visual-poetics

Books read in 2011 (last first)

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:56:00 +0000

68) Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels ( fiction - re-read)

67) Selected Poetry - Jenny Joseph (poetry)

66) Signs Around a Dead Body - Deryn Rees-Jones (poetry)

65) Vintage Sea - Marion McCready (poetry)

64) The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Seabold (non fiction)

63) Releasing Stone - David Morley (poetry)

62) A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor (non-fiction)

61) Off Road to Everywhere - Philip Gross (poetry)

60) Aged Fourteen My Grandfather Runs Away to Sea - Matt Kirkham (poetry)

59) Another Use of Canvas - Angus Sinclair (poetry)

58) The History of Love - Nicole Krauss (fiction)

57) Ordering the Storm - How to Put Together a Book of Poems - Susan Grimm (ed.) (poetry)

56) Terry Street - Douglas Dunn (poetry)

55) Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems - Alice Oswald (poetry)

54) Four Poets - UEA Creative Writing anthology 2011 (poetry)

53) Break no Bones - Kathy Reichs (fiction)

52) Knots and Crosses - Ian Rankin (fiction)

51) Black Cat Bone - John Burnside (poetry)

50) When God was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman (fiction)

49) The Water Table - Philip Gross (poetry, re-read)

48) Deepstep Come Shining - C.D. Wright (poetry)

47) Kennedy's Brain - Henning Mankell (fiction)

46) Rapture - Carol Ann Duffy (poetry)

45) Book of Matches - Simon Armitage (poetry)

44) Full Indian Rope Trick - Colette Bryce (poetry)

43) Unseen - Mari Jungstedt (fiction)

42) The Wasteland and Other Poems - T.S. Eliot (poetry)

41) The Good Angel of Death - Andrey Kurkov (fiction)

40) Slattern - Kate Clanchy (poetry)

39) Something and Nothing - Lynn Woollacott (poetry)

38) Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor (fiction)

37) Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope (poetry, re-read)

36) A Sampler - Partrick Yarker (poetry)

35) Escaping the Cage - Kate Scott (poetry)

34) After the Fire, A Still Small Voice - Evie Wyld (Fiction)

33) The Heel of Bernadette - Colette Bryce (poetry)

32) Seeing Stars - Simon Armitage (poetry - re-read)

31) What the Water gave Me - Pascale Petit (poetry)

30) The Triggering Town, Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing - Richard Hugo (non fiction)

29) Dog Language - Chase Twichell (poetry)

28) Nasty Little Intro #1 - Hannah Jane Walker (poetry)

27) Miming Silence - Bernadette Cremin (poetry)

26) How Not to Get Your Poetry Published - Helena Nelson (non fiction)

25) Corpus - Michael Symmons Roberts (poetry)

24) One Eye'd Leigh - Katherine Kilalea (poetry)

23) Ararat - Louise Gluck (poetry)

22) MUDe - John Redmond (poetry)

21) District and Circle - Seamus Heaney (re-read -poetry)

20) Enchantment - David Morley (poetry)

19) The Suitable Girl - Michelle Mcgrane (poetry)

18) A ha, 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit... - Jordan Ayan (non fiction)

17) The Wild Iris - Louise Gluck (poetry)

16) Electric Shadow - Heidi Williamson (poetry)

15) The Meanest Flower - Mimi Khalvati (poetry)

14) In the Country of Men - Hisham Matar (fiction)

13) Faber New Poets 6 - Annie Katchinska (poetry)

12) Faber New Poets 5 - Joe Dunthorne (poetry)

11) Faber New Poets 7 - Sam Riviere (poetry)

10) Shadow Tag - Louise Erdrich (fiction)

9) The Ghost Orchid - Michael Longley (poetry)

8) Legion - David Harsent (poetry)

7) Rachel Hore - The Memory Garden (fiction)

6) Double Vision - Pat Barker (fiction)

5) Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (fiction)

4) Captain Starlight's Apprentice - Kathryn Heyman (fiction)

3) Rain - Don Paterson (poetry)

2) Look We Have Coming to Dover - Daljit Nagra (poetry)

1) Things We Didn't see Coming - Steven Amsterdam (fiction)

