Sunday 2 May 2010

Poetry writing month



I don't think I could have done 30. Well, maybe I could. But I did do 20, having come back from holiday and remembered Na/IntPoWriMo ten days into April. Phew, that was interesting and rewarding, if more so for me, I'm afraid, than for this blog's few and now probably fewer readers. Twenty's probably as many poems as I'd written  in my life before, so it's not too surprising that most of them didn't do it.  And I knew, really, that I mostly don't have the wild and playful imagination or the musicality that make a poet, being someone who tends to  think and write in long, rolling, discursive periods. 

A lot goes on in my head, lots of push and pull, tunnelling and soaring, but it's all pretty literal and straightforward - not poetic. Not poetic, at least, by the most specific definition. There are other definitions. In a way, I think, all writers who write with the whole of themselves are poets, must bring to their writing a quality of attention and of opening that we  most associate with poetry. That's why I'm so glad to have done this. 

I found it demanding, absorbing and really quite wonderful to try and write a small poem every day. While I laughed at myself for feeling every time that I'd got something and then realising, once it was done, that I hadn't, it wasn't a laughable enterprise in the current and dismissive sense of that description. The endeavour to write poetry, however successful or unsuccessful, if you give it your all still takes you to that place, deep and far into the heart of words and feelings, as far as possible from the fast and skimming tempo of life in 2010. It's difficult and precious and can probably make me a better writer. So I shall try to keep on doing it, but rarely, I suspect, in public.

7 comments:

Zhoen said...

Still here. Rarely have a response to poems.

alembic said...

I loved reading your poems this month. They took me to new places where I got glimpses of another side of you, the one who also takes the startling pictures. You may say that you tend to think in "rolling, discursive periods," but your photos, now joined by the poems illuminate that other creative side of yours, which is, yes, the poetic.

Dale said...

My favorite of the twenty was "Sign" -- I loved that.

I think Maria's right, you're just not very used to responding to your poetic impulses with "Oh, I should write that!" I dabbled with poetry for a long time before I got a sense, with a half-formed idea: oh, this is heading into poetry land, not prose land. I've got a poem gestating here.

Huw said...

I really enjoyed your poems and the combination of them with photos.

Beth said...

From another who tends toward "the literal and straightforward" - I'm glad you wrote the poems, and recognize the reasons for entering that territory as very valid. (An odd thought - I wonder how many poets are, like you and me, only- or eldest children. I bet it's less than people coming from other places in the birth order. A certain carefulness and responsibility got dinned into me at an early age, and it's still not that easy to explore the "sauvage" side in poetry that you bring up here, and others seem to access so easily.)

Jean said...

Thanks for the supportive feedback.

Maria, you're too generous, but your perception about poems coming from the same place or mode as photos is spot-on, I think. I'd like to bring that place into my prose writing more, and also to bring narrative into my photos. And just generally play with and think about this a lot more.

Beth, what a fascinating comment. Yes, what you say resonates profoundly. There is a kind of play, the wilder kind, that, having grown up a lonely child, I cannot do. Not so much the carefulness dinned into me by adults, perhaps, though there was certainly that, as the lack of experience in being swept up by something larger than myself, by a collective adventure where self-control is not necessary, not the point...

Jean said...

Dale, I agree with you about that poem being the most successful as a poem. Also pretty solemn and icky, though, aaargh...