Poetic Creativity and Hidden Door 2014

The last year hasn’t exactly been the most productive for me in terms of writing new poems. I have tried and mostly failed, with a few exceptions, but since the StAnza International Poetry Festival my mind has been buzzing. Buzzing too much really. I have begun to wish it would stop and just leave me alone although, no, I don’t really wish that because I know I have to write these pieces if I ever want an approximation of inner peace again! It’s partly the poetry and the creative inspiration from being in St Andrew’s and partly other things I’d rather not go into. I feel that talking too much about the content of a poem before writing it might either stall the poem or affect its fluidity i.e. fix it too early along a defined path. I like my poems to veer off the path, otherwise I could end up telling you what I already think or know, which probably isn't that interesting..

It’s strange how poems come. For the last week I’ve seen one poem form in my head, but only its shape. I could virtually see it on the page, an embryonic form, but there were no words at all (although what's inspired it is clear). That's until I woke up early this morning before 6am and, trying to get back to sleep, suddenly found four complete lines scratching themselves into my brain. I have now written them down on paper. I have modified them slightly from their initial near-dream state, but only for reasons of music and rhythm, not meaning. There a few small gaps as the line-breaks need to fall between specific words, but it’s the beginning of something. Not just a single poem, I’m pretty sure, but a sequence or cycle or series of connected poems.

Annoyingly, it’s not the one I most needed to get a move on with. I am appearing at the Hidden Door Festival on Tuesday 1st April. The festival is at the Edinburgh Vaults and promises to be the event of the year in the capital: art, music of all kinds, photography, poetry, other spoken word, all combining and often collaborating.

I am genuinely excited by the commission – to produce a poem to go along with a live performance by the Viridian Quartet of Steve Reich’s rarely performed work ‘Different Trains’, one of my favourite classical pieces. I have ideas and a few stray lines at the moment. It will be the first poem I have ever written that will require more than one voice to read it, that's a definite component. It’s quite a task to put it all together and the stress of having to produce the goods is building, not necessarily a bad thing.

I remember David Morley saying at a Stanza masterclass a few years ago that he likes to work on more than one poem at a time. If he can’t get one poem to inch forward, another one might do. Sound advice and one way to defeat writer’s block. What I’m hoping is that kicking off the first poem mentioned above will, in some alchemical way, feed into the creative process for the second very different kind of poem. Let’s hope...

A Few Transtromer Nuggets

‘...a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”’ (Tomas Transtromer, ‘Below Freezing’)

‘Many workshop poets comb their personal memory and write poems about their childhood, filling the poems with a clutter of detail. This clutter sometimes ensures that the piece will remain “a piece of writing” and will not become “a work of art”’ (Robert Bly – ‘Tomas Transtromer and “The Memory”)

'So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of this is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us company part of the way.
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers – trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the darkness.'
(Tomas Transtromer, tr. Robin Fulton, ‘from ‘Schubertiana’, part 4)

‘Art helps us, [Transtromer] says, as a banister helps the climber on a dark stairwell.’ (Robert Bly)

From Blank Screen to Hamlet

I’d had a few thoughts on this blog over the past few months: how to revive it or how to give it a decent burial. I contemplated erasing it entirely, which may actually happen at some point. But, instead, here I am with a new post, mainly because I have been trying to write a poem and have come up with a blank screen, a highly attractive shade of luminous white.

The poem is a new opener for my next collection, as I feel there is no real opener among the poems already written. What makes an opening poem? Well, there’s no formula, although it has to be really good and has to act as a doorway into the rest of the book. Perhaps those twin demands have simply made its writing impossible up till now. Also, it’s the last poem I will write for the collection (I may delete poems, but not add any more) and, somehow, the final step towards completion of anything is often the most difficult of all.

