All entries for March 2008
March 17, 2008
Responses to the Guardian Online Poetry Workshop
Writing about web page http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/
I was delighted by the response to the past month’s workshop. You might remember there were two parts to it: a poem written while outdoors during the dawn in some natural environment, and a poem shaped by field-guides and the prose of natural history - an outdoor poem and an indoor poem both of which had a type of fieldwork as part of the method. For me, morning is the favoured time for writing; it feels luckier somehow. Dawn and pre-dawn always offer a sense of possibility, however foul the weather. Senses are sharper; responses less gnarled by day’s stress; and there is more to hear in the way of animal life, and to see in ‘the slant of light’ (as Patricia Wallace Jones puts it in her poem below). It was good to find so many poets getting out at dawn as a result of these exercises. It is an unconsciously effective time of day not only for natural revelation but also for self-revelation - dark nights of the soul can make for interesting dawns. Many writers used it as an exercise in mimesis; but some also took the opportunity to look sharply into themselves. As for the second exercise, I really believe that good natural history field guides can be (in part) as numinous in their perceptions and language as good poems. Many of this month’s poets found natural magic within their own field guides (even Wikipedia yielded a treatment on Tree Frogs). However, one of the main aims of this part of the exercise is not only to discover the poetry lying asleep in prose, but also to shape it so it escapes its origin and finds a fresh tone. It has to be woken up into poetry. The poems that accomplished that leap are wide-awake. Edmund Sandar’s Mule by Sarah Westcott Product of Jack Ass and Mare, bred by man since prehistoric times. Uses: particularly mountain warfare - the mule is rarely seen in peace. Skin: hard and insensitive, usually brown; sometimes sorrel or cream. It is short, thick-headed, long eared, voice: a feeble, hoarse braying. Mules possess sobriety, the patient sure-footedness of the ass, endure greater heat than horses but are sometimes sorely obstinate. They lack pride of ancestry, or hope - both sexes are completely sterile. Mules cannot gallop and without fail refuse all but the purest water. Sarah Westcott makes a sure-footed poem here – not only is there a sharp wit to the choice of material but a trustworthy precision in how the material is then shaped. There are back-stories to these facts, and therefore a sense of narrative withholding. Facts can beguile with as much charm as fiction, and when the facts have the tone of fiction then they carry even greater charge: ‘the mule is rarely seen in peace’, ‘mules cannot gallop and without fail / refuse all but the purest water’. It was the inclusion of the phrase ‘without fail’ before the reference to pure water that won me over in a poem in which failures of expression, of reproduction, are given such play. Fog Woman by Patricia Wallace Jones Moved by shifts, an upland chill over sun-warmed water, she follows the hills, cascades and falls on the far edge of summer. Unlike autumn when she moves slower, lower to match the slant of light, she is thick with the season, weaves up through the gaps to spend her days quietly so tied to land no breath can stir her. Patricia Wallace Jones creates a highly resonant and engaging poem from the dawn exercise. As in some of Michael Longley’s poems of the natural world, the brevity is extremely well-judged - less is so often more. There is grace of judgement in the movement of two phrases - the long vowels of ‘she is thick with season’, and monosyllabic final line that pulls the fog into the land, almost seeming to guy it down as if it were a softly billowing tent. There is a rewarding restraint to the syntax which I admire. Tree Frog's Romer by John Pache Tree Frog discovered in a cave on Lamma J.D. Romer to be found in Hong Kong and nowhere else. Tree Frog hoped J.D. Romer once to be extinct, the population disappeared in 1953 due to the collapse of the cave. Tree Frog, a chill upon his skin, rediscovered in 1984 J.D. Romer who spends most of the time on the ground, especially in clusters of litter. Tree Frog learns to his advantage of J.D. Romer brown in colour with a dark X-shaped marking on the back, which gives camouflage against the background. Tree Frog brings X to X whilst J.D. Romer gathers by the water's edge at night or on cloudy days and produces high-pitched staccato calls, which sound like those of crickets. Tree Frog, finger twitchy, giggles at J.D. Romer who doesn't like climbing trees and has poorly developed suction discs. Tree Frog, who recently hit a homer, unfolds a map showing the natural distribution of J.D. Romers (both past and present) and the locations of the release sites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer's_Tree_Frog I had to take a hop into Wikipedia myself to get to the bottom of this quirky poem – and I have since learned a lot more about this resilient species of Tree Frog and its discoverer, J.D. Romer. In truth, this interesting piece is not so much a ‘found poem’ as a rearrangement, with variations and inversions on the original – it collages the original material. The poet is playing a game on the original writing game, which is perfectly admissible and charming. For example, I very much like the way that meaning, the line and even stanza-shape ‘hop about’. The tone in particular – an arched eyebrow of tone – is appropriate and witty. It feels to me like this poem would like to be part of a sequence of such collages; it is a poem that needs the company of other poems like itself. At the moment, it feels a little exposed. I’d like to see more poetic variations from the elegantly sceptical pen of John Pache. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HAWTHORNS by Roy Kelly Hawthorn, or quick, consists of two species. Crataegus monogyna Jacquin, the commonest, is very widely distributed throughout Britain. Its particular features are: divided leaves, one stile, one stone in its fruit, many small flowers, and it tends to be spiney. The less common species, formerly known as Crataegus oxyacanthoides Thuillier, is more correctly named Crataegus laevigata (Poiret), the Midlandthorn. It can be distinguished by its leaf shape, which is almost entire like a plum. None make lovelier lawn trees. It has two or more stiles, and two stones to its fruit, and other, more subtle characteristics, including fewer, bigger flowers, and many serrations in the edges of its leaves. C. laevigata is the hawthorn of woodland, C. monogyna the hawthorn of open spaces, though people will call them both May, flowering like Joseph of Arimathea’s fragrant staff, sweet-perfumed evidence of Old Style Spring. In disturbed areas their isolate identity is readily broken, then blurred, allowing pure species to hybridise. Cut back in coppice or hedgerow a hybrid swarm will send up new shoots, each having its own root system. Under these conditions a hawthorn settles, modest, tenacious, enduring centuries, a slow, continuous recruitment, an indefinite historical record and Gregorian lyric, a commonplace habit of singular beauty: unpredictable odd lengths in green and black and white, dense and polished, plentiful as prose, entwined with thorny spikes threaded to puncture fingers or rag an arm, sharp as all the heartaches lying in permanent wait. The Romans, ages past, placed the leaves in a newborn baby’s hands, for luck. (Acknowledgements to A. D. Bradshaw’s article on hawthorn in the pamphlet Hedges and local history, published 1971, Standing Conference For Local History, from which this text is largely adopted. Other useful words come from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and W.J. Bean’s Trees and shrubs hardy in the British Isles, 8th edition, John Murray 1976) Exuberant as well as exuberating, Roy Kelly’s ‘The Significance of Hawthorns’ is a tour de force of precision and adventure in language. ‘Hawthorn, or quick’ sets the open-minded – and open-handed - tone for a poem which is as much about language as it is about an exploration of habitat and habits. The shifts of language are rapid but they are never disorientating. This is skilful writing: ‘C. laevigata is the hawthorn of woodland, / C. monogyna the hawthorn of open spaces, / though people will call them both May, / flowering like Joseph of Arimathea’s fragrant staff, / sweet-perfumed evidence of Old Style Spring.’ Kelly’s syntax has the spring and energy of some of Les Murray’s nature poems in which syntax often impersonates the movement and perception of the natural subject. The spring and energy of hawthorn branches swings through the very arrangement of the poem on the page. The branches of the poem’s lines may be pruned and trained, but wildness is also allowed. Kelly shows writerly confidence in lines such as, ‘unpredictable odd / lengths in green and black and white, / dense and polished, plentiful as prose, / entwined with thorny spikes / threaded to puncture fingers / or rag an arm, / sharp as all the heartaches / lying in permanent wait.’ I very much admire the panache and poise of this fine poem. You can say of a poem like this: as is the gardener so is the garden; as is the poem so is the poet. GHOSTING by Harriet Torr Ghosts, creeping perennials spreading fast round makeshift burial mounds. Past whiteness being itself in the snowdrop, past coal seeds spitting back, past the creep of landscape the fault line of a rose, past the birds that wheedle and turn the sun’s treddle on ice, past where the thaw-fur unsettles the identikit of rocks, past a boulder, sitting like a man, the river’s print under his thumb. Past the Caithness slabs where flora evacuees drive on lichen its weathered excess of maps. Past the plankton of a sea’s drift sweet pebbles and rain-flowers shift for a silence, for a song, for the shadow of the owl in the moth’s eye, for the lichen that hang their spores against this dry stone wall, soft as the memory of moss cushions for the shape they hold: Stonecrop and Saxifrage, Ragwort and Rue, the latitude of summer, the longitude of snow. An excellent poem by Harriet Torr whose phrase-making is especially vibrant, vivid and fresh. Visual effects are sharply realised and focussed: ‘the shadow of the owl in the moth’s eye’; ‘the latitude of summer, the longitude of snow’, and lichen on slabs as ‘weathered excess of map’s’. This is purposeful, precise and powerful writing from a poet I expect we shall hear more of. The repetitive elements give the piece the charge of an ecological litany. Were I a small press poetry publisher I would be on the trail of Harriet Torr for a first book. Dawning by Tina Cole At this hour there is only form; darkness receding, outline revealing names to shapes. A dry stone wall all line and gap, and precarious layers teetering. The eye strains for pattern tracing spine and highway, brittle mosaic; dark tessellation. Light thins streaking a wilderness where briars run amok in topsy-turvy pandemonium. Grey-green moss blankets form, shadows flicker across muddy fields. Ancient stones regain ochre mouse back brown, dull-eyed yellow. From its precipitous opening, Tina Cole’s poem shows a fine eye for close-up detail and for cool, passionate description: ‘…tracing spine and highway, / brittle mosaic; / dark tessellation’. As the poem puts it ‘the eye strains for pattern’. It would not take much extra work to revise this into a shapelier piece, maybe by using a tight syllabic pattern deployed in tercets? I like this poem very much, and I would like it even more were it passed through the finer sieve of syllabics. STRAWBERRY BLONDE by Beth Somerford A late February night-to-morn; pied trees and sleeping rooks still darkly calligraphed until a Midas touch begins to bronze the tight-packed trees so they are lit like platinum foils; a melt-in-the-mouth morning, the light like grainy pear, and sliced by scars of vapour trails where paper knives have slit the air-mail sky revealing secrets, white on white, like empty pages. Telegraph wires cut a slice of air, a sliver marked between tall trees, or two imagined verticals. The trenched outlines of field and path, are layers of spiked gorse and silver-scribbled bramble stems. The new sun on a curve of bank, where paths congress, lights up a moss lanugo; clouds, meringue-glazed troughs of cream, a shepherd’s warning in the east and itching towards day. Beth Somerford’s poem is elegantly composed and convincing; it needs only slender revision to make it compelling and inevitable. Many of the images are intense and powerful but some need a little trimming to render them complete and focussed. What works extremely well here is concise description such as ‘to bronze the tight-packed trees / so they are lit like platinum foils’ which echoes the ‘moss’d cottage trees’ section of Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” – but updated to a modern silicon age. If the poet can capitalise on numinous moments like this, and carry that close observation and writing into the other images, then a considerable poem might well result. Plum Tree by Andrew Webb In the lit taper of birdsong, and here in the finger puppetry of crocuses, day has taken. Daffodil heads, oversize, hang like snowdrops. Edges of holly leaves are luminous against their black centres, and white lichen splashes the box tomb lids. Against the tree’s broomstick timber, blossom stands out briefly like white spores of mould. In summer, six weeks’ married, we ate its fat plums as if there were no tomorrow, and now this tree is kin to another smuggled message: its twigs and white and crimson buds are meshed by a tethered net of frost as if – like the ivy cut at its base marauding still the braided cable of its roots and trunk – it were scaffold for an other, parasitic tree. This is the day’s betrayed conspiracy. A pressed albino stalk is all that’s left of the meadow saxifrage that has lifted the flyleaf of this gravestone, while moss makes braille of the names and dates of that. A hen blackbird, low as a trip rope, crosses my path, pursued. A window’s leadwork is a colouring-in book of animals and wise men who crowd around mother and child. Many of the poems that came from this workshop feel quite lonely (they are not the lesser for that). Nevertheless what many poems depicted or evoked were a single human observer and some observed nature. In Andy Webb’s fine poem, nature