POETRY STUFF – Page 8 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Reining in the high horse

Do you say ‘weep’ ever – except inside a poem?

It’s a word I noticed a lot during the reading window. If you’re a rhyming poet, ‘weep’ has always offered temptation because it goes with sleep and deep and keep. Also ‘weeping’, as a feminine ending, has a deliciously mournful fall to it.

But these days there aren’t so many rhymers. The poets are doing other things. These things include a subconscious (I think) attraction to certain ‘poetic’ words. They tend to turn up towards the end of a poem.

The little word ‘yet’ is one to watch. It often signals a mini-epiphany (‘and yet’), which means the poet may be getting onto her high horse.

On the other hand, ‘yet’ (meaning ‘but’) may put in an appearance because the poet has already used ‘but’ and needs an alternative.

Alas (and ‘alas’ has gone, except for entirely mock sorrow), poetic technique is tricky. A matter of getting the balance right between deliberate repetition (allowable even on a low horse) and accidental harping on one word too much.

And yet ‘yet’ is allowable, even in contemporary conversational register, in the phrase ‘yet again’, or ‘not yet’. So it’s not the word itself that’s retro: it’s the way it’s used.

Which brings me to ‘for’.

‘For’ as an ordinary preposition (‘This is for you’) is no problem.

It’ s no problem in a phrase like ‘left for home’ or ‘for the love of Mike’, either. But when you come across ‘for’ meaning ‘because’, you’re back in high-horse territory.

I couldn’t do it here for I would immediately sound odd. (See what I mean?) But it pops up in poems all the time. It’s more convenient than ‘because’, less business-like than ‘since’…

But back to weeping. If you need to weep (in a poem) and don’t want to use the word, what will you do?

I don’t weep at funerals; I cry. But ‘cry’ brings its own problems, for it also means to shout out loud.

‘Whimper’ and or ‘howl’ sounds like a dog.

‘Keen’ is interesting and yet you worry what the person is actually doing.

‘Snivel’ is a person who doesn’t have a hanky, and ‘sob’ is certainly emotive though it sounds blobby.

‘Tear up’ is modern, unless you read the word wrong and visualise shredded paper.

In Scotland, we have the word ‘grete’ for weeping but alas it can get confused with the English ‘hello’, forbye.

On balance, weeping in poems is not such a great idea. Though obviously if the reader weeps, it’s quite another matter.

Verbs leaning through the window and other coincidences

The coincidences in the poems sent in to me during the December window ARE uncanny.

Here are some of them:

♥ Two sets of envelopes, one immediately after the other, have both egrets and herons in the same poem.

♥ Four poems in one day’s reading use the word ‘gift’ (as in we gifted her our dog) where once we might have used ‘give’ or ‘gave’. Last window, it was ‘hefted’ instead of ‘heaved’. Now it is ‘gifted’ instead of ‘gave’.

♥ Horses are off the menu latterly. But now a lot of foxes. Ted Hughes started it and Robert Minhinnick continued, so this is nothing new. Nice to see foxes are back, in fact.

♥ Two lots of supermoons arrived in poems on the same day. I thought there would be more, like there were for the last comet, but it may be early days.

Bugbears:

♠ People writing ‘til. It is either until or till. Both of the latter are proper words so you get a choice.

♠ Habitual past tense – ‘I’d run down to the shop / and buy the daily bread. / I’d talk to Mrs Bloggs / but I’d forget the things we’d said.’ I contend that a single action in the past is always more interesting than the things you used to do. (‘I ran down to the shop / and bought the daily bread. / I talked to Mrs Bloggs / but I forgot the thing I said.’)

You get the same construction when filling in back story – ‘I’d talked to Mrs Bloggs and I’d bought the daily bread / but then I saw the postman / and remembered what I’d said.’ Back story tends to be boring, though sometimes necessary in a narrative. In poetry it brings in a lot of letter D, which is involved in ‘I’d’ and ‘we’d’ and ‘you’d’. Too much letter D is a killer, aurally. Trust me.

♠ Too many stanzas starting a new sentence with And (cap A). You can overplay your And.

