Fractal Stanzas

Riddles, Readers and the Unpopularity of Poetry

2011-01-25T09:09:00.000-08:00

We’re writing riddles at the moment at my children’s Poetry Club. We’ve read some riddles together, and attempted to solve them, and the children have got a lot of pleasure out of ‘getting it’, particularly when they ‘got it’ faster than I did.

Riddles have been a sub-genre of poetry since poetry started being written down and presumably for centuries before that. The Exeter Book is a C10th codex of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and among the works contained within it are nearly a hundred riddles. Riddling seems to have been more than just a pastime for the Anglo-Saxons, however. It seems to have, at least in the works that we are left with, been indicative of the way they liked thinking. In Old English there are at least eighteen different words to describe aspects of thought: a fact which seems to indicate that the Anglo-Saxons valued and gained pleasure from cognitive effort.

The Exeter Riddle Statue, in the centre of Exeter, is by Michael Fairfax,
and features eight of the Exeter Book Riddles... with solutions for those who
can work out where to find them.

The kenning, for example, the compound noun which is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon as well as Norse poetry, could be considered a micro-riddle in its own right. Take the kenning ‘whale-road’ (from Beowulf). This is not an obvious or direct description of the sea. It is created in the same way that riddles are – by circumlocution, by describing something in a way that makes the reader look at it as something else. It requires some cognitive effort to decode, as it brings together two semantic domains, and requires the reader to make connections which then yield meaning. But yielding the meaning isn’t the only point – what’s also crucial is that, having worked out that ‘whale road’ is referring to the sea, the reader (or listener) will now have a whole new way of experiencing the concept that is the sea. Wait! I hear you cry – you’re talking about common or garden metaphor, here, aren’t you? Well, yes.

Using a workshop idea from The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Wilson & Hughes, The Poetry Society, 1998), I got the children to look really closely at an apple. I then asked them to tell me something about the apple, something that described it but used words as if they were describing something else. They came up with some great descriptions: perfectly designed to mislead a reader, but at the same time, extremely accurately observed. They loved the trickery of it all, the way they were disguising the apple with words, the way they were making the reader expend effort on their creation.

Riddles are very valuable when trying to get children to write poetry. Because riddles force the writer to make their readers do some work, the writer has to look at the object of the riddle in an entirely fresh way, in other words, defamiliarise it. But in riddles, this defamiliarisation needs to follow certain rules – the descriptions have got to seem strange, but be logical when ‘solved’. It’s all about holding two ideas about something in your head at the same time: our apple became a person wearing a pointy hat, with a freckled face, and flesh that wept when pierced by sharp white knives. Metaphors galore – and the children didn’t even realise they were creating them.

All this riddling fun set me thinking, though. Riddles are very much a sub-genre of poetry, and, within a contemporary context, a very distinct one. Unlike most poetry, riddles are about one thing. They can be solved. The cognitive effort expended is rewarded by measurable success. A nice mental tick. ü That’s not the case with other poetry: but there are many readers who don’t like poetry just because of this. These are the readers who think that all poetry is a kind of riddle: there is a ‘hidden meaning’ that the poet has wrapped in wordy flim-flam, and all they have to do is peel off and dissect the outer coverings to find what it really means. These are the people who are made uneasy by the fact that a poem doesn’t have to mean anything, it just is. It’s just there for the reader to make their own meaning. Basically, we poets make them make all this cognitive effort and then won’t tell them whether they’re right or wrong because, basically, we can’t. And if we could, we wouldn’t want to.

My sister, who’s a maths teacher, is made really uncomfortable by not being told what to think about a poem. An acquaintance who loves crosswords feels he is being cheated if a poem’s deliberate ambiguities will not allow him to settle on an interpretation. He reads a lot of poetry, really wants to love it, but finds himself frustrated when he can’t pin down what the writer intended. He’s not happy that the poet’s intent might have been to make him decide.

Ask a poet what it means and you’ll get short shrift. You might get a bit of background, or an admission that they are addressing a certain theme, but you’re unlikely to get anything more specific. There is an anecdote which tells how Robert Browning was once asked the meaning of one of his more’ difficult’ poems. ‘Madam,' he is said to have replied, ‘When I wrote that, only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.’ And T.S. Eliot said ‘What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author’. I’ve heard that Carol Ann Duffy, when visiting schools, refuses point-blank to answer questions about what a poem means. And I think all three of them are right.

But, I wonder – as poets, poets who presumably would like more people to enjoy poetry, do we need to think a bit more about this? Are these readers wrong? Are they just not ‘sophisticated’ enough? Or are we being too demanding? I wouldn’t want to write poems where the ‘meaning’ is hung out like washing on a line, because what I value in poems I read is the way that I am a co-constructor of meaning, the way that a poem doesn’t think I’m thick, leaves me space to make up my own mind. I don’t want my poems to be solved like a riddle, and then discarded from the mind. But – and it’s a big but – I want more people to enjoy reading poetry as much as I do. I also want them to buy my book.

Theories of literariness place cognitive effort and schema refreshment high in their characterising factors. Riddles might be seen to fulfil those criteria. But in addition, polysemy, ambiguity, space for each reader to inhabit a poem and own it for him or herself are also vital.

