Alma Poetry Projects to Make and Do

Getting your poetry out into the world
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-913437-63-3
Verlag: Nine Arches Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 246 Seiten

Poetry Projects to Make and Do, edited by Deborah Alma, The Emergency Poet, is a 'how to' handbook of essays, prompts, advice, and ideas designed to help both aspiring and established poets find new ways not only to create new poetry, but to share and take it out into the world through collaboration, projects, performances - and more. With an array of real-life examples from experienced poets, Poetry Projects to Make and Do provides imaginative case-studies and inspiration for readers to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. Each essay encourages experimentation alongside plenty of practical tips and guidance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alma, Deborah

Leseproben

Roz Goddard

Netting the Golden Fish: Reading Like a Poet

When I was a teenager in the seventies filling notebooks with outpourings of dark feelings and notions, my father paid good money to have my poems published. I spotted a small ad in the Daily Mirror asking poets to submit their best poems for inclusion in an anthology – which I duly did. The reply was encouragingly swift and let me know I was the new Sylvia Plath and could I send £40 for inclusion in the anthology? My dad paid up. The anthology, when it arrived, was a green exercise book with my poems squashed toward the bottom of page eighty-three. I’ve never forgotten the disappointed surprise tinged with shame – it woke me up somewhat. I knew nothing then. I didn’t read poetry. Why bother? I was a genius. I like to think Dad’s money wasn’t wasted – I read lots of poetry now, some of which are fully accessible in the library of my heart.

My long-time friend and poet Jonathan Davidson is an advocate of reading poems slowly, giving them their due attention, often returning to them over a period of years. On a recent walk, he produced from his wallet a fragile and many-times folded copy of the W. S. Graham poem ‘Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons’ – a poem that has been a companion to him for over thirty years: “when solace is required, it is this little piece of genius that I reach for.”

In his recently published essay ‘The Slow Poetry Movement’ (Redden Press, 2023), he advocates experiencing “as deeply as possible the pleasures and illuminations that can unfold from spending time with a poem”. I agree.

I can remember the moment I came across Katherine Mansfield’s poem ‘Pulmonary Tuberculosis’. It felt like I’d been waiting for it my whole life – an ‘Oh, I see’ moment. I seemed to have gone beyond my initial comprehension of the poem – an intellectual understanding if you like – to access a deeper resonance that tapped into an experience of illness I instinctively knew could open significant doors to new ways of thinking for me.

Mansfield suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis for much of her life and was regularly treated in sanatoriums for her illness. Here’s the poem:

Pulmonary Tuberculosis

The man in the room next to mine has the same complaint

as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he

coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he

coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are

like two roosters calling to each other at a false dawn. From

far-away hidden farms.

Since I was young, I’ve been deeply affected by illness. My mother was gravely ill when I was a child and I remember that painful, twilight time of not knowing whether she would live or die. During those days of my mother’s illness, reading became a sanctuary in the uncertainty and sadness. I read Johanna Spyri’s Heidi over and over, finding thrill and solace in a child’s life on the mountainside under the big, open sky – a fantasy landscape far from my Black Country street with its booming power forges and mysterious warehouses. The stoicism and beauty of the Mansfield poem appeals to me: the scene, the stuckness of two people in illness – together but separate. They are fellow travellers communicating beyond words. It illustrates the tenderness and compassion that can be felt when witnessing the pain of others – it’s a poem about our human predicament and the choices we have in how we deal with sorrow and helplessness. Mansfield is an observer of her experience as well as being in it.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2020 and, during that time of deep anxiety, I returned to this poem to remind myself that I’m not alone and also that I have a choice about how I view and assimilate my experience.

If I can bear to be with the pain of diagnosis, what it might mean for my future, be tender with the experience – it could be helpful.

