Unpicking knots and hour-glass figure poems

Last week I went on an Arvon course at The Hurst in Shropshire with the wonderful Daljit Nagra and Julie Copus – the week was quite wonderful and I’m sure I’ll mention it again in later posts. One immediate effect that last week has had is to encourage me to interrogate my own poetry far more than I have before. I’m finding myself going back to poems that I knew weren’t quite right but had something going for them and I’m tugging them apart line by line, word by word, stitching new bits in here and there in the hope that I’ll eventually come up with a new set of Emperor’s clothes….

Looking at your own work is (for me at least) the hardest thing to do because even after weeks of ‘resting’ a piece I still know the story and what I wanted to say and I can’t see past that to see what the poem needs to say. I had a conversation with Julia about this and she said that I was rather like someone listening to a great piece of music through headphones and singing along – I could hear the entire orchestra but all the audience got was my a capella version – she did kindly add that she was sure I had a lovely voice. I’ve always suspected I’m a little tone deaf.

So what’s the best way to deal with this problem? How do we make our work convey exactly what we want them to say? I truly wish I had a quick answer to this one, I wish I could say, “Well, it’s easy, just do X, Y, Z and then Bob’s your uncle and a deal for your first collection will be yours for the taking!” But I can’t. So far my remedy for redrafting is as follows – and this holds true for any type of creative writing whether it’s a novel, short story or poetry and even for writing non-fiction too.

Don’t censor yourself in the first draft

Try to train yourself to write freely or practice ‘automatic’ writing. Stephen King recommends this in his brilliant book, ‘On Writing’. Set yourself a time limit each day when you will not be disturbed by anything. Then write whatever comes out of your fingers. Last week I put myself under pressure at one point – I’d poured cold coffee over myself, wasted my break by waiting next to an empty loo I thought was occupied and had to write something, anything within ten minutes – here’s the start of it

“I’m harassed, panicking, I don’t like being pushed this is not how I work. I like plans, preparation, being ready, not hurried. I come prepared, I don’t just throw things together. I plan, prepare. I admit I’m anal and like order and I’ve not even begun to say what I wanted to say because I’m panicking, unprepared. I don’t like this. I feel boxed in, cornered – a rabbit in headlights except rabbits don’t do that deer do but rabbits just ignore the headlights and go squish under the wheels of a 4x4…..”

And from then on a poem suddenly appeared. It was a piece all about people who come to the countryside with very different expectations of their life to those who have always lived there. I admit it, it was a bit of a rant but one I hadn’t intended to write until I was put under that bit of pressure and also because I tend to write a great deal without thinking - ‘automatic’ writing.

So that’s fine, you’ve now got something down on paper. Great. Now what?

 

Put it away for a few weeks

Honestly, it helps. If you can put it away for more than a few weeks that’s great – with any luck you’ll have forgotten writing it and you’ll be able to see what the piece is really about. Distance – that’s the thing. Finding distance with your work is so important – you need to see the writing as something away from you, not part of you. Objectivity is what I’m getting at here and when you’ve just written something it’s hard to be objective and see things like weak line endings, bad meter, poor images and so on. After a few weeks those things should (hopefully) become a little clearer.

Now you’re at the stage that I was a few weeks ago – loads of stuff written, redrafted after a few weeks and then I’d even submitted pieces here and there. Some of the poems have been successful and some haven’t – that’s not always because they’ve been poor poems (I tell myself) but sometimes the editors have been looking for different types of work or perhaps just recently found something similar that they preferred. Well, at least that is what I was telling myself, but now – after last week’s many conversations – I’m beginning to see that some of what I’ve written isn’t yet fully formed. My background has been very much story based – I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction, I wrote a novella for my Masters, I wrote opinion pieces for a magazine – all stories of a type. Yet my poetry has tended towards lots of abstract and rather nebulous ideas…apart from those that have made it into print…guess what? They’ve been rather like tiny stories.

So, my next piece of advice…

Apply the same rules of writing to fiction AND poetry

When you want to create a really rounded and fully formed character in a story you consider how you describe them with all the senses, how they speak, how they move, what others think about them, what others say about them, what motivates them and so on. So apply that to a character in your poem – think about what they’d say, what motivates them and so on. Even apply it to your poem – what is motivating it? What’s it really about? Pull it apart, work out if each and every line, each and every word works with your poem and with what you want it to say. Try writing out your poem in longhand if you normally use a PC or laptop. Try writing out your poem into prose, change the line endings, add words, take them away, keep slowly chipping away at it until it looks exactly as you want it to.

This last bit is the hardest part of all and I’m still grappling with them – so expect some further posts in the future attempting to make this part of the process somewhat clearer!

At the moment I’ve pulled one old piece apart and I know it’s saying something – originally it was an observational piece about two elderly women on the bus – I watched them and they interested me. Now I know from what I’ve written and rewritten that it’s a piece about being in the mother-daughter relationship and being overshadowed. The poem still doesn’t work yet, in fact it’s got rather an hour-glass figure – a great beginning, a strong end but nothing in the middle. I know that just like prose fiction I need to give it an event, something to hang it all around, something to give it tension but right now I can’t see what that might be. So this poem will stay in my Drafts folder for a while longer and that’s irritating because I like things finished….which is why I probably rush stuff and submit it before it’s really ready.