♠ The leaning verb.

Leaning verbs
It is possible that I’m losing the plot completely. I could be imagining the fact that they’re ganging up on me.

No, I’m not imagining it. There are a lot of leaning verbs in free-verse forms, and especially towards the end of the poem.

What on earth are ‘leaning verbs’? It’s my name for them. it’s a way of describing a series of verb clauses, where two or more verbs have the same subject. There’s probably a proper grammatical term for it. They are sort of in apposition. Like this (I am rhyming my example for fun, but this is really a free-verse thing):

I ran to the shop,
bought the daily bread,
talked to Mrs Bloggs,
forgot the things she said.

A leaning-verb lover would never put ‘and’ before the last verb in the sequence. The verbs are stacked one by one against the subject (in this case ‘I’). The leaning-verb user likes to stack verbs. It gifts (I mean, gives) a good strong stress to the first syllable of the verb, and in a repetitive pattern, this creates a sense of structure and pattern. Often each verb gets a line of its own.

Some poets will do this without commas at end of the verb clause. They will use a line break to substitute for a comma. This is fair enough, unless you plan to use enjambed lines later, in which case the common reader gets anxious.

There’s nothing intrinsically evil about the leaning-verb construction, and it’s certainly not wrong, grammatically speaking. But if it becomes a regular habit, poets should take note. Because habits quickly become convention, and staidly conventional writing is what killed the so-called ‘Georgians’.

Look out for leaning verbs in the last two lines of free-verse poems. You’ll be surprised how often you find them, in poets of all ranks. You’ll find them so often it’ll start to sound as ‘right’ to you as ending on a rhyme once did (witness Simon Armitage’s Cataract Operation).

But you want to sound different from the rest, don’t you?

Delights
Some poems just work. The poems that work work in their own way. They’re not much like any of the other poems that work, generally speaking, so it’s impossible to generalise about what makes them delightful. If it were, I would share the secret with you here.

All I can say is, sometimes poems just do it, whatever ‘it’ is. They make you wake up, sit up and read them again. And again. A poet can sometimes write five pleasantly dull poems and then one that’s a sit-up. If the poet could write the sit-up poem every time, she would. We all would.

During this reading window, I read about a mile of poems, and every 44 yards or so there was a sit-up. It was wonderful. There were also poems that could be sit-up poems, I thought, with a little tinkering, though tinkering can be over-rated.

Returns
All the poems have now been returned to their owners, though they only went in the post yesterday. Just so you know. For me, it’s back to publications and reviews, both of which are shouting from the sidelines: me, me, me. And my ‘to do’ list, which is up to 21 items.

Also it’s time to eat.

Rodents through the window

Forget horses. Today it is wasps and rats.

The less lovely things in life can be the best inspirations. But the isle of Iona has popped up three times too, and Iona is gorgeous.

The leaning verbs are still leaning. I think I may be making it a bit of a mission to prop them up. Or bring them down − whichever metaphor grabs you.

Honestly, some great poems today.

Among its other virtues, poetry bears witness. Real things that happened and can’t unhappen. The grain of things. Seen as they were seen.

On windows and stacking

Yes, it’s a new year but I’m still reading poems from the old window.

If you happen to be wondering why you sent yours in early December and haven’t had a reply (I am usually pretty quick) it’s because it all went wrong. I did manage the first few as usual, day by day, but quickly I gave up. The pressure of work, as they say, pressed in a pressurised fashion, and I had to start stacking.

Poem stacking is not difficult. Much easier than logs. So the stack didn’t actually topple for a while, at which point I carried it upstairs. Then all that seasonal stuff got in the way. (Try reading poems and wrapping parcels at the same time).

The people I returned poems to in early December returned emails to me. The emails were already out of control so I started a second stack: the poems that had been replied to. But I didn’t post them, and I still haven’t posted them so as not to attract more emails, until I have time to read emails again.

The ‘replied to’ stack is now slightly higher than the ‘waiting to be read stack’.