SAVE

following your dream

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:23:00 +0000

I have been a bit slack on the blogging front recently. Sometimes life just gets in the way and what little creative time I have I try and dedicate to poetry and editing. Last week I decided to allow myself a day that I devoted mostly to reading. This seemed like a decadent and indulgent thing to do and my reaction to allowing myself to do it led me to look more closely at why I felt that way. I suspect it has a lot to do with the attitudes of the people who surrounded me in my younger life. Although my mother was an avid reader (and it was definitely my mother that instilled in me my love of books), many other people in my younger life viewed reading as an indulgence and a waste of time. My first serious partner for example (who was dyslexic) often used to ask me why I was reading - his attitude was that I could make far better use of my time by doing something more practical.

It may be that these attitudes were the thing that held me back from studying for so long, and even when I did come to study I felt that I had to study something practical. It was only relatively recently that I allowed myself to study something that was important to me and I did a creative writing degree and later an MA. My only regret is that I did not pursue my dream earlier. If I had to give advice to my younger self it would be - don't listen to all those doubting voices, follow your dream!

How to order a collection

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:13:00 +0000

So I have finally come back to thinking about putting a collection of poems - or at least a pamphlet sized collection - that I can send off to publishers. There are several reasons why I have been putting it off and these include lack of time and fear of rejection. Still the time has come and today I began thinking about how I would ever put the poems I have into some kind of order. This led me to thinking about what the overriding themes are within my work and I narrowed it down to: childhood/family, loss/alienation and other poems - it is these other poems that are the most problematical to place. Some of them are about place e.g. rivers, forests, journeys) but others are more abstract and harder to define. It is hard to know how to put this body of work together in any kind of comprehensible order. I have thought of moving through the work as if it is a life cycle starting with poems about childhood moving through to adulthood but that leaves me wondering how to place the poems about nature and other subjects. It also made me wonder do I mix my prose poems which are about a fictional family amongst more personal poems about childhood? These are difficult questions and as yet I have come up with no definite answers.

Writing Away

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:22:00 +0000

So there is something about being away from home that makes me write. I think it is to do with beinng away from the day to day pressure of trying to earn a living etc. But it is more than that too - sometimes all I have to do is simply get on a train and I get the urge to start writing - maybe it's to do with being in a space where I can't do anything else for a while. Being on holiday also puts me in that space and couple that with reading some inspirational poetry ("Infinite Differences: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets" edited by Carrie Etter) and I am well away. I just hope that when I come to typing up and editingv that there is some reasonable poetry...

Arvon Courses and writing exercises

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:28:00 +0000

Last week I was lucky enough to go on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank with tutors Philip Gross and Colette Bryce. The place is stunningly beautiful and we were lucky enough to have glorious sunshine every day. Philip and Colette are both excellent writers an d as you might expect the course was varied and inspiring. By the end of the week I felt like I had really clicked into full on writing mode. My only regret is that the course was not longer - I think I needed a couple of days at the end just to solidly write and edit. It is so easy to lose momentum once back in the world of the everyday and the internet. I have only been home a day or so and already I can feel my writing mind receding somewhat. I can really appreciate the benefits now of writing retreats and might endeavour to save up for one. Just a few days where I can solidly work on my collection without any distractions.

On the plus side I have two completed poems and the beginnings of several others - well more than beginnings but they still need some major editing. One of them was written mostly in a workshop at Lumb Bank. It is amazing how sometime doing a set exercise can inspire you to write something you wouldn't have written otherwise and on a subject you might not have necessarily chosen for yourself. For the exercise we were all given three slips of paper and told to write a word on each. The slips were then arranged on a table in the next room and we walked round the table and chose a word which we then went away and wrote about. The word I chose was water.

I think one of the other reasons the course was so inspiring was the high calibre of the other poets - I think that we were exceptionally luck that we had a wide age range and some really talented writers. It was similar to when I was doing my MA in that when you are with talented and inspiring writers it makes you step up your game and work that bit harder.

Hollyhock

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:04:00 +0000

That day my heart was a Hollyhock:

a deep flash of red

blooming on a pale stem.

Narrative Sequence

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:06:00 +0000

I am thinking about the narrative sequence, which seems a little ridiculous given that I am hardly writing any poems at the moment. But I am looking at them in preparation for the Arvon course I am going on next week. I don't think that there is much of a narrative sequence in my own poems - except for the prose poems, which definitely do go together - although at the moment I would say that they are a collection of poems about the same family rather than a sequence with any kind of logical order.

