National Poetry Month: Day 30

I carry my wounds like an aphid carries her children

Perhaps all these days
laid end to end
form a map of the heart
that lived them;
perhaps all these mornings
overlaid upon each other
form a topography
of the landscape inside
the mind that woke in them.
certain, however, that
in the drooping of the day
there is no poem,
only a falling curtain.

– Delilah Des Anges

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There has been this month very little emphasis on meter, and that is because despite a number of poetry courses I have never really been able to get to grips with it much outside of a partially-intuitive de-DUM-de-DUM when attempting iambic prose or the like. Trochees, spondees and so on are far, far beyond my remit.

The closest I have been able to get to understanding how the devil one is supposed to make sense of meter, and indeed a book I would recommend in general for furthering your understanding of poetry and your own skills of prosody, was How Poetry Works by Phil Roberts. In recommending one book on poetry analysis and writing which works very well for me I should I suspect also recommend a book which does not work for me at all but which is very popular and has a chatty, down-to-earth approach to helping you write your own poems, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled.

For a continuation of this month’s activities by greater minds than mine (not hard to find), in the short analysis of poems or poetic genres accompanying anthologies of poems, one cannot go far wrong with Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley and published by Bloodaxe Books, or Axed Between The Ears edited by David Kitchen and published by Heinemann. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, edited & commentated by Ruth Padel is, as one might expect, also a good way to continue learning about poetry and poetry analysis.

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Have you enjoyed the poetry this month? The mini-essays? Are you merely grateful that it’s all over? Whichever, why not take a little pocket change – or a lot! – and donate to MSF.

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National Poetry Month: Day 29

Sunday afternoon lament

Tip
tap
tip
on the pane
drip
drop
drip
goes the rain
nag
nag
nag
in your brain
drag
drug
drag
the mounting pain
swill
swirl
swill
down the drain
sob
cough
sob
all over again
as
drip
drop
drip
goes the unrelenting
unrepenting
blood
stain.

– Delilah Des Anges

In poetry pacing is regulated by two separate factors: the position of words on the page, and the meter of the lines. These two can interact with each other in order to further manipulate the reader’s perception of the speed of the poem.

Metrically, switching between types of meter can have a profound effect on the experience of the poem’s pace; the reader can be brought to a near-standstill, or feel acceleration in the pace of the lines towards the poem’s crescendo. This can be heightened still further by the change from long to short words, or vice versa, and long to short lines, or vice versa.

In terms of placement, line-breaks and isolating individual lines has a psychological effect on the reader’s pace; a visual species, we learn to associate the spacing out in the plane of the page with the spacing out of events in time, as typographical cheats such as increasing the kerning will demonstrate:

s l o w l y

s   l    o    w   l    y

s     l      o     w     l    y

visual trickery like this may seem “cheap” in comparison to metrical manipulation but this is only because it is a little easier to achieve!

A third means of pacing control is lexical. This should be inherent to all poems, and occurs when the poet’s word choice is determined in part by how difficult or lengthy the word is to read, as well as the semantics and semiotics of it (or indeed the euphony of it).

Al three taken in careful combination can throw the reader through the poem at precious the pace the poet wishes without any silly extraneous annotation, or any guidance from outside sources. A sign of a well-put-together poem is the ability of anyone utterly ignorant of the material to read it as it is meant to be read, in a manner identical to any other completely ignorant or utterly informed reader.

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National Poetry Month: Day 24

Today’s News

Fortune to be made from forests of the future
When two immovable objects collide
Only one survivor found
Smuggled into the country
Star footballer reveals all
My affair with Royal member
Warnings of hard times ahead
Amazing artifact fake, says expert
Dog saves child from wolves
Mother sentenced to 12 years
Manager goes ballistic
Urban poverty on the rise
And we fell for it
Terror Threat
Fortune to be made from forests of the future
And we fell for it.

– Delilah Des Anges

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National Poetry Month: Day 23

All Apologies

Layout is not an area of poetry construction that I’ve paid much attention to in the decade and a half since I switched from writing them all in wine-coloured A4 exercise books to typing the sods into whatever word-processing software happened to work on whichever computer I was borrowing at the time. It didn’t really occur to me until very recently, watching the snippets of Richard Siken’s poetry pass by me on Tumblr like literary detritus on a flooded river of nonsense, that in order to preserve the precise formatting one could simply make the poem into an image.

I wrote this one at work, which meant that the only image manipulation software I had access to was MS Paint; logically I could just have written the thing in Word, taken a screencap, and pasted that into MS Paint, but I was at work and therefore all of my logic circuits were occupied trying to work out what the hell the students wanted (I work, currently, at a University in an admin role). So I wrote this into MS Paint, fiddled with the font repeatedly, and ended up back where I started with Arial. Font-fiddling is one side of unformatted straight-to-screen writing that I generally neglect because one never knows which fonts someone will have installed.

