This could well be the mother of all rambles.
Jim Murdoch was writing about line breaks in poetry this week and it turned into an exchange about rules in poetry and in turn into a discussion about each poet's own rules for him or herself. Jim came up with a list of rules for him and suggested some of us others have a go. I managed to sneak some thinking about this in amongst the summer vacation acitivities and, as Mike Yarwood used to say, this is me...
I started off trying to write a proper list of rules (and please remember 'trying' was in my 'life in seven words' last week...I'm always trying...). So - I tried to be neat and tidy and theoretical and sensible but it didn't last very long. There is a bit of a list in here somewhere but there's lots of other stuff too. It's no good me trying to be too organised when really I'm just a big lump of thoughts and feelings and experience and ideas and instincts and huge hormonal surges that almost knock me over sometimes. My head is messy and, like most poets, I am something of an extremist (aren't poets so often the most of something – the craziest, the most anal, the weirdest, the most obsessive, the cleverest, the funniest, the most serious, the most withdrawn, the biggest drinkers, the most eccentric, the most erratic, the most pedantic..? No wonder there's so much disagreement!). All I know is I can't keep down a day job (and night jobs were tricky too) and yet I want to try and live out there with the rest of the folks so writing rules are not exactly my priority I'm afraid. First I have to get my daughter to school (during termtime, obviously), feed my family, clean up a bit, get to places (my weak link), not cry too often in unsuitable situations, treat people well, try not to be a pain to everybody else...all these things are my first rules and poetry rules come quite a long way down after those. Writing is one of the things I personally do to get some freedom and to get away from constraints (I know for some this might sound vague or affected but it really is true for me). I find writing easy, reading poems out to an audience even easier. I am good at communicating – pretty much always have been (even when everything else went AWOL) and I love moving words about...hearing them do their work...getting them into rhythms and patterns. I write poems...quite naturally. Some are quite straightforward, some are not at all. I don't rewrite a lot or plan or come up with theories - I just write and it feels good (and on the whole people seem to like reading and hearing what I come up with - I get a lot of good reactions – even from poets sometimes). The whole business makes me feel so elated that the last thing I want is to spend too much time analysing it or weighing it down with rules and regulations. Some people find rules and principles reassuring (and I can see the need for them when you're performing heart surgery or building an aeroplane) but my brain just refuses to think about poetry in this way. I have tried to read more about feet and metre and so on but every time I do my brain just refuses to take it in (honestly!). It puts its fingers in its ears and chants 'la, la, la, la, can't hear you!' And I'm not stupid...I was, like most poets, extreme at school - the cleverest kid in the class (most of you reading probably were too...in some way or other, even if the teachers didn't know it) but when it comes to poetry structures and so on my brain just says to the poet bit of me 'you don't need this, you're doing just fine as you are'. And, honestly, I think I am. All this will mean some poets think I am stupid...but that seems odd to me too. I don't write for them or live for them. Can poets only be odd in the way that suits other poets? All this instinctive behaviour is my personal kind of odd. I worry about pretty much everything, pretty much all of the time but, strangely, I don't worry about line breaks. I worry about violence and cruelty, about life and death, about moving and staying still, about sadness and happiness... but writing is something I just get on with. For me it is a job...a strange one with odd hours but a job all the same. '18,000 women and children trafficked into UK sex trade' they reported in 'The Independent' last week...and here am I pissing about on the computer and thinking about line breaks. I think about that and then I just can't get too worried about literary matters. I know some people might say 'just don't read the papers' (and sometimes I don't) but overall I think ignoring the rest of the world and concentrating on punctuation is not the way I personally can proceed. It's priorities again. I don't think being a writer has to mean getting into a cocoon away from those poor little common people who can't enjoy our finer lives. I am just as crap as the next person (one minute) and just as not crap (the next...if I'm lucky). We are just people, people!