One of the recommended texts for the course is "Wild Iris" by Louise Gluck which, I am re-reading at the moment. I am not sure that I like the collection as much as some of her other work and it is hard to pin-point why exactly. I think it is maybe that her themes for the collection (apart from flowers) are the biggies - life, death, god etc, and although I know that most poetry (my own included) does cover these topics in some way, books that set out to look at them from the start often feel like hard work to read. Maybe I just like my poetry a bit closer to something real - as I said I don't know what it is I don't quite like about them.

I am wishing that I had a more portable copy of "Deepstep Come Shining" by C.D. Wright that I could take with me. Deepstep is one of my favourite narrative sequences (along with "Dart" by Alice Oswald) - what I like about both those books is the freshness of voice and the way the bigger subjects are in there along side very ordinary mundane day to day stuff. Both sequences also have strong voices, which is maybe something that I feel is lacking in "The Wild Iris".

It will be interesting to see how the tutors get us to look at sequences in regard to our own work. I haven't avoided writing one but just have not felt compelled to write for long periods on one subject. I suppose the closest I came was all the childhood poems that I wrote when I was doing my degree at the Art School.

Writer's Block

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:21:00 +0000

I am having a bit of a writing block at the moment, which could be in part due to my operation but not really sure if that is the only reason. Whatever the reason I need to get back on track with my writing and just at the moment I am not sure how to do it. Perhaps it is time to do some creative writing exercises...

The trouble with writing...

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 16:12:00 +0000

I have slacked off with my blog recently - not because I am lazy, but because I have been busy and I have been putting my writing energy into writing and editing poems as well as trying to send stuff out to journals etc. My Easter resolution was to be much more pro-active about submitting work and so far this seems to be paying off as I have already had two poems accepted.

Yesterday I printed a bunch of poems out to see if I had enough to put together a pamphlet sized collection. I find it really hard to know what to leave out and what to include - there is very little that I like of what I wrote at the art school and even of my MA work there are are only a few that I am really happy with. I wonder if I am too critical - the trouble with creative work is that generally as you evolve you go off your earlier work. I felt the same about my art work too and in fact I recently had a purge where I threw a lot of my old work away. I don't necessarily want to do that with my poems though, I suspect some of my earlier ones can be made better and maybe I will spend a bit of time trawling through them finding the ones that are worth saving.

Syllables and Endings

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:28:00 +0000

I have been reading The Triggering Town - Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo. I remember taking this book out of the library a couple of years ago when I was doing my Creative Writing degree but I can only assume that I never got around to reading it because I have no memory of the content - and I have had no feelings of deja-vu as I am reading. If you haven't read it I would recommend it. I have certainly been enjoying it and will probably go back and re-read some bits at a later date.

One of the bits I found really interesting was about the use of single-syllable and multi-syllabic words in poetry. I can't say that this is a topic that I have really thought about in great depth before. Hugo argues that multi-syllabic words have "a way of softening the impact of language" (p8) whereas single-syllable words get right to the point - they show toughness, rigidity, the warts and all world. With this in mind I re-looked at again at a poem I have been working on - it is about dead things and starts off alluding to dead rabbits hanging on a market stall when I was a child - sure enough the first stanza which is all about memory is full of multi-syllabic words (remind, childhood, rabbits, muzzles, marbles etc), whereas the last line is almost entirely made up of single syllable words. Obviously I am making this distinction unconsciously whilst I am writing. Maybe it is some kind of unspoken rule about the way we use language that is so ingrained in us that we do it without even realising. I am planning to look at some more poems tomorrow and see if the same rule has been applied. I suppose it could also help with those tricky endings - you know when that last line just isn't working and you just can't figure out why. I'm not keen on hard and fast rules about writing though so I think I will play it by ear!

The Ethics of Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:22:00 +0000

I am finding the latest book I have been given to review a challenging read. There seems to me to be a question of ethics. A few years ago when I was doing my creative writing degree someone posted a poem on the University Bulletin board about "chavs" - I can't remember much about it now except that it was quite derogatory. What I do remember though is the massive debate that ensued about the ethics of writing and posting such a poem, the uncomfortableness of humour at someone else's expense (something that is more acceptable in stand-up comedy but less so on the page), the judgement that is both made and invited when one produces such a poem. The general consensus seemed to be that it was not acceptable.

