The Point of Workshopping

Finally getting my poetic mojo back, I recently went on a poetry workshop dayschool with the fabulous Jenny Lewis. The topic for the day was 'Revisioning and Editing'. We were invited to send, in advance, two poems that weren't quite working in their current form and then, on the day, after some suggestions as to how to approach such problem poems on our own, we were split into groups to workshop.

In the event, we only had time to workshop one each of the poems we had sent in and in some cases, only a fragment of the poem. The practice in Jenny's workshops is well-established: the poet reads their poem, sometimes providing a little of the background , and then the rest of the group discusses what works for them, what they like, what they don't like, what they might do instead. The poet remains silent during the discussion but is free to take notes. After a while, the poet is invited to join the discussion and can rebut or comment as they see fit. Then the group moves on to another poet and poem. It is up to the poet to redraft later according to their own wishes. During our dayschool, we had somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour to work on redrafting. In the afternoon, Jenny used a timer to provide eight minutes each to present the new draft with comments on how the workshopping had helped or otherwise, with copies of the original poem circulated for comparison.

My poem was quite a short one; there was one word that I couldn't settle on and I wasn't happy with the title, but I liked the idea behind it, so I felt it just needed some fresh eyes to help me polish it. The group collectively ditched the word I wasn't sure about and didn't mind the title, though they discussed several others in the process. However, they detected a sinister tone that I hadn't noticed and suggested that I write it out in a prose poem form, switching the order of a couple of phrases here and there and changing one punctuation mark, which they felt would emphasise the poem's sinister nature.

Into the redrafting phase, I gratefully crossed out the ditched word, switched the phrases around and set it out as a prose poem. Switched the phrases round again and rewrote it as a prose poem. Crossed out some phrases completely and rewrote it as a prose poem. The prose form just wasn't working for me.

However, thinking about changing the lineation made me think about the way lineation might affect the tone of a poem. I wondered if the inherent menace of the narrator would come over better with more space, more pause, between words and phrases. Set out in three-line stanzas, with the middle line of each indented slightly, I felt the sense of something not being said was much stronger. Playing a little more with a couple of phrases, and the poem reached a draft that I'm quite happy with (and will doubtless submit somewhere, so no, I'm not publishing it here - yet). Overall, a very useful and successful day.

You might wonder, since the title didn't change, the main word that went was one I had wondered about anyway and I ignored the advice to set it out as a prose poem, how I can regard the day as useful. It doesn't matter that I didn't follow their advice - it's my poem, I don't *have* to do what anyone else says about it - but the group made me look at a different aspect of the poem, one that I hadn't considered, and that made all the difference. An article in Mslexia by author Jane Rogers discussed the different effects writing in the first or third person can have; when I met  Jane shortly afterwards, I thanked her for the article and told her it had inspired me to rewrite my WIP in the present tense rather than the past. She probably thought me rather odd ( many people do, doubtless!) but by making me think about such a fundamental aspect - narrator - of the story-telling process, I was able to think about other fundamental aspects - tense - and rewrite accordingly.

So next time you have the opportunity to workshop a poem, go for it. It doesn't matter if you disagree with every single one of the suggestions made, because if it makes you think about your poem and how it can be considered, it's worth the time and effort.

Stop the World I Wanted to Get Off (but have possibly recovered now)

When I first started blogging, I was - how can I put this - a little over-enthusiastic. Daily entries, most of them quite lengthy. After the novelty had worn off (and I had read Anne Allen's blog about not overloading your readers), I calmed down to approximately one entry a week.  Regularity of entries was the recommended way rather than frequency.

However, I suspect that a regular once every two months is probably less frequent than even Anne had in mind. My excuse? Too much to write about. That's right, too much. As soon as I thought, 'Ooh, that would make a good topic for a blog entry,' something else would happen that superseded it until eventually my head was spinning in such a whirl that nothing at all got written.

I have finally managed to slam on the brakes, my head has stopped whirling and last week I actually looked at a poem that I started writing back in March but hadn't got round to editing since. So in the spirit of slowing down, please allow me to tickle your semicircular canals with some thoughts about Julia Copus's poetry collection, 'The World's Two Smallest Humans'.

I first came across Julia Copus when studying poetic form with the fabulous Jenny Lewis; after reading some of Copus's new form, the specular poem, we were to try our hands at our own versions. Naturally, the form is deceptive, and creating a poem that follows the rules *and* says something even vaguely meaningful was a challenge too far for me. But her name stuck with me and I recently acquired her latest collection, something slim to read on the plane when I wasn't allowed to read from any electronic device.

