Tag: poetry workshops

Blog/

Both sides now

Sky above Clouds by Georgia O'Keeffe

A smooth drive to London yesterday for Anne-Marie Fyfe’s newest workshop, on the theme of clouds.  As in ‘I wandered lonely as…’, or ‘from both sides now..’ And yes, Joni Mitchell did make an appearance, as did Debussy, Django Reinhardt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, John Lennon, The Wizard of Oz and a range of Surrealist art, amongst others.

I’ve said this before, but I really do think these workshops are the best I’ve experienced. With so much stimulation – verbal, visual, musical – the sheer pace of it (although it never feels hurried), and the continuous nature of the exercises, you have no time to lose focus. It doesn’t matter if something doesn’t ‘click’ because there’s another question or exercise coming right up. Nothing seems to distract, not even the relentless traffic and sirens of the Old Brompton Road. You are immersed, coming up for air after two hours and wondering where the time went. Anne-Marie plans these workshops well in advance. Not only are there plenty of materials and handouts but it’s obvious that a huge amount of work and thought has gone into the workshop design.

In the late 1990s I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe and became a fan – I couldn’t afford actual prints but came away with frameable posters of three of her paintings, my favourite of which is one of a series called ‘Sky above Clouds’ (pictured above). Last year the Tate Modern in London ran a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition (the first in the UK, I think) – I was excited to see on display another Sky above Clouds, and realised I’d forgotten how BIG the canvases are.

I thought of this painting during the workshop, and was also prompted to remember how, as a child, I thought of clouds as 2D objects, decorating the sky, just as O’Keeffe depicts them, which perhaps explains why her painting appeals so much to me. I think I was well into adulthood before I had any appreciation of the scale of clouds, of their 3D shapes, of the distances involved. Seeing them from planes was a shock – how clouds can gather in huge towering columns unseen from below, and how the highest clouds are still way above you even when you’re above the cumulus.

Most of the participants came up with new poems or the beginnings of new writing. I was more moved to get out an old poem which has been on the back burner since 2013 – something in the workshop triggered new ideas about how to revive it. That’s not to say I didn’t also come away with fresh ideas, I certainly did – and twelve pages of notes.

Coffee-House Poetry Classes at the Troubadour on Sunday afternoons – great value for money and highly recommended.

 

 

Blog/

Notes from a workshop with Andrew McMillan

andrew mcmillan photographed by Innes Morrison

As promised in my last post, here are my notes from the workshop I did on Saturday at the South Downs Poetry Festival, with Andrew McMillan. I’m including links at the end to other workshop notes, in case you find these posts useful.

I was really impressed with Andrew’s workshop. It’s tricky to teach a one-off session like this when you’ve no way of knowing who is coming to the session nor what they hope to get from it. As well as asking us to each say (briefly) what we hoped to take away, he also offered participants the chance to feed back after every exercise, and the chance to read aloud the example poems. Andrew had planned the session well and we motored through a lot of great material, but his calm and relaxed style meant it never felt hurried or forced. That’s exactly what I want as a participant – to feel challenged by the material, confident in the teacher and unaware of time passing.

So here’s a summary, in which I hope I’ve captured the essential points.

‘All poems fail – which is why you have to write the next one.’

‘Be prepared to throw your life off a cliff.’

Go to the place that makes you feel uncomfortable. Write the thing you wouldn’t want your mother to read.

How do you get at the plain truth of something and still make it sound fresh? Think about the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’. Getting to the ‘poetic’ truth might not mean presenting the actual truth of what happened.

The thing you want to tackle may be too big or overwhelming to get to grips with. So drill down to a small detail and let that be a metaphor for the big thing.

Example poem: ‘Your Blue Shirt’ by Selima Hill (from Gloria: Selected Poems. Bloodaxe. 2008)

‘How plain can it be and still be poetry?’

‘All poetic metaphor exists because you can’t find the one word or phrase which encompasses what you really want to say.’

AM loves it when plain language is used to express a simple truth, eg W H Auden: “Thousands have lived without love but none without water.”

Readers need time to pause and think.

It’s important to achieve balance – moments of ‘high poetry’ can contrast with those of mundane or ‘plain’ language – the contrast and balance can make each moment effective. Compare for example to music with its highs and lows.