I think it would be fair to say that the majority of people don't read contemporary poetry. And presumably that’s because they don’t enjoy it. And a lot of them don’t enjoy it because they don’t understand it. And they don’t understand it because they can’t work out what it means. And that’s because they’re not really meant to – at least, not in the sense that they expect.

So maybe we need to get people to move on from thinking of poetry as a glorified riddle. We need them to value their own contribution to the writer-text-reader relationship. But how we’re going to do that, I don’t know. Any ideas?

Books of 2010 (Part 2)

2011-01-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

Five More 'Not-Reviews'

Some books I like a lot. Some I know I won't like, so I don't read them. Some I like more than others. If I enjoy something I like to share it. So this is just a little pre-blogpost (and post-the last blogpost) warning. These bloglets about books I have enjoyed are simply that. I'm not going to analyse the books (well not much), I'm not going to pick them to pieces, I'm not going to rank them, or place any relative values on them: I'm just going to let you know why I enjoyed them. And hope you might enjoy them too.

Josephine Dickinson: Silence Fell (Mariner, 2008)

Josephine Dickinson's poetry is poetry of the moors and mountains, of the farm, of the rain and the mist, of the seasons. It's poetry deeply rooted in place, in the often harsh reality of rural life, and it's poetry deeply rooted in sound. Sound patterning is woven through each poem like coloured silk. A poem called 'How Can I Explain to You That He Was Real?' starts

In a lump which banged as it humped,
the last of the lamb came out of the freezer,
deliquesced in the summer heat
in a bowl overnight. Next morning
it slid from its bag, unwrapped
from its thick aroma...

You could be hearing this through a wall, only picking up part of the sense, but you'd still be getting the thuds and the awful slick oozing. Your guts would know something about what was happening even if your intellect couldn't quite put a finger on it. The reason I find this sound patterning particularly interesting is that, from the age of six, Josephine Dickinson has been profoundly deaf. In the Foreword to the collection she explains to Galway Kinnell that '...when I see and write words, I experience their sound, rhythm and meaning with my whole body...' and 'the possible range of human experience is so vast that in losing one sense, one gains a new dimension in the others.'

I'm particularly interested in Josephine's deafness because I have worked with deaf children in poetry workshops, but her deafness is not why one should read the book. One should read it because of the poems: poems that tell the story of a place, a way of life, and a relationship, and that invite the reader to come along and experience these things too.

Fiona Benson: Faber New Poets 1 (Faber, 2009)

Fiona Benson's slim pamphlet is a gem. Her poems are beautifully crafted, every word exquisitely chosen, poised, and placed. Water, blood, fish, animals, religious allusion, all thread through this elegiac collection in its attempt to address and come to terms with loss. In 'Prayer', she describes how

I saw you like a hare, stripped and jugged
in the wine of your own blood, your tail a rudder

and in 'Corpo Santo'

I could dedicate myself to this:
the pursuit of cadences in salt and warmth
and the sinuous will of this many-ribboned shoal

I've met Fiona several times, and had the privilege of her feedback on some of my own poems. She's lovely, and quietly brilliant. I'm looking forward to her first full-length collection - if this is anything to go by, it'll be fabulous.

Abegail Morley: How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon, 2009)

Abegail Morley's poems inhabit the realm of metaphor in the same way that people inhabit the realm of their own skin. And the people in her poems inhabit their own skins in the way that fish inhabit knives. Her collection is not a comfortable read. It addresses breakdown and mental illness with the delicacy, the beauty, and the ruthlessness of a scalpel.

She snatches a letter, a word,
and harvests her head,
finding the middle of a sentence.

(from 'Misplaced')

It was very deservedly nominated for the Forward First Collection prize last year. Beautiful cover too.

Brian Turner: Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe, 2010)

In an article in the Independent, Fiona Sampson posed the question 'Where are the war poets now?' Reading that article led me to the work of Brian Turner, an American soldier-poet who served in Bosnia and Iraq. I found this collection, which deals with war from the perspective of 'afterwards', completely gripping.

No moral judgments are made, but unflinching observation brings the reality of the war right into the reader's head. War experiences and post-war life bleed into each other with horrifying and surreal clarity. In a poem called 'Helping her Breathe' the speaker focuses in and in to a single experience in an arena of noise and fear:

Subtract each sound. Subtract it all.
Lower the contrailed decibels of fighter jets
below the threshold of human hearing.
Lower the skylining helicopters down
to the subconscious and let them hover
like spiders over a film of water...

This is the war poetry for today.

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems , edited by Michael Hofmann (Faber, 2005)

It took me a long time to be keen on translated poetry. I think I had been too exposed to the kind of 'parallel text' text that gives you literal translations without actually producing any poetry. I did a substantial amount of Latin literature for my degree in English and European literature, and as I wasn't particularly confident in Latin, I have to confess I did an inordinant amount of checking my own work by way of other people's translations. But literal translations just don't get what poetry's about. Who was it who said that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'? (Robert Frost, apparently, according to a quick Google). This anthology does get what poetry's about: poems are translated by poets, and thus the poetic possibilities of English are explored and exploited as well as the literal meanings. There are some great translations. For instance, Robin Robertson translates Rilke's 'Spanish Dancer':

she is a struck match: sparks,
darting tongues, and then the white flare
of phosphorous...