not only spills into the life of the poet, but into the lives around the poet and his world of holly leaves, white lichen and the tree’s broomstick timber. ‘I’ finally becomes a ‘we’, and the poem is warmed by the company; warmed to such a degree that a child is born towards the end of the poem! There is pleasing sense of formal alertness in this poem – half-rhymes and full-rhymes nudging sideways off the line-ends. But the best is saved to last: the precision and iron-like grace of the final eight lines has an almost Augustan toughness and sensitivity. I have had to re-read these wild yet precise lines several times to get their measure, and I find they present new illuminations with each reading. AT CHICHESTER HARBOUR by Mandy Pannett Common seals may be observed in lower reaches of the harbour. When the tide is out they like to bask on mud and can be taken for a rock. At high tide it is worse – you have to spot their tips of snouts. There is one plant that doesn’t grow elsewhere in Sussex. Eelgrass is a flower that serves as haven for scallops, crabs, species of fish and other wildlife, offering habitat and food. In spring the cuttlefish arrive and comes inshore to spawn. Summer time the fishermen will trawl for sand eels which are used as bait for other catch. This harbour is a ‘nursery’ for bass – waters where the young can grow. Changes are predicted for this place as temperatures and sea levels rise. As I wrote in the workshop, by entering into an engagement with traditionally non-literary fields of knowledge, we open their languages (and even their sometimes-opaque jargon) for our use as writers. By doing so, we hope to release fresh themes and subjects for our imagination to scrutinize, turn over and play with. The American poet Marianne Moore had a especial genius for this. The design of Ms. Moore’s poems depended mostly on syllabic count and intricate judgments concerning space and line-breaks. The language and subject of her poetry almost seemed to spring from the language and subject of a clear scientific paper. The balance between an intricate - but inevitable - form and ‘found’ content is tough to get right, not least because it is an exceedingly delicate balance. One can end up sounding flatly prosaic on the one hand, or archly ornate on the other. Mandy Pannett’s poem has considerable potential to become a marvellous poem. It is dense with images and wonderful ideas (‘seals…can be taken for rock’, ‘waters where the young can grow’); the choices of material are continually interesting. The piece needs further moulding and shaping to further ‘release’ its potential as poetry. Maybe syllabics might be one answer, as they were for Marianne Moore? Voices by Madeleine Wurzburger Eleven Mallard males, one female, dusky buff-white, quiet, dark drake heads with uniform dull yellow bill, one bill orange, drift on water. High dawn flight: flocks of gulls in lines - silent, some stragglers. The hum of geese re- assuringly, peep peep from the trees. The river ripples. One swan flapping fluid over the surface – hoo hoo hoo – doesn’t stay. Water blue-grey. Madeleine Wurzburger’s dawn poem is closely observed – like so many of the poems composed at dawn through this workshop. As I wrote above, dawn and pre-dawn always offer a sense of possibility and senses are sharper. Because of the greater threat of predation at this time of day, the senses of many animals are sharp – including those of the predators. I admire the final stanza of this poem, and the disappearance of the swan ‘flapping fluid over the surface’. Crow Land by Scharlie Meeuws The air is cooler at dawn, sound travels further, from the dawn chorus to a blackbird’s rapid scolding call, as the crows appear, growing black ink splotches on patchy rice paper skies. The two carrion crows are chasing a leveret racing in zigzags down muddy tracks, now in hiding under a blackthorn hedge. A wood pigeon and a collard dove vacate the chestnut tree in protest. Since there is something unheard in this early chase by blood brothers, as the ear is honed only to a few decibels, the mind must listen beyond sound, tune in to higher vibrations funnelling bird meaning. A chase is not always about survival or attraction but a call for life at the edge, as if birds were unearthly, their shape opaque illusion in simulated flight, as if wings were ghostly hands to urge and wave on stagnant air flow, play down crop thieving or flutters over fidelity. By circling the tree tops crow land is built with crow energy and crow voice. Crow laws are issued in crow language. Translation sets frontiers in keep-out-pattern claiming links between the living world and the fields of death. In the east the three-legged sun crow keeps on chasing the white moon hare. Here the spirit is craw-music, tongues in the air. Riddles of death and rebirth that live on carrion, sneak