The solitary stars
Sep. 11th, 2014 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughIn a recent Facebook post, I mentioned that I'd written a couple of poems after a long fallow period, or more accurately, a long period when I had written, but not thought anything worth keeping. In the comments, someone asked a question, not the old chestnut "where do you get your ideas from", but the far more interesting question of why some of these ideas end up as poems while others prove intractable, and what the process is that sends them one way or t'other.
To start with the two I wrote this week, which came from two very different places and followed different routes to completion. The first derived from a thought I had about my neighbour's trees, and an image I could pretty immediately see them providing. This, for me, is a good place to start, because poems that start from things or images, for me, are a lot more likely to get written than ones that start because I feel like writing a poem on a certain theme. The latter usually end up more like lectures, or at least prose. The core image then meshed with a couple of other things currently going on in my mind and the neighbourhood, all of which I could see were tending the same way. I wrote the poem quite quickly, over a couple of days.
The second was quite different. It derived from something I'd read in a history book about a year or more ago and been, at the time, much moved by. I'd had a perfunctory go at writing about it at the time and got nowhere. I was reminded of it because an email arrived with some proofs to check, of an interview I'd done for a book. In this interview I'd mentioned that I was working on this idea, and when I read the proofs, I thought perhaps I'd better go back and do something about it.
I was into half-rhymed terza rima at the time, and started out trying to work the idea into this form. It fell into it easily enough, but it wasn't exciting me and I could see the thing going the way of so many poems I'd started and abandoned as not being keepers. But I was sure this one had something going for it as an idea, so I persisted, but abandoned the terza rima. The breakthrough was an idle reflection that if Cavafy had happened to know of this particular event, he'd surely have written about it. Light went on in head: okay, thinks I, we'll channel him and see if we can figure out how he'd have handled it. Which I did, and ended up with something I liked. It isn't, I hope, imitation Cavafy; apart from anything else, it doesn't rhyme, which most of his did, but there's definitely an influence there, especially in the way the incident gets seen through the eyes of a character in the poem, which I hadn't been doing when I first read about it. Perhaps because of this, the poem didn't turn out to say quite what I thought it was going to when I began. Once I had this character's viewpoint, the poem took shape quite quickly but it had essentially taken over a year from the first idea.
Now, my notebook is still full of other ideas that didn't make it - or haven't made it yet. It's possible some of them need a nudge, like the one my second poem got when I read those proofs. Or a lucky insight, like the one about Cavafy. It is certainly a fact that the older I get, the less easily satisfied I am with my work and the more I reject. It isn't enough for there to be nothing obviously wrong about the poem - there needs to be something not only right but necessary about it. This may partly be down to my being aware of so many more poems now, of knowing how many poets have handled this or that material and thinking well, there'd better be something different about yours, or there's no point in writing it down. I think I have also become more exacting in the same way about reading. I have read a lot of poetry collections and thought "it's all right, good even, but it isn't essential; I wouldn't grieve unduly if I could never read a collection by that poet again". With the poets I love - Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Sorley MacLean, Paul Henry, Louise Glück - I do feel they're essential; if one of the ones still living brings out a new book, I know I'll have to buy it.
I don't know if this business of heightened expectations happens to other poets as they age, meaning they complete, and keep, fewer poems the older they get. I think it's true for me. Also that being intrinsically idle, the odd nudge can help. But mainly I think it is things coming together - an image links with an incident, or a phrase wanders into the mind and changes the rhythm of how you were going to clothe an idea. Maybe some writers work like sculptors and chisel a poem out of a single block of marble, as it were. I think I'm more like a jackdaw who has to assemble it from various materials collected in different places and sometimes over a very long time.
Oh, the title of this post - from a poem of Housman's in which he uses the image of gardening for his own creative process:
And some the birds devour,
And some the season mars,
But here and there will flower
The solitary stars.
To start with the two I wrote this week, which came from two very different places and followed different routes to completion. The first derived from a thought I had about my neighbour's trees, and an image I could pretty immediately see them providing. This, for me, is a good place to start, because poems that start from things or images, for me, are a lot more likely to get written than ones that start because I feel like writing a poem on a certain theme. The latter usually end up more like lectures, or at least prose. The core image then meshed with a couple of other things currently going on in my mind and the neighbourhood, all of which I could see were tending the same way. I wrote the poem quite quickly, over a couple of days.
The second was quite different. It derived from something I'd read in a history book about a year or more ago and been, at the time, much moved by. I'd had a perfunctory go at writing about it at the time and got nowhere. I was reminded of it because an email arrived with some proofs to check, of an interview I'd done for a book. In this interview I'd mentioned that I was working on this idea, and when I read the proofs, I thought perhaps I'd better go back and do something about it.
I was into half-rhymed terza rima at the time, and started out trying to work the idea into this form. It fell into it easily enough, but it wasn't exciting me and I could see the thing going the way of so many poems I'd started and abandoned as not being keepers. But I was sure this one had something going for it as an idea, so I persisted, but abandoned the terza rima. The breakthrough was an idle reflection that if Cavafy had happened to know of this particular event, he'd surely have written about it. Light went on in head: okay, thinks I, we'll channel him and see if we can figure out how he'd have handled it. Which I did, and ended up with something I liked. It isn't, I hope, imitation Cavafy; apart from anything else, it doesn't rhyme, which most of his did, but there's definitely an influence there, especially in the way the incident gets seen through the eyes of a character in the poem, which I hadn't been doing when I first read about it. Perhaps because of this, the poem didn't turn out to say quite what I thought it was going to when I began. Once I had this character's viewpoint, the poem took shape quite quickly but it had essentially taken over a year from the first idea.
Now, my notebook is still full of other ideas that didn't make it - or haven't made it yet. It's possible some of them need a nudge, like the one my second poem got when I read those proofs. Or a lucky insight, like the one about Cavafy. It is certainly a fact that the older I get, the less easily satisfied I am with my work and the more I reject. It isn't enough for there to be nothing obviously wrong about the poem - there needs to be something not only right but necessary about it. This may partly be down to my being aware of so many more poems now, of knowing how many poets have handled this or that material and thinking well, there'd better be something different about yours, or there's no point in writing it down. I think I have also become more exacting in the same way about reading. I have read a lot of poetry collections and thought "it's all right, good even, but it isn't essential; I wouldn't grieve unduly if I could never read a collection by that poet again". With the poets I love - Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan, Sorley MacLean, Paul Henry, Louise Glück - I do feel they're essential; if one of the ones still living brings out a new book, I know I'll have to buy it.
I don't know if this business of heightened expectations happens to other poets as they age, meaning they complete, and keep, fewer poems the older they get. I think it's true for me. Also that being intrinsically idle, the odd nudge can help. But mainly I think it is things coming together - an image links with an incident, or a phrase wanders into the mind and changes the rhythm of how you were going to clothe an idea. Maybe some writers work like sculptors and chisel a poem out of a single block of marble, as it were. I think I'm more like a jackdaw who has to assemble it from various materials collected in different places and sometimes over a very long time.
Oh, the title of this post - from a poem of Housman's in which he uses the image of gardening for his own creative process:
And some the birds devour,
And some the season mars,
But here and there will flower
The solitary stars.
