Thoughts on Writing Poetry

Since I completed a course in creative writing earlier this year I have meant to start actually writing some of my own poetry: partly to show off my new skills (ahem, I struggled with the poetry section!) and of course also to practice what I have been taught.

One of the lessons I learnt was that you don't have to be a genius to write competent poetry, but you do have to be in possession of certain things. One, you need to have a grasp of its basic principles.  This means that you need to understand what constitutes poetry and what makes it successful in fulfilling the requirements of the reduced form.

As I understand it, putting aside formal rhythmic constructions (something that can further aid the constrained form) what one needs to understand about the alternative,free verse is that as a poem it is the intensity of the language rather than the measuring of its construction regularity that helps it work. A process of heightened language with all extraneous fat trimmed off, where the effects of the poems subject and theme are intensely illuminated.

I feel that there is a truth in there somewhere based on one of my failures and the reactions I received when I submitted it for marking. It was about a market house building and how it had operated under a mighty clock that ticked through history chronicling hundreds of years events that happened under its watch (no pun intended). The problem with it - despite my straining for figurative language in every single line, was that it lacked specific focus. It was about the building, it was about the clock, it was about my relationship with the clock and it was about differing events that were observed and reiterated by the speaker should the clock be able to ever tell him its life story. In short it was all over the place. This, despite many people liking it because of its good use of imagery and the helpful implied rhythm, wasn't really poetry, it was more like chopped prose. It told a story that could have been reconfigured into a longer form with all breaks reconnected into sentences and paragraphs.  It was an account with many nods to poetic form (not metrical but other techniques to do with poetic language) but not a deeply felt interrogation into a specific thing that spotlighted something specific in a typically poetic-like incremental way.

So rather than stepping off a bus (which I did) into the granular and mottled pavements which still had the wreckage of Saturday night's wrappers and noticing the clock and wondering what it made of me, what it thought of the events the previous night and the last three hundred years, I would have been better concentrating on the pavement - with its mottled surface and its hard uncomplaining manner. its mossy dampness, its dried blood, the papery flotsam  that floated above it like blasted ticker-tape. Or, stayed with the clock with its stern-blinded eye and ginger bread bricks and stayed with it. Not sure whether the subject matters: pavements or clocks in themselves are worthy of poems, but this is just an example of where I went wrong. I didn't place a light on something and then stay with it making evident why I was writing the thing.

The other is to love language and be prepared to experiment with it. Cliche is the darkest pit into which all original writing incompetence bubbles and seethes - a midden of word menu choices stolen and guarded by imps which are sold to the tired, the unimaginative and the linguistically bereft.  I have done it myself many times. Described something not in terms of my own perceptions but in ways in which I have already heard them - as good as those ways might have seemed at the time.  No prose let alone poem - which requires maximum individuality based on its tiny size - could possibly survive a Woolworth's style language pic and mix. Any one who's anyone would simply see through it. This isn't from the heart they'd say - this is a mental cut and paste - a borrowing of generics - nothing new to see here. That's why a love of language is the other thing you need as a poet. To know what a poem should be about and shine a light on it without wavering.  And play with language so much it looks like it was written in a spiraling vortex that's time shifted from babel.

I'd like to finish here with a few words to add to My Dream Lexicon which is what this whole blog's about. Completely random and in themselves nothing special but at least provide a flavour of the kind of odd, eccentric,unexpected kinds of words any poem I write from now on will include.

So, if you scroop you emit a grating or creaking sound. Cronk is a kind of croak, apparently.  Gride means to grate or scrape harshly - I wonder if you can gride on someone's nerves?   A swazzle is a device that you place in your mouth to generate a Punch and Judy style vocalization, (easily swallowed apparently so treat with extreme care.) To yawp is to make a raucous noise and dirdum means humming and droning. A huzz is an involuntary shiver,and a gilderoy describes a very proud person. I have lists of these words all ready for my new career as a poet which is of course is really what this world needs.  

Words and Tweets 1

Lately I have been feeling indebted to Twitter.  Not because it has been enlivening my day with reports from witty contributors who appear on my timeline with their daily apercus, clever jokes, germane observations and so on - no, I feel indebted because I'm supposed to be writing more, and I'm not.  But I am tweeting a bit.  Actually, quite a lot when things are happening - or rather things are going on in my life that seem to provide material. And tweeting is quick.  It is also presented to others very quickly which satisfies the: 'who am I writing this for again?' question that's in the back of every writer's mind. And if that's not enough, it also fulfills that odd 'need' to memorialize an event of any kind, notates every scrap of knowledge or fact or word that might be of use sometime later - in short it's a good little substitute for the infamous writer's notebook. So well done Twitter.

