Back to Writing (finally)

It's always interesting to me how time off from teaching and the internet can start me writing again. Throw in a good poetry book or two and I am well away. After a worryingly dry spell that has lasted a good couple of months, just the odd poem here and there, I have written twenty two pages over the last three days. I put this down, in part, to the influence of Melissa Lee-Houghton's book Sunshine, which I received as a Christmas present. I had been looking forward to reading Houghton's latest collection as I really loved her last book Beautiful Girls. Houghton taps into some of the same themes that come up from my own past - although her past is even bleaker and darker, but somehow (like reading Sharon Olds and Pascale Petit) reading these poems gives me a kind of permission to return and explore some of the darker aspects of my own past. Of course it's not just the themes - I have to find the writing style exciting too and I do find Lee-Houghton's use of language both exciting and inspiring.

I am not largely (well I don't think I am) a confessional poet - although when I first started taking poetry writing seriously I did err towards writing in that style. In fact I wrote largely in a confessional style until mid way through my MA when my style started changing and evolving - it wasn't that I stopped writing about that stuff completely, but I felt less need to tackle those themes head on. A lot of the poems in my collection Bird Sisters, for instance, do touch on family tension and difficult (mostly familial) relationships, but they deal with them either in a fictional or a metaphorical way - for example in one sequence the narrator's sister is an owl.

These new poems that I have been writing are more in the style of my poem Friday Night King's Head, which was published on Proletarian Poetry earlier this year. Friday Night King's Head is from a sequence of stream of consciousness style prose poems that I have been writing occasionally over the last couple of years. The poems are dense and prosey - and usually explore one event or incident (Friday Night King's Head is about one Friday night in my old local). Sometimes the poems jump from one theme to another echoing the way memory and thought works, and sometimes they explore one subject more deeply - for example one of the poems is a list of things that as a child/teen the narrator was told not to do, each sentence starting with the word don't. The poem offers a slow revealing of the family dynamic - this poem was in part inspired by Lee-Houghton's poem A Good Home, which starts with the words "Don't run on the lawn." (In recognition of this I will put "after Melissa Lee-Houghton in italics below the title - I know there is a technical name for this but I can't think of it right now).

It feels exciting to be writing again after such a dry spell. It makes me realise how writing makes me feel happier and more fulfilled. I know I have been doing things that have been detrimental to my creativity - printing out all the Cafe Writers competition poems for example and i also wrote cover endorsements for a couple of books which takes concentration and close reading. I just hope that now I am back in the saddle that I can keep this writing momentum up.

The truth in poetry

There is some dispute over whether confessional poetry always has to remain true to the facts being written about. My stance would be that if you are writing an autobiography in verse then you should try and stay true to the facts as you know them, however, for individual poems it is better to say true to the poem itself.

Many beginner poets (and more established writers!) get hung up about writing about an event exactly as they remember it –

Say you want to write about a particular road trip that you went on as a child – in writing the poem you want to somehow recapture the feeling that being on the road trip gave you.  You start writing your poem but a few drafts down the line you find it is still not quite working.

You take the poem to a work-shopping group and are flummoxed when they don’t quite “get” the poem; they suggest taking some of the details out. You are resistant because you have written events exactly as they happened.

At this point it is clear that the poem is not working as it is and you need to make a decision – the poem is trying to capture a feeling, and that feeling might be better evoked by changing or eliminating some of the facts – facts that are not serving the purpose of the poem. Your other choice is to try and re-write the poem or write the experience as prose where chronological order and the facts are more important.  It’s a tough choice but as you become more experienced as a writer you realise that your writing moves beyond you anyway and it becomes easier to not be so precious about the initial inspiration for a poem and recognize that the poem has grown and evolved into a being all of its own.

My own writing improved tremendously when I stopped writing in such a personal way. It’s not that I no longer write personal poetry - I do, but I write it in a different way. It no longer beats you about the head with its personalness  - one of my MA tutors described it as relentlessly personal – personal to the point in which it excluded the reader. If you are writing to be read - and let’s be honest most people are, then you want your poem to speak to the reader and for them to be moved by it. This is what some writers call the greater truth of writing – the poem might not be entirely true (or true at all!) but if the reader believes in it then it has a universal truth.

Confessional Poetry - Fiction or Lie?

I read an interesting essay last night by an american poet called Ted Kooser who was basically saying that he felt writers should not write what seems like autobiographical poetry unless what they are writing is absolutely true. His view is that a reader implicitly trusts that what he/she is reading and responds accordingly (i.e. feels sypathy for the writer etc). If the reader believes that a poem is a true representation of the poets life and then finds out it is fictitious they feel cheated.

I found this very interesting. Personally I always view poems as being fictitious (like novels) unless the writer states otherwise. I often use things from real life as a starting off point for poems - but my poems are sometimes written by a fictitional narrator, I use real experinces but change them or add to the in the same way that I might do if I was writing a novel or a short story. Obviously if I was trying to write my autobiography I would do my utmost to try and recreate a true account of the events of my life. Poetry, however, I use to explore life events - events that really happened and the ones that didn't. Writing for me is a way to explore alternate realities. To do things differently, to imagine what might have happened if things had been different. I do not do this to try and deceive the reader. I see writing poetry as similar to writing short stories - I create a little universe that I hope the reader can believe in for the time that they are reading it. That is what I look for in the poetry I enjoy reading too.