ON WRITING POETRY: A LIMP-WRISTED WIMP REFLECTS
Now here’s a topic to set pulses racing. This’ll knock the porn links & political rants into the proverbial cocked hat. On writing poetry: some reflections from someone who does it. Lots. MmMM! No, no – read on just a little bit further. There may be something here that touches a nerve or flutters a memory…
So why the sarcasm? (Let’s not beat around the bush. This isn’t gentle, mocking irony at work here). Because poetry is the art that dare not speak its name. Consider. You’re at a dinner party. You turn to your neighbour. You fall into conversation while awaiting the last course. You get your respective jobs out of the way. You dispose of family, homestead, household pets, favoured make of car & you ask what s/he does for recreation, for the cultivation of mind, heart & soul. S/he says, ‘Actually, I paint/sculpt/work in ceramics/play the violin’. Oh, interesting: clearly a creative spark within. Not just a doctor/carpet-layer/bank clerk/high court judge – an artist too. And if it’s a member of the opposite sex maybe your heart beats a little faster…
But what if s/he says, ‘Actually, I write poetry’? The heart skips a beat. S/he might just reach into jacket pocket & produce a sheaf of folded A4 paper? ‘…& I’ve got some with me. Would you like to hear them?’ Somehow a sort of protocol has been breached. It is as if some very slightly indelicate note has entered the conversation. As if s/he has suddenly alluded to a troubling personal problem ‘down there’; provided you with a morsel of knowledge that you’d rather be without. But why? What is there about such a declaration that is somehow marginally less romantic, raffish, bohemian than had the activity been one of the other arts?
It’s words. Paint you splash on with a brush or lard on with a palette knife. Sculpture you hew out of stone or wood or weld out of metal. A pot you nurture from a lump of wet clay on a wheel. A violin you tuck under your chin & caress with a bow. For all of them some sort of applied skill involving tools, arcane materials, a different application of motor coordination is required. But poetry is just words & words belong to everyone. All a poet does is shuffle them around on a bit of paper. And surely anyone can do that. In an impatient world hungry for immediate understanding the fundamental pointlessness of taking a bunch of words on some circuitous trip all around the houses when surely a direct statement would do the trick seems paramount.
There are other problems too. Isn’t most poetry either about subjects so anachronistic & thus fundamentally inapplicable to our busy, beleaguered lives or matters so exposingly personal that it can have no relevance for the average reader? Either incomprehension, boredom or embarrassment must be the nett result of 10 minutes snuggled up with some earnest soul’s slim volume. It’s a simple fact that poetry simply doesn’t get read for pleasure by very many people. A well-constituted poetry magazine is unlikely to reach more than between 500 to 1,000 readers on publication. Over time it might pick up a few more as it languishes on the shelves of the local library. In schools in the UK poetry forms an integral part of the English curriculum & so thousands of 16+ & 18+ students are trawled through the works of the First World War poets & the more anthologised moderns. But, as the Head of English at my school has it, they would rather stick hot needles in their eyes than have to read any of the stuff once the exams in which the poems have been analysed into oblivion are out of the way.
So, fads & fashions that dictate that for a short while poetry is the new rock’n’roll notwithstanding, it remains for most people either an arcane or verbose way of stating the obvious. Or it’s a strategy by which words are embellished & embroidered & then clipped & trimmed into elaborate patterns meaning absolutely nothing. A sort of verbal origami.
And finally for so many people too there is a deeper unease, a half-memory, maybe, of a time in life when the romantic muse pursued even the most prosaic of them with uninhibited energy. Can there be many of us who haven’t at some time in youth sat down & scribbled off a heartbroken threnody to a lost love? And then, to demonstrate the cosmic scale of heartbreak, shown it to a few close friends. And then basked briefly in the melancholy glory that attends, not the infatuated adolescent but the wounded artist. Time (two weeks, maybe three) heals the scars & the verses end up in the back of a drawer, returning maybe years later to haunt the author.
It’s the nakedness that poetry implies that cancels it out as a respectable creative option. In an increasingly inarticulate world that communicates in cliché & jargon, there is no place for what is interpreted as promiscuous self-exposure on the part of the poet. If the poem puzzles, resentment is caused: what is the poet trying to slip past me? If the poem communicates, embarrassment results: why are you trying to share your vulnerability with me? What do you want?
Meanwhile, for the poets scribbling away in their garrets, the reality is very different. I would venture that for the majority of jobbing poets art is a minor element in the mix & craft is most of what the process is about. The raw materials are already in place: on the page, on the screen, in our ears, in our mouths. The poet stands quietly on corners plucking them as they emerge then carrying them away to push them laboriously about the page in search of a resonant image, a potent phrase. All of which is done dispassionately, thoughtfully. The coolness & detachment of the poet pushing & tugging at the stack of words is in direct inverse proportion to the intensity of passion he or she is trying to capture & communicate. Chewed pens, strangled cries, tearstained pages are not significators of the process of emergence of a poem on its way towards greatness. In order to establish the timelessly universal from the minutely particular, the poet must work like an architect, building a structure whose strength comes from a balance of stress & counterstress. And that process involves a sober, controlled, patient tenacity that is a million miles away from the chest beating & hair tearing that characterises the poet of popular myth. Just like painting, sculpture, ceramics, playing an instrument, the crafting of poetry is first & foremost & last & hindmost a job of work, occasionally transcendentally exciting, mostly steady, undramatic & very solitary.
1:14:25 AM 
|
|
