Writing slumps and prose poems

I went into a bit of a slump after my dissertation. I knew that it was going to be hard when the course ended - there is always an element of grieving when something comes to an end. What I didn't anticipate was that I wouldn't be able to write. I went into a kind of writing wasteland, I wasn't even inspired to write any blog posts and this went on for several weeks.

I am happy to report though that I have, if somewhat tentatively, started writing again. I wrote several small things last week, one of which was a prose poem. The prose poem is an interesting development. I wrote my first one in the first term of my MA. David and I had gone to Derbyshire for a short holiday and we were staying in an old (and damp) cottage by a church at the top of a hill. I don't know if it was the change of scenery but I found myself writing in a completely different style to usual. I wrote a poem which I originally called "Sin-Eating" and is now called "Lent". The poem is written in a child's voice and has a slightly American feel to it. The narrator is part of a large religious family and the poem is a kind of stream of conciousness narration. I was pleased with it and it drew a good response from my MA class who requested that I write more in the same vane. Unfortunately though, this didn't happen - no more writing in this style was forthcoming and I wondered if it was perhaps a fluke, a one-off inspired by being in an unfamiliar environment. When I was writing the poems for my dissertation however, another prose poem emerged and appeared to be in the same voice as the first one, and then last week I found myself writing another. I was surprised but pleased and am wondering if over time they will develop into a small collection.

Just The Beginning?

So my creative dissertation has been handed in and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. My writing over  the course of the last year has changed dramatically. I came to the MA writing mainly semi-autobiographical poems about my dysfunctional family and growing up on a Thetford council estate. But recently I have moved away from using my past as the main subject of the poems. The need to write such deeply personal and uncomfortable poetry seemed to dissipate somewhat with the death of my mother and although what I was writing was still personal it had a different register and was more universally accessible. I found I no longer felt the need to write solely about childhood but was drawn to new subject matter. It was as if my mother’s passing and the end of what had become a difficult relationship had released me from the need to keep going back over old ground. I found myself in new writing territory. The journeys within my poems changed from the child’s journey into adulthood to physical journeys through real landscape. My reading matter has reflected this and I have been drawn to the river poems of Alice Oswald, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Philip Gross. 

I felt a sense of trepidation when I began these new poems. I wasn’t used to writing without the recognizable anchor of the past and was worried that without the obvious human element that the poems might lack something vital.  I didn’t want them to be purely descriptive. I also began to find that the language available to me somehow wasn’t adequate for what I wanted to express and I wanted to change it somehow. I tried to do this by using compound adjectives, a technique that Seamus Heaney often uses and one that I have always liked. I used this technique a lot when I first started writing poetry seriously. I also found myself wanting to play with the form of the poems. I have never been a fan of concrete poetry but these new poems felt like they needed to move around on the page. Redcastle Furze, for instance, felt flat in its early drafts - once I started moving the text around and took out the punctuation it gained a new momentum. The final version echoes the physical path that the narrator takes through the estate as well as giving clear emphasises when read aloud (projective poetry).

…the page can be used like a canvas, the lines stuck like pieces of a collage, or the page can be air, giving the lines room to move like the parts of a mobile.[1]

From the journey poems it seemed a natural progression to write from my personal rural experiences – I lived for ten years in a commune and also travelled around staying in other communities during that time.  From this time I drew inspiration for poems about wooding and milking cows (although only the cow poems made it into the dissertation).

By semester three I finally began to feel that I understood how to be rigorous with my editing: to recognize weaker lines (not as easy as it sounds) and what works/doesn't work. My practice now is to go back again and again when I feel a poem is finished and take out even more lines and words than I have would have done before. I have also learnt to detach myself from the subject matter and the need to include every detail when writing from direct experience – a poem is not an autobiography – to hold too tightly to the facts when writing can lead to a poem that doesn't make senses or excludes the reader. It is the greater truth rather than the actual truth of an experience that is the crux of a poem. A useful bit of advice given to me by a tutor was to examine each element of the poem separately – e.g. metaphor, punctuation or line endings. I used to try to look at everything at once and this made for much sloppier editing as well as an overwhelming feeling of where do I begin. I have also found it helpful to write down the imperative of each poem. The imperative is not the subject matter - for instance the subject of The Mound is a children's playground but the imperative is the loss of innocence.  It is not always easy to know what the imperative is, even in one's own poems, and this is where work-shopping can be invaluable. My block this semester has been in editing rather than writing.  Yare Song was problematic and eventually I put it away for a month before looking at it again. This worked as when I finally came back to it I immediately saw that I needed to cut more lines out rather than add lines to it – I had been stifling the imperative with uninteresting description.