And there’s Hamlet. Yesterday evening was a chilly, damp affair and I spent most of it curled up on the sofa reading Hamlet and thinking of how Shakespeare managed to knock off over a hundred pages of brilliant poetry, full of memorable lines and deep thoughts, whereas I have been struggling for days to write a poem that will fit inside a single page. Perhaps Shakespeare had those kind of days too. “Write something!” the creative writing tutors shout in near-unison, but “To be or not to be...” was not just “something” and may have needed days or weeks of silence before it all poured out. I have written something – this blog post – and I am thinking of Ophelia. Ophelia was a sap, wasn’t she? While Hamlet makes his “to be or not to be...” speech for himself, Ophelia ought to have listened in more carefully. She chose not to be in the end but, really, she chose that with every decision she didn’t make and farmed out for other people to make for her. Hamlet is quite nasty to her as time goes on. If it were a modern play, Ophelia's character would be condemned by many as an example of misogyny. She is certainly a tragic figure, all the more so because of how easy she is to identify with for more or less everyone, including me. But even poor, conflicted Hamlet finds making his life count for something almost impossible, even though he articulates his dilemmas with an emotional clarity most people can never approach. We don’t all have Shakespeare’s help. Only the clown, who also happens to be the gravedigger (a Shakespearian masterstroke), seems to find fulfilment in life, a fulfilment that comes from immersing himself in death. His work, at least, will outlive all the others.

Facebook, Poets and Writers

Facebook is fun. There’s no doubt about that and the number of users testifies to it. You’ll never get millions of people to sign up voluntarily for something that takes up time and bores the pants of everyone. For writers, it’s also an effective way of putting people in touch with one another, of making new links and cementing old ones, of keeping up with what’s going on in the literary world via a multitude of links, videos and status updates.

But there are problems. Serious problems. Everyone bangs on about privacy issues, sometimes with good reason and sometimes as knee-jerk reaction. The amount of time it can swallow is colossal, even if you think you’re on top of things; it’s hard to stay out of a debate you’ve contributed to for long, and good newspaper headlines make effective links you just can’t help clicking on. Some people talk about being addicted, but it’s often less of an addiction and more a feeling that you need to know what people are saying about what you’ve said, so that you can respond.

And so much of what’s on Facebook is interesting! Within fifteen minutes your head can be swimming with David Cameron’s latest idiotic soundbite, an atrocity in Uganda, a murder in Essex, the latest Guardian blog on why literary prizes mean everything/nothing, the discovery of ancient lakes on Mars, a new chocolate bar, glowing reviews of the latest Faber effort in all the broadsheets, an old Pavement video, an interesting fact about a little-known marsupial, A.N. Other’s latest poem about eating breakfast cereal while looking out a window at clouds...

And this is the real problem, I think. To write poetry requires focus, not a narrow focus, but focus that leaves space for the unexpected intruder. Intrusion has to come from a deeper place than fifteen minutes worth of noisy and tangled links, videos and discussions. A poem often begins to work when it is focused and then shoots off at a tangent, a tangent that somehow feels inevitable by the end of the poem. Social networking gets in the way both of the focus and of the welcome intruder. Instead there’s a crowd jostling at the walls of your brain for entry and, really, almost none of that stuff should have an invitation. The one intruder who matters usually gets lost in the baying crowd.

In the latest Magma, issue 51, Maitreyabandhu writes:

For a poem to communicate profound thought, the poet needs to think deeply; for a poem to express deep emotion, the poet needs to feel deeply; for a poem to be beautiful the poet needs to experience beauty.

Social networking can be detrimental to depth of thinking and I’m beginning to think that it can also act to limit our emotional depth too. I suppose it’s the same with any form of information overload: we may feel many things in quick succession about a huge variety of events and facts, but we’re denied the chance to go deeper into how we feel about anything. We might discuss things and learn things and discuss how we feel about things, but it’s all instant, buzzing communication, and usually has nothing to do with the specific piece of writing we’re trying to get done. Expressing how we feel in poetry without resorting to cliché, obscurity (always good for hiding the fact that we’re not saying anything! Although I am not suggesting that all obscurity implies this...) and overblown sentiment is one of the most difficult things to carry off in a poem, and social networks have made it that bit more difficult.

I’m not sure what the answer is. One solution is to abandon all social networks, and some writers I know have gone that way, but they do, I think, have value. Another solution is radically to limit time spent using them, but this is notoriously difficult to achieve and it only takes a few minutes for your head to be clogged with every subject under the sun. Emptying it of all that stuff can take hours. Maybe going for a run or taking up squash could help. Anyway, I’ll now post this article and, of course, link it to my Facebook wall...

The Sadness of Unambitious Poetry

“How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not.”

(Keats, 1818)

The Art of Recklessness

I’ve just ordered Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, which sounds really good to me. I like the way he attempts to prove the need for recklessness by using the example of Shakespeare, Wordsworth etc, not just the modern writers we might typically expect to hear from. The blurb says:

How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? “Poetry is not a discipline,” Young writes. “It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . .”

Here's an interesting review of it. The author of the review admits his own bias in its favour, but still goes on to say interesting things about it.