There are translations from Derek Mahon, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hofmann, Christopher Middleton, Robert Lowell and other practising poets, as well as such poetically sensitive translators as Margitt Lehbert and Susan Bernofsky. The book ranges from Morgenstern and Rilke, through Brecht and Gottfried Benn, to contemporary poets such as Matthias Goritz and Ian Wagner. There's also a parallel text version available, which is interesting even if you don't read German (which I don't, apart from menus and road signs) because it's fascinating to see the original poem on the page and see non-lexical parallels and differences. After all, the shape of the poem, and the white space around it, are such a large part of the experience of poetry.

I'm still dipping into this one, and enjoying meeting new poets. I see there's a Faber book of C20th Italian Poetry too, (edited by Jamie McKendrick). That's next on my wish list.

A belated happy new year to you all. And if you have any recommendations from your own reading last year, please feel free to add them here in a comment. I'd love to hear from you.

Books of 2010 (Part 1)

2011-01-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

My house is full of piles of books. They teeter and totter on tables, on shelves, beside beds, on the floor. I ought really to start tidying them up and sorting them out. My attempt to alphabeticise all the fiction books in the house failed last March at about G, but I do feel it would be good to know approximately where a particular book might be found.

However, picking through the piles today, I have been sidetracked into contemplation, and now find myself sitting at the laptop with yet another pile: a small selection from the books I read or acquired during the last year. A pile that wants to be a list. So here goes – musings on some books I read last year, and would recommend to you. Part one is all blokes, but that’s chance – just the way I picked up the piles. Watch this space for Part 2 to follow.

Don Paterson: Landing Light (Faber 2003)

Okay, this wasn’t published in 2010, and I didn’t even buy it last year, but it’s probably the poetry collection I’ve been back to most often over the last twelve months. ‘St Bride’s: Sea-Mail’ is one of my favourite poems ever. It’s beautifully balanced, subtly rhymed and patterned, and is one of those poems I just don’t want to analyse, and I certainly don’t want to influence other people’s readings – I just want everyone to read it and appreciate it for themselves, to find their own significances. It’s also one of the few contemporary poems that successfully centres the text, a practice which is usually scorned as suitable only for the interiors of greetings cards. Nothing Hallmark-ish here, one feels, just the perfect appropriateness of the shape of the stanzas on the page, and an apt allusion to Herbert’s Easter Wings. Except – I wonder whether Don might be having a little wry smile at us. This is, after all, a poem about sending a message – although a very different one from those one might find in a greetings card. As the speaker says:

I post this more in testament
than hope or warning.

Mario Petrucci: Heavy Water (Enitharmon, 2004)

I picked this up in the Oxfam bookshop in Durham in October, and on the six-hour train journey home I read it from cover to cover. Then I went straight back to the beginning and read it through again. It’s probably the purchase that has most affected me this year. It’s a collection-sized sequence of poems based on eye-witness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath.

There are the ‘Grey Men’:

They thicken to a second skin – grow on us –

our clothes. A grey rind. Only teeth show through. Our
teeth only. White and shining and in the moment.

Today a man with a box and shoulder strap
waved his wand over our empty boots. Jumped back.

The slow deaths:

In the dark she goes to him
for his crusts of hipbone

‘The Room’:

…There is

a room for weeping. How hard
the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the rooms themselves. They
must hose it out each evening.

The state is watching. They made
this room for weeping.

It’s horrifying, wonderful, and important. The poetry feels so true to the voices that although the language is far from ‘every-day’ they seem strangely unmediated. It’s as if the poetry has clarified and distilled them. Read it.

Alasdair Paterson: On the Governing of Empires (Shearsman, 2010)

I heard Alasdair read a good selection from this book at its launch in Exeter, and was hooked from there on. He pulls and shapes his poems, his stories, his fragments of possibility, out of texts that had no idea that they might have poetry within them: princesses are analysed through the discourse of furniture catalogues, an unwanted tattoo becomes a riff on the manipulation of language. Definitions are stretched and pulled, verbs are juggled like eggs about to hatch. I love this collection for its language play, and what it allows us to apply to the world we live in. As the speaker in ‘on verbs’ says:

we’re picking their language over
like looters with a bolt of cloth
a thing of the finest weave

Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems (Faber 1988)

I’ve come late to Louis MacNeice. I put this on my Amazon wish-list on the strength of having recently read ‘Soap Suds’, ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Bagpipe Music,’ and was given it for my birthday. It’s like a box of very expensive, very rich chocolates, and I’m still dipping into it, making time to savour each one. But oh, it’s full of wondrous stuff.

Read ‘The Brandy Glass’. I don’t often learn poems off by heart but I want to have this one inside my head for ever.

Michael Donaghy: The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions (Picador, 2009)

I wish I could have met Michael Donaghy, or just attended a reading or a talk or a lecture by him. His essay ‘Wallflowers’, subtitled ‘A lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling’ is just a joy. Erudite, witty, original – an absolute pleasure to read. The whole book is a pleasure to read. Another one I read cover-to-cover on a long journey, and have gone back to many times since.

So - that's the first few books from the pile beside my laptop. The new pile that I have just created. Part 2 will follow soon, and then the contents of this pile can be repatriated to their original teetering stacks. Hey ho.