Example poem: ‘Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop (from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979)

If something’s not working, try stripping out everything that’s not essential – adjectives, fancy verbs, ‘wow’ words etc. Find the ‘survival mechanism’ of the poem. In this way you’re left with something sparse but dense. THEN you can think about building it up.

Example: ‘His Stillness’ by Sharon Olds (fantastically moving!) – from Selected Poems, 2005 (Cape)

Uncertainty can come across as more honest

The idea of not being sure about something can somehow be more honest and can allow a way in for the reader.

In a way, all memory is false because another person present will recall the same thing differently.

Example poem: ‘A Spruce New Colour’ by Tom Paulin (Love’s Bonfire, Faber 2012)

Consider balance and contrast in language choice and tone

Try to avoid writing about a serious subject matter in too high a register – it can seem a bit ‘poetic’, not really honest. Explore ways around this by varying the language.

Example poem: ‘I will love the twenty first century’ by Mark Strand (from the Ambit Magazine Retrospective) – where he gives the more ‘serious’ ideas voice via a third person, which the voice of the poet then undercuts.

One way of framing a serious topic and to foreground it without losing credibility and staying grounded/true is by bookending it with more down to earth details.

Example poem: ‘Dave and the Curried Soup’ by John Sewell (Bursting the Clouds, Cape 1998) – a mid section of energy and sexual excitement bookended by the banal details of a soup (‘The trouble with Jerusalem artichokes…’)

Last thoughts: ‘What people will think when reading your work … is not important’ (ie don’t let that fear inhibit you … you have the freedom to write whatever it is you need to write) – AM says when he wrote the poems in Physical he wasn’t thinking about them being published let alone read!

‘Poems need to vibrate on the page with energy.’

‘Something has to be on the line when you write a poem.’

If you’ve enjoyed this you may be interested in previous blog posts where I’ve passed on words of wisdom from poets:

Notes from a Don Share masterclass

Mimi Khalvati on editing and what to bin

More words of advice from Mimi Khalvati

Tips from Don Paterson

Mimi Khalvati on form, and a few ‘banned’ words

 

 

 

Courses/

Bring up the poems (are they dead or sleeping?)

As part of my autumn poetry reactivation plan (sounds good, eh?) I’ve signed up for an online course from the Poetry’s School with Karen McCarthy Woolf. It’s a feedback course for the ‘general improvement of left-for-dead poems in need of resuscitation’. This premise really appealed to me – having quite a few poems languishing at the moment, some of which I feel at the end of my editorial tether (with). (Apologies for the clumsy construction, but since I’m off duty while writing this I feel able to mush over any dodgy grammar or whatever. It’s the equivalent of pulling on a onesie and eating a takeaway while watching TV. I’m at home. Off duty.)

Putting Baby to Bed

Soooo … time to dust off some old pomes. While we’re on the subject, I should mention that I was pleased to find out that South have taken two poems of mine for their autumn issue, just when I’d thought they wouldn’t find a home. I did think I wasn’t going to submit to South again, but when it came to it I just felt those poems belonged there, so I’m glad the selectors felt the same. It’s an unusual setup there – no one editor, but a committee, of which (as far as I can tell) two or three people act as selectors for each issue. Although submissions are anonymous, there’s a distinctive consistency about the poems chosen. For example, my Lewes cohort Jeremy Page manages to have something in every single issue – what gives, JP?? – and other names too are ‘regulars’. The magazine doesn’t include poet biogs (which is a shame) but it does have a launch event for each issue (which is good).

Anyway, I digress – my question to you is, when do you leave a poem for dead? Is it ever actually ‘dead’, or just sleeping gently in a drawer until you bring it out for another airing? Do you have any good success stories about poems you resurrected after a long period of time? I’d love to hear them.

Poet's Tips/

More words of advice from Mimi Khalvati

Having recently been to the last of Mimi Khalvati’s Lewes for workshops for a while, I realised I hadn’t been blogging about them as I used to. It was also time to clean out my ‘workshop notes’ folder, so here are a few more things I’ve jotted down from time to time – I hope you find them interesting. Even though I can’t recall or reveal the poems that prompted them, they’re all points that resonate with me.

