On Don Paterson's 'Lyric Principle'

Last night I found myself reading the second part of Don Paterson's controversial essay, The Lyric Principle - having found it impossible to wade through when it first appeared (in Poetry Review Vol 97:3 Autumn 2007) - and decided to blog about it.

I had read Part I of The Lyric Principle and enjoyed it (though not as much as Paterson's equally controversial 'Dark Art of Poetry', the 2004 T.S. Eliot lecture, which struck many chords with me). I did try to get into Part II when the magazine came out, but at the time the prose felt torturous and impossibly weighed down with abstruse detail, along with voluminous footnotes worthy of a spoof academic essay. So I gave up the effort.

But last night, flicking through some of last year's poetry magazines in search of a particular poet, I came across the essay again (Part II) and began to read it.

This time, for some reason, the difficulties I'd experienced back in the autumn were no longer apparent. Everything, in fact, made good clear sense.

Indeed, his remarks made such good sense that, aware of the various outraged 'letters to the editor' that had appeared in the wake of their publication, I couldn't work out why The Lyric Principle was so very controversial. After all, what was there to argue about?

Paterson's main point in Part II, very basically, is that good poetry works because it takes account of our innate preference for pattern and surprise. Which is just another way of saying what all good writers know instinctively, that we should 'give them what they want, but not the way they were expecting it'.

I can't recall, and don't have the earlier Poetry Review to hand, how Part I was controversial, though from reactions in the subsequent issue, I suspect the furore may have been caused by claims that poetry should work in the same way as music, and/or that sound can't be separated from sense. I can't see anything to get upset about there either. But perhaps I missed the point ...

I can understand some people being more sceptical about all this, and perhaps feeling ruffled by the occasional note of hubris behind Paterson's writings, but I'm naturally excited by anything that combines the two great obsessions in my life: language (i.e. linguistics) and poetry.

I can't overstate that position, really. I am, and always have been, hugely resistant to anyone setting themselves up as a figure of authority. It's a knee-jerk reaction on my part to distrust whatever they might say, regardless. But to be given carte blanche by an acknowledged expert on contemporary poetry to continue doing precisely what I've been doing since I first started knocking out my own doggerel at c. 9 years of age, i.e. turning the dial until I can't hear the hiss of the static anymore, is both a relief and a great pleasure.

But not only that. Paterson's detailed list of which consonant and vowel sounds complement each other rather than clash in the poetic line leads neatly into my own personal observations on the similarities between languages, those startling correlatives you come across once you start looking in-depth at a number of different languages - even between languages not belonging to the same 'family'. And once you've been working with a heavily stressed medium like Anglo-Saxon poetry for any length of time, you do tend to respond favourably to the idea that some vowel sounds in some words - though this can also vary according to whether they are in a stressed or unstressed position in the line - are simply 'filler' and should be avoided; the poetic equivalent of fish paste.

So if anyone out there has a good idea why so many people seemed to react poorly to The Lyric Principle, perhaps they could enlighten me?

Last Oak

Last Oak

Soot sunk oak tree, tarred question mark
trying-to-be-trunk,
it had stood
since the last forest burnt, blind old man
surrounded by stumps
still smoking creosote, an unlit tower
scoured and bare
yet proud in its final hours as mad Lear
in his wreath of dead weeds
or Ginsberg’s locomotive sunflower,
peering through red mist
to where sun was,
its last leaf-memory of green,
green things and wild.


*


This poem was published in Seam poetry magazine last autumn. The new issue of Seam is due out in the next few months (it's published twice yearly) so I'm hoping the editor - also a poet, Anne Berkeley – won't mind too much if I reproduce that poem now on Raw Light.

'Last Oak' was originally intended to form part of a book-length poem sequence based around a quasi-eschatological and environmental theme. That's how I envisaged it during the act of writing, anyway. This link will take you to a previous blog post about the Seam launch last year, by the way, where I discuss that unfinished sequence further.

In the end, of course, only four or five poems from that sequence - provisionally entitled End of Days - were ever written. And of that meagre handful, I imagine that only two will make the cut for Camper Van Blues, my third poetry collection, due out later this year from Salt Publishing.

'Last Oak' is definitely one of them ...

An Odd Week

Frost and swollen tonsils.
Broken-down cars and confusion.

Too many children with sick bowls.
Putting the third collection to bed.

Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
(Sermon of the Wolf to the English).
Ovid's Metamorphoses.

And the new Ashes to Ashes:
"The prozzie's about to be rescued
by three armed bastards!"