Soon they will all go into the post at the same time, but not for at least another week because you can’t rush this stuff. Peoples’ lives are in those envelopes. Lives on hold.

So the reading continues. If yours was one of the under-stamped envelopes, it will come back to you, because I haven’t been to the sorting office and offered to pay for them. It does cost a ridiculous amount to send a large letter envelope these days and many of us have still not caught up with that.

If yours was one of the special delivery envelopes for which the postie hammered at the door and woke me up, I forgive you. But please don’t do that again. An ordinary delivery works perfectly fine, and if you choose ‘signed for’ the postie just ignores it anyway.

So here’s a brief review of the preoccupations this time round — half way through the stack.

♦ Most frequently occurring animal: the horse.

♦ Most frequent grammatical things that bug me: ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’ (I blame Bob Dylan) and ‘were stood’ instead of ‘were standing’ or ‘was sat’ instead of ‘was sitting’ (probably his fault too).

♦ Most frequent poem type: the journey, punctuated by imperatives (turn right, go past the post office).

♦ Most frequent poem structure: the Now and two stanzas later Then poem. Or vice versa.

♦ So many leaning verbs I begin to worry that I’ve made the phenomenon worse. And I’m noticing another thing: the two leaning nouns in the last line, something like this:

We have no other way of attracting
the horses and so we arrive with
our hands full of marshmallows, buttercups.

♦ Using line breaks to substitute for commas (I wrote about this not that long ago and now I can’t find which blog it’s in) while having other line breaks across an enjambed phrase, so the reader starts not to know quite how to read safely without falling off the edge.

I feel unreasonable a lot of the time, and when it comes to punctuation, I get what my mother used to call ‘fratchetty’. Why on earth should semi-colons affect me like the rhinoceros and his skin. Give me simple punctuation and I’ll rest easy.

But really I’m living the life of Riley. There are numerous delights, but each is individual. It’s like the Tolstoy thing about all happy families being alike but unhappy ones being unhappy in their own way; except not. A good poem is uniquely happy, but lots of poems are made unhappy in exactly the same way.

(Riley is living my life, but he’s not very keen on it and wants to go home. And yes, I know I used a semi-colon. Grrrr.)

How (not) to begin a poem

Thoughts from the reading window.

The first three or four lines of a poem are make-or-break territory.

If you hook the reader firmly at the start, she’ll follow you willingly right through to the very last syllable.

The poem is one long fishing line (usually with line breaks). The reader is a rainbow trout. The poet’s art is to play that fish and reel it in.

But the first few lines may well be where the fishing line, at least in its early drafts, fails.

They’re where the poet is still unpacking her kit, getting ready for Real Poem action. They’re where the poet is most likely to include phrases like ‘I remember’ or ‘I think’. Or ‘As I see the dew on the hollyhocks, I…’ Don’t do it!

The old prose writer’s trick is to delete the first paragraph and start with the second, where things are getting interesting.

I find myself suggesting this often for poems too.

Delete the first stanza? Try starting with the second.

Maybe delete the first three lines? Consider starting with line four.

In fact I scribble this so frequently that it may be worth trying with all poems, just to see how far the opening lines, as they stand, matter.

Then there’s the tangled line. By this, I mean a poem that opens with a lengthy sentence, spreading over several breaks, and it’s just difficult. So it’s like getting stuck in the reeds with a distant view of clear water.

Or the poem that hurls in a really odd break at the end of the first or second line. Jumps and challenges are fun, but not too soon.

Or the opening lines set up a metrical pattern. Or they seem to. And then the pattern drops. So it wasn’t a pattern at all. The disappointed fish is off the hook and floundering.

I’m talking in the abstract. Much better to give examples from my creel.

But I don’t have time in this most pressurised month of the year – and besides, the poets wouldn’t like it.

I have more poems to go and read. Many many more. And other fish to fry.

(I may discuss the over-wrought metaphor next week.)

View from window courtesy Ron King.

On Windows and Fish

The reading window is open. The envelopes are stacking up.