My poetry habits have come from all kinds of influences and ideas. I suppose they must come partly from emulating poets I've read and heard and liked ( I did a post about that subject a while back) but I think they also come from doing the opposite to some poets who haven't switched the lights (or the music) on for me personally. Also I do write poems unashamedly for the widest reading public possible. I have always worked this way – it seems the obvious way to me. I've ALWAYS wanted to communicate with as many people as possible. I know some people don't like that idea...they prefer to concentrate on the art of writing (if you like) and let the readers come (if they do). That is one way to work and it is fine but it is not mine. I like communicating and always have done (sometimes crowd-pleasing, sometimes crowd-surprising, sometimes crowd-worrying...the full range). To me poetry is communicating - even with only one other person, even when you're only reading a poem through to yourself. I love it sometimes when one of my own poems helps me understand what I think. They're clever things, poems. Cleverer than us mere mortals.
Like many poets I get ideas from prose and art and music too. I am interested in all the artforms equally (though my visual sense is probably the least developed – see my poem 'Seeing isn't everything'...on website under 'Seeing and believing'). Music, as I've said here before a hundred times, is my biggest influence. The sounds, the lyrics, the broad range of possibilities...I was listening to Nina Simone as I was cooking earlier on...her voice just poured out of the speakers and into my odd little miles-away-from-her world. Boy, did she know how to deliver lyrics!
Anyway, let's try and get to some rules or guidelines or habits...
1. I start every line of every poem with a capital letter. It looks right to me that way – big and bold and proud like each line has something special to say (which it should do...for me...it is connected to the other lines, obviously, but it is also a little unit of its own...a member of a team). When I look at magazines or books with all those lower case letters at the start of most of their lines it looks...wimpy, too shy and retiring, too neat, too 'correct by modern standards'. It's just personal taste really but capital letters are what I like at the start of a line and I don't see that changing. So far only one magazine has changed them to lower case and it bugs me every time I see them. It is their 'house style', they say. I have to say I think 'house styles' for poetry magazines are the strangest idea. So if E.E.Cummings were to rise from the grave and submit they would change his letters too? No, they wouldn't. So it's an imposed style until the poet is famous? That's just bollocks then. To be frank. Celebrity culture. Bollocks.
2. Line breaks....here we go.... The honest truth is I don't fret about line breaks too much. When writing what you might call free verse I fear I really do put them in 'when it feels right' (Jim's least favourite option). All I can say is that I don't have any problem with 'when it just feels right'. Feelings have always been hugely important to me – maybe too important but, you know, I control it as much as I can – feelings are just my extremist subject. I do write from the heart/gut/instinct...all of those places and more. ..those places tell me where to break my line. Sounding right is a huge consideration too. I try various options (in my head and out loud) and one of them usually, in the end, does feel and sound right. I like each line to have
some clarity of its own..even if it's only one word... and when a line is complete (for me) I do just know. I read poems out quite regularly to audiences so that helps me understand whether my breaks are making sense and working as I want them to. Obviously when I'm writing a more straightforward rhyming poem the line breaks are easy to call...that's one reason I like writing like that sometimes...it's a break from the break decisions! I like variety in writing – pretty much across all the boards.
I also use the line break to punctuate to a large extent. I have tried using proper, correct, prose-like punctuation in poems but I hate it (especially on line ends). When I look back at the poem with all those commas and full-stops I just hate it and I have to go back and take them all out again. I like my poems as mark-free as possible (though I do leave in the odd question mark here and there) and I can't really explain why this is – especially as the visual is not an expert area with me. Why does it bother me so much how it looks? I have no idea. Despite a good education in many ways I don't ever remember being taught much about punctuation. I certainly never learned about semi-colons in school (or at home) and they are not something I feel comfortable with, for example, even in prose. So I'm sure some of it is ignorance (if you like) but I'm 41 and I'm not going back to grammar school now. So I'm more 'rough and ready' than 'perfectly planned and presented'...so it means some people will never 'take me seriously'...I can live with that. You know, we all have our faults. Faults and weak spots are one of my big subjects - I love them. Some artists yearn for perfection...I dwell on the dirt, the bits that won't work...
3. For me every poem should be saying something new that I haven't quite said before in another poem (and hopefully no one else has said it either but I don't worry about that too much). It may be quite a clear message (I have nothing against a poem with a message – poems can do so many things, why limit their place in the world?) or it may be a fairly message-free little picture of something or somebody. Sometimes I may not really even know what it is doing...until quite some time later.