Warwick Castle: a first visit

My version of The Wanderer continues. Slowly, painstakingly. About four lines a day on average. This must be the longest it's ever taken me to write a single poem. Perhaps I ought to be worried. Still, this being a translation/version, I suppose it should be possible to take a good month over the composition without losing the thread ... after all, this poem's been kicking about for so many hundreds of years, it's not going anywhere.

The big news is, I finally organised myself to visit Warwick Castle this weekend. And I was impressed. The place had an immediate and profound effect on me; I could feel lines and phrases carving themselves out on the air as I wandered about its high-ceilinged halls and narrow stone passageways.


For those unsure what this visit is all about, I decided back in October - on becoming Poet Laureate for Warwick - that I wanted to write some poems about Warwick Castle - once in decline, now beautifully restored and one of the best examples of a 'working' medieval castle in England.

My friend Julie Boden, based here in Warwickshire and herself a former Birmingham Poet Laureate, advised me early on to decide what sort of legacy I wanted to leave behind once my stint in the Laureateship was over. And while I had all sorts of grandiose schemes in mind, the only one that's really stuck has been this simple idea of writing about Warwick Castle.


Oddly enough, David Morley was also there this weekend, a major Warwickshire poet and the writer in charge of the creative writing programme at Warwick University; I spotted him in the 'medieval' cafeteria, lunching with his family, and went over to say hello.

Apparently fancying himself as the man from Porlock, David stopped for a quick word a few minutes later while I was scribbling down some notes and phrases over a latté. Luckily, I have no intention of starting to write any of the Warwick poems until much later this year, so his efforts were in vain!

Basically, my visits this weekend have been purely preliminary, just looking about the place and setting my mind in motion. But it's proved an extremely worthwhile thing to do, far beyond what I had initially envisaged.

At first, I thought Warwick Castle might provide inspiration for two or three poems. But having received such strong vibes both from the castle and its grounds, I've got a hunch this could easily become a much longer-term project.

Time to start blocking in 'Warwick Castle poems' on the calendar, perhaps.

Back to the Wanderer

Re my recent post about Don Paterson and losing the thread of my Wanderer translation, I'm pleased to report that all the controversy has been absorbed into my bloodstream now and I'm translating the poem again.

Though perhaps I should say versioning, since although many parts of my poem are a straight translation from the Anglo-Saxon, I've taken one drastic step away from the original, with the result that it can only ever be a version now.

Please note though, I haven't changed my opinion of Don Paterson's views on translation. I've simply revised my opinion. Which is entirely in keeping with my character.

Meanwhile, in my capacity as Warwick Poet Laureate this year, I've been commissioned to write a poem on the history of circus elephants in Leamington Spa.

Beat that for sheer randomness.


----------------
Now playing: Julius Katchen, Georg Solti; London Symphony Orchestra - Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, I. Moderato
via FoxyTunes

Blogging instead of Tinkering

Just a quickie this morning. As the bishop said to the actress.

Trying to avoid tinkering away at my current poetry manuscript - due at Salt Publishing roughly within the next six weeks - I did a random sweep of the blogs this morning, and noticed that Ben Wilkinson's blog, 'Deconstructive Wasteland', is shaping up to be quite an interesting read, poetry-wise.

Check it out here.

The Controversial Art of Translation

As I'm currently translating The Wanderer, a tightly-constructed poem in Anglo-Saxon of some 120 lines, I turned to Don Paterson's 'Orpheus' this weekend for some inspiration, as the last few pages of 'Orpheus', his free version of Rilke's famous sonnet sequence, are taken up with notes on the difference between translating and versioning.

At first I was impressed, almost mesmerised, by his highly intelligent and persuasive prose. But as I began to see how his opinions were negatively impacting on my confidence as a poet-translator, I became annoyed. Paterson freely admits that his argument is almost wholly a defence of those who - like himself - 'translate' poetry without a strong understanding of the original language. But that doesn't prevent him from becoming overly-rigid and dogmatic about the issue.

Paterson believes that you must either translate a poem - which is ultimately pointless in verse because it's almost impossible to get the sense and the spirit of the thing down in poetry - or write your own version of it - i.e. essentially a new poem - without bothering too much about being true to the original.

'If, through naivety or over-ambition, both translation and version are attempted simultaneously,' Paterson writes, 'the result is foredoomed.' (p. 81, Orpheus, Faber 2006)

This is over-simplifying the translation issue to the point of nonsense. Anyone who has ever attempted to translate a poem into verse knows that it's impossible to do so without making your own choices along the way, some of which will not be a straight translation but must necessarily be your own invention - or reinterpretation - of the original. The only way to translate a poem without independent choices of that kind - i.e. poetic acts of re-reading - is to translate into prose.