But it wasn't supposed to be like this. I have recently spent some time in London and I have just returned from  a long week-end in Dublin. Both places have been the themes of many a Tweet lately. But very little proper writing. So should I feel indebted to Twitter? Perhaps. If it wasn't for this useful shorthand I would have shaken off the despairing laziness I am prone to. But perhaps micro blogging with Twitter gives me permission to indulge in that laziness. Perhaps I would have written something of a decent length, developed a decent analysis of something  before now. Perhaps Twitter is a bad thing.  Being idle normally provides me with a wake up jolt after an indeterminate amount of time and I know I have to do something. But  if I labour under the misconception that I'm not being idle because I am Tweeting - and after all don't those Tweets require a writer's skill? (This is true up to a point if you value the impact of a paragraph over all other writing).  And if I am crafting clever, profound, observational asides, aren't I keeping the creative pot boiling and well stirred and defeating the tempting evils of indolence?  Again, perhaps. Perhaps Tweeting is good because doing nothing is so very bad.

But surely Tweeting shouldn't be used as an excuse for not writing, rather, it should act as a spring board for more in-depth writing - even if the paragraphs found within the longer form aren't as cleverly succinct or well constructed in the end, as each independently considered Tweet. How could they ever be, you would never get to the end of anything longer. I have known tweets to have a birth so painful, so stubborn, so impossible - they've been sent back up the chute and they die of asphyxiation never to re-emerge to blankly blink against the glare of expectation.  

Maybe to all that. But this blog is called 'My Dream Lexicon' - and quite a few of my Tweets have been formed when I'm not feeling humorous or profound or cruel or self-satisfied but are just efforts at language use practice.  No real surprise there for someone who owns a blog, just one of many but still, who owns a blog that suggests a passion for language and words. Here are a few of the Tweets that concentrated on words during the last few weeks - where better to reiterate them than on my wordy blog:

Rasorial:  Given to scratching around for food like poultry. As I writer I can see that it would be useful figuratively if not literally.   My Tweet read: 'Given to scratching the ground for food, as poultry. I shall count the days until I use this word (wait for it) figuratively.'  Not a great Tweet - the more interesting ones (not necessarily the word themed ones) are the ones that have been shoe-horned into 140 characters but still work. In some cases, I like to think, rather well.

Ramfeezled: 'A priceless gift from OED means worn out, exhausted, confused, muddled. Not sure of its derivation but I welcome it to my life.'  What I meant there I suppose was that I recognised it as being a useful word and term and as a writer words are very much the building blocks of the trade - and lively conversation is probably the most underrated skill in existence. A word like ramfeezled can only make you into both a more interesting writer (unless or until it catches on to such an extent it becomes tired and cliched) and a surprisingly good, perhaps funny wise engaging conversationalist.That's the theory anyway. Look at its construction it's got everything. Recognizing this is probably one of the skills you need as a word smith.  There are legions of scrabble experts out there who know twice the words of average mortals who look as if they could send the guests at a go-naked swingers only New Years Party in a free pub into a haze of mind numbed boredom. It's not just knowing the words, it's knowing how to use them. But you do still have to know them - but that's just part of it.

Sehnsucht: The longing for something.  The inconsolable longing in the human heart for something. Part of the Germans have a word for it season. The thinking behind this notion of the German language is that though the language is smaller, they have prioritized in areas where we haven't in the validating the coinages within the German speaking world. Here they have acknowledged that a condition existed for which a word should be be properly ascribed. Part of the German psyche must have contributed to the need for a word to describe succinctly a feeling that is known within the human emotional repertoire. English people will experience the same feelings - but presumably will have to describe them as best they can withing the limits of their own language dropping in words like heart-break or unexpected longing, or crafting intricately involved sentences to make the point incrementally.  My heart feels empty, something is missing. I don't know what it is but the absence of something is making me feel bereft, down, sad. If I could just identify what it is I could begin to rectify this absence this hole from which something must fill. And so on. A German speaker theoretically would stop you in mid flow and say Ja ja du bist sehnsucht which would bring elucidation (if not to German speakers) and a little comfort to the sufferer.

Atmospheric Fear

I am trying to cultivate new interests and following on from doing both available creative writing courses with the Open University I keep trying to develop my interest in writing poetry and scripts: radio, film and stage.
The tutors and course writers on both courses didn't agree on everything, but one thing they did all agree on was the importance of the writer's notebook.  I thought I would give that idea some thought.