iridescence into bleak blackness. Scharlie Meeuws’s ‘Crow Land’ is a quietly strong poem and it could be sublime - it would not take much to take it in that direction. There are marvellous moments in imagery, in tone and rhetoric – this is a poet who knows how to write a compelling piece and I admire the energy and range of expression. At present, too much of the poem is too close to the notebook in which it was written. It now needs the total and totalising light of the writer’s attention to be ‘written through’, to rid it of prosaic lines, overwritten images, and to pay a razor-like attention to line-endings. My respect for the poem - and the poet - leads me to suggest a radical revision. First, close up the poem’s stanzas. Second, ‘wrap’ the poem back into itself as if it were a prose paragraph. Third, consider it as a prose poem before reading the poem out loud. Fourth, after reading out loud, begin line-breaking the poem on a unit of breath (Allen Ginsberg’s notion for composing “Howl”). Fifth, try easing the line-breaks on a strict syllable count (say, a roughly Miltonic ten-syllable line) and revise and cut accordingly. Sixth, look at all these possibilities side by side and read them aloud again. If one of them works best then you have your poem. If none of them works, then consider losing about forty percent of the poem, and trying it on the ear in a new, tighter version. I hope the poet will be pleased with at least one of these results. Dawn trilogy by Rebecca Gethin Dawn 1. Ajar Faraway sounds of daybreak somewhere beyond, not quite here sweek, dwee small uncertain sounds of light hweet chaak hweet skrike owl calls faraway uncertain light of day breaking ee-eep, pew pew fluttering of wings crows skycall to one another a cow drinks, sucks up water though baggy lips drips slop back into the trough ching, tik, chink here in the undergrowth light flutters with the uncertain glow of a lit match sweek, pew pew hills loom darker than night tsee-tsee-tsee darkness recedes into twitcheny throstle rinses the dregs of night pours out daybreak repeats and repeats the opening phrase. Dawn 2 Twitcheny Leaves rise from out of the trees revolve slowly like charred pieces of paper billowing in a plume of smoke that ignites into starling song. Dawn 3 Transparent The river is a ghost of itself luminous with steam - the still air is colder than running water. Light thickens flickers on the surface. Stones twitch. From under the bank glimmers move upstream. Daybreak is this rippling. The meniscus shivers black grey, black grey. Something like a dipper bobs and curtsies. The current reverberates bubbles rise swirl downstream and the deep pool below the rapids’ hurleygush has turned blue-green. Rebecca Gethin’s dawn sequence is ambitious and interesting in the manner of one of Alice Oswald’s extended first-hand explorations of the natural world. The first section is the most honed. It evinces a convincing negative capability in its responses to, and emulations of, birdsong - the syntax switches between spoken and sung. Visual perceptions are provisional and open (I like the conceit of the cow’s ‘baggy lips’); and I admired the manner in which senses are melded in the half-light, in the space between dreaming and waking – ‘Something like a dipper bobs / and curtsies’ [my italics]. Throughout the sequence, I enjoyed the way the poet takes her lines for a walk – this is a poem, and a poet, on the move, open to a variety of sensory stimuli and alive with the shiver and excitement of exploration (The river is a ghost of itself / luminous with steam - / the still air is colder / than running water.) There are parts of this poem which are quietly astonishing. If the poet were to revise anything she might revise aspects of the lineation in the final section. Beech by Peter R White Wilkinson, John and Mitchell, Alan (1978) A Handguide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe. Treasure Press, London Beech (Fagus sylvatica) cannot make roots in saturated soils but drive them through dry layers to reach moisture. Hence although a thirsty tree it is not found in wet hollows nor on clay soils. Male flowers are little balls of stamens on slender stalks. Female flowers are green with white filaments and are on short stout stalks. Beech live for barely 250 years then die and fall to pieces suddenly. Peter R White’s ‘Beech’ is a classic and careful “found poem” in that it does not depart too much, if at all, from the source. The driving roots and the tree’s thirst are the high moments when line and content seem to work well together. I also like the ending, the precipitous finish of the tree’s downfall. Pastureland by
David Morley
17 Mar 2008 09:21
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Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry
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