On truth – you can’t / shouldn’t always be true to the real or original experience. It doesn’t matter if ‘that’s not the way it actually happened.’ Similarly, if you’re creating a ‘found’ poem, your selecting and framing of the material is part of the work, part of making it good.

On considering the whole at the same time as the specifics of a piece – you may have good reasons for every line break or stanza break, but you need to consider the whole poem at the same time, because what’s good for one line break may not work in the wider context of the whole poem. Turn the sheet of paper around and look at  it from behind to really ‘see’ the shape – is that really what the poem wants to be?

On music versus logic – Sometimes you need to keep something in for the music, even if it’s not logical or whatever. If an element of a poem is part of the musical composition then perhaps it has earned its place.

On deciding what the poem wants to be – what you set out to write may not be what gets written. Perhaps it’s a song, or a ballad. What does it remind you of – what are its ancestors? Is it two different things, and if so, which direction will you go with?

On understanding what stage your poem is at – this has nothing to do with how long you’ve worked on it – a poem can be finished without any re-writing, it can also be worked on for years and still be at the early draft stages. You may think each redraft should take you closer to a finished poem, but it’s not necessarily the case. (Sadly!)

It was Mimi’s birthday last week, so there was cake …

Mimi Khalvati Lewes workshop may 2014

Angst/

On Heavenly Bodies and feeling empowered

Publishling cartoon
Copyright Cartoonstock.com

A few interesting things on the go at the moment. ‘Heavenly Bodies’ which I wrote about last week is gathering momentum, and there’s talk on Facebook of having a launch in Preston, or somewhere points North, which will mean I’ll have to miss it, alas. Anyway, at least I’ve written my ‘constellation’ poem, although I think I’ll look it over a few more times before sending it off to Rebecca Irvine.

Although I’ve been a bit dry lately in terms of producing new work, one thing I’m pushing forward with is a promotional pamphlet. I’ve given this a lot of thought. The purpose is twofold – firstly to have something to send/give to people which showcases some of my (previously published) poems, and perhaps to sell at readings, and secondly to shake off the feeling of passivity that going in for endless pamphlet competitions engenders in me.

Maybe I’m too impatient, but I lost a good poet friend last year, very suddenly. Life is short, to take action is empowering, and what have I got to lose? (Apart from the cost, but at least it’s all under my control!) It’s a very small collection, and doesn’t impact on my newer unpublished work, nor does it overlap with the pamphlet submissions I’ve got out at the moment. Plus I’m really enjoying the process of learning about publishing, print and all the other mysteries!

Meanwhile, with the help of my ‘loose committee’ I’ve been working out plans for the Brighton Stanza this year, which has grown considerably and we now need separate workshopping meetings as the monthly ‘open’ meetings have become so large. There’s a vibrant and wide-ranging poetry scene in Brighton, and although one of our aims is to encourage fine writing through close reading and critiquing, many people prefer to hone their performance skills, or read and share their work without scrutiny, or simply listen, learn and gain confidence.

There’ve also been various work-related things that have taken me away from poetry the last couple of weeks (curses!) as well as music-related things, such as turning pages at recitals, co-ordinating rehearsal dates and availability of singers for choir gigs.

But in between times I’ve been enjoying Michael Symmons Roberts’ Drysalter which just seems to ‘keep giving’ as they say.

Poet's Tips/

Mimi Khalvati on editing and what to bin

Notes from a poetry workshop

On Saturday I dropped back in on one of the regular workshops with Mimi Khalvati run by the excellent Lewes Live Lit here in my home town. I was lucky enough to be rewarded with a place in one of these highly popular groups about 18 months ago, and although I’ve been on a break from them, when the opportunity arose to re-join I took it.

As usual I took notes, and while many things discussed were specific to the poems we workshopped, there were a couple of strong ‘aha’ moments for me, which I thought I’d share with you here.

First of all, on the subject of a poem that isn’t working but that has some ‘good bits’…

Mimi described how she had recently been working on a poem at which she had made five or six attempts – not edits, but actual start-again different approaches. In the end, all she kept was one line. And the rest? Kept for a rainy poetry day when she might use them in another poem? Still lingering in her notebook under ‘good metaphors or phrases I could use somewhere’? No – it all went in the bin.