Notebooks are indeed wonderful things. Repositories for ideas, quotations, snatches of conversation, interesting facts, new words heard or read or otherwise discovered, character traits, metaphors, similes, other figurative devices and examples.  This list is endless.  When you think about it, how could you hope to ever be a writer of fiction or poetry without one, or many? Impossible surely. If you go about your life with a mind closed to the colours and the shapes that surround you - or pop up randomly and everywhere. If you aren't receptive to the possible ideas and themes in news articles or travel, or mindful of  interesting nuggets of information disguised inside the mundanities of everyday life. If you do not hear with interest yet another new word or an old word used differently, then perhaps the notebook isn't for you because it's unlikely that you'd want to be a writer. but for the rest of us they are vital.

I have several so at last I have done something right.  The one I'm going through at the moment (notebooks are like the diary allusion quote about always having something interesting to read)   and one is a specific file of what I consider to be interesting words, rarer words, words found in dictionaries of local dialect,words sprung from thesauruses from Roget's to Turd Words: others drawn from books, glossaries and lists of neologisms. Some of them are more appropriate to poetry I admit - but others have been useful in life writing and fiction.

Looking through this notebook today has reminded me of some of these words: Fuscous caught my eye. Dark or dusky. Definitely one for the winter's evening poem. It's accurate and evocative in its own right - but has the added advantage of being descriptive of a bird: the Fuscous Honeyeater, a dark grey bird found in Australia. Fuscous Grey could be considered as similar to Dylan Thomas' Crow black or Kingfisher blue.

There are other grey and gloomy words to consider when writing this non existent drab filled poem: tenebrous is a good start - and under its entry Merriam Webster really goes to town:  caliginous, stygian, crepuscular, fuliginous, are the most interesting to me. Caliginous and fuliginous are hardly ever seen, though both do appear in my notebook.

There's some good misty terms too: Glaucous is defined in my notebook as a pale yellow mist. Fulvous as a dull brownish yellow. These have to be worth remembering if i ever dip my uncertain toes into horror genre writing. Glaucous in particular looks as if it would reward the writer when looking for a synonym for pale yellow eyes (of a vampire? a werewolf?) Fulvous may be better in depicting the atmosphere.  I can see dangers here though - Gothic horror can sometimes seem cheesy and dated and words like that might be perfect in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, but not in modern fiction, even if writing in a particular period prior to the ubiquity of electric lights and mobile phones (how on earth do you pull off old fashioned chillers in today's period settings?). Probably still good for poetry though.  I still think interesting, shocking, surprising words inserted into poetry helps provides the kind of vitality a poem needs to set itself apart from the rest.

I can already see a few more horror words that I might want to use during a Halloween piece (we are approaching the end of October after all) that can be added to those already mentioned.  Grume: clotted liquid - think blood and gore. Fleer: to laugh lecherously (unpleasant word with unpleasant overtones) Guttering: That thing that candles do when icy stabs of wind slip through the window frames and act like ghostly breath. Again - lose the electricity - you need to be back 100 or 50 years at least. Gelid means icy cold. lie the silent pants on your neck as you watch the candle guttering. And finally scroop - a grating creaking sound.  Is there a better word to end on?

Test Blog

Next month I will be restricted to the iPad for blog entries as I will be away from my PC. Given that I will be spending a month travelling around London, I should at least have plenty to blog about when I do get around to it so it would be really useful if I get used to blogging with the pad - even if I'm writing my notes up at the end of each day. Hence this blog which is an iPad blog.

When this trip was planned it was with the intention of staying in an apartment in Bloomsbury. Not exactly where I wanted to be but with some the help from Google maps and Wikipedia I soon got used to the idea.   Using maps I was able to focus intensively using the zoom facility on to a the small geographical area where the apartment block is situated.  As with anywhere else maps will then highlight precisely what streets, buildings, and points of interest populate the spot. And with London being London, very quickly I soon began getting excited all over again.  There was a pub very close to our front door: the Skinner's Arms: an old pub which this close to the centre of London is bound to have a story, but nearby in Queen Anne's Square - misnamed because a mistake over the statue in the square in the image of Queen Charlotte.  The Queen's Larder pub - so named after Queen Charlotte who requisitioned the cellar of the building to store food for the ailing George 3rd who was being treated for insanity at a nearby doctors house (now denoted by a blue plaque).

I also noticed under my virtual microscope one of those Hanson cabman's shelter still sited in Russell Square - one of only 13 hat have survived. Weirdly I have loved the idea of these now, listed building, for years and have never seen one. And there was to one within spitting distance if our apartment.

Within the same square there's a school of oriental studies which displays a plaque to TS Eliot. Not of world shattering interest, but now sufficiently interesting enough to look out for. As is the site, also marked out, of a 1694 sword duel between to noblemen John Law and Edward Bear Wilson which ended in the death from a sword thrust by one or other.  There's a house that once belonged to Disraeli's son to look out for and  the very  statute of Queen Charlotte that caused the confusion between how the square was to be named.