And even the wildest version must, at some point, pay homage to the original sense, otherwise why bother choosing that poem at all?

Influenced by his thoughts, I quickly realised that my own version-in-progress of The Wanderer was part-translation, part-version, and therefore, in Paterson's view, 'foredoomed'. I started tinkering with it, first to bring it back to a straight translation, then - frustrated by the resulting woodenness of the lines - to shift it more boldly into a version, abandoning all pretence of honouring the original.

Having done that, I have found - not surprisingly - that I've completely lost my bearings. I am no longer writing with that strong, sure-footed certainty with which my translation began. The poem feels like a chore to be finished, in whatever faltering voice I can manage to dredge up from the depths of my lost confidence. As the poem itself exclaims: 'All that joy has perished!'

I shall now have to put The Wanderer aside for a few days, and see if I can write something else in the interim, to get my focus and my confidence back - before I continue with my 'foredoomed' translation-version.

A Thin Dream of Life: lines from the Aeneid

I promised this little translation from Virgil's Aeneid to my friend Bo some weeks ago; so here it is now, much to my chagrin, a pretty ropey piece of prose disguised as poetry by virtue of having its sentences lopped in half and separated with white space. A thin dream of verse ...

But as a first 'serious' attempt at classical translation, it's not too desperate and was, in fact, rather useful as a starter exercise. I'm relieved to say that my ongoing translation of the long Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, is far more in line with the sort of original poetry I'm writing, i.e. it's less easy to tell at a single glance that it's a translation!

Where the elipsis occurs, a few lines are missing; I leapt over them in the translation to get to the central image.

Re-reading this, it's clearly not 'finished'. Especially the first two segments (I hesitate to call them stanzas). But that's a good thing. 'Finished' poems are beyond help. Unfinished ones ... well, if they're unfinished, it's easier to believe you could get them right one day, which is always more comforting than accepting that you've failed.


A Thin Dream of Life
(a translation from The Aeneid, Bk 6, l. 268 on)

Shoulder to shoulder, they took by night
to the shadowy wastes of death,
walking bare caverns like two people
lost on a forest path, their way home
shifting under a sullen moonlight,
clouds hiding the stars, everything blackened
by night’s monochrome.

Reaching the jaws of death, they saw
how those most grieved and oppressed
had thrown down their beds,
how the old and unwell
had built themselves a den there
with the poor and the starving.
Grim-faced and scared, they stared out
from death’s workhouse ...

at some vast shadowy elm,
older than time, extending dark arms
at the heart of this hell;
a resting-place, where a thin dream of life
still clings on and cleaves –
so they tell – with its sticky fingers
to the undersides of leaves.

In Dark Places - the revised draft

Click to enlarge

Now that we're well into January, I can no longer put off posting up my own effort at the Dark Places writing and revision exercise. You've probably all forgotten the original poem, and who can blame you, but there's a scribbled-on draft above and it can also be found on Raw Light here if you want a quick refresher.

The poem's earliest genesis
I began writing this poem by copying out a few lines from Ezra Pound, then attempting to continue in the same 'voice' and style but on a different theme. Cheating? Probably, but not something I'm too worried about. If a particular technique kickstarts a draft, why not use it?

It's not something I do very often, though I did write a poem called 'Thanatos' - published in PNR, and in my second collection - using this technique. I chose an incredibly powerful, almost raw poem by Ted Hughes as a template on that occasion, addressed to Sylvia Plath and entitled 'You Hated Spain'.

The Ezra Pound I used was a snippet of some ten or so lines from the middle of Canto II. It begins 'And, out of nothing, a breathing/hot breath on my ankles'. It's an extract that focuses on the senses above all: smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. And this emphasis on physicality reminded me of a visit I'd made to the Pont Du Gard, some ten or twelve years ago, with a lover in tow whose star was about to dim for me.

I wanted to keep faith with Pound's use of the senses. So I used 'fish-scaled' and 'urine', thought about how the 'light' inside the aqueduct was blocked by people stepping across the openings above or coming towards us down the narrow tunnel. I remembered the 'rough' walls under our fingertips, the need to stoop. Plus the blinding heat and dust that struck me as I left the cool interior of the aqueduct itself at the far end.