Her point was that when something isn’t quite working, poets are often quick to say “maybe I can put that great line into another poem” when in fact it’s worth asking the question “maybe I can put it all in the bin.” Not that it’s always the answer, but that we should be more prepared to let go. I know I’m guilty of this, and it may be the reason why I’ve one or two poems that have been rejected seven or more times, despite several re-writes. I probably need to go at them from a completely different angle and not be so wedded to certain lines.

Secondly, on the subject of editing …

‘”Nobody writes magical stuff straight off,” (well, most of us don’t!) “the magic usually comes in the editing.” What often happens, said Mimi, is that we create some magical moments in amongst some other writing that might be less than magical. The key is to recognise this and cut out the less interesting stuff. Only it’s difficult, because we think it’s all crucial, all part of how we got to the magical moment in the first place. But the reader may not need to see your ‘workings out’. Don’t worry about being clear or logical.

In other words, editing doesn’t just mean things like cutting out unnecessary adjectives or replacing uninteresting verbs, but really thinking also about the impact on the reader, where the real interest, tension and magic lie, and making sure other parts of the poem aren’t detracting from this. This really made sense to me. I’ve already looked at two of my current poems with this mindset and made some (hopefully good) changes.

Close readings/

From first draft to publication

Something of an experiment today. I love seeing those handwritten drafts of famous poems, with the crossings out and alterations, such as this version of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ at the British Library. I think it’s fascinating to see how people work on poems, and in workshops I often wonder how a particular piece is going to change, and why.

We don’t often get to see the full journey of a poem, so I thought I’d have a bit of fun with the idea and take one of mine to show how and why it changed, what happened when I workshopped it. It’s one that eventually won The New Writer competition and was published in their anthology edition this summer, in other words, ‘finished’ in one sense of the word (if poems are ever finished?) Warning: this is a long post.

Here’s the first draft (13-10-12):

Waiting for the bus

He cuts the engine at eleven twenty,
leaves the radio going, eighties pop.
Turning, I cup hands to my temples,

press them to the window, strain
to make visual sense of the black
outside. The driver sits back, lights up.

A few people look about to leave.
Heads slouched in sleep lift expectantly,
backpacks are pulled down from racks

Someone fills the aisle with his body.
Thigh brushing my knee, he murmurs
an apology. Next to me, Terry’s hand

on the headrest in front, taps along
to the Annie Lennox song that’s playing.
Let’s get out, he says, so we do, but

at the roadside I lose sight of my feet
and with them my confidence. Terry’s arm
is outstretched, pointing at a star

low on the horizon, adrift from Orion,
faint at first but stronger with each blink,
a desert lighthouse. It’s coming, he says.

From the minibus, a shout. Figures move
around inside, fetching their things.
Relax, I hear the driver say, not yet,

it’s at least twenty minutes away.
So we watch as the dot grows fat, splits
into four, ploughing the highway, thirty

miles in its own time, kicking up red dust.
I wonder at what point we are visible:
Giralia turn off, junction with Burkett Road,

midnight pickup, nowhere for a drink,
the drivers greeting each other, a dirty laugh,
radio patter in the background, Eternal Flame.

There were some things I liked about this – the radio playing in the background was important and I thought the detail of the eighties pop (Annie Lennox, Eternal Flame) were good. I wanted to get across the sheer blackness of the night, the emptiness of the landscape, the boredom of waiting. The key thing is the idea of the bus approaching from so far away that although its headlights are visible, it still takes ages to arrive. The loneliness, the sense of being utterly out of place.

But – although you could say there was too much ‘telling the story’ and ‘he says… he says’ I decided to go further down that route, make it richer, go into ‘overdrive’ mode which for me usually means the lines get longer and sentences denser. Should the sparseness of the landscape make the details stand out more? Would more detail of the inside of the bus throw the emptiness of the landscape into sharper relief?

The next complete draft was five stanzas of 8 lines. (Did I have a competition in mind??) Much of it was unchanged, but with some detail added:

…
A man fills the aisle with his body,
starts talking loudly in bent vowels.
Ocker – this from Terry, his hand
on the chrome bar of the seatback,
tapping to an Annie Lennox song.
  (from draft 3, 16-10-12)

The title had changed to ‘Leave no trace’, a phrase which appears in the third stanza. The original, ‘Waiting for the bus’ just sounded so pedestrian to me, especially as the bus is so clearly depicted. Need something more intriguing!

