poetry

portrait – writers

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Fourteen writers,
heads bent, pens
scratching, grey hair,
blond, dyed (mine, that is),
imaginations aflutter, fleeting
competition resolutely pushed
aside. Faint mewing outside
‘shut up, Ted’.  Is our four
minutes up yet, we thought,
breathless.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘The Bean Eaters’ by Gwendolyn Brooks, noted the Van Gogh-like style and tone, and were asked to writer our own painting-poems in four and a half minutes.  As my first attempt ‘portrait‘ took only one and half minutes, I spent another two on this.

extraplorer on tour

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I’m back!

OK so the ‘year of the poem’ has not turned out exactly as envisaged in my January posts.  The year of the poem turned, quite quickly, into the year of hardly any poem at all.

Until now.

After months of almost continuous business work and travel, devoid not only of any written down poems, but of any poetic moments at all (maybe they were there, but so fleeting that they escaped before I even had a chance to notice), I am on a poetry course.  Four whole days of thinking and writing about poems.

So I thought you might like to join back on the adventure of extraploring…

To get us started, last night we did a welcome unlike any I’ve attended on a course (this is my first ever poetry course).  We didn’t ‘go round the table and say our names’, no, too prosaic by far, we went round and said our favourite words.

I was in immediate and total bliss: ‘swipe’, ‘splash’, ‘twilight’, ‘botch’, ‘gossamer’, dollop’, ‘interstices’, ‘lime’, ‘splendid’.  A (to be honest) motley collection of us all suddenly united under the banner of ‘I love words’.

And then… well, I will keep you posted with our exercises and writing and you can see how we get on.  One thing to note: This is an ‘editing poetry’ course so some of the questions I have sometimes asked might get answered here.

Wish me luck!

 

 

year of the poem – philosophy

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The writing and thinking about the (as yet unrevised) ‘washed up’ poem has left a domino rally of thoughts tipping over in my mind.  The idea that the poem was teaching me how to write it was phenomenal.  But the next thought topped it; perhaps it was true of all things.

Paying close attention is the essence, for me, of what it means to be a poet.  The poet leans in to the idea or thought or person or moment or object, listens intently with her whole being, and in that listening, the secrets of the poem are revealed.  No listening, no poem.  No attention, no inspiration. No patience, no-thing.

The idea that this might be true of all things did not itself come out of nowhere.  As I mentioned before, I read some lines a little while ago with the phrase ‘you are truly the poetry of God’. This idea of being poetry has lingered.  I have spent some of the time on the journey between my home and the café where I do my work pondering this; what if life was inherently poetic?  What does it mean to be the ‘poetry of God’ (whether or not one believes in an actual God)?  What am I learning from poems that is true of life?

In my (paid) work, there is a lot of time spent learning theory and models and then ‘applying’ it to people, to work with them better.  This has value, but recently it’s been making me restless.  What other ways might there be to learn better how to create together?

The idea that people (and projects, and all things) have a poetic nature is liberating because it simplifies things down to one thing; pay close attention; the person, thing or project (or self) will tell you who and what it is and is becoming. It will almost reel you in to its field so that you start thinking and acting in the way that will help create it. You do not have to be afraid that you don’t understand or know or have the skills yet, if you pay close attention it will reveal each step when you’re ready. It is beautiful.

This is also very helpful for me because I am continually doing work that I have never (or no-one has ever) done before.  I am constantly faced by projects which are an entire unknown.   I love this idea because as I lean into the project, listen carefully – even do actual listening to the people involved, it will tell me how to co-create it.

(A funny note:  I tried to make this thought process into a poem – I thought it would be fitting -but it would not go at all; it didn’t want to be a poem.)

washed not quite up

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Yesterday’s poem, ‘washed up‘ is one of my first poems on extraplorer where I feel like I have not quite got to the proper form of the poem.  Most of the poems I write here seem to write themselves a little bit.  They slide out onto the page, and I usually work to some kind of internal rhythm as I write them, a kind of inner knowing of the form which I can pay attention to, and there it is.

The idea of washed up has been stolen by the Emily poem.  I had an idea for a collection of poems called ‘washed up’, and I might still try to make this because it is a glowing idea still.  But I was also very impatient to used the idea of washed up and somehow the Emily poem came along as I wrote the title.

I like most of the poem (and thank you readers who also liked it), but I think that it has got more to come.  I can tell that what I would really like to do is to make the poem more formally restrained than my normal very fluid writing.  The first stanza captures the feeling of this.

‘She set sail
for distant shores
from home.
She stayed indoors.’

The 3/4/2/4 syllables in each line I think set the pattern for what the other stanzas should be like (maybe with some variation).  For me, this rhythm emulates the rhythm of the sea.   I like the idea that the formal restraint could also emulate some of Dickinson’s writing (for example), while the sea rhythms would make it embody the idea of it being washed along the currents.

Another thing that maybe needs to be sorted out (I have only just realised) is that there is a clash of imagery between something in a bottle ‘Glass bottled / tears’ and a notebook which is what I originally envisaged.  I would like to think about these more and see if they should both stay or only one.

As with the formal constraint, I think the use of some rhyme here and there (‘shores’/’indoors’, ‘tread’/’instead’) makes it also have an element of homage to Dickinson’s writing.

I would also like to work out whether I really like the repetition of ‘small hand’ ‘distant shores’.  I think it might be too heavy-handed.

At the end of the day, I was too impatient to post the poem.  I really wanted to have written something, which is a very different feeling to feeling something is ready.  But also, I feel excited that the poem might be something I could craft. For me this is progress because until now I’ve been scared to do too much crafting in case I get self-conscious and can’t write.  Instead this poem is giving me a little gift because it wants to be crafted!  Amazing!  Maybe there are some poems that want to be and some that don’t (poem as a pet  metaphor has snuck in again, hooray, my favourite).

The poem is teaching me how to write a poem.

Awe.

(I would say ‘back soon’ but it might take me a little bit of time to work this out…)

washed up

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She set sail
for distant shores
from home.
She stayed indoors.

And all the world
unfurled in that
small hand and
took shape as
large as life could be.

Her poetry, afire
set out to sea.
Glass bottled
tears adrift on
waves of time.

And laughter too,
And beauty, loss
and tiny sparks
of tender feeling
rolled up and tied

with lines of pen
and ink
bobbed as currents
pushed it to and fro

and so to me, in
my small hand,
a visitor on distant
shores where she
would never tread.

Where Emily would
never go, her
poems went
instead.