Poetry News: Bard is a Four-Letter Word
The 2015 StAnza Poet in Residence Clare Mulley joins us to report upon, discuss and simply ponder the poetry world. Take this first column as an introduction...
Oh, the joys of moving. If you’re sensible, everything is already stored in its proper place at home and it’s just a question of putting it in the right box. As I’m not, my bedroom has a bad case of piles. Piles of dirty laundry, piles of clean laundry, piles of books, piles of rubbish, piles of things that haven’t had homes since I last moved... After five big moves, you’d think I’d have learned by now. Well, at least this time there’s a three-suitcase limit. When you have to be ruthless (no ‘maybe-I’ll-wear-this’ items or ‘fond-memory’ trinkets, and don’t even mention the ‘interesting-stones-I-collected-on-travels’), the job gets done far more quickly.
Once that’s over, the fun begins. Not only am I moving, I’m starting my first magazine column (incidentally, hi there) and a new job, a poetry-residency-cum-teaching-assistant role at a London school – the first paid role I’ve ever had with ‘poet’ in the title. That, as any poet will tell you, is a rare and jammy thing to wangle, especially if you’re new-ish. Do I feel guilty? Only slightly. It’s not going to be a breeze – proving I’m worth the extra salary will keep me on my toes – but, as a wordaholic, I honestly can’t think of much I’d rather do than help children unleash their creativity with words.
Speaking of creativity, it’ll soon be time to crack on with another job – namely, starting a poem. As part of another residency, I’ve been attending re-enactment events with the Battlefields Trust and gathering material for a pamphlet. With Bosworth’s 750th Anniversary looming, I’ve just had an e-mail: are there any poems I could read at the event this weekend, preferably on Richard III? Well, erm… no. After emailing last month to check if there was anything I should prepare, and getting no reply, I assumed I’d just be watching and scribbling ideas for later. A year ago that email would have triggered panic, but experience has left me more chilled. You’d be surprised how often this happens. Event organisers really don’t intend to muck the writer around – they just get to them last in the rush of sorting out all the other, more concrete tasks. Sadly, some do go one level up in douchebaggery, and assume that pulling decent writing out of thin air shouldn’t be a big deal, because ‘it’s your job’. Luckily, knowing this, you can prepare the cheat’s way like on Blue Peter. I may not have a poem for the weekend, but I have the ingredients.
When the residency started, even before I visited my first battlefield I started reading, watching documentaries and writing down all related thoughts – sometimes I thought of questions to ask myself to help me get into the frame of writing about war. How long, for instance, does it take to load a musket between shots, and how would you try to stop yourself fumbling in that time gap? How were corpses and decay treated as a topic in the Middle Ages? This type of mind-mapping is always my way in. Even when I begin crafting the poem itself, I rarely start with the first line, unless one pops up and the rest grows afterwards. If, as Lodge said, the first line of a novel is a threshold into another world, then it’s the same with poems… but this threshold is more like the entrance to a party. The way you walk in and greet people can make or ruin a first impression, and you don’t have long periods of time to grow into yourself. If you trip, or blurt out one inept word, that’s it. A poem that starts with a ‘clunk’ is dead in the water. The personal display aspect also creates problems; a novelist can be screened by their world, but poetry, being someone’s artistic reaction to an idea or theme, is by its very nature self-reflective. You can’t hide.
So how to enter a poem gracefully? Like the party, I suppose you have to balance enough subtlety to enter without disrupting the atmosphere with enough interest to grab attention. Many poems are ready-made, in that they are a pre-existing pool of images, ideas and statements – it’s just how you tap them. Out of curiosity I googled ‘starting poems’, and found an article by the Academy of American Poets, which asked six poets that question. Interestingly, a lot of them do what I do; they mind-map ages before starting anything, and let the ‘entrance’ come after the tone of the whole is set.
Cate Marvin expresses it perfectly: “I like to think of poets as moving through the world with their minds poised like nets, intent on capturing scraps of language, resonant images.” The world is waiting to be written, so we’re always mapping it first – poems are what follow. After all, you can’t decide where you start a walk without knowing the lay of the land, and which rocks lie under the surface. Once you’ve studied the surroundings, you can start planning the route. Only then can you choose a departure point.