I wasn’t happy with the heavy blocks of lines, the look of it. So the next complete version was in quatrains, six stanzas, but much longer lines. I renamed it again, to ‘Midnight pickup, junction with Burkett Road’ and took it to a workshop with Mimi Khalvati and a group of excellent poets.

The comments I got were that there was too much telling of the story, that the ideas ‘peek through’ in some places but the heavy narrative was obscuring it. I’d altered the last stanza and wanted to end with the ‘swapping’ of the passengers getting off with those getting on, but in the course of so doing had introduced another, confusing theme:

…
I wonder at what point we are visible, Giralia turn off, midnight pickup.
The twice weekly ritual of hard grind across desert, stopping here
where there are no signs, for the swapping of human cargo, this thought
as we climb on, as behind us the radio fades to black: Eternal Flame. (d5, 20-10-13)

“Is it about human trafficking?” someone wanted to know, and suddenly images of a war torn landscape and body bags were interfering. Clearly the ‘human cargo’ bit was misleading. Mimi’s advice was to listen. Where’s the poetry? Cut the cord between what actually happened (if indeed it did) and what the poem wants to be about. “Tension between two elements is good but conflict isn’t.” She singled out the two middle stanzas as being ‘where the poetry lay’:

At the roadside I lose sight of my feet and with them my confidence.
Am I wearing shoes? What planet is this? Nothing above or around
but stars fat as glitterballs, too huge to fit my eye, impossible to gauge
where anything stops or starts in this landscape, or guess who’s here

with us, the nocturnals, how many sets of eyes. Our presence
is no more than a fly on a kangaroo’s tail – we will leave no trace.
Terry is pointing at a dot low on the horizon, adrift from Orion,
faint at first, but stronger with each blink, a desert lighthouse. It’s coming.

There was so much good advice to think about. I put the poem away for a month, then went back to it. The next version was pretty close. Suddenly the focus is quite different, and the ‘lost feet’ have been elevated to the opening line. The drafts are getting shorter so here’s the whole thing:

Midnight pickup

My feet are lost at the roadside.
You ask what planet this is –
impossible to say, or gauge
starting points in the landscape.
I hear the nocturnals: tenacious,
strutting. By day they scratch
brutal lives in the shadows,
dry faeces and shuttered eyes.
I can see nothing above or around
but glitterball stars too fat
to fit my eye, on black horizon
a single dot hanging adrift
from Orion, a whisper, faint
at first, but stronger with each blink,
a desert lighthouse. It’s coming.

My breath is as slow as it takes
for a dot to grow big as a bus.
I wonder at what point
we are visible, Giralia turn off,
junction with Burkett Road?
Can we really be found
in the frayed desert, will anything
stop here, where there are no signs,
for the swapping of humans,
attracting the invisible gaze
of lizards, marsupials, snakes,
their ancient paths disturbed?
I hang in your constellation,
unsure if my eyes are open,
trusting, heading North.

(d7, 22-11-12)

I was reasonably happy with this, but not entirely. So I took it to another lovely workshopping group. Immediately, things came to light that were so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d missed them: ‘nocturnal’ animals sleep by day, so what’s this about them scratching around in the sun? There was still some confusion and talk of aliens and prostitutes. Out went the metaphysical fancies ‘I hang in your constellation’ and poetical phrases ‘ancient paths disturbed.’ Great stuff.

So draft 8, which was the version I submitted – funnily enough it went back to tercets, just like draft 1, but the whole thing had become more sparse, rather like the desert. Out had gone all that stuff about the interior of the bus, the radio playing, the people. I kept the ‘swapping’ idea in there, just about. I was quite pleased with the lines ‘breath is as slow as it takes / for a dot to grow bus-big.’

Midnight Pickup  

My feet are lost at the roadside.
You ask what planet this is,
where the landscape starts.

I hear the nocturnals: tenacious,
their brutal lives a scratch
of dry faeces, leathered skin.

Above and around, nothing
but glitterball stars too fat
to fit my eye, on black horizon

a single dot hangs adrift
from Orion, faint at first
but stronger with each blink

a desert lighthouse – it’s coming
– breath is as slow as it takes
for a dot to grow bus-big.