It's the top level of the Pont Du Gard you walk through, which you always used to reach via a short scramble up a dusty hillside and a series of narrow and torturously steep steps. You can climb out onto the very top at intervals - a hazardous decision on a windy day, with no barriers between you and the sheer drop - and stare down at the river below, a marbled greenish-blue dotted with swimmers.

Letting my own voice out
By about the 10th line, I was finding it impossible to sustain that eliptical Poundian style for much longer. So I gave up and just let my mind wander wherever it wished. As you can see from the sudden expansion of the lines, the poem begins to change and develop at that point. Most importantly, the unexpected word 'we' makes an appearance, along with a past tense, both elucidating the narrative voice and giving the poem an emotional context it had originally resisted.

At about that stage, I deleted the lines from Pound that I'd used as a springboard, and gave the poem its own title, Pont Du Gard.

Technical Problems
Why are the 'hands' in line 13 'well-worn'? Surely the stone is worn, rather than the hands. Or was I transferring the epithet unconsciously, thinking of a 'well-worn' relationship, maybe one just about to snap? A clever enough answer, but I'm writing a poem here, not a dissertation.

I played with the line, and cut the too-obvious hands, throwing the primary beat backwards to make 'stone well-worn,/blackened with water'. This tightening of the metre also brings it into line with the earlier part of the poem. But at a later stage of the draft, I found this didn't work and had to change it again, as you can see.

My other basic revisions followed that tendency - i.e. to shorten the line and tighten the metre, removing elements in the second half of the poem which negate the mysterious and abrupt sense-explosions of the first ten or so lines.

I also considered eradicating the later references to 'we' on the same grounds.

Initially, the appearance of 'we' felt like a strong and useful progession to the specific from the general, but that may not be the case if the poem is the weaker for it. Perhaps the human presence, as I write in my marginal notes on the poem itself, anchors this rather ephemeral poem to reality. But it may also ruin it, by destroying its opening atmosphere of other-worldliness and making this feel too much like a 'holiday' poem.

But is it worth saving from the wastepaper bin?
I like this poem. Some of the phrases tug at me pleasingly. But I need to know more about its purpose before I can push on with more rigorous revisions or think about it as a finished piece.

Poems without purpose are like roses without a fragrance. They may look great in magazines, and even poetry collections, but no one remembers them as especially important, including the poet. And if we are at all serious about poetry, we want our poems to have purpose and to be remembered.

Purpose need not be overt in a poem; overt purpose is usually awkward and embarrassing, rather like going about naked in public or wearing too ostentatious an outfit for the occasion. The best sort of purpose is often secret, its deepest levels hidden even from the poet. But it must exist, and we must sense its existence as we read.

So what purpose does this poem have? Answers on a postcard.

The revised draft
Here's one possible redraft, but 'Pont Du Gard' needs far more work if it's to achieve any sort of poetic conviction:

Pont Du Gard
Stone hall for the shrunken,
black pit interior
fish-scaled with urine.
Grim shadows of men
blocking the light up ahead.
Broad squares of sun-flash,
rectangular access
to blind air and buffet.
Swimmers below
pale fins burning in water.
Sink back into darkness
at the next space, worn stone
blackened with water,
the rough runnels of history.
Filigree depths
where the heart struggles to rise.
Pinioned to single file
in the low-roofed
night haul of the Roman:
troll-trod, dwarf dominion.
Afterwards, hot dust and olives,
a dazzle of strangers
on the long road backwards.

Charlotte Lamb

The novelist Charlotte Lamb - and me, sporting a dazzling pair of cerise earrings - on holiday in France, early 80s

It would have been my mother's 70th birthday today. She died in October 2000. I've posted this photo and blogged about it on the memorial site I run for her over at charlottelamb.blogspot.com.

What would my mother, author of over 150 published novels, have said about my sloth in finishing my current book? She'd probably have thrown the local paper at me and told me to get a job as a waitress instead - her usual riposte whenever I discussed my writing with her.

Happy Birthday, Mum! Wherever you are ...

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year to all readers of Raw Light - of which there is a steadily growing number, so I thank you all for finding me and for returning so frequently. Your company makes the effort worthwhile.

I apologise for not having blogged up the revised draft of my own poem (see writing exercises below). It has been rewritten. And I have my notes in rough draft ready to accompany it. I'm looking at the damn thing right now. Unfortunately, the spirit may be willing but the flesh is all blogged-out. In other words, you will have to be patient a little longer.

For those following the writing exercises, I hope you all read some new poetry over the Christmas break - if you get one - and write something of your own in response to it.

