Autobiographical Poems

Within my collection of fictional autobiographical poems I have tried to create, through use of language and imagery, a sense of alienation and displacement. I wanted to subtly show how the sense of being an outsider that the narrator feels as an adult is echoed in her experiences as a child growing up on a small town housing estate, and that this in turn is echoed in the experience of her family as a whole. Although these poems are not directly autobiographical they do naturally have definite echoes of my own experiences within them. I would hope that I am not as unsettled and alienated as the character in the poems but I have experienced some of those feelings at different times in my life. I was also bought up on a small town housing estate and can trace a sense of displacement and alienation through my own family’s experience. It may have begun with my mother’s grandparent’s move from Southern Ireland but for me it really began with my parent’s move from London to Thetford in the nineteen sixties. My mother was from Ealing and my father was from Acton – both busy centres with a lot going on. They had both been brought up in London. In 1969 they moved to Thetford due to availability of work and housing. They were part of the first wave of what was known locally as “London overspill”. Thetford couldn’t have been more different from London. It was a small rural market town surrounded by pine forest. They had moved themselves away from everything they knew and all their friends and family. It must have been a hard time for them, they did not know a single person in Norfolk and although my father had his job, my mother was isolated at home with a small child. They did not have a car or a phone and had little money for travelling home to visit relatives. There was only one busy road in Thetford – the A11 and that gave the impression of passing the town by, especially when in 1970 the route was diverted from passing through the town centre.

As a bright child who was often bored in school I spent a lot of time gazing out of the classroom window daydreaming about who might be inside the colourful cars and lorries and where they might be going. Cars held an extra mystery for most of the Redcastle Furze kids because in the early 1970s very few families actually owned one. The only person in my family who owned a car was my dad’s mother who would come and visit us once or twice a year. On the day of her visit my sister and I would wait all day by the tall landing window vying for first sight of her yellow mini as it rounded the bend. We lived on the main road in and out of the estate but there was little traffic – maybe five or six cars a day.

There must have been some sense of animosity or alienation between the incoming Londoners and the native Thetfordians, which my parents might have noticed – but as a child I was blissfully unaware of such things. I was however acutely aware of my own sense of “otherness” which partly stemmed from the fact that though essentially working class my parents were fairly intellectual. The house was filled with: books, music, craft objects and the walls were colourful and covered in large French posters. My mother was large and to cover this she wore floor length homemade dresses (a source of acute embarrassment to me as a teenager). They also enjoyed a fairly active social life – they were involved with CND, Thetford Against Missiles, a local arts centre and gallery and later on ran a folk club. This may all sound fairly exciting and idyllic but it was coupled with a precarious and volatile relationship.

Dylan Thomas said that when he first came to love poetry as a child that it was the sound of the words that he came to love first and the meaning was only secondary. For me it was the opposite - I loved the places that the nursery rhymes and poems took me to. I wanted to be that pedlar man driving his gypsy caravan through the countryside or dancing round a fire at night in the woods with the raggle taggle gypsies. I didn't neccessarily need my poems to have a narrative but I did need them to have something that drew me in and allowed me to dream myself out of my ordinary life and into some mysterious other world inside the poem.

The Magic of Existence

"It is not 'how' things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."
(Wittgenstein)

Similarly poetry doesn't seek to describe 'how' things are but the magic of their very existence. One way of doing this is ostranenie (остранение) or defamiliarizaation - the poet seek to show us something ordinary or mundane in a new way - an example of this is the poem "Fork" by Charles Simic:

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Simic believes that "The labor of poetry is is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words." (Simic, Charles, Wonderful Words, Silent Truth - Essays on Poetry and a Memoir, University of Michigan Press, 1990). I like this analogy, when I read a poem I like it to take me by surprise, to turn reality on it's head for a moment.

Simplicity

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

(Hans Hoffman)

When Hoffman said this he was talking about painting but I think that this quote equally applies to poetry. Good poetry is all about eliminating the unnecessary words and creating space (like Hoffman's light) for the ideas to breathe and grow in. The words are like colours in a painting if you pile to many on or crowd them too close together they become muddied and lose some of their beauty.

Cliche in Autobiography

I have been reading On The Edge by Richard Hammond as background research for my dissertation (which is an investigation of celebrity autobiography and the misery memoir). Hammond is a famous British television personality - most famous for shows like Top Gear and Brainiac, Science Abuse but also for the near fatal car crash and subsequent brain injury that he sustained whilst filming. I chose to read Hammond's autobiography because like many others I have developed a soft spot for him - I was endeared by his quirky, humorous and down to earth presenting style and the fact that he comes across as being reasonably intelligent. I was, however utterly disappointed by his book. It seemed to me that he hadn't given anything much of himself in the work, his writing seemed to consist of one cliche after another. I became heartily sick of hearing how grateful he was to his family and how lucky he is to have recovered. whilst I am not doubting his sincerity or trying to diminish his gratitude, I was however left with the feeling of having just read a glorified thankyou card rather than an autobiography. Hammond is very vague about his childhood and gives little away about what he was really like before his accident.

It seems that a lot of writing these days - especially autobiography relies very heavily on cliche - I wonder if it is a form of laziness - publishers want to get the books out quickly whilst the market is ripe - so they don't take the time to really work on them in the way that a novelist or biographer might. Or is it that it is too easy to get published these days? Celebrities don't become famous for their writing skills - so should we expect them to be able to write to the same high standard as a novellist or biographer? Or has the "Dumbing Down" (to use a cliche) occured as some would have us believe, in response to public demand. Do the readers of today prefer a more conversational, less literary writing style?

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.

Thinking in Images

"Poetry is a special way of thinking, it is, precisely, a way of thinking in images, a way which permits what is generally called ‘economy of mental effort,’ a way which makes for a ‘sensation of the relative ease of the process.’ Aesthetic feeling is a reaction to this economy."(Shklovsky, Victor, 1917, (translated by Lemon, L.T. & Rees, M.J. "Art as Technique")