Rattling the Bag

2010-11-22T09:26:00.000-08:00

The Second-Hand Bookshop and the Poetry Anthology.

Last weekend I was in Durham, attending a fantastic Poetry School workshop with Don Paterson. Six hours on what it means to read a poem. Bliss.

I did have a few hours to spare, though, and as well as being dragged (kicking and screaming - honest!) by my Durham undergrad daughter to investigate the Satanically tempting range of cakes at Cafe Continental, I paid a visit to the Oxfam bookshop. Three floors of second hand books, reached by uneven, Dickensian staircases: books in ancient bookcases, books on the floor, on the landings, piled on tables, on any available ledge; and to make the experience even better, chairs and squashy sofas on which to relax and peruse possible purchases. There was everything, from hardback copies of 1920s school stories complete with dust jackets depicting jolly girls with bobbed hair and lacrosse sticks, to Dan Brown, to Russian language novels and books on how to grow great tomatoes. And all the relevant props, too: antique typewriters sitting in corners, looking as if they were waiting for Agatha Christie or Ernest Hemingway to pick them up and bring them to life again; ancient gramophones and old guitars tucked between boxes of CDs, LPs and sheet music. I love the serendipity of a second-hand book shop. There is no purchasing plan, no central buying system, no beady eye on the populist. Everything depends upon what has been donated.

Not dissimilar to my house...

In the Durham bookshop I came across an almost pristine copy of The Rattle Bag, a book I’ve been meaning to buy for a while. First published in 1982, it is an anthology of poems selected and edited by those two greats, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney[i]. It’s a diverse collection, and what makes it a joy to read is not only the individual poems but the way in which they are arranged. Not by theme, or by poet, or by date, but simply in alphabetical order of title. So on the same double page spread, we have Thom Gunn’s ‘Baby Song’, in which the speaker contrasts existence within and without the womb, and John Clare’s ‘The Badger’ in which a badger is hounded out of his hole and baited by dogs.

'Baby Song', written in apparently simple rhyming couplets, starts

From the private ease of Mother’s womb
I fall into the lighted room.

Why don’t they simply put me back
Where it is warm and wet and black?

The John Clare poem is also in rhyming couplets, but these are compressed into five 14 line stanzas with no punctuation (although it has unfortunately been punctuated in the provided link), so the poem gallops onwards in a heady and horrible rush as the badger is hounded and baited and eventually killed. But almost from the beginning there are lines in ‘The Badger’ that speak to the Gunn poem. The womb is ‘wet and black’ and the badger’s ‘sharp’ nose is ‘scrowed with black’. Just finding that duplicated word, jumping out from line ends, makes me feel that there is a relationship between the two poems. Suddenly I am aware that we are in parallel worlds: the badger’s world of dens and holes, where the ‘host of dogs and men’ lie in wait to trap him, forcing him to become part of their world of clamour and torment, with its hostility and lack of shelter; and the new-born’s world of cold, harsh light and noise, a world in to which he has been tipped unwilling. The impotent baby is ‘raging, small and red’, while the less impotent badger 'runs along and bites at all he meets/ They shout and hollo down the noisey streets’. He makes a break for it, and ‘tries to reach the woods a awkward race’, but is beaten down and dies.

I think many people might have finished the poem there (and indeed many versions I found on the internet cut the last stanza), but Clare now goes off into a bizarre aside, telling of how some people ‘keep a baited badger…/and tame him till he follows like the dog’. When I got to the end of this stanza I was pulled inexorably back to that baby. The baby that we left in its cot remembering that ‘A rain of blood poured round her womb’, while the badger died in a rain of blows ‘kicked and torn’, and therefore in a rain of its own blood.

‘But all time roars outside this room’ says the baby. The rain of blood seems such a horrific image, bringing as it does connotations of war and slaughter, but it is actually the roaring of 'time', the coming future and all that it implies, that is the truly terrifying thing.

In a similar way, the badger’s fight and death, horrific though it is, seems to me not as horrible as the alternative. The badger’s battle with the people retains a dignity and almost a pleasure in the fight (‘The badger grins’, ‘The blackguard laughs’) which is completely lost in that final stanza where the it has become complaisant to men, a servile gladiator, a toy. And this makes me think of that baby: when it forgets its rage, when it becomes subject to time and the inexorable movement through it, when becomes subjected to the world outside, will also have lost something important. I’m still trying to discover exactly what.

My newly-purchased 1982 edition of The Rattle Bag

There are many other groups of poems where the juxtaposition has this wonderful serendipity. R.S Thomas’s ‘Here’ faces John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Here Lies a Lady’(no link I'm afraid, because the only version I could find online was very different the Rattle Bag one), so we have lines in which hands will not behave as the speakers feel they should. We can see

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?

in the same glance as

For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads –
What was she making? Why nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps and laces, snipped into curious shreds –

And turning to the next poem, Thomas Hardy’s 'Heredity', we also have death and embodiment, but in a 'face':

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on

and the next, Miroslav Holub’s A History Lesson, has

The dead like so many strained noodles,
a pound of those fallen in battle,
two ounces of those who were executed,

several heads
like so many potatoes
shaken into a cap -

and ends

And did it hurt in those days too?

Wow.