Therein lies the problem with the collection I am reading at the moment. The poet has written a series of poems about the seamier side of society but the very writing (and reading) of them feels like a judgement has either been made or is being invited. It is an uncomfortable feeling - maybe I would have feel comfortable if the poet was writing them in persona but they are observations. I would like to know how other people feel about this.

How to read out loud

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:27:00 +0000

Someone who is not really into poetry said to me at the weekend that he "got" my poems better when he heard me read them out loud. To begin with I was perturbed by this but then I realised that a most of my best work is MEANT to be read aloud. This doesn't work so well for the series of prose poems that I have been writing though, I just don't seem to know how to read them out. Tonight I am thinking that I might have to lay them out on the page differently for reading out - maybe breaking the text up. I am reluctant to do this though - they are written as prose poems surely they should be read out as such? - if I need to divide them up to read them better then surely that should be how I present them too? It's a dilemma.

And talking of reading aloud I saw Alice Oswald read at UEA a couple of weeks ago and she was awesome. The best reader I have seen since I saw Robin Robertson last year. I love her work anyway but she was a mesmerising reader, absolutely spell-binding.

Whether to Read Out Loud

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:03:00 +0000

Over the last year or so I have been writing a series of prose poems that are written in the specific voice of a youngish girl. I like the poems but I am feeling unsure how well they will work when read aloud (especially in my adult voice). My question is are there times when poems work better on the page than read aloud or do I just need to bite the bullet and have a go at reading them? I like to think that most good poetry works well read out loud and that in fact poetry SHOULD be read out loud wherever possible. I am not sure why am feeling so uncertain about this particular sequence, especially because I think the work itself is quite strong. I guess you know where you are with more regular poem shapes - you have the line breaks that give you indicators of where to pause when reading. In theory the punctuation should serve the same purpose in a prose poem, however the nature of the poems is that they are written in a stream of conciousness style, which is easier to cope with on the page than read out loud.

Things that stop you writing

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:29:00 +0000

Writing and editing are slow at the moment. I have lots of good excuses for this - I am too busy, my work space has been suffering a plague of noise from the builders across the road, I am lacking in inspiration, worry about money, trying to find work, needing to go on a trip etc. The truth is that they are all true and none of them are. I am indeed suffering from being busy and lack of inspiration - but what exactly is it that makes us write? And what is it that at other times brings the creative process to a grinding halt. It is all to easy to blame outside factors but as any good Zen master would tell you peace and creativity come from within. When I am stressing about money, work or noise it is because I am choosing to hear those niggly worrying voices inside me over the calmer more creative ones. This is probably why many people take up meditation (and I have lots of good reasons for not doing that either!) it can put you in touch with that calmer part of your psyche.

I am feeling like I need to make a real effort to claim back my creative life from all the other things that I am allowing to encroach on it. Wish me luck...

Motivation and self-imposed deadlines

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:16:00 +0000

I was talking to a writer friend earlier in the week about how one can keep oneself motivated post MA. I am finding that my writing, but more especially my editing, has become sporadic now that I don't have deadlines to write for. I guess that one answer would be to set my own deadlines, but I know from experience that I don't adhere to my own deadlines in the same way - I thrive under that outside pressure, it gives me that extra push to work on my poems that bit harder. I am also quite slack about submitting work to journals and competitions - yet I know that this is the way to get your work known, it doesn't make sense. Last year I used the excuse of not having enough money as I was a student - yet I am still hardly submitting, I need to sort it out. My friend said that he is the same, he will have a flurry of sending stuff off and then not send any for a while - he thought maybe it was to do with rejection, and he could be right. Rejection is something that as emerging writers we have to learn to live with but it can be hard sometimes.

On a more positive note I have had had two websites ask if they can use my poems this week. I was flattered and although they weren't offering money I said yes. It is just good to get the work out there. As sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow says "an artist's enemy is obscurity..."