So not much from me this week. Instead I’m reading poems and baking cake. The cake is for the HappenStance Winterfest event at the Scottish Poetry Library on Wednesday. Last night I dreamed I was there and the reading part went all wrong because we had a poet who wanted to read but who wasn’t on the programme and I couldn’t even get him to begin his poem, let alone end it. So there was much panic, the time management at such events being a delicate matter.

But in the end he read something, and Andrew Sclater did some stuff, and Gerry Cambridge did some stuff, and I thanked everybody.

And then I remembered that although I’d brought the cake and the crisps and the juice and the white wine and the red wine and the serviettes and my notes, I had forgotten the books.

So the rows of seats were full of lovely people who had arrived for the books to be launched and there were NO BOOKS.

A great relief to wake up and go and read some poems. Pencils sharpened at dawn.

Stuff Christmas shopping. I have other fish to fry.

How to get your pamphlet reviewed

‘Is it true – what Shelley writes me that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review?’ [Letter from Byron to John Murray, 26 April 1821]

You have a poetry pamphlet in print. So what next? Poets both crave and fear reviews but mainly they needn’t lose sleep. ‘Publishing a volume of verse’, as Don Marquis notably remarked, ‘is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.’

I think it’s easier to get echoes than it used to be, though not all echoes are as desirable as people think.

Why do people want reviews?

They want a genuine reader response (as opposed to praise from their friends).
They believe reviews will help sell the publication (usually they make little or no difference).
They want attention.
They want to trawl them for useful blurb to go on their next book jacket (or current web page).
They think it’s what’s supposed to happen after you publish your writing.
They want to learn. (You can learn from what some reviewers say.)

The number of poetry readers, relatively speaking, is small. The number of poetry pamphlets published every year is big. (I have no definitive statistics but it is a fact that more come to me every year than I can manage to read. At my left elbow is a pile of unread pamphlets, about 25, and 3 more arrived yesterday.)

Maybe an attention-catching review for one of these, shared on social media, would bump that pamphlet to the top of my ‘To Read’ list. It might. So how would you accomplish that?

Frankly, it’s of little use posting your pamphlet to every magazine you can think of in the hope of generating a review. It will just cost loads and you’ll end up feeling bitter. Why was Last Year’s Dead Leaves by M. J. Petticoat featured in a review when yours was ignored?

Magazine and newspaper editors have skyscrapers of books and pamphlets staring at them beseechingly – more than could be reviewed in a month of Sunday blogs. It’s a mug’s game adding your humble publication to that pile.

So what’s to be done about all this? There are really interesting reviews all the time on the web, and some on paper. If one of them is to be yours, what do you need to do?

First, spend a little time finding out how it works. Don’t send your pamphlet to a magazine editor if the magazine doesn’t publish reviews. If the magazine does do reviews, find the correct procedure. If in doubt, email the main editor and ask. Many magazines only review books, not pamphlets. It’s reasonable to suppose you stand a better chance of a review in a magazine where you’ve previously placed poems or contributed as a reviewer yourself.

When did Poetry Review last review a set of pamphlets? When did the Times Literary Supplement last pay attention to pamphlets: it has happened – but when? Have you ever seen a pamphlet reviewed in The Guardian? Does Best Poetry of 2016 (in any publication where such a round-up exists) include reference to any pamphlets?

Let me be more positive. Is your pamphlet listed on Amazon? It may or may not be. It’s certainly possible to get it there. If it’s there, has anyone posted a reader review?

Look at Shelley Day’s The Confession of Stella Moon, published earlier this year. Forty-five customer reviews – so far. More people read novels than poetry, but novelists are much better at courting customer reviews than poets. Look at Fiona Moore’s Night Letter, currently shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Pamphlet Poetry. Not one customer review on Amazon.

Fiona Moore’s pamphlet has received review comment, not only in a couple of paper magazines but also here and here and here. More for Moore than many. But please note that this poet writes reviews herself. She blogs at Displacement, where (among other things) she writes about poets she admires. She also regularly reviews elsewhere.