Taking two poems (or indeed other types of writing) and seeing what sparks come out when you rub them together can be fascinating. But having them placed together by chance of alphabet makes it even more exciting that such sparks can be generated. There isn’t any need to analyse these glints of connection to get the pleasure out of them. One just needs the willingness to notice and to be pleased by the resonances, the extra significances to be found in both parallels and differences.

Andrew Motion is quoted as saying ‘What I try to do is lean two things up against each other and see what happens'.[ii] And Don Paterson, in the workshop I attended, talked about a term he has coined for the way in which a poet places things next to each other for the reader to make connections. He calls this ‘isology’ – from the root ‘iso’ meaning equal. Unlike analogy, it is not implying parallelism or correspondence, just juxtaposition and equality.

Andrew Motion and Don Paterson were both talking about leaning things up against each other within the space of the poem. But this is also what happens here, in the larger space of The Rattle Bag. The serendipity of an alphabetical arrangement (deliberately chosen by Hughes and Heaney) gives the reader space to see what happens for herself, to make her own connections, to hear the poems speak to each other across the page. Like people meeting, and sharing their experiences, their anecdotes: people finding they could be friends.

[i] See here for an article by Heaney about ‘The Rattle Bag’ and ‘The School Bag’. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/25/poetry.highereducation

[ii] Hugo Williams in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe) ed Herbert and Hollis.

Children's Poetry

2010-11-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

Fairytales, Lies and Rainbows

My poetry workshops for Year 4 and 5 children started again last week. Children seem to respond to poetry so easily, and in a world where they are assessed to death, it's rather nice to do something with them where they don't have to make sure they show a wide range of punctuation, or create complex sentences using a wide range of connectives, or indeed, make what is commonly described as 'sense'! Last year, inspired by Kenneth Koch's book 'Wishes, Lies and Dreams' I got a group of children to write a list of 'whoppers': things that could not possibly be true. Although some of the whoppers were rather prosaically grounded in reality (having lots of money, lots of ponies, and other things that were really wishes rather than lies) some of the whoppers were fantastic in all senses of the word. There were a lot of exclamation marks to make sure the reader didn't miss how enormous these whoppers were, but my favourite was this dead-pan tercet:

I can take out
My eyeballs and put them into
Cups and Mugs.

Different children respond to different types of prompts. Some love just being given free rein, while others produce their most powerful work from the confines of a strict framework.
One of my most successful workshops last year was quite structured: the children were given a framework for an interview with a fairy tale character, the notes from which they turned into a poem.

Here is the framework I gave them. It was photocopied onto an A3 sheet, so there was plenty of space for ideas.

Interview with a fairytale character

Choose a character from any fairy tale. It might be the hero or heroine, or an evil villain, or it could be a minor character who doesn't do much at all in the story, but sees it all happen.

Character name:

Decide: when in the story are you interviewing them?
It might be at the beginning, sometime during the action, at the end, or years later. You need to decide this so you can imagine your character’s thoughts, feelings and appearance. You don’t have to tell us in the poem – we should be able to work it out!

Now, imagine you are the character you have chosen.
Here are some questions for you to answer.

Questions for your character

Describe your hands or feet.
What do they look like? How do they feel? Write your answer in the voice of the character.
My hands/feet are….

What temperature do you feel inside? What geographical or weather feature is it like? (Choose one that’s not too obvious – eg don’t say ‘hot as the sun’
Inside my …
I am…
as …

What thing do you wish you were instead of yourself? (Perhaps something in the story, or perhaps something from another story? Something magical or something ordinary - you can choose.) And why?
I wish I were…
because/so/then…

How do you move? (Think of some exciting movement words/action verbs)
Where are you moving?

If you were an animal / something else, what would you be, and where would you go? (If your character is already an animal, choose a person for your character to imagine being.)

What can you see in front of you? What is it doing?
(Choose an object that is part of the story, but make it be doing something that it doesn’t necessarily do in the story, or it hasn’t done yet…)

Use all these answers to make a poem. You don’t have to put them in the same order as the questions, and of course you can add extra things in.

Choose one section, and repeat it somewhere in the poem, changing it slightly if you like.

Choose a title that gives the reader a clue to the character but doesn’t say exactly who it is!

A great variety of poems was produced: we had the Wicked Witch of the West talking from her grave, the Frog Princess in a lather about rising water levels, Snow White contemplating revenge, and Red Riding Hood's Wolf contemplating tasty little girls. Some of them were so gruesome I felt I had to go and explain to parents that there honestly had been no obligation to write Stephen King type horror. Eight and nine year-olds seem to just love being a bit subversive with early childhood stories, and if they can get some rotting bones in there somewhere, they're in creative heaven.

I had to test the framework, and this was the poem I came up with:

Step

My feet have no toes. Blood
drips on the floor.
My feet are small – but still not small enough.
Inside my head I’m hot as a hurricane.
In front of me the fire is turning to ash.

I wish I were a Barbie with her tiny tiny feet.
I’d have fitted my whole self
inside that sharp
glass shoe.

But now I hobble
from room to room –
from window to fireplace, and back again,
a hundred times a day.
If I were a raven on the Castle tower,
I’d rap my beak against their window
as they sleep. Smash that perfect glass.
In front of me the fire has turned to ash.

The children weren't the only ones who got a bit dark...

