February 2013 – Robin Houghton

Form/ 25/02/2013

Sestinas – your opinion please!

So what do we think of sestinas? A fun exercise? A thankless exercise? A beautiful form best used sparingly? Hackneyed tell-tale sign of creative writing workshop-itis? Should have left it to Dante?

I expect I’m not alone in loving word puzzles so I’m tempted to attempt my first sestina. Yes! A sestina virgin! I confess I read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Two Lorries’ and loved it, not realising it was a sestina (read it here and hear Heaney reading it). I’d like to play with this form, but want to know what you think of it. Have you written some fab sestinas? Would you rather not touch them with a barge pole? Care to point me to a lovely example/exponent? Any tips? Thanks!

(diagram from Wikipedia)

Inspiration/ 25/02/2013

Ted Hughes on ‘the problem with writing directly of recent experiences’

I’ve just finished reading The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber 2007 edited by Christopher Reid). There is so much in this book that I’ve found illuminating and inspiring. Yes, there were quite a few detailed accounts of fishing trips which I couldn’t quite get into, and I’m sorry to say a fair bit of the erudition of Ted’s letters to fellow writers and his publishers did rather go over my head. But it’s an extraordinary window into his personality. I really felt for him as regards the whole Sylvia Plath ‘fantasia’ as he called it, there’s such a strong sense of him boxing himself into a corner from which there was no escape until he published ‘Birthday Letters’.

Towards the end of the book, Ted writes to his daughter Frieda, who has sent him some of her poems to critique. We don’t get to read his comments on the poems themselves, but his summary comments were, as always, very interesting. In particular, here’s something that really rang a bell for me:

The problem about writing directly of recent experiences is – the memory is simply too unfinished. And the feelings are still too engaged in the real situation. They are too painful and unresolved to say anything about. You can try – but they, those attempts to express those feelings, will always seem shallow, one-sided, exaggerated, false etc.

At the same time, they will find expression through some image that seems to have nothing to do with them – ie where you can deal with them because they are disguised. So your attempts to express the feeling of an experience directly, in the terms of the experience, will be blocked, false, cramped etc and yet if at the same time you wrote a story about witches and demons, or mechanical dogs, it would be full of wild feelings and and you would feel the release. The emotions of a real situation are shy, but if they can find a mask they are shameless exhibitionists. So – look for the right masks. Cast about and experiment. A feeling is always looking for a metaphor of itself in which it can reveal itself unrecognised.

When you find yourself writing directly about something that preoccupies you with rage etc – just remember that. A metaphor provides the escape route.

I love that – “a feeling is always looking for a metaphor.”

Readings/ 21/02/2013

Brighton vs Forest: the result

It was hot stuff last night in the basement of the Poetry Cafe. I was just about ready to pass out in the second half and resorted to fanning myself with the folded remains of my poems.

But quite apart from the heat (maybe it was only me suffering? must be age), a good night was had by all. A good variety of readers and material, some wonderful poems, several laughs and plenty of lovely people come to listen – thank you. And most of all three cheers for Jo for introducing us Brighton lot and coralling us all. Hip hip … For me personally, it felt significant – my first reading in London.

In the photo (not sure we were all ready at that moment but I like the quirkiness of it):

Back: John Taylor, Antony Mair, Cliff Bevan, Andy Williams and John Walsh
Middle: Ruth Wiggins, Jennifer Hall, Hassan Vawda, Sonia Jarema
Front: Dave Brooks, Mike Sims, Jo Grigg and moi

Readings/ 20/02/2013

Reading at the Poetry Cafe this evening

Six of us from the Brighton Stanza are reading this evening alongside six Forest Poets (Waltham Forest) in a ‘Stanza Bonanza’. I don’t think it’s a competition, more like a friendly mingling of Stanzas. Anyway we are definitely the away team. And Paul McGrane of the Poetry Society won’t be there supporting his own Stanza (Forest) because he’ll be at the Orient. Ah! So it takes a bit of footie to find out where people’s priorities really lie!

As a special ‘thank you’ for sitting through yet another poetry night, I’m treating my long suffering husband to drinks in the bar at the top of the Gherkin beforehand. Hurrah!

So now all I need to do is decide whether to read one of my new ‘poem a day’ efforts, or whether it needs a bit of cleaning up first.

Really looking forward to hearing what my fellow Brightonians come up with, and also the Forest Poets who are all new to me. If you’re in London, do come along and give us a cheer – 7pm at the Poetry Cafe, Betterton Street.

