It's All Academic From The Archive Podcast : Writing poetry

[00:00:01]You will now hear Jackie Kay and W. N.

[00:00:03]Herbert giving their views on poetry and what it can do.

[00:00:08]>> Poetry in my view is little moments of belief in quite intense language. And poetry always loves language, loves the words, is in love with language in some sort of way, and finds a way to get that across, to get the music of language and the love of words across in quite a short and precise way. Poetry loves using images, metaphors, alliterations. There's all sorts of techniques and tricks that people can do, repetitions in poetry that you can't do in prose, or if you did do it in prose, it would seem very mannered uh prose. But poetry, yes, it's almost a moment of belief for me. It's a moment when you write a poem, you have to have a certain amount of conviction. You have to believe in that poem, and you have to get your reader to believe in it, too.

[00:00:54]You're almost writing the poem and you're saying to the reader or the listener, "Come into my world and see what I see."

[00:01:00]>> It's a poem about where we always go on holiday, but which my daughter assumes is just going to continue forever and ever, which is the same little town in Crete and the bay. The poem's actually named after the bay, so that it's got a Greek name, Ormos Almirou. And it was about just one moment when we were playing in the sea.

[00:01:20]And it's that sort of thing which I think poems are very apt for, apt machines for capturing, the same way as cameras are, you know, just this little moment which seems to have a resonance and seems to keep on resonating. So that I was actually sort of just jumping up and down in the waves with her, and I glanced sideways as a particularly big wave came over, and she jumped up, but she didn't jump up high enough. So there's this kind of moment when she was just sort of stuck in the wave, completely immersed in it.

[00:01:48]And it sort of affected me in a way that I couldn't say anything about, which is another one of those signs, contrary to the people who say, "Oh, you could write a poem about that." It is precisely the moments when you don't know at all what you think about something that you could possibly write a poem about.

[00:02:05]Ormos Almirou Bobbing with my daughter in the Cretan waves, their salt snock window like slugging jade that neither opens nor closes on the view beneath, a desert of wrinkles that the sea composes then wipes out to show her sway over days.

[00:02:28]I glance sideways as she rises in her ruffled swimsuit, tries to be a crest that the lip doesn't need, but it's higher than her hair.

[00:02:40]She arcs with its roll and is contained for a moment like Longley's otter in the mayo swell is born facing out through its pain till she breaches in light.

[00:02:57]>> Yes, my dad was a lifelong socialist, and the last few times I've gone to visit him, I've noticed he's been wearing shoes that are not his own shoes, and I've just looked at the shoes and said, "Who's died now?"

[00:03:08]And he's told me, and um you know, all the old socialists, of course, he's getting to that age where all his friends are dying.

[00:03:15]And it made me really think of all the marches these people had marched in and all the things that they've believed in, marches against war or against apartheid. The shoes of dead comrades.

[00:03:25]On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades, gifts from the comrades' sad red widows. My father would never see good shoes go to waste, good brown leather, black leather, leather soles.

[00:03:39]Doesn't matter if they're a size too big, small.

[00:03:43]On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades, the marches they marched against Polaris, UCS.

[00:03:51]Everything they ever believed tied up with laces.

[00:03:55]A cobbler has replaced the sole, the heel. Brand new, my father says, "Look, feel."

[00:04:02]On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades. These are in good nick.

[00:04:06]These were pricey, Italian leather. See that? Lovely. He always was a classy dresser, was Arthur.

[00:04:14]Ever see Willie dance? Willie was a wonderful walzer.

[00:04:20]On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades. It scares me half to death to consider that one day it won't be Willie or Jimmy or Arthur.

[00:04:30]That one day someone will wear the shoes of my father, the brown and black leather of all the dead comrades.

[00:04:38]I couldn't have written that as a story because it had to be something lyrical about the tone of that. And it's a kind of I suppose it's an analogy to my dad and to the past and to socialism. And it's got a certain kind of a voice. If I tried to do that in a story, it would have had to bustle more and be up and about. I'd have had to really create the man and the character and perhaps all the other men who have died in it. And I wouldn't want to do that. So, the great thing about poems is that you can say a lot in a very short space of time and that you can fill in, if you like, as many details as you want and leave out a lot. There's an awful lot of space in them. There's space for the reader or the listener to imagine these people, Willie or Jimmy or Arthur, but not to have to have their lives and their lives and their houses and their pets and their cars. Basically, which is the kind of thing that you need in a story.

[00:05:26]>> On this track, you will hear poets discussing sources of inspiration and useful methods.

[00:05:32]>> One of the problems that people set themselves when they're beginning to write is that they assume that they must be inspired. And inspiration and there's a kind of grand notion that says like almost a divine wind, the great flatulence of God, which must pass through people in order for them to put pen to paper at all.

[00:05:49]But, of course, you know, in order to put pen to paper at all, you have to actually think of something, and you actually have an interest in the craft of how you're putting it down. And that is where inspiration comes from. It comes from work on the page.

[00:06:03]>> I think one of the things about poetry that I notice that those who thinking about it perhaps for the first time are determined to do is to make it mean as much as possible.

[00:06:13]Whereas, in fact, in a strange way to make it mean as little as possible. I don't mean by that nonsense, but what I mean by that is to cut down on the range of possible readings.

[00:06:24]And basically, if you look after one, that's enough to be going on with.

[00:06:29]And if there happen to be one and a half or two, fantastic.

[00:06:34]Many people try to incorporate three or four or five readings into a poem and end up with none because nobody knows what's happening.

[00:06:43]And that's one of the reasons why poems are unintelligible is that they mean >> [clears throat] >> no single thing.

[00:06:50]And there's a theory, of course, that they should mean all things to all men, which is complete baloney.