On a more cheerful theme, we are, at the moment, working on poems about rainbows. We've imagined that a rainbow is something you can use, and we've brainstormed lots of wild ideas about possible uses. Rainbows seem to have magical qualities: we're getting a lot of variations on the themes of transformation and transportation, as well as the more mundane (if you can call them that) possiblilities of use as a slide or a bridge. The next step is to get the children to choose their favourite ideas, brainstorm some great 'rainbow words', and make a poem from them.

Hopefully there won't be a single dead body or vengeful heroine in sight! But you never can tell...

The Sound of Silence

2010-10-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

John Cage, Edwin Morgan and the finding of meaning.

Christmas is coming. I can read the signs. There are sparkly decorations in the shops and department stores have started displaying bizarre ‘gifts’ such as electronic talking monkeys that you can clip to your shoulder…(Thank goodness there weren't 'gifts' like that 2000 years ago, or the Three Wise Men might have arrived bearing Gold, Frankincense and Talking Shoulder Monkey...) What else? Oh yes, X Factor fans are thinking about the Christmas Number One. And on Facebook, a campaign against anodyne manufactured pop is once more underway. There’s a group which wants to try and get John Cage’s 4’33’’ onto the Christmas Number One spot. I have to confess, I’ve clicked the Like button.

Born in 1912, John Cage was an American composer, philosopher and artist who became famous for stretching the bounds of music. His 4’33’’ is probably his most famous work. It was composed in 1952, and is for any combination of instruments. The score basically instructs the musician to not play during the piece’s three movements – it is four minutes and thirty three seconds of absence of instrumental playing. However, it is not four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, but of environmental noise, of expectation, of aural space.

Cage had been considering the idea of silent music for a while, but was pushed into writing the piece by the example of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who had produced a series of paintings which were basically large white squares. The point of this was that even if they just looked like blank canvases, they would change according to the conditions in which they are viewed: the quality of the light, or what other colours there might be in the room in which they were displayed. In a similar way, Cage’s 4’33’’ uses the silence as a background canvas for the ambient sound and atmosphere: the sounds to which we are usually too distracted to pay attention. Both Rauschenberg’s pictures and Cage’s music required the audience to pay hyper-close attention in order to experience them. Viewers and listeners had to make an effort: it wasn’t all laid out there in front of them. In fact, this requirement of effort meant that they had to become part of the creative process themselves.

White Painting (seven panel) by Robert Rauschenburg

John Cage said ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry’. Edwin Morgan, the Scottish poet who died this year, and whose tribute event, organised by the Poetry Society is taking place at the Southbank Centre, London, on Nov 3^rd, took those fourteen words and made his own poem of them. The poem, 'Opening the Cage', is a fourteen line variation of those fourteen words, each line creating new meanings through new combinations.

It takes effort to tease meanings out of these lines, and I’m sure different people will find different things. To me, the first line seems to state the poet’s need to write, his uncertainty about whether that writing has any worth, and the fact that this dilemma is what he is considering:

I have to say poetry and that is nothing and I am saying it

By line 7 the words seem to have assembled themselves into an invitation to strip away all the fripperies of life and perhaps also of language to get to the bare bones:

To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it

And after a sonnet’s worth of variations, the poem concludes (if a conclusion it is) with the decisiveness of a manifesto:

Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

John Cage was very interested in aleatoric music, the music of chance. Morgan’s poem is very much in that spirit – the randomness of word-shuffling produces chance combinations from which meaning can be derived. Morgan chose the fourteen he felt made the meaning he wanted. It’s an interesting paradox, however, that while the poem is punningly entitled ‘Opening the Cage’, implying the freeing of language and meaning, Edwin Morgan might be considered to have imposed a cage of his own by using the sonnet form. (If it is a sonnet – certainly Don Paterson includes it in his 1999 Faber Anthology 101 Sonnets.) However, a more controlling poet might have added punctuation to clarify the meanings he wished his reader to derive. Morgan does not do this. He lets the meaning of each line stay fluid and free. (Have a look at the similarly constructed 'The Uncertainty of the Poet' by Wendy Cope, a poem also derived from another artist's work, to see how punctuation pins down meaning.) It seems to me, also, that implicit in the poem are all the other possibilities which Morgan did not use. For these reasons the sonnet-shaped cage is only an illusion. It’s a poetic Tardis: the inside is bigger than the outside.

If one accepts this notion, ‘Opening the Cage’ is a poem that could continue, inside the reader’s head, for a lifetime. With 14 words there are 14! (that is, 14 factorial: 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 and so on down to x 1) possible combinations – in other words, 87,178,291,200 different ways of arranging those words. Well, you might say, some of those combinations will just be gobbledygook. Okay, let’s go for a gobbledygook one: the purely alphabetical

am and and have I I is it nothing poetry say saying that to

Is there any meaning to be found in that? Of course there is, of you look hard enough. The ‘am’ separated from its implied ‘I’ has a plaintive, questioning tone, while the repeated ‘and’s and ‘I’s reinforce this feeling of uncertainty. Then we have the question around which this line revolves, the shaky, inverted ‘is it nothing, poetry?’, followed by an imploring ‘say’ – tell me the answer. Next comes a phrase that implies no confidence in the received answer, ‘saying that to…’. This seems to me to question the motives of the unheard speaker: You’re just saying that for some other motive. Whatever it is, it means I can’t rely on your answer to help me in my search for whatever I’m searching for.

