Edward Palmer, an English poet and critic, his advice to her was never to let the conscious mind force a poem into shape. That’s important, I think. It can be pleasurable exploring traditional patterns in poetry, and good practice trying them out, and if a poem falls into such a pattern, then let it be, but if doesn’t want to, don’t make it.

According to certain psychological theories, we exist upon a seething mass of unconscious energies that seek to become conscious through us. They are our life’s work, whether we know it or not. And poetry, indeed any form of creative expression, is a good way of achieving that, and it’s not like we have any choice in the matter. For a creative person to ignore the pressure from within is a very bad thing, and will backfire with more neuroses than we know how to handle. But to sit a while with pencil and paper, jotting the lines that are offered up, seemingly from nowhere, is worth years of therapy, whether you know an iamb from a trochee or not.

Poetry has always been an important aspect of any civilised culture, and not just for the professional – if indeed there’s such a thing as a professional poet any more. But can anyone really write poetry? Well, okay, not everyone wants to, not everyone gets it, but I suspect if you’ve a hankering for it, you can write it well enough. As a way of expressing the seasons of your life, there’s no finer way of honouring your self. How to start? Start with your life. Imagine you are a bit of the universe seeking to discover the meaning of itself through your eyes. So you capture a moment in time as if to bookmark it, and you say to the universe, okay mate, this bit’s important. Let’s remember this. Then you look back over the stuff you wrote twenty, thirty years ago, and you can see the change in yourself, the smoothing out, the growing up.

However we should beware the trap of thinking poetry is a road to fame and fortune because of course it’s not. Even the Poet Laureate only makes £6000 a year, which doesn’t get you much of a mortgage, does it? Fame and fortune are their own path, with their own rules, and only about one in ten who seek it, by whatever means, succeed at it. But in the business of writing poetry what we’re really looking for are glimpses of meaning, which boil down to those occasional and all too often elusive personal gifts of insight from the unconscious. Sometimes those insights are beautiful, sometimes they’re ugly, and mostly they’re of no interest to anyone else. But as always, in the writing of anything, the person most served by the effort is you, the writer. Poetry, however you define it, helps us grow a little. It’s just occasionally we’ll hit upon something that’s of a more universal appeal, so it’s not always true we should give up on the idea of publishing altogether. But as ever my advice these days is just to blog your stuff, thus calling it “sort of published”, and be done with it. Poetry can heal all wounds, but pursuing, through poetry, the eternally precious bane of fame and fortune is pretty futile, and worse, it will tear your heart wide open again.

Read Full Post »

A poem a day

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry recently, all of it self published, through the WordPress blog, and I’m enjoying it.

We have plenty of dead poets, their words filling the dusty tomes of the past.Theirs are the voices we know best, theirs are the poems we learned by heart at school, and we all have our favourites. Some of those dead poets attained a degree of fame and celebrity in their lifetime, others despaired, self published their works then died in poverty, only to become revered by later generations. Sadly though most of those self-published were never heard of again, and their works are lost.

Even sadder, things have gone from bad to worse for poets and poetry. There are no lucrative publishing contracts any more, no more celebrity poets of the stature of the great Romantics, and the days of publishing by subscription are also the quaint relic of a bygone era, replaced by a rancid mire of disreputable vanity publishers and other dubious “author services”. So the smart poets are moving online. They’re setting up blogs. They have  dayjobs, and post their poems for free, by night.

While to the uninitiated, this might seem futile, little better than keeping your poems in a drawer, these poets have readers, they have followers. Their comment boxes are full. They have fans! But these are not household names, not poet laureates, nor holders of court in literary circles. They’re simply people in touch with themselves and their muse. They write well, and often, and their persistence has led to a quiet popularity among their peers, to say nothing of a dedicated online readership. Their poems are not to be found in glossy hardback in select bookshops – no – it’s much better than that; their poems are on the phone in your pocket.

So, you “follow” a poet you like and their poem pops up in your reader. You read it, and the poetry then becomes a part of your day. I have lots of books of dead poetry, but I rarely read them now, because time is pressing, and that’s a pity because it’s the daily exposure to poetry that’s the magical, all-important thing. It lifts you to another plane, snicks your head into a different gear, a different way of thinking and seeing.

Poetry is not meant to be an inaccessible literary form, one to be picked apart by highly educated critics in tweed jackets and bow ties. It’s meant to be a voice that everyone can listen to, a voice that everyone can hear. If a particular poet doesn’t speak to you, don’t think that it’s your fault for being slow or insensitive or lacking in poetical finesse. You can always find another poet who will touch you. The most effective poets have a way of cutting through the surface of life and exposing a jewel of emotion, a thing that can alter mood, and coax our brainwaves onto that more subtle frequency, put us in touch with a higher innate sense. But for all of that, poetry is about daily life, about the experience of our lives, and our reflections upon it.

The myth of poetry is that it is elitist, that only those who have done it at college can really understand it, that only those few poets who have escaped a merciless drubbing at the hands of pinch faced critics have a voice worth listening to. I failed English literature at O-Level, forty years ago, then went on to a career in a technical discipline void of anything even remotely artistic, but my ignorance of literature does not prevent me from enjoying, or connecting with books, or poetry, or indeed any other art form. Nor should it prevent you.

Art keeps the balance in our lives, and a balanced life knows no despair.

If you have a drawer full of poems, would like others to read them, but can’t find a publisher, consider blogging them. It’s an unlikely medium, I know, but one that’s catching on. Whatever you do, don’t pay someone else to publish them for you, or you’ll end up seriously out of pocket and with nothing to show for it but a crate of hardbound copies cluttering up your garage.

People read blogs, and they’ll read yours. And if you’re just not into writing poetry, consider following a poet’s blog instead. You’re sure to find one you like – just search WordPress Poems. Their voices can be a real balm for the soul as you set out into the grey fog of your morning commute. So find yourself a poet and let them in, or better still, find the poet inside yourself.
A poem a day,
Keeps the greyness at bay.
You too are a poet,
Though you might not know it.
So please don’t be shy.
Give blogging a try.
It’s really good fun
And the readers will come.
With apologies to Mr. D. Oggerel

 

Read Full Post »