The MA has been an exciting journey for me. My subject area has widened considerably and my writing has gone in new and exciting directions. Someone said to me recently that a previous student on the course had told her that it was only six months after the course had finished that she finally began to realise the profound effect that it had had on her - it's like you need that time to really begin to process and assimilate the intense learning journey you have been on. I feel for me that although I can see a real progression in my work: especially between my first and final submissions,  in some ways, my journey has just begun.

The lost art of punctuation

I realized today that I haven't written a blog post for almost a month. I was away for a week of that time but the real reason for not posting is that I have been too busy writing, editing and re-editing my work.  It feels like a struggle. Just when I think that a poem is finished I take it to a workshop and realise that there is more work to be done. I am trying not to get down about it. I know that the more I work on them the more rigorous I am being but at the same time I am trying not to repeat the mistake of over-editing until the heart has gone. These extra edits are generally small - losing words, phrases or lines and playing around with punctuation.

Talking of punctuation - I seem to have suddenly lost the art of knowing how to use it properly. I have never had a huge problem with it before - except perhaps the occasional over-usage of commas - but this semester I am struggling with it. part of the trouble is that it feels like the rules of punctuation should be different for poetry - if you took a poem and wrote it out as prose (I have tried this) and punctuate it like prose then reformat it as a poem it often feels over punctuated. I seem to be erring towards wanting less and less punctuation within my poems. Maybe it is to do with their subject matter - journey poems and poems about nature seem to warrant different treatment from the poems that I was writing before which were mostly about human concerns and very personal. Those semi-autobiographical poems seemed to need similar treatment (if a slightly lighter hand) to prose poems.

I came across an interesting blog on the subject of punctuation within poetry which you can read here

It's in the Editing...

I think I have finally realised what it means to be more rigorous with my poetry editing. The trick is: to learn how to recognize the weaker lines (not always as easy as it sounds); to get feedback about what works and what doesn't (what seems blindingly obvious to the writer may leave the reader completely flummoxed! The trick with that one is to detach oneself from the subject matter - especially if it based on a real place/person/event) and then to carefully question each part of the poem and look at how/if it is working, look for clichés (can you say it in a more unusual/interesting way?) check out whether or not your metaphors are working and whether they are conflicting with one another (for instance in a recent poem I had children swarming like ants but in the next line they were worming through a tube - these are conflicting metaphors that could confuse the reader).  

Another practice I have been finding really useful as part of my editing process is to look at each poem and try and write down what I think the imperative is. The imperative is not the subject matter - for instance the subject matter of the poem I mentioned earlier was a children's playground but the imperative of the poem is the loss of innocence - how things seems different as we grow up and how we try and hold onto that innocence.  It is not always easy to know what the imperative is, even of one's own poems and this is where work-shopping can be invaluable. Once your work has been critiqued it is good to try and explain what the work is really about (if it wasn't clear already). When I work-shoppped my poem about the playground for the first time it became clear to me by the end that the poem wasn't actually achieving the goal I had set it and I was able to rectify this with a few simple changes.  

Where has the "I" gone?

I had a great work-shopping session with a friend on Tuesday morning and  she raised quite an interesting question about my recent poetry - which was where has the "I" gone? And looking back at the body of work that I have produced on the MA it does seem that the "I" has been somewhat absent from my work. I find this extremely interesting, especially so because the work that I produced on my creative writing degree at the art school had a very strong sense of self and was intensely personal and firmly rooted in time and place. So where has this self gone? Is it that I haven't felt comfortable enough to be as candid as that on the MA? Is it that I have worked through those issues and moved on in my writing? Or is it that I have been responding to the comments of one of my tutors that some of my poems were less accessible because they were so personal?