[00:06:56]They should mean one thing, roughly speaking, to one man or woman.

[00:07:01]That's enough to be going on with.

[00:07:03]>> Well, I think, you know, both music and movies are very good for poetry in a funny way, you know, because movies often give you little moments and snapshots in the way that movies can zoom in to something in a close-up is very like a poem. A poem is a kind of a close-up. It's a close-up of a moment in tiny detail, often. And then it can pull right back, and you can get an entire expanse of land. So, in a poem, you can get a whole panoramic vision in a short poem. So, it has that ability that the camera has, poems have, of shifting focus and moving a lot. And music also uh shares a lot with poetry in terms of its rhythms. I mean, whether you listen to classical music or folk music or jazz and blues, you'll still always get a sense of the music's rhythm, its patterns, and the way in which certain, say, jazz refrains work, the way that they return to the same note again and again. And those kind of techniques poets use, too.

[00:08:01]>> The crucial thing about a notebook is it's where everything can begin. If you are working in between times, as I am often, then you have to get hold of those first little bits of phrases, those first little bits of ideas, those first colors, those first rhymes that might start something off. And I believe that it's an essential tool for all writers. I don't think that anyone should ever rely on their memory for creativity. I think if you're not doing that as a writer, then you're not doing your five-finger exercises. You're not practicing your chords. You're not sketching. And if you're not doing that, then the next stage is harder to get onto. And so people get bigger and bigger gaps, and then they come back to the notion that they have to be inspired to start at all, and they don't do the work.

[00:08:48]>> The most important thing I tell them to do is to read contemporary poets in particular, but just to read, read, read, and read. To me, the point of life is to read just as much as it is to write. And a lot of people that write poetry or that want to write poetry start off and they don't read. And you come to them with their poems, and their poems are sort of written in sort of very oldy English syntax. And you say to them, "What contemporary poets have you read?" And they haven't read any. So I say that that was very important. And to go to readings, to go and hear people read. There's a huge amount of literature festivals now all over the place that they could go and hear live poetry readings because hearing a poet read their own work gives you a key, in a way, into their work.

[00:09:30]>> You will now hear Jackie Kay, Paul Muldoon, and Jean Binta Breeze talk about the use of autobiography, as well as other people's voices as subject matter for poetry.

[00:09:40]>> I often use my own life in my poetry in the way that artists might paint pictures of themselves. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually writing about yourself in an obvious way in the way that an artist isn't necessarily painting themselves when they paint. You can actually change your history, change your past, change your memories and alter it. But I like to use it a bit like a springboard to dive into the pool of my imagination. I use my own life like that.

[00:10:07]>> Oh, I think the fact that I'm from Northern Ireland has been a huge element in these poems.

[00:10:13]Of course, because never mind whether or not one might be writing poems simply to as a citizen there try to make sense of what's going on.

[00:10:22]is a responsibility I think it's situation in which we've all tried to make sense of things in so far as we're able.

[00:10:33]So that is a feature of many of these poems. But mind you that's a feature of life in every part of the world. I mean there is too often I think a feeling that you know if one lives in England somehow everything is settled and there's no discussion.

[00:10:47]Everything is cut and dried.

[00:10:50]Everything has a sheen.

[00:10:52]Or if one lives in the US everything's kind of over in some ways. Well at least ideas are blatantly false.

[00:11:00]>> I think there is a private voice. I write many poems that I have published in my books which I never do on stage.

[00:11:07]The only time I do them is if I find myself in a very intimate setting with you know a few people and you can kind of talk and sit in a chair and say, "Hey, I was thinking about my daughter when I wrote this one."

[00:11:22]But there is a stage at which you need to kind of harness other voices beyond yourself.

[00:11:32]>> Well ever since I was a girl, I used to go to Burns suppers where there would be all these really quite exciting addresses to the haggis, and it would be poetry to me was initially something very dramatic, you know, the haggis would be stabbed with a knife. The whole idea of having a poem to a haggis, anyway, is hilarious when you think about it for any length of time.

[00:11:49]And so, I like that, the drama in poetry from going to Burns suppers, and I like the idea that you could find that the poems could be voices really, raw voices that could just come out to you from the dark. So, I like to try in my own poems and create some sense of drama. That is very important. And then, I suppose a frustrated actress, I used to always want to be an actress, so and the next best thing to acting is writing the parts, creating the voices.

[00:12:16]>> Jackie Kay and Paul Muldoon.

[00:12:19]>> I don't necessarily use rhyme in a completely formal way, so I like using rhymes out of the way that ordinary people speak, and I like using repetitions and rhymes from my speech patterns. I'm very influenced by the way that people talk. I've always loved listening to how people talk and listening to them say things like my mom would say to me, "I'm not hungry hungry, but I'm hungry." And I'm supposed to know exactly what she means. So, I love that, those kind of uh almost kind of nonsense that people speak, and we all know exactly what it means, and I like to try and capture that. So, but I think that if you rhyme in such a way that you're struggling to make something rhyme just for the rhyme's sake, then it's a bit like you wagging the tail of the dog rather than the dog wagging its own tail. So, I don't only have poems rhyming when I feel that the voice of that poem needs to when there's a kind of a natural facility within the poem for the rhyme.

[00:13:10]>> One of the things I would say about it, of course, is that imposition is not part of the deal either in terms of the formal stanzaic patterns or in terms of what's happening within the line.

[00:13:21]There is a tendency for the language, first of all, to fall into that I am big pattern, that's the way the English language is built.

[00:13:31]There is that tendency. And also, for words to find chimes and rhymes. That's intrinsic to the language rather than something that's imposed upon it. So, one's simply availing oneself of what's there.

[00:13:50]>> If you enjoyed this clip, feel free to follow the links on screen for more interesting articles and free courses from the Open University.