The making of good prose

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:37:00 +0000

I have been reading quite a few novels recently and have found myself wondering - do poets make better prose writers? I can't help but read prose with a poet's eye for detail and because of this I am keenly aware of mistakes, mixed metaphors and unintentional repetitions - things that you would never get away with in (good) poetry. It seems that one can be more sloppy in prose writing.

I am currently reading "Double Vision" by Pat Barker. It is not a bad book although I would not call it literary, the story is compelling but I feel that it could have been better edited. There are repetitions of description - for example she uses the metaphor of fire to describe the way light falls on snow or ice, the first time it was fresh and original but she uses it three times in as many pages. There are also other annoying little niggles - most of the time the characters either drink coffee or whiskey whatever the time of night or day - this seemed unrealistic to me, not many people roused in the night by nightmares would choose coffee as their drink of choice.

This may be nitpicking and it could be that being so successful means that Barker is less rigorously edited by other people - a criticism which is often levelled at J.K. Rowling. But it made me think about the books I come back to again and again because not only are they good stories but they are well written, and I realised that most of the authors I love are also poets (Louise Erdrich, Anne Michaels, Paul Auster, Mervyn Peake). As a poet the economy of words used means that you have to be more rigorous with your editing - there is no choice, so it follows that this would also apply to your prose writing. However I also find that fiction writers who are also poets use language in fresh and original ways. That's not to say that there aren't fresh and original prose writers because of course there are.

This led me to look at what I as a reader want from a book. What makes a book great for me is if I am moved by both the story and the writing. With Pat Barker's book the story is moving but the writing itself is not. Maybe I am greedy but I want both, I want the prose to have that indefinable quality that makes it memorable and makes me want to read it again.

Maps, Memories and Editing

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:48:00 +0000

It is always interesting taking a poem to a workshopping group. although sometimes it can be a little nerve-wracking. You can never anticipate how other people will read your poem or what they will read into it. The poem I took to my group yesterday was about a specific memory - but what I found interesting was that when the others read it they saw it as fantasy rather than a memory. Thinking it about it afterwards I realised that the poem has many layers but these layers are not all easily apparent to the reader. The first idea is that life is viewed as a map or a series of maps, the second is that memory is used as a means of escape from unwanted thoughts - here memory is also used as a kind of fantasy - although the fantasy is something real that is remembered.

Here is the first few lines (but bear in mind it does need a lot more work:

If you travel far and fast enough

you might even escape

the unrolled map of your childhood,

you might sneak off its edges

and into some dream of narrow lanes

high hedges, man made hills.

In a place like this

you might find yourself

under a canal bridge with a small boy

blowing on a harmonica beside you,

watching birds skimming the water...

In the poem at the moment the idea of the map is in the first and last stanza but not in the ones in between and it was suggested that more could be made of the maps which I think is an interesting idea. I was not worried that they viewed it as a fantasy rather than a memory - the beauty of sharing is that sometimes other people read something in a completely different way than the writer intended. Some people get irate about this but I don't mind it - if I did I would simply re-edit to try and make my meaning more implicit.

Poetry Readings, Telephone Boxes and Interpreting Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:36:00 +0000

Last night I gave a short reading (three poems) at the "Salon" event at The Arts Centre. The Salon is run by Writers' Centre Norwich and is primarily a networking event with a couple of short readings. I was very nervous about reading as it was not really a "poetry crowd", but I had some great feedback afterwards.

image courtesy of Jrennie84

One man I talked to wanted to discuss the meaning of my poem Telephone Box - he thought that the message I was trying to convey was that it is harder to talk to someone who is far away than someone who is nearby - say in the next house. This is an over-simplified view of the line in question: "it is difficult to talk over distances and mean anything" - I think that the meaning of this line is less literal but more metaphorical, it is emblematic of human relationships and the difficulty of human interaction. I believe that it is more difficult to communicate effectively over any distance, big or small, than it is to communicate with someone face to face. However greater physical distance also affects the way the mind views the separation and this can increase the potential for miscommunication and feelings of alienation.

