Maps, Memories and Editing

It is always interesting taking a poem to a workshopping group. although sometimes it can be a little nerve-wracking. You can never anticipate how other people will read your poem or what they will read into it. The poem I took to my group yesterday was about a specific memory - but what I found interesting was that when the others read it they saw it as fantasy rather than a memory.  Thinking it about it afterwards I realised that the poem has many layers but these layers are not all easily apparent to the reader. The first idea is that life is viewed as a map or a series of maps, the second is that memory is used as a means of escape from unwanted thoughts - here memory is also used as a kind of fantasy - although the fantasy is something real that is remembered.

Here is the first few lines (but bear in mind it does need a lot more work:

If you travel far and fast enough

you might even escape

the unrolled map of your childhood,

you might sneak off its edges

and into some dream of narrow lanes

high hedges, man made hills.

In a place like this

you might find yourself

under a canal bridge with a small boy

blowing on a harmonica beside you,

watching birds skimming the water...

In the poem at the moment the idea of the map is in the first and last stanza but not in the ones in between and it was suggested that more could be made of the maps which I think is an interesting idea. I was not worried that they viewed it as a fantasy rather than a memory - the beauty of sharing is that sometimes other people read something in a completely different way than the writer intended. Some people get irate about this but I don't mind it - if I did I would simply re-edit to try and make my meaning more implicit.  

Book Groups and Writing Dilemmas

It is great that post MA I am still writing, but I have observed in myself of late a distinct lack of discipline when it comes to editing.  In fact I have done virtually no editing at all since the MA ended - I can only surmise that it is the lack of any definite deadline that has made me so lazy.  

Instead I have been putting quite a lot of energy into preparation for the poetry book group I am running. There were five of us at the first meeting but quite a few more people have said that they are interested in coming - although I suspect that the snow might put a few people off this week!  I have enjoyed the research aspect (must be the perpetual student in me!) - writing questions, looking up difficult words etc. and I have started posting the notes I have made onto a new blog, which you can find at poetry book group if you are interested. This month we are looking at "Dart" by Alice Oswald.

A friend in one of my workshopping groups recently commented that my writing seemed a lot more relaxed now I was not on the MA. I wasn't sure what she meant exactly but I found it an interesting comment and have since have tried to examine whether this is true and if so why. It is hard to tell if my writing became uptight as a result of my mother dying or being on the MA, or a combination of the two.  I also find myself wondering if this new relaxedness within my writing is  a good thing or a bad thing. I liked the change in direction that my work took during my final semester at UEA, I have written before about my reluctance to be pigeon-holed as a writer who only writes about the human condition and dysfunction, but I have also experienced some resistance to this change in direction from some of my writing buddies who felt that some of the new work more rural work didn't have quite the edge that my previous work had. Initially I was annoyed and alarmed by this - I wondered what would happen if I could no longer write about anything personal. I think it was an aberration though, probably caused by the death of my mother and everything that surrounded it, and I am finally starting to write some more human stuff again.

The Poet's Portable Workshop

Yesterday I was looking for a book in the university library and I found a section of books about creativity - in particular writing poetry. I ended up going home without the book that I had originally been looking for but with a stack of other books instead, the idea being that they might help jump start my creativity and help with my writing practice.

I started reading the first of these books last night. It is really interesting, it is called In the Palm of Your Hand - The Poet's Portable Workshop and it is by Steve Kowit, who is an author I have never heard of. Some of what I have read so far is fairly basic stuff - stuff about point of view, showing not telling etc. But I think it is good to be reminded of these things from time to time and have examples where what he is talking about is working well. later on in the book there are writing exercises as well and I am looking forward to doing those. One of the things that our lecturer this term has done is given us the occasional writing exercise to kick start our brains and I love them. I nearly always get some kind of usable idea out of writing exercises. One of the poems that I am working on at the moment is a poem called Swimming Lesson and it came out of a writing exercise I did with the Access to Writing group at City College.

Line Endings and the Dance

It seems as if this term all the conceptions and ideas that I had of how to make a poem good are being turned on their head. For instance I had come to understand that you should try not to end a line on a weak word (for example and, in, the etc.) but then last week our lecturer said in the poetry workshop that it CAN be OK to end on a weak word as long as the word that follows it on the next line is a strong one. To give an example we were looking at a poem about the countryside and the poet had ended some lines with words like 'as' and 'in' - but this was OK because the following words were 'owls' and 'time' which are strong words. It made me stop and think again about my own writing style - it seems that as soon as I begin to think that I might be beginning to know what I am doing everything changes and I am forced to re-examine the way I do things and why I do them.

I am still not writing as much as I would like but at least I am writing a little bit - although some of it is coming directly out of the things that are happening in my personal life, which is only to be expected I suppose but it means I don't necessarily want to share it with the world just yet (if ever).

I am enjoying the poetry workshops immensely though (and not just because they are a distraction from everything else that is going on). Last week the lecturer said two things in particular that have stayed with me: the first was that as poets (or indeed writers) we should write about "things that come to us and haunt us indirectly," and the other was that "a good poem can be reduced to the steps of a dance." I really liked these two ideas - the first because it seemed so lovely and I think that she is right and that by and large those are the things that I try and write about. When I try and write about other things (things that I think that I "ought" to be writing about perhaps) my writing is nowhere near so successful and feels false and laboured. The second idea I just love because it is such a good analogy.