My Blog

Taming the Terza Rima. Not.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:58:12 +0000

I have been working on this poem on and off for about the last year. Admittedly that’s not long for a poem, but it feels endless to me. The first draft was free verse. I knew roughly the territory I was from a point of view of subject matter, but I also knew that the first, easy draft was a piece of nothing really, a starting point.
As I have become more and more acquainted with formal poetry, I have begun to recognise that horrified, delicious moment when I realise that what seemed like a straightforward free verse poem is actually wanting to be a piece of formal verse. It is kind of ‘Oh no!’ territory when I think it’s going to be a sonnet, but it’s much, much worse when I realise it wants to be a Terza Rima. I know the amount of work involved. The TZ’s interlocking rhyme scheme of tercets, aba, bcb, cdc culminating in an ending which involves among other things, finding five words that all rhyme with each other, almost seems to drive itself. It has a forward motion like a go-cart rolling down a hill. Hard to control, and hard to stop. Once you’re in the rhyme sequence it’s almost impossible to escape, and if you change any of the rhymes, you often have to unpick so much of what went before and comes afterwards.
This particular TZ rolled on quite nicely until the very end. Almost until the last line, I think. There were of course all kinds of problems along the way and in the revision process, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted out with many hours of patient picking, unpicking, murdering of darlings and re-configuration. After all the art of a formal poem is to make the rhyme and metre look as if it just fell out like that and couldn’t be any other way. Anyway, most of the poem is shaping up. It doesn’t look too bad.
But the end!
Every time I think I’ve cracked it I realise I haven’t. This is a familiar feeling with Terza Rima. The rhyme and metre lull you into a false sense of security. It sounds good, so somehow you kid yourself it’s okay.
In the latest debacle, I managed to create an ending I thought I was happy with. What a great feeling. I went to bed feeling more relaxed than I’d felt for weeks.
On re-reading the next day, I realised I’d stolen the rhymes for the new ending from the tercet before the final ones. Ah well, I thought, I’ll change those rhymes, but not the end because the end is WORKING! Days later, I had succeeded in unpicking the last third of poem but kept the new ending intact.
Was that it?
No.
It was at that point I realised the new ending was Not Good Enough. It didn’t fit. It was ponderous and pompous and not at all in keeping with the diction of the rest of the poem. I had changed about a third of the rhymes in the poem to work with this ending that I now realised wasn’t right. Grrrrr!

As I write this blog, the ending still eludes me. This puts me in a mood of almost constant frustration which I try to bury so as to continue my everyday life. After all, most people wouldn’t really understand the idea that a friend/mother/wife/customer is being tetchy, difficult and distant because they’re having trouble with a rhyme scheme. And part of the reason I’m writing this blog is avoid boring the non-poets in my life with the technical tedium of explaining the problem, and trying to spare them my self-indulgent misery.

Maybe if I can let go, take more time and trust, the poem will find its own ending eventually. Maybe I just have to get out of its way.

Don’t hold your breath.

Launch Fever

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:34:40 +0100

Some experiences are so good I just can’t help recording them. The launch of my first collection was one of those.

Organising your own launch is a bit like organising your own party but with the added knowledge that you will have to stand up and be counted. It’s one thing having the odd poem in the odd magazine: it’s another thing altogether publishing a whole collection. It’s very exposing. Yes, it’s exposing personally: there’s a lot of autobiographical material in there, but that’s okay because I’m used to that in readings, and anyway it’s all been given the fiction treatment. More disquieting is the fact that the work of so many years is gathered together and is on the line artistically. That’s the stuff of sleepless nights.

Then there’s the question of who will come to the launch. Will anyone? Have you remembered to invite everyone you meant to invite? So many haven’t replied but might turn up. So many said they’d come but send last minute emails with their excuses. I’ve done that myself on occasion. Sometimes life gets in the way of poetry.