The fact that the conversation in the poem takes place in a telephone box serves to increase the sense of isolation and disaffection of the speaker. There is, however, a deeper meaning than the one conversation. The poem could be said to be about the wider human experience of miscommunication and alienation - experiences that go beyond those of a phone-call but that can happen when you are speaking to someone in the flesh. With human interaction there often comes a large or small level of evasiveness and a lack of complete honesty. People also understand and interpret one another's words in terms of their own experience (ego if you like) and their own particular state of mind at the time the interaction takes place. We also look for hidden meaning in one another's words using the tools available to us - reading of facial expressions, what we know about the speaker and their history etc. All this means that even when you are talking face to face there is plenty of room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and consequently alienation.

I chose the vehicle of the telephone call to convey this idea of how humans have trouble communicating with one another - the telephone box itself reinforces the idea of separateness, how ultimately we are all alone.

A Bit About Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:20:00 +0000

I have been trying to observe my writing habits this week. I already know that I write much more if I write my morning pages regularly but this week I have also noticed that a catalyst to writing (or a change to writing style) can be a change of notebook.

Earlier on this year I went to a poetry workshop at Writers' Centre Norwich with John Mcauliffe and he talked about how his poetry writing was affected by the size of notebook he chose to write in. He said that he had started taking a bigger notebook out with him so that his writing was less limited and had longer lines. I had never really paid attention to this before and have experimented with varying the size of book I take out - although for convenience I do normally end up with quite a small one.

What I noticed this week, however, was that my writing became more sparky when I started writing in a new notebook. I always have several notebooks on the go - my writing is messy I guess, a bit like me, I generally have a large notebook (A4) that I use for morning pages and writing at home and one or two smaller ones that I carry around for writing in when I am out. I also try and buy notebooks that are quite attractive - it seems to help my creative process somehow to have an inspiring notebook, so it's great when I get given them as presents - they may stay on a shelf for ages but I always use them eventually. This week I noticed a book that had been sitting unused on my piano for quite some time, it had been given to me as a present over a year ago and for some reason the time had never been right to use it. Yesterday, however, I picked it up and opened it and the ideas just started to flow. It was a little like having a change of scene but without having to go anywhere.

The other thing that is nearly always guaranteed to trigger writing for me if I am feeling creatively constipated is reading. If you don't read other poets you can't be a good poet yourself - I really believe it as simple as that! It would be a bit like trying to create art without ever having seen any art or knowing what art is. For me it is a vital part of the creative process. I do, like anyone else, have those times where I try to read book after book and nothing inspires me and in those times I usually turn to the few favouritess that I go back to again and again. I have a whole host of favourite poetry books, but there seem to certain ones that galvanise me into wanting to write more than others - I'm not sure why those books in particular - it must be something about the voice or the writing style. Two such books are Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lehoczky and Like Something Flying Backwards by C.D. Wright.

Escaping the Thought Rut

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:39:00 +0000

I seem to be a bit immobilized at the moment by weather and health but I am trying to make the most of it by reading and working my way through a book called How to Write a Poem by John Redmond. It might seem like quite a basic title but actually I am finding it really useful. The chapter titles are what you would expect from this type of book - basic stuff like "Viewpoint", "Image", "The Question of Voices" etc, but they are well written and each chapter has a writing task at the end related to the chapter that you have just read.

I love this kind of book - I think that however practised a writer you are it doesn't hurt to go back over the basics once in a while. Sometimes you might learn something new or be reminded of something that you have forgotten. I find the writing exercises really helpful too - anything that takes you out of your own thinking rut (and we all have one) has got to be good and occasionally they have inspired a really good poem that I may not have otherwise written.

Book Groups and Writing Dilemmas

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:08:00 +0000

It is great that post MA I am still writing, but I have observed in myself of late a distinct lack of discipline when it comes to editing. In fact I have done virtually no editing at all since the MA ended - I can only surmise that it is the lack of any definite deadline that has made me so lazy.

Instead I have been putting quite a lot of energy into preparation for the poetry book group I am running. There were five of us at the first meeting but quite a few more people have said that they are interested in coming - although I suspect that the snow might put a few people off this week! I have enjoyed the research aspect (must be the perpetual student in me!) - writing questions, looking up difficult words etc. and I have started posting the notes I have made onto a new blog, which you can find at poetry book group if you are interested. This month we are looking at "Dart" by Alice Oswald.