And I’ve derived that ‘meaning’ from listing those fourteen words alphabetically. You, dear reader, might derive a completely different meaning – it’s up to you. All it takes to derive meaning is a reader with the willingness to do so.

Edwin Morgan

This kind of poetry, poetry that demands so much of the reader’s participation in the act of creativity, reminds me of the writing of someone I once met in a critique group. She was severely dyslexic, and had come to poetry, and literacy in general, quite late in life. For her, her poetry was mostly therapeutic, but for her readers, it became something quite exciting by virtue of her dyslexia. I can’t give any actual quotes, because I’m not in touch with her now, but, for example, in a poem about domestic violence, she might write things like ‘meating’ instead of ‘meeting’, and ‘burned’ instead of ‘born’ – changes which often added a startling and completely unintended complexity to her poems. When she was alerted to this, she was often delighted with the effect that she had created, and would let it stand. Her meanings were created in an aleatoric way, and the initially chance significances found by her readers were then fed back into her later revisions of the poems.

I’m not sure that Cage’s 4’33’’ will make the number one spot. Nearly sixty years after it premiered it still provokes angry responses, as can be seen by some of the comments on the Daily Mail's coverage of the Facebook campaign. One person even rants about how the people who support the campaign should be locked up. What amuses me, though, and would probably have pleased both John Cage and Edwin Morgan, is the fact that the Cage piece must have suggested itself for this year’s campaign simply because of its chance sonic relationship with last year’s successful campaign band. Rage Against the Machine – Cage Against the Machine. A chance rhyme from which such appropriate significance and meaning has been derived. How could it have been anything else?

Recording of the BBC Symphony Orchestra performing 4'33'' at the Barbican, London, in 2004.

‘Opening the Cage’ can be found in 101 Sonnets, ed Don Paterson, Faber 1999.

Writings on the Wall

2010-10-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost and the Berlin Wall

This time of year, when all the green stuff is beginning to die back, the bones of the countryside start to become more visible. Here in Devon, the networks of hedgerows and dry stone walls are suddenly foregrounded; their structure and relationship to the land revealed now that the lushness of summer is receding. They seem organic, these boundaries, part of the nature of things, since many of them have been in place for hundreds of years or more, but of course they are all man-made and need to be maintained.

In Robert Frost’s great poem ‘Mending Wall’ two neighbouring farmers walk the length of the dry stone wall which separates their properties, each on his own side, repairing the holes after the winter weather, making the boundary between them once more complete. ‘Something there is that does not love a wall’, muses Frost’s speaker, pondering the damage that occurs when no one is there to see. But he still goes though the spring ritual of mending: one day a year to ‘set the wall between us once again’. 'Just another kind of outdoor game,' he says.

This particular wall serves no useful purpose as far as the speaker can see, since all it does is separate one kind of tree from another, and as he says ‘My apple trees will never get across/ and eat the cones under his pines…’. His neighbour sees things differently: insists, as his father did before him, that ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, and as readers we may smile at this old cliche, this unsophisticated parochialism. But then we read Frost's description of him picking up the fallen stones ready to put them back in place and mend the wall:

...I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed

and we realise that to the neighbour this is something far deeper and darker, more primeval, than just a game.

There’s something very ancient in this need for boundaries, for marking one’s territory. History is criss-crossed by the bones of boundaries: Bronze Age field systems on Dartmoor, castle walls, city walls, Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China. Frost’s wall, like all these walls, is a social and psychological construct as well as a physical one: to the neighbour it is a representation of ownership, and of tradition, of something which must remain fixed. For Frost as poet, it seems to represent the barrier between two people’s points of view.

Point of view about boundaries and territory is addressed in another Frost poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.The poem starts

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

The speaker is riding through some woods which are not his, but the trespass seems to be implied not in the passing through, but in the stopping and looking. Perhaps taking pleasure from something that is not yours is a crime, even if by doing so you hurt no-one? Certainly Frost seems to feel that his speaker has crossed some kind of moral boundary. ‘He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods…’ has a very different implication from a possible alternative that Frost didn’t use: ‘He will not mind me…’. So even without walls, the social boundaries of territory exist.

In English, the word ‘wall’ is a kind of catch-all. We have to use the same word, whether we mean the internal vertical surfaces of a room, or an exterior dividing agent. German is kinder, and allows speakers to distinguish between an internal wall (Wand) and an external one (Mauer). The most famous German wall is of course the Berlin Wall, a barrier between two diametrically opposed points of view – those of Communism and of Capitalism.

The division of East and West Berlin took physical form on the night of 12^th August 1961, when East German troops and workers tore up the streets adjacent to the border, and laid barbed wire and fences to prevent anyone crossing. The first bits of actual wall (concrete and blocks) were laid by August 17^th, and soon there was a wall along the whole border. In 1975, however, the East German border troops started building a new type of wall along the border: the Grenzmauer 75. This was made from 45,000 sections of reinforced concrete, each 3.6m high and 1.2m wide. It was painted a bright, inviting white. Graffiti was of course forbidden in East Germany, but by the beginning of the eighties, artists had decided that the Western face of the wall was a massive canvas waiting to be filled. Many artists, known, unknown, or anonymous, painted on the wall. Sometimes a painting was only there a day before it was painted over. Anyone could paint. The wall, a symbol of oppression, became a place of expression – but only to those on one side. The Western side was riotous with colour, the Eastern side plain and greying.

