How (Not) to Write a Poem

This isn’t to be recommended. Write a poem my way and you’ll probably wonder why I bother.

I know poets who know their beginning, middle and end before they start writing. For them, it’s how they get it down that matters but they know exactly where they are going. That must be a great feeling.

I thought I’d examine the birth and generation of one of my poems, a piece I started a few years ago, known then as Given to Exaggerated Gestures. I don't know whether this will interest anyone other than me, but that's the nature of blogging - send out a post for anyone who wants to receive it.

When I start a poem, I hardly ever know where I’m going. I get an idea, an image, a thought, and I start writing at the first opportunity. Some times (usually) I only get a few lines. In the case of this poem, I got:

He drove a dump truck to work
though his onion-strung bicycle
would have done. He liked to lie out
by the landfill site to count pigeons
in the haze.

Once it begins to get difficult, I stop. I think about the poem when I’m not at my computer, and when/if an idea occurs to me, I start writing it again. I had a few lines about a clearly eccentric character, and I felt he was now dead, and I was reading Simon Armitage at the time, so it seemed natural to switch the action to a laddish pub. And so I did:

And thinking about it -
that night in the pub, when he slung
a dart at the moose head
with the eye-patch and plastic antlers
and swore he’d shot it through the nose
first time round
(despite being vegetarian),
was typical of the man.

At some point, I keep going to an end, even if the going gets difficult. I decided to introduce a mysterious “we” who follow the character around, a giant tangerine, and a factory workforce who appear to drown in the tangerine-juice. Where did that come from? Well, I don’t often know what the ending will be until I get there, but sometimes it comes to me in the process of writing. Here, I knew the ending the minute my imagination gave me the tangerine (the tangerine disappears in later drafts, as does the ending). So the first draft gets completed:

For the last fortnight we’ve dogged
his tracks, and today we clock
the suck on the half-eaten orange spangle
he stuck to the dashboard
twelve hours before,
and the quest for cones to flatten
or for a lost boy to boot out
at some far corner of the city,
and finding neither,
the parade through the factory
dressed as a giant tangerine on stilts,
only to topple fifty feet,
burst open on broken machinery,
and hail stones on uncovered heads
that strain like stalks above the juice level
rising fast from the shop floor.

At this point, if I think the poem is worth working further on, I might let other people see it, and take note of their comments. Or I might leave it for a few weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes. With this poem I workshopped it – not to rapturous applause. People hated the line in parenthesis about being vegetarian, and they hated most of S2, especially the cones, the lost boy, and the ridiculous tangerine. And they hated the ending.

I shelved it for a few weeks and decided that, with a reception like that, it had to be worth working on. I redrafted it but made it even worse. You want to see the second draft? I should warn you that six drafts of this poem that have survived, so this post has some time to go. I’ll finish off just now with the awful second draft that I didn’t let anyone see for reasons that will obvious. I didn’t need anyone else to tell me it wasn’t working:

He rode an apple cart to work
though his onion-strung bicycle
would have done. He liked to lie out
on the strawberry patch
by the landfill site to count pigeons
in the haze and get high
on the scent of wildness.
He filled cans in the fruit cocktail
factory, spat in each one before sealing.

And when I think about it,
that night in the pub - when he slung
his gin and lemon at the moose head
with the eye-patch and plastic antlers
and swore he’d shot it through the nose
first time round -
was typical of the man.

We’ve stalked him for a fortnight.
Today he sucks a pear drop he’d stuck,
half-eaten, to the dashboard, twelve hours before;
drunk on the sensation,
he picks up a tramp and dumps him
blindfolded, under a date palm on a roundabout
island in a far-flung corner of the city.
But for the grace of God, go I,
he whispers, as the tramp begins his orbit.

And given to exaggerated gestures,
he polkas through the factory
dressed as a giant tangerine,
only to fling himself fifty feet down,
burst open on broken machinery,
and hail pips on uncovered heads
that strain like stalks above the juice level
rising fast from the shop floor.

Uuuurgh. Second drafts like this often seem to go backwards. More on this over the next few days. I promise you it does get better and I, at least, was happy by the time my sixth draft took shape, an almost unrecognisable poem that appears in The Clown of Natural Sorrow.