At what point are we visible –
Giralia turn off, Burkett Road –
will they find us in the desert

with no signs to stop them?
And will the swapping
of people, backpacks, jokes

amount to anything here
stood as we are on red rock
bone on bone under black?

(first appeared in The New Writer issue 115, summer 2013)

Poet's Tips/

Notes from Mimi Khalvati workshop

workshop notes 26-1-13

workshop notes 26-1-13

Yesterday was the first of our monthly workshops with Mimi Khaltvati this year, and as usual I came away with plenty of new insights and reminders. Here are some of the things Mimi said which I jotted down, as usual I’ve tried to stick to ‘universal’ comments rather than those to do with specific poems. Hope you find it useful.

On form/shaping/editing: Test out different forms, don’t just plump for the first way you’ve written something, which may be a bunch of uneven-length stanzas. Is that really the best you can do? It can make a huge difference – for example triplets can be more musical, lighter than big blocks of ten lines or whatever.

On villanelles – they need “strenuous thought”. You have to think backwards. You need to have arrived at a transformation in the last two lines, their meaning needs to have changed even though the words haven’t.

On consistency of register – if you use contractions (I’m, he’s etc) sometimes but not always, that will seems wrong. Beware mixing up idiomatic and archaic phrases, especially if it’s done to fit a certain metre or rhyme scheme.

On rhyme – ‘if you choose the wrong word to rhyme then everything goes wrong!’

On specific references to things the reader may or may not be familiar with: “it’s courteous as a writer to assume the reader is one step ahead of you. It also makes for better writing.”

On developing a critical faculty – ask of other people’s writing (as a precursor to asking it of your own) ‘what is missing? what more could be done?’ “A fierce critical faculty is a wondrous gift.” Be prepared to think in larger terms rather than just tweaking.

On beautiful language – it’s not enough to just write beautifully. Too much beauty can be soporific. (Mimi admitted literally falling asleep at a reading by a prominent poet – I couldn’t possibly say who – because it was all too lovely “the melody, the evenness of the waves…”). So how can you break up it up? You need a counterpoint. Look at what you’ve written and move things about if necessary – a strong start to a line can serve as a stake, a prop holding things up. You may naturally write beautifully – but your best strength can also be your weakness.

On tricky links – you can make ‘leaps’ (I took this to mean the idea of moving between seemingly unrelated images or meanings) – leaps are good – but they need to be ‘clear leaps’. If something is in the way, confusing things, you need to get rid of that, clear the way.

On developing a ‘forensic’ eye for syntax – check for missing subjects or verbs that change tense, confused constructions, missing commas etc due to long sentences with sub-clauses over several stanzas. (For me, this is a bit like writing HTML – every time you open a bracket or start a new ‘declaration’ you have to close it, even if it’s hundreds of lines later, with all kinds of embedded instructions in between. If you get something wrong the whole thing falls apart.  But it’s so satisfying when you find the missing inverted commas or bracket!)

Workshopping/

How to tackle the “What does it mean?” question

Puzzled

Puzzled

“Poems need room for the imagination to engage” says Roselle Angwin in a interesting blog post on creating ambiguity in a poem, not telling the whole story.

So here’s a problem I have, and I can’t be the only one! When I take a poem to a workshopping group I really don’t like explaining. Anything. I just don’t think it’s relevant. So if I’m asked straight away “what does this mean?’ I want to say ‘what do you think it means?’ Letting people decide, or hearing people discuss amongst themselves can be very revealing about where the problems are. Not in the sense of ‘oh no, they’ve got it all wrong, I need to change that so that my meaning is clear.’ Because if I do that, there’s no ‘work’ left for the reader. And anyway, I love it when people put their own take on a piece. It means they’ve engaged with it.

But how to tackle the ‘what does it mean” question? Sometimes people get a bit tetchy if I refuse to provide answers. And if I say ‘I prefer not to explain’ it all sounds rather pompous. Or if I do find myself explaining, I get all defensive and then annoyed that I’m coming across as not wanting criticism, which of course I do, but I think this ‘need to find the meaning’ gets in the way of really looking closely at the thing.