Making a poem into an image is quite useful if one wishes to be didactic about how it is viewed, because everything down to the font face is under one’s control, but as anyone using a screen-reader to access this page will be able to attest, it does decrease accessibility somewhat.

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National Poetry Month: Day 22

communication disordered

let me kiss the words out of you
i will replace them all with “mine”.
i will put a curse on you with my mouth
so that for the entire day all you can say
is how much you want me. has it started yet?
i will touch you on the mind and teach you
to speak your thoughts straight into mine
and i will send you my words in a brown envelope
so that i can be silent in your presence
and let you speak for me.

– Delilah Des Anges

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National Poetry Month: Day 18

Found Poem

I found this poem nestling in the dirty cracks between the seats of a bus it read you are alive until you’re not and then you’re dead a perfect piece of poetry I thought and would have said had I not been travelling alone with only the music in my headphones to keep me company on my way home a perfect piece of poetry which summarises neatly all the words in my poems which so often defeat me when I’m trying to arrange in thought and word and deed in what becomes an unthinking empty screed of rhyming words upon a page it sums up without taking an age and this is what I read

you are alive until you’re not
and then you’re dead.

– Delilah Des Anges

The concept of “found art” is well-known as a convenient get-out for those of us who really cannot draw or paint and “found poetry” occupies a similar conceptual space; the idea that poetry is created naturally by accidental combinations of words in overlapping adverts and graffiti or in the accretion of notes in the margin of a text.

In this particular poem (where I’ve abandoned the usual structural device of shorter lines, end-stopping, or drawing attention to rhyme with any other method, but rather left it as a chunk of rhythmic prose) the idea of a found poem is toyed with – the “found poem” in question does not exist – as the central platform for the rest of the work, but it is not a found work.

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National Poetry Month: Day 17

New Savagery

Our first foolishness was to adopt
the god of a desert tribe
to rule a land of green forest,
wind-raked moor, and
infinite coastline;
we should have worshipped a fish
hurtling upstream
for eternities,
not listened to an old man
whose dissipated sons
can only bicker and divide;
we should have made sacred
the colours of our mud:
black loam, grey chalk downs,
red sandstone, and the moorland’s
thin brown.
We ought have touched only
our skies full of clouds
and knelt only to sow, and to raise up
our fallen children.
Now we sow blood for the world
and make sacred
the hue of wars
in deserts.

– Delilah Des Anges

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One of the great challenges of writing both prose and poetry can occasionally be the task of keeping them out of each other. When you are in the habit of writing rhythmically for poetry, it can quite easily seep into your prose as a matter of habit; thinking in beats is a hard habit to shake, as are bursts of alliteration or internal rhyme. However, these tics in prose can be surprisingly useful if you are writing a specific genre: fairytales. Far from being distractions or sounding unnatural, the sing-song intonation that accompanies poetry (often iambic pentameter works best for this) carries over to fairytales in a very organic fashion and makes the story pleasing to repeat; a great feature retained from the fairytale’s origin as an oral story.

There may be occasions when writing a story when it becomes apparent that what is actually necessary is to turn it into a poem because the cadences and rhythms are too poetic for the subject matter in prose; this occurred with Shots in the Dark. Originally a short story, it was reborn as a narrative poem after a friend read it over and said she could “see the poem lurking in the prose”.

Conversely, there are times when what is intended as a poem takes on a life of its own and characters, bursts the boundaries of poetic tropes and forms and demands to be written as a story. The important thing is listening to what form a piece of narrative wishes to be presented in, because if you force it, the end result will not be as good.

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National Poetry Month: Day 16

Give me no more land

There are no limits to love.
It may be collared and caged,
bargained over and quarrelled
about; but when the wave comes
and rips out the land from
under your feet, there is
an arm that descends
in spite of the fractures
in its bones.

Gifts seem mean;

You are cold.
I will cut open my belly
crack my ribs open like the
opening of locked gates and
you will sleep inside me
like a Russian soldier
in the carass of
his faithful horse.

You are lost.
I will make a map of my skin
and draw roads in red with
the tip of a pin or a knife
until you are pointed
in the direction of
your own name.

Giving is not enough.

Bone-weary from walking the world,
I volunteer to sprint to you
for the sake of nothing but
breathless, nervous laughter
and a desolate land of endless
fertility, without boundary,
where there are no limits
for me to love.