Anyway it was all good in the end. Woolfson and Tay, my favourite bookshop, was the perfect venue and was filled with people, many of them brilliant poets themselves. But there were also family members, old friends and new friends too. This was a coming together of many different parts of my life. It was a hit like none other to see friend after friend walk through the door. Cherishable.

It had been a fascinating process putting my set together; so satisfying to consider the loose narrative arc of a reading, to rediscover my own poems once in book form and find that they are having conversations with each other that I didn’t know about. Maybe that’s something that can’t happen until a body of work is gathered together between two covers. I imagine the process of discovery will continue over the next few months as I do more readings.

And yes, there was wine, and yes, there were canapes, and yes, there were endless kisses and hugs at hello and goodbye, and yes, there were book signings, and yes, there was music from the divine Fiona Bevan and lovely poetry from Nii Parkes and Alison White. And yes, there was laughter, there were a few tears and nods and poetry ‘ah’ noises. And yes, there were the comforting presences of Jacob Sam-La Rose, my editor, and Nii Parkes chief editor at flipped eye.

And amazingly, nothing went wrong. Except that we ran out of books. But maybe that’s a measure of success. And I wanted to write this post while I’m still basking in the rosy glow and before I find out whether or not this book will have a life of its own after the launch event. And that’s in the lap of the readers and the gods.

A few people had told me you don’t really enjoy your own launch. What? I can honestly say I had the time of my life.

Poets, Pounds and the PBS

Fri, 1 Apr 2011 16:44:55 +0100

It was a dark day, as we all expected, when the Arts Council of England announced the cuts it had been forced to make. There was less money from central government so we knew there would be big changes.
The ACE decided to go for wholesale cuts rather than, as they described them, ‘salami slices’.

Inevitably, there were winners and losers. There were some surprises, such as the complete cut of the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Trust, who run the Aldeburgh Festival. Many small publishing houses lost their grants. Faber, who are commercial publishers, were awarded £40,000.

Most people have something to say about this. Many people have passionate words to say and say them loud and clear on blogs and facebook. The speed with which news gets around is staggering.

Many of us believe that supporting the arts is a very important way to spend state money. Not only does it feed the soul, intellect and spirit, but it can actually make money in some circumstances. Poetry is on the whole not profit-making, as we all know, but all of the arts are to an extent interdependent and feed into each other. Think of Pascale Petit’s classes at the Tate Modern and all the ekphrastic poetry that has emerged from that. Or Simon Barraclough’s recent live show where he commissioned poets to write about Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. Government funded arts then train artists who often work in the private sector , which in turn helps to boost the economy. Think of the vast number of tourists who attend theatres in the West End, for example, or go to our art galleries.

The public and very personal feuds that are going round the internet since ACE made their announcements are profoundly shocking to me. In particular, criticisms have been levelled (rightly or wrongly) at the Poetry Book Society for its narrow choices and the way it favours bigger publishing houses. Some go so far as to suggest it’s a small club of people feathering each others’ nests. Many are furious that Faber, as a commercial publisher, has been awarded money from the public purse. Some of the online dialogues have become very nasty and extremely personal.

My mother always said I was a born diplomat and I notice that here I go again. But really, whose side are we on? Surely we’re all on the same side. We might have individual views about ways in which state funding should be apportioned, but surely we can put aside our personal feelings and concentrate on the job in hand: be respectful of each other (because if we’re not, who else will be?), provide a united front and show this government that we provide a service worth supporting.

David Morley put a wonderful quote from Churchill on facebook. When asked why he continued to fund the arts at the expense of the war effort, he said ‘What are we fighting for?’

Or to twist a well-worn phrase: ‘If we are not for ourselves, who are we?’

Peace, Man.

Poetry, Damson Jam and Milly Molly Mandy

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:33:48 +0100

Even poetry can become noise. I had such a strong sense of this as I decompressed over the weekend after an intense few days of writing at The Hurst, one of the houses belonging to The Arvon Foundation. I was lucky enough to be there with two great teachers: George Szirtes and Mimi Khalvati.