4. I like to try most poetic forms at some point. There are a few I haven't tried yet (the ubiquitous haiku, for example) but I may try one when it's completely out of fashion (just to be awkward). I can't tell you how much I am averse to the whole idea of fashion! I would rather sit through 'Love Actually' again than go to see 'Sex and over-hyped City' (Women love it! Full of shoes!). But back to poetic forms...mostly I know pretty quickly whether the form and the content are working well together or not. If it's not working I switch to a different form and try something else. Sometimes words come right and sometimes they don't but I have never, ever, ever had writer's block. How could you run out of ideas? I just don't get that. There is so much to write about! Being too miserable or confused or just messed-up to write...now I can understand how that might happen... but it doesn't happen to me. I just keep on going...whether anyone's listening or reading or not.
5. I avoid at all costs the very idea of schools of writing. I don't like any of the labels used for writing really and I've never understood the need to put poets into groups and schools (I've certainly never wanted to be part of one). The poor old poet spends all that time busting a gut to say their piece and then we tidy them up into neat little groups with ridiculous names (often once they're dead). Neo this and post that. Women poets very often don't fit into any of the groups (Stevie Smith...where she?) and that is significant perhaps. Go sisters.
6. I write about pretty much any subject matter. If it is very personal (and easy to comprehend) I do consult my nearest and dearest at times to see how they feel about certain details going into the public domain. Only once has someone near to me said 'no, please, I don't want people to know that' and I tweaked the poem accordingly to make it less specific. My loved ones are very good to me and support me and put up with all this poetry nonsense. Their happiness is important. A person can be too selfish and self-obsessed.
7. Personally I have to feel happy with the finished poem – and my poems are finished, generally speaking. I have to feel each poem is as honest as it can be and is not posing or trying to be something it isn't. I must always feel that I haven't tried to paint myself as more intelligent or more honourable or, indeed, more honest than I really am. It can be tricky to work out what is what...I do my best.
8. I try to explore writing as much as I can...I am an experimental poet in my own mind even if I don't fit other people's ideas of what an experimental poet is (it seems to be that if they like it it is experimental and if they don't it is just rehashed crap). I try different things in every poem (different language, different references, different styles, different priorities, different intentions). One reason I fell so far into Raveworld in my twenties was the escape from uptight Britain that it provided – an escape from that place where you had to do things in a certain way, where you had to think in a certain way or you were just unacceptable. Raveworld merriness and freedom had a lot of illusion mixed in with it but it was still a fantastic time and place to be young and alive and not never, ever going to bed. Lots of the records used the refrain 'open your mind' and whilst this did often just mean 'fill yourself with drugs' the phrase still hangs around my head - especially whenever I hear or read someone telling other people how to be or think or write. I opened my mind... well, perhaps a little too much. In fact at one point pretty much everything nearly fell out onto the floor in a heap...but then...I stuffed some of it back in and here I am....doing what I do, doing what I can, doing what feels right. It's messy but effective. My kitchen cupboards aren't too bad – my head is allowed to be a mess. It is my head.
9. I try to shut out other people's ideas about poetry when I am writing. So other poets might sneer at something (I think to myself as I am writing...) but I just have to put that out of my head. It is the poem that matters and it will come out as it needs to – me and the poem will work it out. To me a lot of the stuff that gets talked about poetry is just fluff that spoils the sound on a record player. So pick off the fluff and let the record play for goodness sake! Ah, that's better...
10. I am always ready to change my ways of working if it seems the right thing to do at the time. I don't expect to be the same writer at 60...if I get that far. Changing, progressing, learning, trying...now I'm back where I came in.
This is probably as close to rules as I'm going to get. And it's not very close is it? I am pretty much always better at expressing my thoughts in poetry than in prose so here is all the above in four nice, short, easy lines:
PSAll the games, all the talk
But this much is clear
The words keep on moving
They're freer than we are
RF 2008
See what I mean?
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