By and large, poets don’t try very hard to get reviews on Amazon. It’s a moot point whether they should. Perhaps they think responses will just pop up. Generally they don’t. You have to solicit attention. If an articulate friend really loved your pamphlet and tells you so in an email, ask them to post a few comments on Amazon (unless you’re ethically opposed to Amazon, in which case consider GoodReads, a site I like very much – although since 2013 it has been owned by … Amazon).

Some webzines accept pamphlet nominations for review – and offer them to their review team. Sabotage Reviews, which reviews pamphlets but not (usually) books follows this procedure. So the issue might be whether someone on the review team would take an interest in your publication. Is your name familiar to them? If you’ve already published poems widely, it might be. Get your name out there!

In my experience, most poets think more about getting their own work reviewed than the role they might play in reviewing other people’s. Pamphlet poets regularly ask about OPOI reviews at Sphinx Review. It is rare indeed for one of them to send an OPOI response to a pamphlet recently enjoyed.

Ink, Sweat and Tears has ‘no resident reviewers’ but accepts ‘unsolicited reviews for poetry and short story collections.’ The guideline word count for a pamphlet is 500 words. So here a reviewer would have to offer the review. The editor doesn’t organise it. You can’t review your own book (though sometimes I wonder why not).

There are blogger reviewers: Matthew Stewart at Rogue Strands. Tim Love’s LitRefs. Dave Coates at Dave Poems. Emma Lee at Emma Lee’s Blog. John Field at Poor Rude Lines. There are lots more… You could be one of them. You can set up your own blog, or you can go to GoodReads and simply select a book and write about it.

Tim Love did a fascinating analysis of what happened to his pamphlet, Moving Parts, with the reviewers. Tim has been around for a long time in little magazines as a poet, reviewer, letter-writer; on the web as a poet, short-story writer, reviewer and blogger; in real life as an organiser and contributor to poetry groups and events. It helps.

How to launch a poetry book

There are many ways.

I like the way the word ‘launch’ suggests champagne and an ocean liner. And recently I did attend a poetry reading in the sea. It was almost certainly the first ever event of its kind and it was during Poetry in Aldeburgh in early November.

Poets are tough people. They can do almost anything. Including taking off their clothes and immersing themselves in bitterly cold sea water while declaiming verse. The four fearless poets involved in this reading were each other’s audience because the spectators (I was one of these) were too far away to hear the words – and comfortably dry.

Poetry in the Sea was an unforgettable and stunningly beautiful event. But it wouldn’t do for a launch, despite the possibility of boats, because the books would get wet. And at a launch, there are books.

However, there was also a dry HappenStance launch at Aldeburgh, when we booked a beautiful room (with a sea view and amazing stripes wallpaper) in the Brudenell Hotel to launch Charlotte Gann’s Noir. It’s a dark and shadowy book, elliptical in its suggestion and grace – but there was much laughter on the day, as you can see from the photograph, and many HappenStance subscribers and poets came along.

But what are the essential ingredients for launching books?

Well, you do need an audience. There must be books to sell (this sounds simple but printers go bust every year). There needs to be a signing table. There needs to be an author to read (even this can go wrong and I have known launches where the author was elsewhere). The poet/reader needs to perform well and not for too long. Someone needs to make a little speech, introducing the poet and probably proposing a toast. You need glasses, or at least paper cups, and something with which to toast the success of the publication – anything from purest tap water to champagne.

You need something to put the money in. You need change. You need paper to note down sales etc. You need pens for signing the books. You need a clear head. You need a budget.

Because all this almost certainly costs a bob or two. You may or may not have to hire a room (you could use a free back room in a local pub; you could use your back garden; you could assemble in a park). But there is a cost factor.

If you’re selling the books yourself, you may pull in enough cash from the event to cover the cost. But the launch could be at a festival – like Paul Stephenson’s first reading from The Days That Followed Paris – which was also at Poetry in Aldeburgh. At a public event of this kind, you don’t have to fork out for the venue (and if you’re lucky you may even receive a performer’s fee), but the official bookseller will handle sales.

You can have more than one launch, of course, and bigger publishers do organise these for popular titles at bookshops across the nation. But most poetry titles have just one, and occasionally two.