The poems that I wrote about cleaning out my mum's house are personal but in a different way than the poems that I used to write, and the same with my journey poems. The new poems are more about what is happening around the "I" than about the "I" itself. This is very interesting and I think that there is a definite danger that if I am not careful  the poems might become too detached and therefore less accessible to the reader.  The "I" could simply become a thing that the landscape and circumstances surround and act upon rather than taking a central role.

My question is does the loss of the"I" make the poems dislocated and ultimately less powerful, less believable or is the "I" implicit in the narrative voice?

My friend also raised the question about whether some of the poems were doing enough. For example I had written a poem about milking and she questioned whether or not I should give voice to the wider issues that the whole idea of milking evokes.  Heaney, for instance, almost always has a deeper issue in his poems about rural and domestic life. My worry though, is that I don't want to state these deeper issues to openly - aren't the issues of farming, motherhood etc implied in any poem about milking?  I found myself wondering later exactly what the imperative of the poem I had written was - was it the problematical relationship between mother and child/human and animal, was it the ethics of farming, or was it a little of all of these?  One of the things I wanted to do was to dispel a little of the myth of the beauty and glory of rural pastimes. There is a great romanticism (especially in literature) attached to the milking of cows but I found it to be somewhat unpleasant and I wanted to convey this in the poem.

The art of reading

I was having lunch with a friend today and he said that he had been in a kind of reading desert and I knew exactly what he meant. I went through something very similar myself last year and it lasted most of the summer and right into the first term of my MA. It wasn't that I wasn't trying to read poetry - I was getting book after book out of the library but I just couldn't connect with any of them, and it was the same with criticism and novels at first. At one point I began to think that maybe I was finished with poetry (quite worrying when you have just started a poetry MA!).  I finally found my way back to reading though - I started off with short stories - things like Raymond Carver and Sylvia Plath - things that people had said that my poetry reminded them of. Then I graduated to reading novels, just for the fun of it and with no pressure, and it was through reading novels that I gradually found my way back to reading poetry.


Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels had been sitting in my reading pile for ages, at least a year. I had bought it in a charity shop in Edinburgh as I had remembered that George Szirtes had listed it as a must read book in the first year of my degree course. But as is the way of it, I had bought it with good intentions but had never actually read it. Then in the first term of my MA Anne Michaels came to give a reading at UEA and I went to hear her. I was so glad I did - she was amazing, a really good reader and such beautiful (and poetic writing). I went straight home and began to read Fugitive Pieces. It is a beautiful  book, deeply descriptive, thought provoking and with deep insight into the nature of human relationships - if you have only ever seen the film I would highly recommend reading the book as it is so much better!  Anyway reading it made me want to read Anne Michaels's poetry as I thought that if she writes prose this beautifully then her poetry must be amazing, and I was right she has a very sensual and physical style of writing (I have written about this before) and it rekindled my love for poetry.

Real poems vs processing poems

I have come to realise that as a writer it is important to recognize the difference between a real poem and a processing poem. A processing poem is a way of working through all that garbage in one's head, and it is precisely because of this that it is not easily accessible to the casual reader.

A 'real' poem, of course can serve the same purpose but does it in a way that makes it more widely accessible.  It speaks of things that the reader can relate to, or talks of personal issues in a way that makes them universally understandable. A good example of this is the poems that I wrote about clearing out my mum's house after she died. The poems speak of personal experience but not in an intensely personal way - they are not as deeply personal in the way that some of my other poems have been and this makes them stronger I think.

Entering an intensely personal and uncomfortable realm can be a disturbing experience for the reader. Some of Sharon Olds earlier poems take you to this kind of place and because of that they are difficult to read. Over the years she has developed ways of offering the reader a way in to her poems (e.g. making them more of a narrative) which makes them, not exactly less disturbing but easier for the reader who hasn't shared the experience to enter the poem, understand it and not feel so excluded from it.