There are buildings in the area that were once used by the Bloomsbury Group, and a statue of Virginia Woolf, another of Gandhi, and neurological hospitals which intriguingly link with the George the 3rd story.  A house lived in by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, and an old foundling hospital with its own museum on Coram's Fields.Nearby Torrington Square has a Thursday Farmer's Market, and of course Tavistock Square which is where the bus bomb went off during the tragic events of 7/7.

And I am sure there is much more in this area to be found under the ant's nest scrutiny of Google zoom and Wikipedia, but any research I have done so far has been, if not wasted, perhaps frustrated as the apartment location fro the visit has changed and it is to the east of London I must now switch my gaze.

I suppose London being London, there will always be something of interest on your door step. I'd better take a look at this next one.

The area around Commercial Road is certainly less interesting at first glance and if trip adviser accounts are to be trusted, not particularly pleasant so to continue the exercise of seeking out London.s secret nuggets of interest I will have expand my compass a bit.

Here's a little list I'm going to work with:

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Spitalfields Market, Aldgate Water Pump, Brick Lane Curry Mile,  Christ Church, Spitalfields, the Ten Bells Pub and The Truman Pub (which both have interesting stories to tell )

Some Words.

It's time I made a start - even though I hardly have time to breath today. The best time to start a new exercise I tell myself,  is when you either have no time, or you feel you'd rather do anything else.  If you find yourself in either of these two situations I believe you should throw yourself into whatever it is, and in doing so if you feel you have been successful,  you should succeed with whatever future venture you're trying to get into.

What exactly is a puckered pouch. It's sounds like something you might do with your lips, when expectant of an a little mouth to mouth affection. Actually, it's a mouth piece for trumpet or horn. Chances are I'll never need to know this again - unless I'm either trying to complete a crossword puzzle: 'It offers a snug fit for two mouthpieces while keeping the ends open for moisture to easily dissipate' two words 8 and 6.  Or a quiz: 'ruffle your pocket up for a kiss.' Actually they should be the other way round - note to editor.

But wait - that's a pucker pouch - self explanatory, it had to have something to do with a mouth hence pucker.  But a puckered pouch is something very different. So here it is: a puckered pouch is a purse of sorts, with a zipper and a wrist holder. The purse itself is, well, puckered in that when it's empty it shows loose folds that are aching to be filled something. More often than not, by a lady's make up.  So it's a little quaint ladies toilet bag. I've never been so surprise by a container word since I learned that an etui is a miniature sewing box.

How about some Gees. Like 'gledge' which according to that veritable authority The Urban Dictionary - a repository of many what might be termed 'dirt words' (it's a kind of turd-words site without the freewheeling anything goes obscenities-only-please house rule). The UD says it means jizz (street slang for sperm) and dirt combined into an unwholesome mix.  Charming indeed. But I prefer to see gledge as a form of narrow-eyed squinting which is what it means according to Scottish dialect dictionaries. Whereas 'gloze:' means to minimize or attempt to explain away. Gloze is a good old deceit word, as in: 'When Anthony blunt was exposed 20 years ago, there were some who tried to gloze his conduct'.  Grume is clotted liquid, like a blood clot - which could be used figuratively.  Imagine clot and grume being used to describe fogs and clouds. I'm sure my fledgling poetry would welcome such unexpected descriptive power.

Thinking about it I should concentrate on the words that would likely be useful in new poetry.  I have had time to think of myself as a writer - and although I enjoy dialogue, particularly in script writing, I think of myself as someone who would like to crack poetry and  would be more likely to keep at this to enable my poetry as  more than any other writing discipline, poetry requires a love of language that verges on the obsession.

In that light 'brume' is potentially poetic word again meaning fog.  Heavy mist or fog actually- but brumous is the adjective.  Nothing to do with old Scots this time, despite its sound,  but from the Latin brumas. Brumous could be used to describe an atmosphere at a party, either physically (in terms of cigarette smoke), or psychologically - as in the air hanging heavy with suspicion or resentment - the air was think with accusation, a  brumous of resentment filled every space. All from brume which sounds Scottish, but isn't.

Scrouge: to squeeze, to crowd. Dug up from 1820 this one. I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's  London a Biography at the moment and I'll be amazed if I didn't draw it up from that - like water in a bucket at a well. In keeping with the theme really - most of these words could be used somehow to describe something of the streets of London during the 1800s. The brume of the London Particular (known also as the pea-souper) the filth pumped out of the chimneys in clouds that clotted the buildings, the streets and its residents as they scrouged their way through, bumping into one another or even on occasion falling in front of the clattering carriages or skidding in the miasma of horse ordure that covered the roads like brown porridge.

That's it I'm obviously under its infectious influence. But then a theme is probably always needed if I'm to complete a blog entry a day on words.  Words that might help me one day write a poem.