It all sounds a bit scary if you’re a new poet and contemplating organising such a thing – because often it is the poet who organises the launch – not the wonderful publisher, who is already working on the next three titles and anyway is on holiday in the Seychelles.

I have known poets who got a friend to do the organisation: an unofficial publicity person or secret agent. That works well, and the friend can also do the introductory speech. It’s also often a good idea to launch with at least one other writer: more variety during the reading and someone else to bolster the confidence and share costs.

But there are many models and ways of doing it. The most important single thing is that the audience – and the poet herself, if possible – has fun. It’s a sort of party: a birthday party for the book and a well-wishing. So once you think of this, nothing else matters but a spirit of celebration.

Last weekend I was in Taunton for Annie Fisher’s launch of Infinite in All Perfections. If you give a collection a title like this, you’re asking for trouble. However, it was a fabulous launch with a style of its own.

It was an afternoon launch with glasses of Prosecco, Victorian china, floral decoration on all the tea tables, acres of glorious cake and tea. It was a launch in a terrific hall with microphones and comfy seating. There was a band playing before and after the poetry. It was a launch at which the poet not only read but sang. Such a voice! Such a lyric performance!

If a publication would make a suitable Christmas gift (this is certainly true of Annie’s pamphlet), it’s no bad idea to launch in November or December, so timing’s worth consideration.

I’ve always wanted to do a launch at which copies of the publication were given away free to everyone who came. I’ve never done it but I love the idea; and it could be possible, if it were a launch with a paid entry. Or if the poet (or publisher) was singularly well-heeled.

What’s the purpose of a launch again? It’s to celebrate the arrival of a new piece of making, to send it out into the world, and to find it some good readers. It’s only the beginning, but a good beginning helps.

(One thing to bear in mind: the launch of your first publication is the easiest. Launching subsequent books is much harder. By now, your family and friends have got used to the idea you do this kind of thing. So you may need to think hard about how to do it in a different way with different attractions. A magician. Games. A celebrity guest. Rabbits.)

Poetics and Drinking Parties

I love the word symposium. I don’t know why.

I think it’s because you can hear ‘posy’ in it. And because ‘symp’ starts sympathy and sympathise. And because I think the plural is ‘symposia’, a word I’d quite like to get into a rhyming poem, maybe with a nip or two of ‘ambrosia’.

Obviously it’s a bit of an upmarket, somewhat academic word too. I took part in the Scottish Women’s Poetry Symposium 2016 yesterday at the Scottish Poetry Library, run in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. It was open, of course, to all genders and to many ideas and provocations. A fabulous event, wonderfully well organised in a building like no other, and free to all.

A symposium, to the Greeks at least, was a party, with stimulating flow of drink, food and ideas. We tend to use it these days to mean something more like a conference, with speakers and panels – a formal event. I’m glad to report the SWPS day combined the best of both, with food and drink that was a feast to the eye as well as the appetite. And a most convivial and welcoming atmosphere.

The word ‘poetics’ was in the air. It is, to me, an academic word, and poets who do degrees in writing use it cheerfully, whereas ordinary folk look a bit worried when the term pops up. (We create both divisions and alliances by our use of language.) But at the Scottish Poetry Library yesterday at no point did you have to feel dim for not grasping an academically technical term (though there were a good few – I have them in my notebook). Of course, it helps if you like language and find it interesting, which most people working with, in or around poetry do.

I was talking briefly on a small panel about my poetics. So I had to think again about what ‘poetics’ meant. It’s one of those plural words that’s really singular. That is to say, there isn’t a noun ‘poetic’. ‘Poetic’ is an adjective. But there is a noun ‘poetics’ and it takes a singular verb. So your poetics is probably different from mine.

I suppose Poetics must have a plural. Because if you and I get together and discuss both of our poetics, two sets of poetics are on the table: two poetics? or two poeticses? (I must not think like this. Red herring alert.)

