I’m supposed to be doing other things today. Specifically, I’m supposed to be getting my garden into a state where it can be left for a couple of weeks without rampaging. I’m supposed to be packing, or at least pre-packing – you don’t need to know, trust me: it’s a thing. Or maybe you already know. You will if you’re also the kind of person who works off lists for everything…especially packing.
I’m supposed to be cleaning the house so that it is right to come back to. I’m supposed to be keeping the laundry under hand, so I’ll only come back to what I bring back with me and not a lot of older fustier unwashed stuff…as if anyone but me would notice.
I’m supposed to be getting back into my physical practice, only a walk to the library (I did get that bit done) tells me, by way of a hamstring ouch-ness, that I may have an actual injury, rather than my body doing it’s usual oh-no-you-don’t whenever I feel like I’m on the verge of getting somewhere fitness wise.
Other than the slow & painful walk to the library, I’m not getting very far with any of the things I am supposed to be doing. Supposed by me, in case you’re wondering. I'm the one who made the list, that I’m failing to hold myself to.
I love a list. Not much gets done in my life without a list. Only some days…not much gets done, despite the list.
Today, for instance.
Today, I am supposed to be doing other things, but I am not doing them because I keep wanting to go back to the book.
The book in question is “In Their Own Words” (Contemporary Poets On Their Poetry). Yes. I know. It doesn’t sound like a page-turner does it? The truth is this: I bought it as the recommended text for a series of workshops I did some time ago. I won’t name-check them, because they clearly didn’t do me any good…when I applied to do the next level, I was rejected and recommended to do the one below the one I’d already completed. Ok…fine…but stop trying to sell me a course you’re telling me I’m too rubbish to even attempt. (And breathe!)
The truth is also this: I didn’t read it back then, whenever that was.
It has sat in my bedroom, migrating up and down the TBR pile as these things do…these things I ought to read. Things I once thought I might read. Things I’d forgotten I’ve already bought and almost bought again.
Or is it only my pile that looks like that?
Anyway…this one lingered. It made its way to the top occasionally and scowled at me for neglecting it.
So, at the end of a week in which I had devoured my latest Jodi Picoult (loving every single one as I work my way through in order of publication date) and had then been in equal measure entranced and enraged by Noreen Masud (A Flat Place) I finally picked it up. I picked it up thinking, “Well, I can make a start…work through a couple of essays…add it to the in-progress heap”.
Or not.
I’ll read one or two quickly turns into thirty or forty pages (or seven or eight in terms of actual essays). Poets talking about their poetics. I am so pleased to read so many of them saying they don’t know what their poetics are. I don’t even know what the word “poetics” (in the plural) means.
There are lots of other words and concepts that I don’tknow. Lacuna, objective correlative, proprioceptive,… not to mention all those words from other languages that I want to learn. From Romani, and Arabic, and Portuguese, and Old English, and Sylheti.
Some books I go back to just because of the joy of reading them. This one I have to go back to because of how much went right over my head.
This book I bought because I was kind of told that I should…this book I have resisted because, honestly, it’s not like I’m a poet…or at least not the kind of poet that is that interested in how it’s done, the techniques, the “poetics” (whatever that means).
And yet…I was so drawn into reading how other people approach their work. Mostly. I will admit that there were (naming no names) some essays I found…let’s say difficult. Yes, let’s say that, because I’m in no position to say pretentious. Even if that’s how I feel about them. Some are too technical for me to even begin to know what they are. But so many more of them are just personal…stories of how poets came to poetry, stories of people not knowing how they do what they do, or knowing how but not why, or the other way about.
I think I loved this book because of the disparateness of experience – which might just validate my own. I loved that people make their own choices for their own reasons…so I can do so too.
I am becoming a poet. No, strike that. I am a poet. I have a page on this site that testifies to the fact that I write poems. Maybe not great poems. Maybe not even good ones. But poems, for all the judgement, for all the shortcomings, for all the not understanding of what a poem actually is. I have a stream of them…good, bad, indifferent, beautiful (maybe), ugly (almost certainly)…but there they are. And I wrote them.
And I keep coming back to that day when I claimed I had learned that I am not a poet, and that beautiful stranger butted in to my conversation to say oh but you are. I keep coming back to whatever it was of my life-to-date that allowed me to say Ok, what if I choose to believe that, what then? The answer to which is: I will write. Good, bad, indifferent, beautiful, ugly, angry, silly. I will invest in trying to write better. I will be free enough to not care about good, bad, indifferent, beautiful, ugly, because I am all of those things, and this is not intended to morph into some kind of “career”.
This book sat on the heap, because I expected it to be something other than what it is. To be fair, some of the essays are exactly what I expected the book to be. They are deeply analytical of the how and the why, and the techniques, and the imagery, and what a poem must be, and where one will fail, and all of the stuff that I’m sure gets taught on poetics courses and degrees in poetry and all of that is way over my head. Or at least beyond my sphere of interest.
But…BUT…BUT…for every one of those, there is a whole batch of poets saying, basically, that they don’t know, but this is what they do. They don’t know, but this is why they do it. This is their process, but only theirs. This is how this one poem was done, but others are created differently.
Some of the essays have the feel of oh, I now need to explain what I did here…and attempt to do so, and I’m left thinking nah, I don’t think you did…I think you wrote it and then figured that bit out
afterwards.
I am surprised by how much this book has entranced me. Captivated me. Listening to people talking about their craft, their process, their uncertainties, their origins, all of the things that go into making poems that probably have nothing to do with “poetics” (whatever that is) is a delight. The shortness of each essay helps give the whole, when I sit with it for the five minutes that turns into ninety, the feeling of a conversation. I want to ask questions, disagree, dig further.
Maybe when I've read it again - a time or two - I'll have understood more and have fewer questions, but in the meantime, I'm glad I took the time to actually read it the first time.
I’m supposed to be out cutting the grass, in making dinner, packing for the first of my trips this week, and the second, and figuring out whether my leg will be up to a dance class mid-week. I’m not supposed to be crouched in the corner trying to absorb by osmosis what it means to be a poet.
I do know that part of what I did today – the bit about walking down to the library, taking photos of flowers after the rain – that has something to do with it. I know that the workshops I take, whatever their leaders think of my writing, take me to different places. I know that sometimes I put words on the page, on the screen, and sometimes people ‘get’ where I’m coming from…or where I’m trying ‘to go’.
I know that putting the words down matters - because sometimes they speak to the people that need to hear them. And that is way more important than cooking dinner, or making sure I've packed all the right things or what the garden will look like by the time I get back.
Or whether anyone making selections for a workshop thinks I'm not good enough. I know I am.