Of course, craft is important, as millions of badly written poems on the Internet will ineloquently testify, but it’s just as important to ignore every guideline you’ve ever learned if the poem demands it, to go with the poem and not with your internal censor. The fine tuning can then cut out the misplaced word, dodgy rhythms and sonic blandness etc, as long as the reckless energy remains.

A Book Which Doesn't Exist

OK, it’s New Year, a good enough time as any to get serious about my second full collection, the one which doesn’t yet exist. Poems begin life in a ‘Poems 2010’ folder (now 2011, of course) and move into the hallow of hallows – the ‘second collection ms’ folder – when/if I feel they’re ready. However, I have 55 poems there (most forming parts of sequences) and I am already itching to rewrite some of them and get rid of others, and there are some which, while good enough, don’t really fit in with this book and will either need to be left for a future occasion (by which time I will no doubt be thoroughly bored of them) or booted out.

I have a group of poems I call ‘nocturnes’ – my idea is to have 12 of these and, so far (in an entire year), I have written only 3. They are strange, hard to write, and it’s often easier not to think about them than work a difficult shift in which I may spend an hour and come up only with two or three usable lines. But that hour and other similar hours represent the difference between something being written or not written. This year, I am determined to write the final 9.

Bugged

I have a feeling I have forgotten (on this blog) to mention the Bugged anthology, for which writers were asked to submit work inspired by overhearings. It was an exercise in creative eavesdropping.

I have a poem in it called ‘What Friends are For’. But that’s the least of it. You can read some highly entertaining stories and poems from the likes of David Gaffney, Ian Duhig, Andy Jackson, Pippa Little, Sandra Tappenden, Stuart Maconie and co-editors, Jo Bell and David Calcutt. And it’s only £5.99, which is very reasonable for a 117-page anthology.

Interview With Tim Dooley

Fantastic interview at Tony Williams's blog with Tim Dooley, who talks about his new book, Imagined Rooms, but manages to say all kinds of interesting things about poetry and the process of writing.

Great to see someone mention James Schuyler, who is often overlooked (compared to O'Hara, Koch and Ashbery) in discussions on the New York School's first wave, but who is one of my favourite poets.

Also, interesting reflections on impurity, untraditional line-breaks, and the tensions/links between private and public spheres.

Two Things that are Important for Writing

Very interesting interview with Michael Hofmann from Stylus magazine, March 2009, which I missed completely at the time. A quick excerpt:

RL: So what things should a poet keep in her or his kit? You’ve thrown away the notebook…

MH: Which I regret. You should all keep notebooks. I think the two things that are important for writing… The contrarian Karl Kraus said that a writer who read was like a waiter who ate, as if there was something very distasteful and to be discouraged about that. It’s a wonderful witticism, but I do think that one has to read, that’s the first thing.

And the second thing is walk, which I suppose I took up from Mandelstam or Montaigne, pacing back and forth. It has to do with rhythm. The brain requires a jolt. You need to get away, especially from all the machinery in modern life. (Though nowadays you can take them with you.) Modern life throws more and more machines at us, and writing is something so old. If you want to write, you need freedom from machines. You have to listen to things in your head, and if you’re surrounded by machinery and gazing into a screen, you’re not going to be able to hear what’s in your head. So I would say walking and reading and silence, although I often would type with loud music going on. That has a sort of disinhibiting effect. I used to like that; I’d play very loud records and type.

Three Posts

Some great blogging going on in the last few days...

At Gists & Piths, there’s a really interesting and provocative essay on reviewing titled A Reviewer’s Manifesto.
Over at the Scottish Poetry Library blog, Kona Macphee has a great post in praise of writing habits.
And at Mairi Sharratt’s new blog, A Lump in the Throat, Sally Evans explains how she selects poems for Poetry Scotland.

New Mimesis

I had a backlog of stuff that had been queuing up for attention and this week has been really busy – hence the lack of blog posts. Not that I’ve had nothing to say, there’s just been no time to say it.

One thing I should mention is that the new issue of Mimesis is out, issue 6. It features poems and articles by several names that will make this issue well worth reading. I’m pleased to have three poems in there.

I don’t have any poems under consideration by editors at the moment – I haven’t submitted anything since June, and I really ought to send a few out. I have several publishable poems all ready, but I’m unsure where to submit them.