There are plenty of poems I can’t make sense of, especially on a first reading. If there’s a specific word or phrase I don’t understand, I may comment that this tripped me up, or ask if it’s important that the reader understands it.. By asking “is this important?” you are prompting the poet to question it in her mind. Personally, that’s the kind of feedback I find helpful – comments that make me really interrogate what I’ve written. What do you think? Do you agree? I know it’s not easy to give feedback – I find it really hard myself – so am I being unreasonable? Should I be grateful for any kind of feedback?

Poet's Tips/

Brendan Cleary workshop – drafting poems

Brendan Cleary

The pub with no name, brighton

Yesterday I was in Brighton at the Pub with No Name (which is incidentally in an area with a pub on each street corner as well as halfway down each street, so not having a name is pretty cocky) for an all-day workshop with legendary Irish poet Brendan Cleary. (Brendan is editor of the recently relaunched magazine The Echo Room by the way – worth checking out.)

We were in the upstairs room with the bay window in the photo, with sun streaming through and views almost to the sea. It was an enjoyable, intense, not to mention beer-fuelled, day which ended in me falling asleep in my dinner, but more of that later perhaps!

The day’s focus was on the process of drafting poems. We all shared how we went about bringing a poem into being, how we beat it into shape, what triggered a new poem, that kind of thing. We each workshopped a poem before lunch, and (very briefly, although we ran out of time) another at the end of the day. In between we started a new poem and Brendan guided us through a couple of drafts of it. With just five of us in the group it was pretty full on.

In time-honoured tradition (I love being able to use all kinds of terrible cliches on this blog – sorry!) here are a few of the tips, ideas and other gems given to us by Brendan during the day.

  • On tense: it’s OK to put something that happened in the past into the present tense – the immediacy can make it fresh. But be careful not to mix tenses by accident.
  • It’s also OK to change details of something that actually happened, if the poem calls for it. It doesn’t mean you’re being unfaithful to the spirit of the poem.
  • If you use brackets, or dashes, or lower-case ‘I’ or whatever, have a rationale. Every decision like that, every punctuation mark counts and you should be able to defend your decisions if asked. They shouldn’t be arbitrary. Every tiny detail of the poem contributes to the whole.
  • Whether you start a poem with a page of notes, a random outpouring or a particular shape or form, the first step of redrafting is to go through and mark the bits you consider to be ‘grade A’ then cut everything else. With what’s left, a shape may start to emerge. Be prepared to experiment with different line lengths, different stanza lengths, different forms. What you have cut out may not necessarily be bad, and the bits you are really reluctant to cut may be the material that’s stopping the true poem from emerging – be aware of that.
  • Keep a notebook on you at all times and don’t be afraid of ruining it!
  • If you draft in longhand, the quicker you get it onto the computer the better as it helps the process of de-personalisation. Look at the poem on the page (when typewritten) and consider the logic behind the shape of it, and the white space. “The white space behind the words is the rest of the universe.”
  • Don’t get bogged down with making sure people will understand your poem. Removing some of your authorial intention is crucial – allow people to make their own interpretations and decisions as to what it’s about.
  • Engagement – you have to engage with your poem, and think about how it will engage readers.
  • A poem can go in its own direction. That’s when you might get that ‘did I really write that?’ moment.
  • When drafting/re-drafting ask yourself questions like “What do I not need to say?” “Is this really 2 poems?” “Have I given the trick away too quickly?” “Do I need to re-order lines, or even start at the end?”
  • You don’t often add to a poem after the first draft, but you often cut.
  • Poems can be made from other poems, and they feed off each other. Go back to a successful poem, one you are pleased with, or perhaps where the form suggested itself naturally. Maybe you could write another poem in that form, or the poem may prompt another. (Useful idea when putting together a collection. Poem that work in isolation don’t necessary form a coherent whole, and conversely some poems only work in conjunction with those around them.)

Brendan also quoted John Berger when he said “Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.” Reassembling what has been scattered – what a nice idea.

After a few more drinks in the pub after the workshop ended, I made my way home to find my husband had cooked a sausage casserole, and he and stepson regaled me with everything they’d been up to. But I confess I was completely burned out and halfway through dinner suddenly I couldn’t listen to (or utter) another word. Call myself a poet? I have no stamina!