community

loop

~ extraplorer ~ 1 Comment

Something is looping it seems to me. Here I am, after all, in this blog again, suddenly drawn to it, unexpectedly. What is there for me in my earlier self, I wonder. What is there for me in this representation of a me that you, by being there, sometimes liking, create? It’s mysterious.

I have a week in a space that completely transformed my life, over five months in the summer of 2020. Yes, that summer. Perhaps I will write more about it another time but I knew then and knew even more later, that a fundamental shift had taken place in my perception. Perception of the world, perception of self. I had joked that 2020 would be the year of seeing clearly. The joke had me.

So then here too is a loop.

And I find myself rereading the stories of my childhood.

I’m so much older that when I began this blog. I feel it. I can feel the resonances of greater substance, ontological weight, density, weariness, power. I have ‘made my bones’ but they are heavier to carry around, whereas surely there should be a more expansive freedom?

The true lightness of freedom, the true depth of well-formed substance. Another mystery.

So then there is this younger self. I recognise her and I feel triumphant. The self she was wondering was there is me. Her innocence touches me and I wonder if I can rediscover that. Surely that is a treasure? It is not-knowing and it is, I realise as I write this sentence, fear. I am at risk of an idealisation. It was terrible to be that vulnerable, continually not knowing if there was something there, risking everything with the possibility of nothing.

Something was there.

Perhaps though this is the rediscovery and the loop. That vulnerability recurs. The sight of an old tree in spring always touches me. All those frail sensitive quivering leaves on those full grown sturdy branches. It strikes me how rare it is to see those qualities in a person. Fragility is for the young, it seems, the full grown branches necessitate a kind of firmly-enforced self-protection.

I’m getting nearer some kind of reconnection and when I do I will know what it is. It will be a freedom and a lightness. It will be a reunion and an intensification, an expansion of substance.

And in the meantime, I will write this all to you, who carry the me I might become.

writing to order and other new things

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

So it’s been very interesting to be on a poetry course.  Spending time formally considering my own creative writing makes me realise that the last time I did this was when I was about thirteen years old, in English class, before everything turned into A-level essays on this and undergraduate degree studies on that.

Things I have done today that I have not done in the last twenty-seven years:

  1. Write a poem to order.  Here’s a poem about waiting.  Now you write a poem about waiting (here is ‘Waiting‘, unfinished)
  2. Read my own poem out loud to other people.
  3. Read my own poem out loud to a tutor and receive feedback.
  4. Have other known people (than my mum) take my poetry seriously.
  5. Listened to other people read their own creative work aloud to me.

The morning made me feel intensely passionate and vulnerable and dishevelled and lagging behind and out in front and questioning and excited.

Writing to order made me trip over words, try to be too clever, hit on a line of beauty, tumble over a cliché and want to go into hiding, and to come out of hiding.

Listening to others made me in awe, moved, wry, patient and outraged.

I have rarely had this many feelings in such a short space of time.

High point of the day so far:  A real poet said my  ‘wild night run‘ poem was ‘lovely’.  And she gave me some very interesting feedback about how to make it stronger, which I will work on in due course.

I am tired!

Now I must go and get some poems ready to read aloud later on.

Thank you for your encouragement!

 

[untitled]

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Our hearts are dying,
crushed under the
weight of all our
pain.

Buried
by a thousand
homicides.

Starved
by all our
compromise.

Crying frozen tears.

Forbidden to complain.

Forever claimed by clamour,
we are slowly
wasting
away
to
O

***

Our hearts are living.
Crushed, they
bear the weight of
all our pain.

Weeping
for a thousand
homicides.

Feeding
on all our
compromise.

Warming frozen tears.

Daring to complain.

Never claimed by clamour,
we are slowly
gathering an
everlasting
radiance.

found poem, London, autumn 2014 – commentary

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

So as you know I have been hesitating on whether to comment on poems or whether to leave them to their own devices.  On the one side is the risk of over-explanation (see ‘on leaving things unsaid‘), on the other is my memory of my sixth form project on metaphysical poetry where the explanations of teacher unlocked meaning and allowed me to take part in the poem in a way I would never have done otherwise.

A reader commented about the London found poem that ‘I don’t understand it but of course understanding isn’t a valid expectation to have’, and this has been resonating in the echo chamber of my mind ever since.  Is it true?  I think understanding is a wonderful thing to have.  Understanding brings illumination, and even though it will always be partial, this brings a powerful sense of connection, and warmth and excitement.

So here I am going to put a little bit about what the poem revealed to me, and why the things I saw in London on that adventure turned out to be in the poem.  Of course, my own understanding is only partial, but maybe it will provide some interesting light.  I will also show where I have changed the poem (in two places) since I originally posted it.

So first of all, I don’t have any agenda in the found poem discovery process.  All I do is be on the alert during my time in the city for fragments of text which stand out for some reason.  Then, when I get home, I let them all sit around until they form themselves into verses.  To be honest, I didn’t really think that the things I’d seen that day in London made a poem.  I felt a bit disappointed and I almost didn’t even embark on the discovery process.  But once I’d written out the bits of text (recorded on my camera), unexpected connections started to emerge.