Our reading choices are always telling us something about where we’re at in our lives. Currently my addiction to soft-boiled crime fiction is telling me I’m feeling overwhelmed in my life and need to carve out some time to enter the world of forensic archaeology, sand dunes and peril that isn’t my own. I’m pulled along by the propulsive narrative, lightly-sketched characters and a desire for certainty my own life can’t deliver. If I reflect on my reading habits – it always brings me closer to myself; getting closer to myself opens up my choices about how I live – I’m observing rather than simply consuming.

I often lead poetry writing workshops and begin the session with a period of mindful reading practice – an opportunity to read in silence together, uninterrupted in a conducive space. Maybe you’d like to try it for twenty minutes? Here goes: Select a book pretty much at random from your shelf. Sit down somewhere comfy and, as you read, become aware of how you’re reading. This might include noting the pace you read: fast or slow? Is the text causing a particular response? Maybe it’s speaking deeply to you or causing resistance. Notice what’s resonating. Stay with the words or phrases, perhaps writing down what you find interesting. Is the text speaking deeply to you? What’s it saying? How does it make you feel?

It’s an instructive exercise as it’s rare to examine how we read rather than what we’re reading. I was recently reading a poet new to me and was surprised by how resistant I was to the work: it was thematically challenging and formally difficult, and my attention regularly drifted off. During a pause, I wondered how this might be a richer experience for me – the answer was to give the poetry a better quality of attention; my mind was dismissing the work too soon.

I often follow the mindful reading session with a led meditation which you’ll find in the appendix – it seems to be a good companion to the sense of awareness that’s been developed from mindful reading. As a practising Buddhist, I meditate regularly. Meditation has been described as the “art of being with oneself” or as Alan Watts has written “being in the eternal flow”. It’s a stillness practice that brings me back to myself by deepening my awareness of feelings, emotions and thoughts – like catching a net of golden fish as they swim up. What I discover can be surprising, difficult, beautiful. I’ve found that sitting still over a period of time opens up new spaces in my heart and mind into which diverse ideas have the opportunity to incubate and flower – in other words, the ideal conditions for new poems to emerge.

I’m currently fascinated by Zuihitsu, a form of Japanese poetry that feels like a poetic partner to meditation. In her 2006 collection of poems, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Kimiko Hahn muses on its definition. She looks for something that comes close to “a sense of disorder that feels so integral” and finds Donald Keene’s definition that, with its urgency and instinctual composition, Zuihitsu “follows the impulse of the brush”.

I wanted to explore the idea of following the ‘impulse of the pen’. Those of us who have attended writing workshops over the years will be familiar with the automatic writing ‘killing the white’ or freewriting exercise designed to subvert the judging mind and produce a more natural flow of writing. I’m discovering in my own writing that by going deeper into an image or feeling, a rich flow of fragments and juxtapositions start to shine that seem to come from a place between the heart and the belly – a flow around a theme combined with a surprising tone that I’m enjoying.

Meditation and silence have helped me conceive and approach a different way of writing – not an intellectual, thought-through process but rather an instinctive response to the deepest rivers of my feelings and experience, being alive to what it means to be alive in all its complexity and how I might express that creatively.

Recently, I’ve returned to keeping a journal as a way of systematically accessing my thoughts and feelings – trying to truthfully record how I feel about the heartache and joys of my life. I returned to Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, first published in 1934, in which she discovers that keeping a journal enables her to “plunge into the deeper waters of the mind … suggesting creatures whose ways I did not know.”

Her journal becomes a deep, and faithful record of her loves, hates and fears. Writing a journal seems to be a way of subverting the thinking mind, illuminating what I don’t know about myself in surprising and exhilarating ways.

After all, writing poetry is not a rational pursuit. I find thinking to be the enemy of writing poetry – particularly in the drafting stage. I recently shared a manuscript in progress with my editor; she enjoyed a section that had been written full pelt, Zuihitsu-style from the belly. I like it too, it’s full of blood and energy.

I came across a YouTube video of poet Ocean Vuong talking about his approach to teaching (he’s Professor of Creative Writing at NYU). He “doesn’t centre criticism”, rather the first five weeks in an Ocean Vuong poetry workshop is about encouraging students to “name...