Writing Poetry: The voices within

​​          [ BACKGROUND NOTES FOR A CONTRIBUTION ]                  

THE VARIETY OF LANGUAGE WITHIN YOU THAT WILL FUEL YOUR WRITING

Ability and motivation lie within you, the rhythms and rhymes of your inner orchestra connecting with yourself.  Words, phrases and snatches of song and conversation tumble and turn before your listening and watching mind.    Short and clipped; long and languid; sharp and flinty. Thoughts the sound of water trickling across pebbles in a slow stream.  Words from moments of sharpness; staccato.  Angry language, spluttering in its fury.  The laugh of happiness when in fun with friends; perhaps breathtaking words with someone when your heart pounds.

BEWARE THE LEADEN VOICES

What is Poetry and what is Prose?   You can be given an explanation by a Poet Laureate who said that prose fills the page and poetry doesn’t.  This particular PL recites his own poetry and that of others in a funereal monotone, reminiscent of the chart showing that the patient is almost dead.  A less than vibrant delivery, especially when allied with an academic drawl.  Passionate vitality brings poetry gloriously to life.

POETRY, PROSE AND THE SWAYING ROPE BRIDGE THAT LINKS THE TWO

The distinction between Prose and Poetry can tie us in knots because dividing language in such a way can look inadequate and uncomfortable.  Prose can be inherently poetic.  A fine example of this is In Parenthesis by David Jones, a truly wonderful book about one soldier’s life in WW1.    The King James Bible is a hugely powerful example of the poetic power of prose.  I think instinct is the key.  In the flow of language running through your mind, you will decide whether you are breathing poetry.   The only advice I give is that you should just try it.  Just do it. Listen to the flood of words running through you, into your consciousness and onto the page or into the iPad.  (Did you know Dickens wrote with a quill?)  You might say that Blank Verse is the swaying rope bridge linking poetry and prose. Perhaps poetry is more distilled and intense than prose but even as I type this thought I feel I’m constructing a hostage to fortune, just about to fall into a chasm from this same rope bridge.

But what to write about?  Many of you may be thinking this.  Well, I don’t know, you just have to make your own beginning.   You’ll have poets you favour, whose thoughts and styles appeal to you.  Consciously try not to take on someone else’s forms but listen to your own impulses.  The inner beat.  Are you sensing the rhythmical tick of a clock in your mind as well as the one in your room?  What are the sounds, inner and external that might affect you?

​​​​​​MASQUARADING AS SONNETS

You may wish to try writing something in the sonnet form because there lies a discipline that might suit you, even though, like me, the purists may challenge your claim to be writing sonnets.  I found that the sonnet has a lovely length, long enough to develop and conclude a particular thought, even though the iambic pentameter may be observed by its absence.

RHYMING COUPLETS

What about trying rhyming couplets?  They can be satisfying and they may start you off.

LIMERICKS

Or have a go at limericks.  They don’t have to be bawdy, although many of the most memorable most decidedly are.  I’ve written many but have trod a different path due to having five granddaughters who will in time read my work.  You may frown at my prudishness but I’ll just have to put up with that.  One problem with writing limericks is that the powerful beat and structure can so get into your poetic head that you may struggle to allow other rhythms to get a word in edgeways.

IS IT TOO LATE TO BE A POET ?

Where have all the poets gone?

Why has the good stuff already been written?

Why are all the good poets already dead?

The questions are hopefully untrue.   Pessimists were saying this in 1961 before The Beatles, for example, blew away such nonsense.  Talent and genius are alive and well in the arriving generation, in their various forms.

A SONGWRITER OR A POET ?

Would you prefer to be a songwriter or a poet?  Songwriting would appear to be more popular with young people and there are many singer/songwriters around of high quality. It’s not exclusive.  Why not try both? The accumulation of wealth favours the songwriters presently and will continue to do so, in my opinion.

​​​​​​THE IRREGULAR AND POSSIBLY INFREQUENT ARRIVAL OF GOOD IDEAS

How is it that ideas come fleetingly on the wing and can disappear forever if you delay noting them?         LEAP TO IT !    Somehow you just have to use an iPhone or make do with pencil and paper  –  don’t bother with a quill.

SOMETHING ABOUT ME

The suffering the people of this nation underwent during the 20th Century has faded today as we slip through this next hundred years.  2014 gave many writers the opportunity to revisit the terrifying events of 100 years previously and had four years of retrospection in relation to WW1.  However, the pain of memory and emptiness is acute and lifelong for me due to sad events in my family during these years, as happened with millions of others. I mention this to explain why I have written so much about The Great War.

WILL POETRY REMAIN FREE OR BECOME PART OF A POLITICAL GAME ?

Can poetry remain frivolous as well as serious, or is it to be roped to the new concerns of this present day? You might guess that I’m all for frivolity!  But also let’s retain a commentary on the ridiculousness of life as well as its wittiness, wickedness, slyness, pomposity and glamour, to name just a few strands of our human condition.

MENTIONING THE HUMAN CONDITION

We humans live by our spirit and heart, together with our hopes and fears, loves and comradeship, honour and kindness.  It is here that the writing of poetry can be a beacon in times of storm and destruction.  We can write about the horrors of vengeful dictators to the pleasures of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon; from human disaster to the triumph of the human spirit.

I’m letting Wordsworth get his oar in –

‘Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’

[ The concluding lines from  –   Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood ]

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EXTRA TIME

It’s not the form, or type, of poem that matters most.  The sentiment, the central idea that gives your poem its name is paramount.   The matching of word sounds, the flow of your lines, the adept way you find that balance the poem needs are the priority issues for you.   You may feel happier, more fluent, when you write in rhyme, finding convincingly the right words for each place in the poem.

To start, try a poem of eight lines, with two verses of four lines each.

As a rhyme scheme try – ABAB; ABAB.  or – ABAB; CDCD.   or –  ABBA; ABBA.

If you find the ability to rhyme so regularly rather strained and artificial –

          Try – ABCA; DEFD. –  where lines 1 and 4 rhyme and where lines

          5 and 8 rhyme but where the other lines don’t rhyme, thereby

          greatly reducing the need to find appropriate rhyming words.

If you feel irritated and restricted in finding the right rhyming words in the first place, then perhaps you should start with Blank Verse.  You then have the cheerful challenge of writing what you consider to be a poem as opposed to prose.  It’s your poem and your choice. It’s you who has to wrestle with this.  Can you feel the difference within your thought patterns as you write?  Whatever you write, given that you are sincere, will be accepted as a poem if you say it is. [*] However, the other side of the coin is that there is a Receiver, whereas you are the Giver.  In the great scheme of things, you may not care about your poem’s reception if you are wholly given to writing for yourself, perhaps to clarify emotions or difficulties in your life. Other people write poetry firstly for themselves but secondly for the pleasure of sharing ideas with others and therefore are writing externally as well as just for the inner self.

The essence of writing to share with others needn’t be competitive as maybe this way leads some to feel less talented than others in a writing activity that is foremost about formalising in language deeply held feelings.  In this, I abhor poetry competitions as they lead in a direction that is anathema to the creative mind.  I entered one many years ago and upset myself by my resentment of the three winners – 3rd – 2nd – 1st !   It was a race, where my entry, so hugely superior to all the others [Oh?], fell at an unknown fence.  My deflation was ridiculous and unseemly. So I turned away from competition and gravely ascended the slopes of Mount Poetry to just do my own thing.  Do what suits you.

      [*] When a famous but controversial artist was once asked why a particular, newly assembled piece was a work of art, the reply was –  “Because I say it is”.

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