Angst/ 18/02/2013

Gut feeling

Confession: my poem-a-day pledge has stuttered. I’ve actually been a bit ill, although there’s little evidence for it, and if I worked a 9 – 5 job I would have gone home happy on Friday evening and turned up fine this morning. So a weekend illness hardly seems to qualify. And yet on Saturday night I was pathetically praying ‘if there is a God, please help me now!’

I’m pretty certain I picked up a Norovirus, and despite the crippling headaches Thursday – Friday it only really got stuck in on Friday evening. But I was a textbook case – 2 days incubation, 2 days of grief and then you feel almost normal (except for my appetite, but I can afford to eat a bit less). If you haven’t experienced the full thrust of this gut-busting bug, all I can say is WASH YOUR HANDS, PEOPLE!

I don’t know if it’s a female thing (the advertisers seem to think so, going by all those ‘friendly bacteria’ ads during ‘This Morning’ or ‘Midsomer Murders’) but I do feel I have a special relationship with my digestive tract. You can’t talk about guts in polite company, and few people want to discuss the details of peristalsis or the production of chyme or whatever in even their own body, let alone others. And yet it’s right there at the centre of us, and its metaphoric links with creativity, freedom from the straightjacket of rational thought and so on are everyday shorthand – gut instinct, gut reaction, a feeling in the pit of the stomach, butterflies in the tummy, etc not to mention all the various uses of the word ‘sick’.

So call me cranky but I do feel some sort of spiritual connection with my guts. I’ve tried writing about it, but the few people I showed my efforts to were unconvinced this was ‘entertainment’. Perhaps the whole point is not to write about it, but to write with it.

I could now really fancy eating a Rich Tea biscuit, if I had one.

Courses/ 15/02/2013

Writers and the fear of social media

When talking to writers I meet at workshops and readings, the question of what I do for a living sometimes gets asked. And no sooner do words like ‘internet’, ‘social media’, ‘communications’ etc start popping out than I get stories about how the kids spend all their time on Facebook or their mobile phones, or comments such as how boring it is to talk about what you had for breakfast and who wants to know all that stuff?

Now I’m used to this. I don’t take offence. (And it’s not just writers, by the way.) I have a lot of sympathy for social media refuseniks, and I know they don’t really mean to rubbish everything I’ve been professionally involved with for the last 15 years. In fact I’ve come to realise, with some gentle questioning, that quite often these are people who would love to know more and hate that feeling of being left behind or mystified by stuff that bears no relation to anything they’ve grown up with. So I have a mission to help them!

I already do one-to-one mentoring with people in business or in jobs where they need to know about social media, but can’t or won’t admit it publicly. And I’ve wanted for a long time to do this for writers, because I do believe having a strong presence on the social web is of huge benefit to both the established and (especially) the aspiring writer.

So – I’m running a few pilot workshops with New Writing South in Brighton in April/May. The first is provisionally entitled ‘Social media – feel the fear and do it anyway’ and is aimed at writers who find the whole social media thang a pain and they wish it would go away. My mission is to convince them that a) it’s not going away, b) knowledge is power, so they need to get with the programme and c) they can do it, and in a way that they feel comfortable with, that works for them. There’s no mystery. And it’s got nothing to do with age.

The three follow-up sessions will be helping people establish and nurture their web presence, with lots of good examples, resources and hand holding. If you know anyone who fits the bill, please let them know! (I know it’s not for you, as you’re already here!)

By the way, if this subject interests you, I’ve always been a big fan of Dan Blank of We Grow Media, who is huge advocate of author platforms and provides not only courses but also a wonderful blog. It’s full of insight and valuable resources for writers looking to establish their online presence. Do take a look.

Image credit: Ad Broad

Close readings/ 10/02/2013

What Ted said when asked ‘what does it mean’

After my recent musings on answering the ‘what does it mean’ question, I was happy to come across this in the Letters of Ted Hughes:

To Lydia Clement and Alison George

29 July 1985

Dear Miss Clement and Miss George

Thank you for your letter. If I answered your question it might stop you worrying, but it would not help you. You know that when you answer a problem, you kill it. And it might be a fruitful problem.

Best wishes,

Ted Hughes

As 13-year old schoolgirls. Lydia Clement and Alison George had been reading TH’s story ‘The Rain Horse’ and had written to ask what the horse symbolised.

Photo by Kevin Porto

Poems/ 08/02/2013

Poem-a-day, Days 3 – 4

Dear Reader

For a minute I thought I was struggling already, but the Guardian came to the rescue, or rather whoever it was who posted a link on Facebook to this article, about stealing a line from an existing poem and using it as the basis for something of your own.

