Why my mother didn't become a poet

[sheenaghpugh]

My mother was an infant-school teacher. She was extremely fond of poetry and music; she taught a great deal by means of them and when I was young, she seemed always to be singing or reciting something. It was why, as a child, I wanted to make poems myself; it was simply a way of imitating mother. (She never could be bothered much with housework, a trait which I have also imitated all my life.)

But she never made up her own, and this next step seemed so natural to me that I once asked her why; had she never made up poems? Once, she said, at school, when she was about 12. The class had been told to "write a poem" and she had written the following (at a guess, she must have been reading RLS at the time):

I sit upon the shifting sands
And look far out to sea,
And think of all the other lands,
Where other folk might be.

The teacher, wandering round checking progress, had thought this not unpromising (well, this was the 1930s; it scanned and rhymed and had a line of thought) and had encouraged her to go on with it. No, she said, it was finished; she'd said all she wanted to say. And nothing would persuade her to expand on it; indeed she couldn't see why the teacher should think this either necessary or possible. Well, said I, she probably wanted you to talk about those "other folk", imagine what they were like, draw some sort of comparison with your own life. Mother's reply to this was that any intelligent reader ought to be able to do that for themselves, once the idea had been planted in their head.

Needless to say I haven't followed her in this, because it would make all poetry except maybe epigrams and haiku fairly impossible. But the concept has always intrigued me: plant the idea and then let the readers write the poem themselves... I wonder how many lyric, as opposed to narrative, poems, if reduced to their first verses, would work like that?

Comments

[justwolf.livejournal.com]

I love this! Naturally I don't advocate cutting all poems to four lines, but I love the image of your mother adamant that her poem was complete as it was. It would be interesting to experiment with lyric poems too. I have a lot of sympathy for your mother's point of view, because when I was in school and university, all my writing was criticised for being too short, whereas I always felt I had said everything it was possible to say!