That said, I haven’t actually written a new poem for about three months, which is a long time for me, although I have an idea that my brain, even now (with any luck) is working on subconsciously. I’ve learned that’s how I write best, if I don’t jump in too quickly when armed with an idea and a few phrases. Sooner or later, if I keep the idea in mind, a line or two will start to form and the tone/shape of the poem will become clearer. All this can change when I start writing, of course, but starting a poem too quickly usually produces substandard work.

Kei Miller On Poetry

Great article here by Katy Evans-Bush containing ‘advice for a young poet’. I hope Claire at One Night Stanzas has picked up on this one!

The paragraph quoted from Kei Miller (from the excellent Iota magazine) is terrific, I think, although perhaps a “simply” would get over what I’m sure he means in this part: “poetry is never [simply] about what we say, it is about how we say it…” It's not only beginners who need to learn this, of course. I've read published collections and pamphlets where those basic points seem to have been overlooked. It’s also good to see someone (i.e. Katy) rip apart, with real style, the weird ‘Seven Steps to Becoming a Poet’ article from The Times.

Anyway, I want the Kei Miller quote here too, so:

“Now I’m not sure I can pin down three things young poets should understand – and certainly I can’t say it in any better way than such things have been said again and again: that we must read far more than we write; that poetry is never about what we say, it is about how we say it; that poetry is about making people feel things they’ve never thought before, because before our poems they never had the language to feel these feelings. And that is a huge kind of responsibility, to give people new access to their own selves. But these are big things to say, and some poets might understand the rhetoric but still never be able to do it. Perhaps such people aren’t really poets. That is a horribly damning thing to say, I know. Damning because it is so true.

“But it is a scary thing when you realise that you really can do poetry, when you realise what you are capable of doing to people through language. /So perhaps the thing I’d want to say to young poets who realise they can do it, that they can affect people, is simply one thing – don’t be afraid of yourself.”

StAnza 2009 - The Masterclasses

I got back from the StAnza International Poetry Festival 2009 last night. I’ll try to give a flavour of the festival in several posts, but at the outset I’ll say that I very much enjoyed myself. I heard some excellent poetry and had a good time in between and after.

I’ll start with the masterclasses. I went to two – the first led by New Zealand poet, Bill Manhire, and the second by Scottish poet, Douglas Dunn.

A masterclass is essentially a workshop led by a famous poet. Before the festival, anyone can submit a poem and six are chosen. The audience is given a handout containing the six poems. The leader goes through the poems one by one. Both audience and poet can chip in with reactions, ideas, praise and critical comment.

It’s easy to have a fixed idea of how these should operate. My feeling, after attending both, is that the success of a good masterclass doesn’t depend on a particular approach or style. Bill Manhire was quite ‘hands off’ but asked questions to encourage poets and audience to probe the strong and weak areas of the poems. Douglas Dunn was more ready to offer suggestions and direct constructive criticism. However, both approaches worked and gave rise to interesting discussions between the poet and audience.

My two favourite poems over the two workshops were from Marion McCready, aka sorlil, and from an American writer, Matthew Hotham: both mysterious, well written pieces.

One thing I noticed was this: some of the poets seemed very ready to note critical remarks and consider them. With other poets, there was an immediate defensiveness, a resistance to consider change. In fact, it seemed to me that the stronger the poem, the more ready the author was to consider change! Authors tended to dismiss suggestions for revision on the very poems which were less finished and needed the most work. That’s a generalisation but, I think, not altogether off the mark.

It’s hard to understand the reasons for this. Sometimes authors were reluctant to change because altering the poem would have involved leaving out details emotionally important to them, whether people, images, ideas, or events. Obviously, it’s important not to kill off the emotional heart of a poem through revision. However, the emotional epicentre of a poem isn’t always where the writer thinks it is. What moves the writer isn’t always what moves the reader. I felt many of the biographical details could have been preserved as prose in the writers’ journals and the impact of the poems would have been stronger without them. Maybe that’s the key step to take after achieving a basic acquisition of poetic craft. Most writers write themselves into their poems, directly or indirectly. Good writers, in revision, are able to see when it’s better to remove themselves.

My Persona And I

I've begun writing a series of poems using a persona. The immediate difficulty is that I’ve read most of Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Mr Cogito’ poems and it would be awful to write stuff that sounds a bit like them except nowhere near as good. The same goes for Weldon Kees’s ‘Robinson’ poems I mentioned the other day.

