A poem is not a puddle

I'm unsure how helpful this will be to anyone out there; in fact I suspect some of you might find it quite boring. But I've been meaning to try and cover this topic for a while and I'm hoping it might be helpful in some way. I'm going to talk about two poems which were both written under much the same circumstances. In the first case I was lying in bed unable to sleep. In the second I'd literally just got into bed when the idea came. In both cases I got up, went through to my office, took an A4 sheet of paper, drafted the piece and then went back to bed. In both cases this process will have taken maybe five minutes. What you see on the page is literally a dump and this is how I work with every poem I write, I get the words out of my head and onto the page. Once they're on the page I can't forget them. If anyone could be bothered writing down my Laws of Poetry, Rule #1 would likely be Never be without a means to record your poetry and Rule #2 would be Never keep an idea for a poem in your head longer than you absolutely have to.

I've been asked before: Where do your ideas for poems come from? and the simple fact is they're how the thoughts in my head resolve themselves. Some people dream, others write poetry, some (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) even write poetry in their dreams. That sounds like a rather romantic notion but I'm being quite serious. So many people talk about how they often dream about the last thing that was on their mind as they slept so why is it so unreasonable that a poet end up writing a poem about same? I don't think it is.

This is not a How to Write Poetry Guide. This is simply a record of what I have done to end up with a poem. In both cases the poems appeared in my head as a clump of words, what usually ends up in the final piece as a whole stanza, maybe two. Let's look at the first poem:

This is how the poem 'Background Silence' began life. If I can transcribe it for you it reads:

Background Silence

The silence was always there
behind the noise of everyday life
               cars and mobile phones
Just as
The emptiness was always there
behind the façades of faces and houses
               smiles and frowns
Just as
the blankness was always there
behind the words on the page

Because
There is always something in our road
keeping us from the truth.

The text in black was written first, then the red, then the blue.

And this is what the final poem looks like. The text in blue is what remains of the original draft:

BACKGROUND SILENCE


The silence was always there
behind the
sounds of monitors and pumps

just as

emptiness was always there
behind the
well wishes and smiles and lies

just as

the blankness was always there
behind the
words on every card you read

because

there is always something to
block our view
of the nothingness that is

coming.


Tuesday, 04 August 2009

The poem has now been shaped into alternating stanzas of 7-3-7 and 2 syllables. The structure came quite naturally the lines wrapping around the 2 and 3 syllable lines that give the poem a rocking motion. A syllabic structure has its weaknesses, that I concede, because, just as in music, sometimes we have, for example, 3 beats in the space of two or words where we skip over syllables. I mean who says ev-er-y these days? In olden days if poets wanted to drop that middle syllable they'd make sure we knew by writing ev'ry but that would distract today's readers.

If I read the piece and find that it doesn't scan then I'll look for alternative words. You'll see that I've dropped the definite article before 'emptiness was always there' because it adds an unnecessary syllable. The poem wouldn't fall to pieces if I left it – most people wouldn't even notice (they'd flick over it like a grace note) – but I would.

The first draft is generalised, the final version, contextualised. You can see the lines that jumped out at me:

the blankness was always there
behind the words on the page

Blank cards! As soon as I had cards in my head I thought about where we use cards. The phrase 'façades of faces' made me think of hospitals where everyone does that, patients, doctors and visitors; the rest was easy and obvious.

Here's the second poem:

Transcribed this becomes:

Marks

My father used to mark us out of ten
The dishes
Nine out of ten
The gardening
Eight out of ten

Anything less than 5 out of ten
came with a belting.

I'd give my childhood maybe a four
4 out of ten
Marks is another word for scars
I have these too (both literal and figurative)
the ones you can see and the ones you can't

but there's no one left to punish
so I punish myself
Is that what you wanted to hear, doctor?
Is that worth a 10?

And once edited and formatted we have:

MARKS


My dad used to give me marks out of ten:
homework – seven out of ten,
the dishes – eight out of ten.

Anything less than a five
came with a clip on the ear.

Marks is merely another word for scars.
I have those too, the ones you
can see and the ones you can't.

I'd give my childhood a three.
That's me being generous.

Dad's no longer here and so I have to
mark myself. Is that what you
were waiting to hear, doctor?

What do you think this poem
might be worth? Maybe an eight?


Thursday, 22 October 2009

Again, the blue bits are what remained of the original draft. The structure is a 10-7-7 stanza followed by a 7-7 stanza. It took very little adjustment to find this shape. Again it came quite naturally. This is why I'm no good at writing sestinas or sonnets or any other poem where structure comes first. I suppose Rule #3 would be: Form is dictated by content: do not force a poem into an unnatural shape.

This time there's not been so much change but the violence has been toned down from 'a belting' to 'a clip on the ear' and 'punish' has been cut. 'Gardening' became 'homework' purely because to lose a syllable but the fact is it could have been anything; the specifics aren't especially important and I didn't spend hours sweating over which chores to include, they’re simply examples. There was a time when I would have. I would have sat on that poem for six months till it was absolutely perfect but I don't think that perfection is so important: Rule #4 – Good enough is good enough. (These are not serious rules by the way, just what's jumping into my head as I write this.)

A lot of people would look at a poem like this and assume I had a truly awful childhood. It certainly wasn't a perfect ten but then neither was it as bad as a three or even a four. My father didn't give me marks out of ten but he was the kind of dad who if you came home with a score of 98% he'd want to know where the other 2% was. The same goes for corporal punishment. Yes, I grew up at a time when that was in vogue but we were always smacked on our rears and my dad's hands were so solid no belt or slipper was ever needed I can tell you. And no one has ever clipped my ears. Rule #5 – Poems do not need to be biographical.

I can tell you what was on my mind when I thought of the poem. Firstly I had been asked to write a poem containing certain words which I'm still working on, 'mark' was one of them, secondly, I've been seeing a nice psychotherapist of late and, typical shrink, she started off by asking me about my mum so I told her about my dad because, I said, "You can't understand my relationship with my mother until you understand my father's relationship with his wife." So all that was swimming around in there and this poem is what resulted. Which is how it goes. Rule #6 – Everything is fodder. Rule #7 – Chew your food properly.

The same goes for the first poem, I'd been asked to write a set of poems about silence and that was pretty much all that was in my head when I went to bed. Did some Muse visit me? Was I inspired? Not in any magical way. Rule #8 – Inspiration is a good idea and that's it. When you have a good idea, go for it. If not, Rule #9 – If you don't have a good idea then any old idea will do.

This is how I have always worked. And much the same goes for prose too, get it out of your head as quickly as you can and then, over as long as it takes – and that can be minutes or years – work on it until it does the job for which it is intended. Rule #10 – A poem is a tool, not fine art. Make it look nice by all means but never forget it has a job to do.

I am desperately keen to do as much as possible to demystify poetry. When I was a teenager I believed that this aura came over me and I could only work while 'inspired' and so, once that initial rush of ideas was over, I thought that was me, I added a date, numbered it and stuck it in my big red folder. What a waste.

I don't believe in mysteries. There are things that are hard to explain and things we don’t know about yet. Writing is not a mystery. It can be analysed. There are clear techniques that can be applied. Rule #11 – A poem is not a poem just because you say it is. Think about how you write poetry. Do you have any rules? Or do you think that all rules are bad and that your words should be allowed to flow and pool as they see fit? If you do that's fine but as far as I'm concerned: Rule #12 – A poem is not a puddle – remember that.

Oh, one last thing, my normal handwriting is quite a bit neater than that. Just thought I'd mention.