I had Emily Dickinson on my mind after my last post, so picked up my Everyman Pocket Dickinson and had a skim through. But then I struggled with all that iambic tetrameter – Within my Garden rides a Bird … A Chilly Peace infests the Grass, etc …it sucks you into dumdidum rhymes before you can help yourself, it’s like trying not to look at a road accident as you drive past. BUT, dear reader, I found a lovely line. And used it – not sure how lovely the rest of the poem is but I’ll return to it another time.

And then, since tomorrow is my wedding anniversary and sequestering myself away to write would be too rude, I even wrote tomorrow’s poem today! I am ahead of myself – hurrah!

Yours smugly,

Poetgal

PS best wishes for the weekend 🙂

Angst/ 06/02/2013

Setting myself a new challenge

Emily Dickinson wrote 1,800 poems and died at 55.

After a chat with a wonderful poet friend yesterday I had a bit of a lightbulb moment (albeit over a couple of beers, funny that).

She told me of another poet who had just had a poem accepted by Poetry Review and was over the moon because she had been trying for ages. Trying for ages! And I haven’t tried once. Why not? Because I never feel I have anything good enough. Why not? Partly because I don’t write enough – not enough practice, not enough decent material, etc.

I’ve told myself this before but never done anything about it. So enough of the hand-wringing! I could just pootle along the same as I’ve been doing, sending off whatever I’ve managed to write and hoping for the best, getting the odd acceptance from a magazine, going to workshops and wanting success. Or I could actually work at it, put in the hours and quit thinking it’s going to magically happen.

So as a start, I’ve decided I’m going to write at least one poem every day. I won’t go back to work on a previous poem until I’ve written my day’s poem. I will do this at least until Easter, as a kind of Lenten promise. The idea is not to write just anything, but something – something that has at least the potential to become something good. I won’t pressure myself to send these poems off anywhere, or worry about whether a theme is emerging or ‘could this go in a pamphlet’.

You might be reading this and thinking it’s no big deal, maybe you’re a prolific writer with hundreds of poems. But I’m not, so the thought of having written over 40 new poems by Easter is very exciting. Wish me luck. (By the way, I’ve written my poem for today. A sonnet – ha!)

PS Latest rejection news: Versal, a magazine I hadn’t heard of until I saw them on Facebook and thought I’d try something with them. They are an outfit who make a nominal charge for submitting – a hotly debated topic but actually one I am sympathetic towards. I’d rather pay a quid to a poetry magazine for taking the time to read my poems and respond, than to Royal Mail. And the response was not only quick, but very polite, along the lines of ‘please submit again’. I’m cynical enough to wonder if that’s a stock response to everyone, but if anyone from Versal is reading this, and it isn’t, then I apologise.

Picture credit: Emily Dickinson Museum

Close readings/ 05/02/2013

Poems we read and talked about last night

There may only have been four of us at the Stanza reading group last night but we had plenty to talk about. The poems we looked at were ‘Reprimands’ by Michael Donaghy, ‘Calcium’ by Deryn Rees Jones, ‘Substance & Shadow by John Hewitt and ‘A gift’ by Don Paterson. So America, Wales, ireland and Scotland all represented.

Michael Donaghy is a poet I’d heard of but hadn’t read before, and a bit of digging revealed more about him. A group of his former students at Birkbeck College and City University, London formed ‘The King’s Poets’ a decade ago, and one of their number (Lucy Ingrams) recently took 2nd place in the Magma Poetry Competition I believe. There’s a bit of trivia for you.

Meanwhile the mission was on to rescue Deryn Rees Jones from the mixed impression she gave at the TS Eliot readings (the poem she read included the word ‘dog’ 594 times, or thereabouts.) We all enjoyed ‘Calcium’ I think, and managed to interpret it in many different ways,with increasing vehemence!

I think perhaps John Hewitt’s ‘Substance and Shadow’ was my favourite poem of the night, despite the unpromising title – how many times are we told in workshops to avoid abstract subjects? In fact there was little that was abstract about the poem. Like ‘Reprimands’ it followed a fairly strict form of iambic pentameter with an abab type rhyme scheme. (Although there were noticeably deliberate breaks with this in the Donaghy poem). I want to call ‘Substance and Shadow’ a sonnet, and maybe it is – 16 lines followed by 8 lines – not a Shakespearean sonnet, but another type? Please put me right if I’m showing my ignorance.

Don Paterson’s ‘A Gift’ was the one I brought, from his 2003 collection ‘Landing Light’. It’s actually not my favourite in the book, but I chose it for technical reasons not worth going into. It has a mysterious, almost biblical quality about it (nice link with the Donaghy poem here). I love the way Paterson works with form; in this collection there is everything from sonnets to prose poems to ballads. And always very clever.

Month: February 2013