I’ve done this kind of thing before, writing as someone who isn’t me and holds opinions that may even be contrary to my own, but contains certain aspects of me. However, I’ve always used the ‘I’ before, even when I wasn’t writing as myself. I’ve never been clear, even in myself, whether that was a good idea or not. Several poems in ‘The Clown of Natural Sorrow’ worked like that – The Hedge Artist, The Actress, The Innocents etc. The poem about the Harry Potter launch featuring an unhinged, scissors-wielding JK Rowling stalker, was originally written in the first person singular. I changed it in case anyone really did believe I thought like that!

Creating a persona, a fictional character who ought to develop over a sequence of poems, is a new challenge. It releases me from the anxiety that people might habitually identify me with the ‘I’ of my poems, but it means I have to get inside the head of a fiction who, already, is quite hard for me to understand.

'Writer's Block'

I’ve heard several poets talk about having writer’s block after they had finished their first collection. Also, many novelists go through the same thing after completing their first novel. Where do they go after putting their heart and soul into a debut book?

I don’t believe in writer’s block exactly. It’s always possible to write something, to churn out a poem. But, after I finished the manuscript that was then accepted by Salt, I didn’t or, more accurately, couldn’t write a poem for about three months. I’ve been trying to work out why. It could be that:

a) the ideas I was having seemed like similar ideas to those I’d been working with on the manuscript – not much point in such repetition
b) lines that came into my head didn’t seem any good. In fact, they weren’t any good
c) I had nothing to say. This felt true. But how come?
d) I could have churned out poems. In fact I did churn out one, but I don’t count it as a poem as it didn’t amount to any more than an exercise

However, in the last week or so, I’ve been writing poems again, and have some interesting drafts (interesting to me, at any rate), poems I feel might be the starting-point for a second collection. They have similarities to some poems in the first collection (it’s still me writing them, of course, so that’s to be expected), but there’s progression too (I think).

Maybe time off between collections in a good thing. Three months isn’t so long, although it was beginning worry me and anxiety in itself can be a block to writing creatively.

However, I know of one writer who couldn’t write a poem for about nine years, but is now writing well and fluently again. Perhaps a break from writing, periodically, is a positive thing, even if it doesn’t always feel like it at the time?

Killing Drafts

I revised a couple of poems over the last week – one was almost there but needed more work, the other was nowhere in particular, but I think it’s getting somewhere now. It can be a slow process – revision.

There’s the danger of killing off everything that was interesting in the original draft and ending up only with the bits that seem good because that kind of thing has seemed good in other people’s poems.

There’s the danger that, in trying to push the poem off from where it was before into some place more interesting, you might push things too far and end up sounding inauthentic i.e. trying too hard to be interesting!

There’s the danger of battering your head against a computer screen at ten past midnight in total frustration at a poem that won’t quite work the way you hoped when you wrote those first few lines and everything had so much promise.

There are so many ways to kill a promising draft stone dead, it’s a wonder good poems manage to get written at all. But somehow they do. I can’t yet tell whether these latest ones are good or destined for the shredder (many of my poem-attempts end up unread by anyone but me. I can imagine them all meeting up in some after-life venue for discarded poems. Not a happy place, I guess).

Being Earnest

I always enjoy reading Patrick Kurp’s blog, Anecdotal Evidence, and this post on Herbert Morris, a poet unknown to me, was no exception.

Kurp quotes Eric Ormsby, who contrasts Morris’s work with the “career-building narcissism” and “sameness of tone” he detects in many poets. The rather discomforting quotation is worth pondering:

Earnestness is a splendid virtue; while essential to social workers and scoutmasters, it is, however, of limited value to poets who usually prove to be better writers when they are shifty, unscrupulous, and shamelessly insincere--in matters, that is, unconnected with their craft. Earnestness, by contrast, deadens; it homogenizes the sentiments; it may flirt with irony but never dangerously so; it subordinates magic to agenda; it seeks to please rather than to charm; it hankers after acceptance and respectability, however much it may squawk the opposite--and was any great or good poem ever truly respectable?

Captions and Alcohol

If anyone can suggest better captions for the photos at my Great Grog post below, then I’d be pleased to hear them, and might replace my efforts with them. I keep feeling, for example, that Mike looks more to be going through a mystical experience than talking about dogs (which he did) and Kapka appears more to be overcome with emotion than talking about her collection.

*

Two fascinating articles by Jim Murdoch on writers and alcohol. Part 1 looks at attitudes among writers to drink and Part 2 (which I found particularly interesting) gets down to practice itself.

I’ve not got time just this minute to say anything more, but I will in due course.