Poetics usually means either a theory of poetry, of which there are many, or a way of working in poetry, exemplified by practice. So my ‘poetics’ is exemplified by what I do as an editor, publisher and selector of poetry. That is to say, I have preferences and they’re demonstrated publicly in the books I choose to bring out. I promote the work I like and find stimulating. What I like and what I can like turns into my poetics.

We talked about gate-keepers yesterday too, a more accessible term. Publishers, magazine editors and event organisers have something to do with what gets read or heard: they can open or close a gate to publication. My HappenStance gate is quite small. But these days there are many gates. It’s not so very hard to find one that will open, or even to make your own and invite people through it, especially if your gate opens without public funding.

It’s an exciting time for poetry. Confusing, bamboozling and bewildering too. Impossible to keep up with what’s going on amidst the glory of types and forms and outlets for poems. But there’s no need to keep up. Keeping on, is the thing. Keeping on, and making connections, and joyfully exploring the mystery and magic of language. Sharing. Yesterday’s event was very much about that. Both ideas and poems were shared. Some wonderful things were shared: new names, new ways to go, new things to like.

I ended my own party piece yesterday with my favourite definition of poetry, which is Tom Leonard’s, from his poem ‘100 differences between poetry and prose’ which doesn’t contain a hundred differences at all. But this is the one I like – yep, here’s a bit of poetics for you:

‘if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose’

The smell of the poem

These days there’s a lot of interest in what poems look like.

Issue 57 of Magma was titled The Shape of the Poem and the submission invitation began: ‘Poetry is a shaping of words and that shape can often be seen on the page’. It made reference to the visual cue of lines that turn before they reach the edge of the page: an early indicator that text is poem not prose.

Generally readers expect poems to look like poems. They expect more space round them than around prose. They expect a lot of other things too, many of which are conditioned expectations, operating subliminally – such as rhyme, an aural cue.

If you want to know a reader’s subconscious expectations of poetry, give them a poem that satisfies none of them. Give them a one-word poem. Give them an absence in the middle of a square. Give them a poem in which every line is struck-through or blotted out. Give them a poem they can’t hear. Give them a poem they can’t see.

Poetry – whatever it may be – works by acknowledging, and then – to various extents – both satisfying and disrupting expectation. If it doesn’t satisfy, you won’t like it much. If has no element of surprise, you won’t rate it.

Robert Pinsky says of poetry: ‘It’s voice. It’s a vocal art.’ Well, it can be, although it usually requires more than one sensual response eg. seeing and hearing.

But try watching Cochlear Implant, by the extraordinary British Sign Language poet Richard Carter, and see what you think. That’s if you can see him. Is vision the only way for British Sign Language to be accessible? There might be another way, through touch. Helen Keller could read speech by touching people’s lips with her hands.

We operate through our senses. We make communication in whatever way we can. We call some of those communications – especially those unusually important to us – ‘poetry’. Like water through porous rock, poetry finds ways to reach people.

But what if we think poetry is a visual art, and then lose sight? What if we believe the shape on the page (or the page itself) is essential? What if we believe the poem must be heard?

We are an exceptionally creative species. We find ways. Some of them are technological.

I’ve been fascinated in recent months by Giles Turnbull’s blog. Giles is a poet who can’t see – though he wasn’t born without sight, which means he has his own expectations regarding shape and form. He has acquired a pair of magic glasses, which do the most extraordinary things. His blog about the Orcam glasses is here. And his story is ongoing – do follow that blog.

Giles can’t, I think, respond to Richard Carter making poems in BSL. Richard can respond to Giles because deaf poets can read, though English may not be their first language, so there could be a language barrier. Barriers are not terrible obstructions: they’re creative opportunities.

As for poetry of touch, I expect it’s out there. Taste poetry may, arguably, already be with us. And dogs smell stories. If you don’t believe it, look or listen to this little film.

ps I will be at Poetry in Aldeburgh next weekend. Do come if you can. Paul Stephenson will be reading from The Days That Followed Paris, and Charlotte Gann will have a private launch of Noir on the Saturday afternoon at the Brudenell Hotel, to which you’re warmly invited. Email me (nell) at happenstancepress.com for details or use the message box on the website.