My Blog

Freeing the Poet’s Voice

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:28:35 +0100

We often talk about the poet’s voice on the page, but we don’t hear so much about the poet’s or poem’s voice in a live reading. After a week away at Cove Park with Kristen Linklater with eight other poets, I can vouch for the fact that both the spoken poem and the poet can have a voice as powerful as the one that exists on the page. But only if we are courageous enough to let it out.

Most people would agree that poetry readings can be marvellous - invigorating, inspiring, thought provoking, moving. They can also be dull, painful and embarrassing. Some poems of course translate more easily than others from written to spoken form, but even the most difficult poem can be conveyed in its essence in a reading - but it has to be read well. What do I mean by ‘well’? I can answer that question much more clearly than I could a week ago.

I realise that of the reasons I frequently switch off in poetry readings is because of the lack of connection between the voice speaking the poem and the written version. Well that isn’t surprising, is it? I don’t think I’m alone in suggesting that in some ways poets often hold feelings and ideas inside but use the page as a means of expression. That feels, strangely enough, the safest place to put them. Once the words are on the page we can, and usually do, disconnect from them, ignore the original impulse that created them and move on. Yet we are increasingly required to go out into the world and offer them in spoken form to audiences. We have to find a way to do that, and many of us would rather not get in touch with the original impulse - call it emotional or perhaps intellectual, that first brought the poem into being. In order to do that, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. We feel suddenly exposed. It’s scary. But when you do it, it’s also exhilarating. Not just for the poet, but for the audience too.

Kristen Linklater, world renowned voice coach and all round excellent person took nine of us poets in hand for four days. We found that with the aid of a lot of breathing and voice exercises, plenty of stretching and visualisation, not to mention being physically manipulated during our readings (sounds weird but started to feel quite normal) we were able to translate our written poems into spoken ones where we connected with ourselves, the poem and the audience. Of course there was quite a lot of crying and laughter in the process. If you release tension or held in feeling that is stored in your muscles and really allow yourself to breathe, that’s to be expected. But the crying and laughter were really a by-product of the process - part of the journey towards really embodying the poem.

This is not about acting the poem, or enunciation, or speaking loudly, but learning to breathe well, from deep inside yourself, opening up and allowing your voice to emerge. After all we wrote our own poems. All we have to do in a reading is let them be spoken or, as Kristen said, ‘get out of the way of the poem’. If this all sounds a bit hippy-dippy and new-agey, I can tell you it really didn’t feel that way. It felt natural. It felt simple. It felt honest. And perhaps the biggest revelation of all for me is that I do hold all my poems inside, in my memory. And I can give them to you by heart if I use the various techniques Kristen provides. I love doing ‘readings’ without the book. Doing Speakings, you could say.

Even the sceptics amongst us (and there were a couple) were convinced of Kristen’s approach by the time we came to the end of the four days, partly through our own experience, but partly through watching the others on their journeys to - okay, well, yes - authenticity.

And that is not to mention the delicious communal meals - thanks to Edward Mackay, chef supreme - and the glorious singing evenings in the party pod at Cove Park - watching the sunset, walks to the loch, playing tennis with Maltesers and a saucepan, and the truly invigorating company of a sensitively selected coterie of poets (thanks Polly Clark). An absolute delight.

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.