In the Bible, (Daniel 5: 1-31) the ‘writing on the wall’ foretold the demise of the Babylonian Empire. While it would be pushing it rather to pretend that this is directly analogous with the Berlin Wall and its graffiti art, given the events of 1989 and after it’s quite a pleasing idea to prop, rather like some flimsy but decorative ladder, up against it.

More than twenty years after Reunification, few parts of the Wall remain, although on those stretches that do, the Eastern face is now covered with graffiti too. Pieces of the fallen Wall have made their way all over the world and can be found displayed in embassies, parks, schools, hotels and museums. But there is still a vestigial wall, albeit invisible. Germans talk about the ‘Mauer im Kopf’: the wall in the head. (Incidentally, it’s interesting how the spatial specificity the German noun – its externality – makes its paradoxical placing within an internal space – the head – so much more striking.) Polls have indicated that some Germans regret Reunification, and feel that the erosion of cultural differences between the East and West is a negative thing. In other words, they wish the Wall was still there.

Which brings us back to Robert Frost’s neighbour, who wanted the boundaries kept solid, visible, unbroken. Knowing that the boundary was there in abstract was not enough. To him, the wall in the head needed be made manifest by the wall on the land, even though to Frost’s more pragmatic persona, there seemed no point at all.

So, what is the 'something' that makes the gaps, the something that doesn’t like a wall? The something that

…sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

It’s frost.

Poetry and Maths

2010-10-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

(Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924 – 2010)

Benoit Mandelbrot first started thinking about complexity when he was contemplating, as a young researcher, the length of coastline of Britain. The answer, he realised, depended on how closely you looked. Measure the sweep of a bay, and it might be a mile long; include the ins and outs of the craggy inlets of that bay and you might get a length of two miles; zoom into each indentation of each tiny irregularity that you might feel when you run your fingers over the surface of the rock, and how long might that measure? So, how long is that coastline? In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Mandelbrot said that the question was an impossible one. "The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite."

I first heard of Benoit Mandelbrot in the pages of a book. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Ghost from the Grand Banks has a character, a nine year old maths genius called Ada who becomes obsessed with the beauty and complexity of the Mandelbrot Set. The M-Set is basically an equation: Z = z²+ c. Well, I got my O level maths, so I can see that it’s in the language of maths, but it means little to me. I need a translation. And the translation comes when someone plots that equation on a graph. And what you get, is this:

And the thing about this, is when you zoom in on any part of it, what seems at first smooth becomes more and more complex, and eventually that complexity starts repeating itself. Think of a cauliflower – a kind of blobby brain shape. But it’s made up of little florets that are miniature versions of the whole. And when you look at the florets, they are made up of even tinier little mini-florets. Now if you keep zooming in on the M-set, you will find those complex Mandlebrotian florets budding off the line of the equation, for ever and ever and ever. In Clarke’s book, Ada explains:

‘The boundary of the M-Set is fuzzy – it contains infinite detail: you can go in anywhere you like, and magnify as much as you please – and you’ll always discover something new and expected – look!’

The image expanded: they were diving into the cleft between the main cardiod and its tangent circle. It was […] very much like watching a zip-fastener being pulled open – except that the teeth of the zipper had the most extraordinary shapes.

First they looked like baby elephants waving tiny trunks,. then the trunks became tentacles. then the tentacles sprouted eyes. Then, as the image continued to expand, the eyes opened up into whirlpools of infinite depth… […] Flotillas of seahorses sailed by in stately procession. At the screen’s exact centre, a tiny black dot appeared, expanded, began to show a haunting familiarity – and seconds later revealed itself as an exact replica of the original Set.

I’m a words person, not a numbers person. But it seems to me that Mandelbrot’s investigation of the complexity of apparent smoothness, its fractal nature, can be seen as analogous with poetry. Take a ‘simple’ poem by Charles Simic:

Evening Chess

The Black Queen raised high
In my father’s angry hand.

Two lines. Not even a sentence in grammatical terms, since there is no verb. But if we start zooming in on the poem, we find all sorts of complexity. Sonic complexity, with the repeated, stabbing short vowels (black/angry/hand) and the long threatening vowels (high/my). Then there is contextual and connotational complexity: zoom out and think about what a game of chess might signify: a quiet civilised evening pastime, or a ritualised battle? Semantic and syntactic complexity: the word ‘black’ is placed by both sonic and grammatical echoing, in apposition with ‘angry’ – calling up to me, simply through those relationships, the image of a face darkening in rage. And of course you can look inside the meanings of individual words and find more complexity. The word ‘father’ has so many connotations: the OED has thirteen main definitions of the noun, all of which, by the nature of language, are underlying in some way its use in this poem. I could, like the Mandelbrot set, go on for ever!

Mandelbrot died yesterday. And that’s given me the push I needed to start this long-planned blog. Coastlines, language, maths, poetry, life: they’re all fascinating in their complexity and their simplicity. This blog will be my ‘little room’, for zooming out, and zooming in.