My initial reaction on flipping through the collection was disappointment. I know, shocking, but put it down to the tiredness I felt on discovering there were only two specular poems in the whole collection, 'Miss Jenkins' and 'Raymond, at 60'. These two again flex syntax and context to its limits to create a different sense for each line, depending on where it is in the poem. Potted life histories, a man caring for an ageing mother is reflected through the poem to the small boy being cared for, and a retired teacher reflects on the career that has passed. Then I went back to the beginning and read each poem more carefully and my disappointment was subsumed by my delight in what I was reading.

The inside cover blurb describes the poems as navigating a series of landscapes, both external and interior. Much of it struck me as being rather about silence, at three levels. 'Heronkind', which describes a heron catching a fish, as well as the biological necessity for herons to catch fish; I found myself holding my breath, waiting for the fish to be caught, the heron to feed: a silence of a third kind, beyond the interior and external silence of the landscapes described in the poems.  Silence is referenced directly in the poem 'This Silence Between Us', a metaphorical silence that is talked about and around:
                   'This silence that lies between us like a body
                    that long ago gave up responding to pain,
                    still less to light .....'
and the stanza ends with the question that we all feel in our frustration with faltering relationships, 'how long do you suppose it can continue?'

There is also a theme of children, lost, unborn or unattained: in the sequence 'Ghost' about Copus's attempts at IVF; in the poem 'Stars'; in the 'notes' from Sussmayr to Mozart while the pregnant Constanze reclines in the background; in the escaping young teen of 'An Easy Passage'.  Sussmayr complains of having to translate 'direct from the silence', reading between the lines as we all need to when reading poetry.

I could write at much greater length but don't want to  defer the moment when you too can go and acquire a copy of this collection. And when you've read it, tell me what your favourite poem/line/phrase was. It's tricky to pin it down to one, but I think mine is possibly the following, from the fourth packet of 'The Particella of Franz Xaver Sussmayr':

           The soul itself, in that it is wafer-thin,

            is shockable as litmus - yet agile too and slips
            between the present and the past,
            leaving a trail like pollen dust.'

Enjoy.

The Villainy of Villanelles

   When I was doing the undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford, I was lucky enough to have as a tutor, for a short time, Jenny Lewis, the poet behind such works as 'After Gilgamesh'.  Not only was I lucky during the course, but afterwards too, as she has since set up The Poet's House, from which she runs courses and day-schools. Today, I attended another of her day-schools, looking at poetic form, primarily sestinas and villanelles.

   Now, I like villanelles. When I was doing my MA, I discovered Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art', admired the poem, admired the subversion of the form and assumed it was far too difficult a thing for me to do myself. The rules are quite straightforward, but basing a 19-line poem around two basic rhymes, which adds to the challenge. If you want to check out the rules, they are here. I wrote a couple of pretty terrible ones during the diploma, which are unlikely to see the light of day until they have been seriously re-written, and then moved on, sticking to the safety of free verse. But then, last Christmas, I received a copy of Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled' and determined to master poetic form by working my way through the book.

   I read the introduction, found a wonderfully iambic phrase that kicked my slumbering Muse out of her stupor, and wrote a villanelle. (I still have the rest of the book to read...)  I have since put it on my fictional blog, which means it is now ineligible for most competitions or publications, and read it a couple of times at public readings. At the risk of being either repetitive or overly self-referential, I include it below for your reading delight.

   Today's day-school also generated another villanelle and a sort of tritina, both of which will receive a severe editing before they are either shared or submitted. In the meantime, you could hear me reading, with some of my poetic colleagues, at the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Walton Street, Oxford, as part of their 'Sounds of Surprise' season, on Sunday 25th November, between 5 and 7 pm - cup of tea and cake included. Jenny is also reading the previous Sunday. Go along to one of them if you can, they're great fun.

On Writing Poetry

I have no inkling how to start,

And listen to these words in vain:

"Technique is just the Greek for art."

The moment when true lovers part,

A wartime death, a drop of rain -

I have no inkling how to start.

I seek the words to set apart

A poem sure to bring me fame,

With no technique to make it art.

An idea's there within my heart;

Thesauruses must take the strain

For I've no inkling how to start

And clogged up rhyme, and counterpart

Strict rhythm, make themselves the bane

Of technique, just the Greek for art!

Heroic couplets won't impart

Enough to fool my struggling brain.

I have no inkling how to start

And technique's all just Greek for art.