A friend in one of my workshopping groups recently commented that my writing seemed a lot more relaxed now I was not on the MA. I wasn't sure what she meant exactly but I found it an interesting comment and have since have tried to examine whether this is true and if so why. It is hard to tell if my writing became uptight as a result of my mother dying or being on the MA, or a combination of the two. I also find myself wondering if this new relaxedness within my writing is a good thing or a bad thing. I liked the change in direction that my work took during my final semester at UEA, I have written before about my reluctance to be pigeon-holed as a writer who only writes about the human condition and dysfunction, but I have also experienced some resistance to this change in direction from some of my writing buddies who felt that some of the new work more rural work didn't have quite the edge that my previous work had. Initially I was annoyed and alarmed by this - I wondered what would happen if I could no longer write about anything personal. I think it was an aberration though, probably caused by the death of my mother and everything that surrounded it, and I am finally starting to write some more human stuff again.

Writing slumps and prose poems

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:10:00 +0000

I went into a bit of a slump after my dissertation. I knew that it was going to be hard when the course ended - there is always an element of grieving when something comes to an end. What I didn't anticipate was that I wouldn't be able to write. I went into a kind of writing wasteland, I wasn't even inspired to write any blog posts and this went on for several weeks.

I am happy to report though that I have, if somewhat tentatively, started writing again. I wrote several small things last week, one of which was a prose poem. The prose poem is an interesting development. I wrote my first one in the first term of my MA. David and I had gone to Derbyshire for a short holiday and we were staying in an old (and damp) cottage by a church at the top of a hill. I don't know if it was the change of scenery but I found myself writing in a completely different style to usual. I wrote a poem which I originally called "Sin-Eating" and is now called "Lent". The poem is written in a child's voice and has a slightly American feel to it. The narrator is part of a large religious family and the poem is a kind of stream of conciousness narration. I was pleased with it and it drew a good response from my MA class who requested that I write more in the same vane. Unfortunately though, this didn't happen - no more writing in this style was forthcoming and I wondered if it was perhaps a fluke, a one-off inspired by being in an unfamiliar environment. When I was writing the poems for my dissertation however, another prose poem emerged and appeared to be in the same voice as the first one, and then last week I found myself writing another. I was surprised but pleased and am wondering if over time they will develop into a small collection.

Just The Beginning?

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:44:00 +0000

So my creative dissertation has been handed in and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. My writing over the course of the last year has changed dramatically. I came to the MA writing mainly semi-autobiographical poems about my dysfunctional family and growing up on a Thetford council estate. But recently I have moved away from using my past as the main subject of the poems. The need to write such deeply personal and uncomfortable poetry seemed to dissipate somewhat with the death of my mother and although what I was writing was still personal it had a different register and was more universally accessible. I found I no longer felt the need to write solely about childhood but was drawn to new subject matter. It was as if my mother’s passing and the end of what had become a difficult relationship had released me from the need to keep going back over old ground. I found myself in new writing territory. The journeys within my poems changed from the child’s journey into adulthood to physical journeys through real landscape. My reading matter has reflected this and I have been drawn to the river poems of Alice Oswald, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Philip Gross.

I felt a sense of trepidation when I began these new poems. I wasn’t used to writing without the recognizable anchor of the past and was worried that without the obvious human element that the poems might lack something vital. I didn’t want them to be purely descriptive. I also began to find that the language available to me somehow wasn’t adequate for what I wanted to express and I wanted to change it somehow. I tried to do this by using compound adjectives, a technique that Seamus Heaney often uses and one that I have always liked. I used this technique a lot when I first started writing poetry seriously. I also found myself wanting to play with the form of the poems. I have never been a fan of concrete poetry but these new poems felt like they needed to move around on the page. Redcastle Furze, for instance, felt flat in its early drafts - once I started moving the text around and took out the punctuation it gained a new momentum. The final version echoes the physical path that the narrator takes through the estate as well as giving clear emphasises when read aloud (projective poetry).

…the page can be used like a canvas, the lines stuck like pieces of a collage, or the page can be air, giving the lines room to move like the parts of a mobile.[1]

From the journey poems it seemed a natural progression to write from my personal rural experiences – I lived for ten years in a commune and also travelled around staying in other communities during that time. From this time I drew inspiration for poems about wooding and milking cows (although only the cow poems made it into the dissertation).