– Delilah Des Anges

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The use of poetry as near-prose or rhythmic speech is commonplace; the use of poetry as broken prose, or DaDa-ist noise, is embarked upon usually as a second stage in breaking away from the strictures of classical poetry forms. However, there is a delirious middle ground in which dreamlike imagery and mania can be employed in barely-coherent sentences while using a strict poetic form.

by Sylvia Plath

This is a fascinating combination as structure and repetition of the villanelle form employed here drives specific images (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair) deep into the memory with sing-song rhythm, almost like a nursery rhyme. Like a nursery rhyme the language is bordering on the nonsensical (compare: hickory, dickory, dock), but the steady attrition of the repetition and the relentless grind of the rhythmic lines paired with a content that loaded even if the reader isn’t quite sure what it’s loaded with leads to a haunting sensation leaking out of the poem.

A great deal of resentment is aimed at this side of poetry. It doesn’t make sense, is the usual complaint when the reader is bogged down by figurative language or lost in a maze of metaphor. The purpose of poems like this is not to make logical, rational sense but to make emotional sense. Much like the pop song where the lyrics amount to little more than “whooooaaaaa, baby, baby” (which itself borders on the DaDaist or primeval), what matters is the feeling that the words evoke. Instead of reading the words and searching vainly for meaning within them, it is better to let the poem wash over you, and see what sensation is left at the end of it.

This is not necessarily a means of experiencing art that everyone is going to enjoy, but I find that poems that occupy this weird hinterland can result in one feeling more creatively inspired to write, draw, produce music and so on, some of which undoubtedly will make sense. If nothing else, Sylvia Plath’s plaintive, circling, mad villanelle should form the catalyst in someone’s mind to lead them to create their own original work.

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National Poetry Month: Day 15

What’s On This Month

The movies translate the incoherence
of love into the language of cliche,
give us acceptable outlets that
aren’t too outre, turning ‘I would
eat your eyes to touch your
thoughts’ into ‘take this gift to you
I’ve bought’. It’s profitable to depict
love as sanity but the beast it
releases is born from profanity;
longing is the subject of many a fine song,
but ‘hunger’ as the descriptor is
rather less wrong.

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Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnets are the most familiar form of the sonnet to my oft-cited Average English Schoolchild (ie. me) and follow such a simple rhyme scheme that were it not for the usual assumption of iambic pentameter accompanying I would already be beating myself up for not writing more of them. Iambic pentameter (fortunately) isn’t mandatory for the form, and deviations have been made throughout its use in English, and I have no excuse for not writing more of these eloquent self-contained verses.

The sonnet is a kind of self-contained argument: ababcdcdefefgg, or three sets of quatrain and a closing couplet which summarises the argument or concludes it.

During the period in which they were popularised in England they seem to have been used in praise: Shakespeare’s love poems, Donne’s metaphysical ones. The tidy structure and relative ease of reading, however, makes them suitable for just about any subject, and the concluding couplet fits them out perfectly as a kind of extended limerick, making sonnets especially good for humorous subjects as well as the more serious or lovelorn kind.

The word “sonnet” itself effectively means “little song”, and perhaps it isn’t entirely coincidence that the structure of the sonnet works well as a pop song.

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National Poetry Month: Day 14

Croydon’s Burning

Summer’s hot and full of dust
and ash is reason enough
to wrap a scarf around your face
go out on the rob
like the rest of the street isn’t
already a heaving, scattering throng
it’s hot and the days drag on
Nothing to wait for but the way
the calendar pages turn
street’s a boredom-primed powder keg
TV Cameras already descending
Vultures who didn’t see the steps
faltering up to this explosion
didn’t see the long-burning fuse
they’ve only come to report
see the city and surburbs alight:
It’s just news: Croydon burns tonight.

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Topical poetry has long been a popular use of the medium: indeed, poetry was an excellent way of spreading news to outlying areas when most of the population was illiterate and printing presses yet to be invented or popularised. In remembering the precise pattern, rhythm, rhymes, and wording, the reciters of the poems ensured that the information was not distorted from person to person the way it might have been in another format which was subject to the problems of playing Telephone. No doubt copying errors were made in re-recitation, but it also aided the memory.

In the advent of Caxton and Gutenberg, topical poetry didn’t die off but transmuted from reportage to commentary, rather in the way that newspapers have done in the advent of their digital counterparts. Satirical poetry has always been popular, regardless of whether the poems in question are highbrow or decidedly scatological in nature.

Charlie Brooker began including topical poetry in News Wipe in the form of Tim Key’s performance pieces which not only mock the news but also self-parody, making fun of the practice of writing serious poems about recent events (like mine!). When Mr Brooker joined his colleagues in creating the variously-named 10 O’Clock Show / 10 O’clock Live, he brought over the idea of topical poems and began performing poetic monologues himself, as evidenced in this excellent rhythmic collection of couplets with occasional bursts of quatrain to create tension:

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