Prompted by a question on the National Centre for Writing’s forum about what poetry means to us, as folk who either read or write it, I set about exploring what it means to me.
To steal from L. P. Hartley and adapting to my cause: Poetry is a foreign country. They do things differently there. It is a country which I am only now beginning to explore. I have a problem. There seem to be so many cultural aspects of this country, that I cannot fathom. So many rigid forms and requirements. I imagine whole districts given over to the civil service checking syllables and meter and line lengths and stanzas. I contemplate buying a phrase book for the language of this strange land, that will help me translate iamb and trochee and villanelle and anapest and dactyl and haiku and pantoum and…. I wonder if there is somewhere I can buy a map, which will show me which is the easiest route to take or the most scenic or…
And I stop.
Retrace my steps. Poetry is indeed a foreign country. And truly we do things differently here. But like any country it is not uniform. It has its regions and its idiosyncrasies and its dialects and lilts and strange linguistic permutations. There are many towns and villages and cities and hamlets and isolated homesteads in this country we think of as ‘poetry’.
I don’t need a map or a phrase book. I can just wander over the border and explore. If I wanted to be a student, I could learn the forms and how to use them. Or I could be a lyric vagabond, simply spinning my words to the rhythm in my head and letting them free like spindrift or floating gossamer to land where they will.
To be fair, that’s not strictly true.
I haven’t the patience to learn the forms, or the discipline to corral my words into them. If I write to a form, it will be by accident – somehow the words, the way they need to interact, the spacing, inherent rhythm and necessary rhyme may result in something the academics will recognise.
Maybe. Mostly not so.
I can, therefore, only seek to be a poetic vagrant. I’ll wander down the country lanes of lyricism and pick from the hedgerows, wool-gathering, fruit-picking, down to the shores of supposition and the well-springs of what-if’s where I’ll hunt for shells and pretty pebbles and weather-worn driftwood.
And just maybe, sometimes, I will pull something together out of the gleaning.
~ / ~
There is a moment I have written about before, but the pivotal moments of our lives insist on being re-told. Early this year, before we knew what the year was about to become, I stood on the deck at Cley nature reserve having done my first public reading. It sounds impressive when I put it like that. It wasn’t. Basically, I stood up and read a short prose piece. It wasn’t brilliant, and I was nervous, but I think the emotion carried. Afterwards, standing on the deck talking to another member of the writing group and a complete stranger, I confessed that what I thought I had learned over the six weeks was that I am not a poet. Half a year later I am still both stunned by and grateful for the response from the stranger Oh, but you are!
Oh!
Ok, then.
Then someone else told me to give myself permission.
Oh!
Ok, then.
Brought up mainly on the ballad form, I have always struggled with both freeform blank verse, and the more complicated structural approaches.
When it comes to blank verse in particular, I have often felt so this is a poem, purely because the writer says it is?!
I have refined that view. I now know that something is a poem purely because the reader says it is.
You (and I) can write whatever, but it is not you (nor I) who gets to choose whether it is poetry…only the readers can do that.
I remember a nurse with a long cursive script tattooed on her arm. It read: when words fail, music speaks. Poetry is words trying their very best not to fail. Poetry is words trying to be music. Poetry is words trying to escape the confines of language and become scenes and images or melodies and rhythms that are felt and seen and heard as much as they read and understood.
Understanding. Is that a relevant word to apply to a poem? “What does this poem mean?” is such a nonsense question. We may come close to what the author intended at the moment of writing, but a thousand other meanings will crumble into the space between them and then and me and now, from the moment of writing to the moment of reading is a lifetime and more.
Masefield’s lonely sea and the sky may never have been intended to carry my laments and solstice prayers, but it does so. Omar Khayyam would never have imagined a small girl in a council house sitting in front of a Raeburn stove picturing the moving finger writing, much less know it would be the first stile she would cross into the field of poems.
That is the power and the strength of poetry. Words are freed from the constraint of meaning any one thing… they sing, in rhyme or rhythm, but that is purely to attract our attention, they swoop and soar to move us, or they halt abruptly, stopping us in our thought track. Back-track. Question. Think.
Poems are language made willow: strong, rooted, flexible, and dancing.
Poems are woven baskets into which we can place our understanding – or from which we seek to garner someone else’s.
Poetry is the attempt to delve deep, to the heartwood, to the ocean-abyss, to the molten core of the earth where frivolous things are peeled away and only truth remains.
And yet…poetry is also playful and frivolous. It is limericks and nursery rhymes and song lyrics. Love songs and silliness and sometimes even slimy slugs. Absurdity and humour. I sometimes wonder if we do the form no good service by being too deferential towards it.
Children are among the best poets. They ignore the rules, conjure up absurd images, and delight in their creation.
Poetry is also the playroom sand-box. Grains and granules and buckets and spades and (if we’re lucky) a nearby tap for watering and muddying and moulding.
I’ve quoted this before, but it is still one of my favourite lines when it comes to writing, especially when it comes to poetry because it’s loaded with ambiguity. Does it mean that the writing is alright, or that everything else is alright because of the writing? Who knows. Ultimately that’s the joy of the poetic form, it is free, it cannot (should not) be pinned down…I’ll leave the last words to one of my heroes, the inimitable rocker Ian Hunter:
“Sometimes when I've written a song, it's alright”
~ / ~
*Shades Off by Ian Hunter https://genius.com/Ian-hunter-shades-off-poem-lyrics