What struck me straight away is that there is a theme of restlessness, and design, and home.  The theme of design is not a surprise because I was at the design museum, but what came together is the idea for me that our lives are our homes, and that we have a role to play in designing our life-homes.

From this, the verses started to sing to each other.  The first question unsettles us as to whether we have become stuck in a rut.  And then the answers also have that fretful quality.  I have now changed lines three and four around, as I realised that the ‘sheer frustration’ line is an answer to the companion line.

I then loved the mix of very everyday imagery (about the pencils), the idea of story versus limited options, the challenge of designing a home and the emotional power of that, and the fact that are homes-lives are also kinds of monuments of what we value, and the powerful question as to what others might make of our choices.

I was a bit hesitant about allowing the Charity text fragment into the poem; it felt a bit out of place.  But I also quite like the out-of-place things intruding.  Out-of-place things can put the mind into an interesting state of trying to discover a meaning.  So in time this stanza has made me dig.  The meaning that has arisen for me is that it links to our own possible poverty (of meaning, of aspiration) in our lives, and how that allows a dynamic where we need charity (also an old word for love) to connect us to abundance.

The poem then connects the idea of home and meaningfulness to belonging, which is expressed through the words about membership and uniting.  Our actions to address our inner restlessness may also need hard work (engine rooms), courage (bold moves), and experimentation (hop on hop off).  In these verses, the work of life-design is taking shape.

I also hesitated over and then relished the inclusion of the reference to the story of our fall from grace, because it also helps to point to where we may have sewed flimsy ‘clothes’ to cover up the nakedness we feel in our lives.  This question cannot be neatly tidied away, so it leaves a lasting vulnerability within the poem itself.

Before the poem closes, there is an appeal not to lose sight of children in our life designs.  Children embody our shared vulnerability, and this appeal then also calls us not to create lives that fail to acknowledge this.

The close then returns to mystery, to happenstance, along with searching and intentionality, which resonates back to the idea of design.  The first line is lived intensely in the present, emphasising the continuity of the process of life-home creation.  The second line evokes total commitment.

Originally the poem ended with the exhortation ‘Go to it’, but on reflection, it feels too heavy handed to address the reader in this way.  So this has been edited out, and instead the reader can identify with the speaker in the last lines.  Here the ‘you’ is less direct, and the reader then has more freedom to choose to join the speaker in the exploration of ‘everything’.

Since I have understood the poem in this way myself, I have enjoyed the sensation of life-homes being created, amended and adapted, of the importance of our vulnerability and the joy of a ‘hop on hop off’ approach to experimenting with new hobbies, ideas, reading, and so on.  I continue to enjoy the challenge of the first line, which reminds me to keep adventuring, to be brave to explore new things, and to be alert to places where my life-home habits and routines become confining.

on leaving some things unsaid

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I was going to carry on with part three (photo) and part four (name) of my one month review, and something has made me hesitate.  Is this too much reviewing?  I ask myself.  I feel a bit ‘I’ve started so I’ve finished’, but I don’t want to pay so much attention to something that I wear it out, like washing.

So in fact I will leave it there for reviewing for now.

Leaving some things unsaid is perhaps surprisingly like the dynamic of deciding when to jump off a wave you’re surfing.   Once you’re up, it’s so tempting to ride that wave all the way to the very end, to get the last centimetre of wave out of the experience.  But sometimes that leaves you on a scrappy bit of wave with no energy left in it, plus you’ve gone so far the paddle back can be really long.  Sometimes it’s better just to hop off earlier, leaving some energy and excitement ready for the next one.

In the writing I’ve been doing so far, knowing when to hop off what I’m writing has proven surprisingly challenging.  One of the most common final things before I post a post is to delete the last line.  (I’ll be heading over to ‘found poem, London, autumn 2014’ soon to get rid of ‘Go to it’, I can feel it’s too heavy-handed).  I have an aversion to overemphasising a point and making it annoying.  The other day I realised I wanted to coin a new word, something like obviaphobia, to label the fear I have of saying something that is too obvious, or that has been said too many times already, or getting wedged in an cliché.

(Leaving things unsaid is a habit I try to cultivate in friendships and work.  My sense of justice and precision is such that I often feel compelled to aim for accuracy in accounts of events, feelings, responsibility.  But this kind of precision can be too much to bear.  Discretion is an unsung hero of human relations.)

In music, I have been learning about ‘interrupted cadences’.  A cadence is two chords in a row.  The ones I have been learning about are at the end of a phrase of music.  A perfect cadence sounds like an ending.  And imperfect cadence sounds like you’ve just taken a breath but are about to end.  And then the interrupted cadence is my favourite.  It’s like leading someone up to the end of a path, and stopping just as the path turns a corner, and you can’t see what’s next.

The what’s next? is the unsaid bit, and I like the bit fact that leaving a bit unsaid leaves a space for the reader.