Evolution and Risk Taking in Poetry

It is odd how quickly one's writing can evolve. I have just re-read my post from Thursday and realised that I have already completely edited the last line of that stanza out. I took a risk when deciding what poems to send round for this week's MA poetry workshop and decided to send two that had come from what has been happening to me recently (i.e. my mother's death and all the stuff that goes with it) and the narrative poem which I mentioned in my last post. Sending the poem Fire felt like the biggest risk because as I said before I have written it in a form that I am not entirely comfortable with. However rather than leaving it on the laptop for posterity I decided to take a risk and show it to the class. That way either my fears will be vindicated and they will tell me that it's a load of s*** or there might be something I can salvage from it. In fact they might give me some clue as to how I can use the narrative form in a more successful way. That is what we are on the MA for: to take risks in a safe and supportive environment, which, hopefully, will allow our writing to grow and develop.

(original artwork by pupski)

Back to the Source

The advice of my poetry lecturer this term has been to go back to the place where a poem comes from and see what else you find.

Wise words but not as easy as one might think. I think that largely I have avoided doing this in my writing practice. I tend to write something and then go back and edit it several times, shaping it what I hope is a finely honed poem.

But is rare that I actually add much more to the original words. This is partly through fear of spoiling it and partly through a kind of preciousness about what I have written and I realise now that this is both short-sighted and a little arrogant. I am not doing my work any favours and if I want to take that leap sideways which George Szirtes spoke of last term I need to be able to go back and re access the source of my ideas.

I tried this earlier this week in a poem I was writing about a house fire. I am not happy with the poem itself because I feel it is too much of a narrative and I shy away from writing that kind of poem generally, mainly because the long narrative poem is not a form that I excel at. But hey I am on a poetry MA and it is a good time to be trying my hand at taking risks and writing different styles and on different subjects - trying not to just write in the usual ways about the usual subjects. Anyway to get back to the point I wrote quite a bit of the poem in a a kind of free writing exercise kind of way and then instead of coming back to it later and simply typing it up and trying to lick it into shape I actually went back into the subject and wrote a whole lot more. I was surprised at how much more was there - it is just a shame that I don't like the poem.

here is a short extract:

I hear the throaty rumble of fire engines along the track,

the shouts of men in braces and helmets as they haul the heavy body

of the hose across the field to the river below the wood.

And now the house begins to creak and groan

like a ship straining at its moorings in a violent storm,

its sad mouth collapses in on itself

while its prematurely clouded eyes cry tears of river water.

Everyday

I have been reading this book that I received as a christmas gift. It is called "Everyday" and is a book of photographs by Byron Wolfe. Byron is a photography lecturer and decided to try and take a meaningful picture everyday for a year. Not a mean feat and he just about managed it - I think there only two or three days that he missed and one of those was due to a broken camera.

It made me wonder how it would be for me to try and take a meaningful photograph everyday. There were definite themes that emerged in Byron's work: his children, chickens/pets, fruit trees, washing, mealtimes as well as more abstract stuff like skies and pictures taken in his car.

It made me think about how I woul approach the project if it was mine. Would I want to document elements of the everyday and the threads of my life as a mother/woman/writer etc, focusing mainly on the domestic? Or would I approach it in a more abstract way and photograph elememts of the environment in which I exist which could be either domestic or external to the domestic environment? Or would I marry the two together in some way - or even have them running side by side like different threads of my personality?

It would be interesting to try and keep a log of what day a picture was taken and try and match it up with writing that was written on the same day.