By semester three I finally began to feel that I understood how to be rigorous with my editing: to recognize weaker lines (not as easy as it sounds) and what works/doesn't work. My practice now is to go back again and again when I feel a poem is finished and take out even more lines and words than I have would have done before. I have also learnt to detach myself from the subject matter and the need to include every detail when writing from direct experience – a poem is not an autobiography – to hold too tightly to the facts when writing can lead to a poem that doesn't make senses or excludes the reader. It is the greater truth rather than the actual truth of an experience that is the crux of a poem. A useful bit of advice given to me by a tutor was to examine each element of the poem separately – e.g. metaphor, punctuation or line endings. I used to try to look at everything at once and this made for much sloppier editing as well as an overwhelming feeling of where do I begin. I have also found it helpful to write down the imperative of each poem. The imperative is not the subject matter - for instance the subject of The Mound is a children's playground but the imperative is the loss of innocence. It is not always easy to know what the imperative is, even in one's own poems, and this is where work-shopping can be invaluable. My block this semester has been in editing rather than writing. Yare Song was problematic and eventually I put it away for a month before looking at it again. This worked as when I finally came back to it I immediately saw that I needed to cut more lines out rather than add lines to it – I had been stifling the imperative with uninteresting description.

The MA has been an exciting journey for me. My subject area has widened considerably and my writing has gone in new and exciting directions. Someone said to me recently that a previous student on the course had told her that it was only six months after the course had finished that she finally began to realise the profound effect that it had had on her - it's like you need that time to really begin to process and assimilate the intense learning journey you have been on. I feel for me that although I can see a real progression in my work: especially between my first and final submissions, in some ways, my journey has just begun.

The lost art of punctuation

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:45:00 +0000

I realized today that I haven't written a blog post for almost a month. I was away for a week of that time but the real reason for not posting is that I have been too busy writing, editing and re-editing my work. It feels like a struggle. Just when I think that a poem is finished I take it to a workshop and realise that there is more work to be done. I am trying not to get down about it. I know that the more I work on them the more rigorous I am being but at the same time I am trying not to repeat the mistake of over-editing until the heart has gone. These extra edits are generally small - losing words, phrases or lines and playing around with punctuation.

Talking of punctuation - I seem to have suddenly lost the art of knowing how to use it properly. I have never had a huge problem with it before - except perhaps the occasional over-usage of commas - but this semester I am struggling with it. part of the trouble is that it feels like the rules of punctuation should be different for poetry - if you took a poem and wrote it out as prose (I have tried this) and punctuate it like prose then reformat it as a poem it often feels over punctuated. I seem to be erring towards wanting less and less punctuation within my poems. Maybe it is to do with their subject matter - journey poems and poems about nature seem to warrant different treatment from the poems that I was writing before which were mostly about human concerns and very personal. Those semi-autobiographical poems seemed to need similar treatment (if a slightly lighter hand) to prose poems.

I came across an interesting blog on the subject of punctuation within poetry which you can read here

It's in the Editing...

noreply@blogger.com (Julia) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:07:00 +0000

I think I have finally realised what it means to be more rigorous with my poetry editing. The trick is: to learn how to recognize the weaker lines (not always as easy as it sounds); to get feedback about what works and what doesn't (what seems blindingly obvious to the writer may leave the reader completely flummoxed! The trick with that one is to detach oneself from the subject matter - especially if it based on a real place/person/event) and then to carefully question each part of the poem and look at how/if it is working, look for clichés (can you say it in a more unusual/interesting way?) check out whether or not your metaphors are working and whether they are conflicting with one another (for instance in a recent poem I had children swarming like ants but in the next line they were worming through a tube - these are conflicting metaphors that could confuse the reader).

Another practice I have been finding really useful as part of my editing process is to look at each poem and try and write down what I think the imperative is. The imperative is not the subject matter - for instance the subject matter of the poem I mentioned earlier was a children's playground but the imperative of the poem is the loss of innocence - how things seems different as we grow up and how we try and hold onto that innocence. It is not always easy to know what the imperative is, even of one's own poems and this is where work-shopping can be invaluable. Once your work has been critiqued it is good to try and explain what the work is really about (if it wasn't clear already). When I work-shoppped my poem about the playground for the first time it became clear to me by the end that the poem wasn't actually achieving the goal I had set it and I was able to rectify this with a few simple changes.