Everyone says you can no longer just sit in your attic and create. It is necessary to come out, commune with other poets, publishers, artists and of course the world wide web. This is demonstrably true. If you want people to read your work, you have to tell them it’s there. Hence the usefulness of the internet, of poetry readings, of public events.
But the public face of poetry should never become the main part of the work. A room of one’s own, a chance to commune with your muse, your duende, your inner child or whatever you want to call it, and an absence of distractions is a pre-requisite for creativity. So how to escape from the Tower of Babel that is modern life? A residential week of poetry with a group of gifted people, two talented and rigorous tutors, and no internet access is a good start.

There were sixteen poets and two poet tutors at The Hurst, but there was also an abundance of quiet and solitude. No internet. A door I could close behind me. Mornings I could wake up and dialogue with my dreams. It’s not a still place I find inside, it’s a turmoil of thoughts, feelings and ideas but the important thing is to hang in there with the chaos and bonkers nature of my own psyche.
That is not to say I didn’t take advantage of all the wisdom and bonkersness around me. Poets can help each other in unimaginable ways. Here’s a story about one of the processes I went through last week:

Mimi set us the challenge of writing a pantoum (a Malay verse structure originally, involving rhyme and repeated lines). I had tried several times before and failed, and I was sceptical. But she redefined the pantoum for all of us as only a poet can - with the use of imagery, giving us an idea of the character of the form, rather than just a technical description. And I finally found a way into it after years of trying. Time compressed as I grappled with the weird new beast of a structure, and feeling quite pleased with myself, I came back into the communal part of the building, dazed and dizzy, waving my piece of paper. A couple of people looked at it. One pointed out I’d left two unrhymed lines hanging. Another made me realise it wasn’t about what I thought it was about (this is almost always good news for a poem). Later, I casually remarked to someone that I didn’t like the closing line (which, in a pantoum is also the opening line). ‘Well which is your favourite line?’ she asked. She hadn’t really read the poem except to check the rhyme scheme actually, so she had no investment in it at all. That was an ‘aha’ moment. What could be more important than the closing and opening lines of any poem? After a lovely evening involving dinner and a moving, but also laugh-inducing reading by Penelope Shuttle, I set to work again re-casting the pantoum. At 3am I was still sitting in the dining room, as it happens, and not alone in my room. I was working very companionably alongside another poet who was also tutting and sighing as she struggled with her sonnet. Nothing much was said, but you could feel the empathy.
I’m sure the word ‘damson’ would never have come into the poem unless that very same poet hadn’t brought a delicious jar of home made damson jam to share at breakfast and put the word in my head.
The next morning I was up again at 7am, back in a passionate relationship with my pantoum in a kind of obsessive push-me-pull-you affair. But it was brilliant, after weeks at home feeling disengaged, to be back in the process.
In the afternoon I had a tutorial with Mimi, who gave the poem a close reading and pointed out the weaker rhymes and the weaker points of the poem as well as slapping me over the wrists (gently) for not scanning the poem properly.
Back I went again to my room, counting the feet in each line, getting the images and rhymes precise, functional and resonant.
Well who knows whether this one is finished or only abandoned, but I can tell you that I did read it out loud that night and it really didn’t feel too bad.
The whole experience made me feel a bit like Milly Molly Mandy. I don’t know why. I’m sure there’s one story where she goes from one person to another in the village and each one offers her help in a different way.

You’ll excuse me, I hope, if I gush a little here: it is worth remembering that poets can really help each other. Sometimes when I look at the internet forums it’s as if there’s a poetry war going on. Sometimes when I look at facebook, which can be a brilliant tool for communication, all I can see is ‘but what about me?’. Next time a comment on a forum gives me a tummy ache, I’ll remember this: it’s a big old world out there, it’s bloody hard to write a decent poem and those of us engaged in the process of making them need all the love we can get. And I use the word ‘process’ deliberately. Only by focusing on the process and not the product do we stand any chance of hanging in there for the long haul. With a bit of practical support, intuition and technical help, not to mention a jar of damson jam, who knows what we might discover?