I, meanwhile, have to compose a short Christmas message for a local newspaper in my capacity as this year's Warwick Poet Laureate. I feel like the Queen. Though with not so many pastel outfits in my wardrobe.

Have a great holiday, and do keep coming back to Raw Light in 2008!

Jane x

A Dark Place: some thoughts on the redrafting process

Structural Shifts
In the original draft of A Dark Place, Sorlil gives us 3 stanzas of 5 lines, and a concluding stanza of only 4. Some of the lines in the first half of the poem are quite short. This can feel unsettling if you tend to get obsessed with symmetry when writing, if you're always looking for the most pleasing 'shape' on the page.

I'm not saying that's how Sorlil operates, since I can't possibly know that, but her first draft does have a solid, boxy shape that feels very much on its way to being a final draft. And in her own comment below, she mentions structure as the key element in her revision choices. So why, assuming a quest for 'better' structure, does the poet choose to dissolve her original box shape in favour of looser two-line stanzas?

The first draft perhaps felt a little too close to note form, so she wanted to extend it without having to rewrite. When revising, we usually prefer to work with what's already there rather than write new material, mainly because of natural human laziness but also because revision uses a different set of skills to those we use when creating, and it's not always easy to swop sides, as it were, half way through.

Perhaps she also felt a certain structural gravitas was required to match and contain that seriousness. The five-liner of her first draft may have felt too uneven faced with those four-sided 'slabs' and 'rectangles', yet a four-liner would have presented other problems - such as what to do with the lost fifth line? and would the closed box structure of a four line stanza pull the poem shut instead of opening it up?

Having hit the right note in the two-line stanzas, she extends the line for greater weight, adding 'up' for the sound echo with 'poplars', and for the first few stanzas this new draft feels strong, decisive, uncompromising.

Break-Points & Buffers
Then we hit a snag. The well-known slogan Arbeit macht frei - 'Work shall set you free' - from the original draft has vanished. And this may be Sorlil's first mistake, as it lent an important air of bitterness to the poem, and also provided an important break-point between the inhuman look of the place and the introduction of live human beings - the guard, the poet-narrator herself, the daughter of a survivor, the generic 'you' who flinches at the end.

Structure begins to break down in the absence of that buffering line, which should have separated the two halves of the poem.

Endings
The ending feels rushed: 'And now a daughter of a survivor can't stop//talking'. This too-drastic stanza break needs to be rethought. It's not only rupturing the flow of the poem but its arbitrariness actually draws attention to the way the poet has gone about redrafting, rather like a trick that gives away the magician's secrets.

Of course, the endings of poems are notoriously difficult. I've written about them before on Raw Light, most notably here and here, so I won't spend too long on this. In the first draft, the simplicity of those two lines, 'You flinch when I say/I caught the bus from Dachau' works tremendously well within the context of that particular draft. But in this second draft, we're into a new structure where those lines don't fit anymore. So we get that last line in quotation marks - unnecessarily - and placed alone, cut off from the two-line stanza structure as though for additional emphasis. Which it can't carry off.

If this was my poem, I'd be inclined to shift earlier parts of the poem about in order to get back into a position where I could use those original last two lines more or less exactly as they appear in the first draft.

In particular, that unspecified 'you' - a useful poetic device, if somewhat over-used in contemporary poetry - opens the poem up at the close by inviting the reader to identify with it. Yet the second draft obscures 'you' by burying it hurriedly in the middle of a line - a line which is incidentally too long for the established rhythm, making the poem sound breathless and uncertain at that point instead of centred and ready to close.

Shifting the Focus of Revision with each Poem
The closer a poem gets to the real thing, to being fully alive and aware of itself, the less we need an overview of the poem's problems. By that stage, looking at word and line detail becomes the key issue during redrafting. It's particularly vital not to mess too much with structures if they worked just fine in the first draft, or only needed tweaking. Not that I think the shift to couplets was necessarily a mistake here. The poem feels more grave and measured now, less conversational.

But all decisions have a knock-on effect, and in this draft, further adjustments may need to be made in order to compensate for that change. It's also a possibility that the charm of the original draft lay to some extent in that conversational tone - the sight of those inhuman slabs versus the intimate voice of the poet in your head - and a push to regain that might be something for Sorlil to explore in a future draft.

Thanks
Many thanks to Sorlil for handing over her two drafts to be manhandled in public by such a blunt and insensitive critic. Usual reminder to take everything with a large pinch of poet's salt; another person might say exactly the opposite, and who can be sure which approach is best except Sorlil herself?

A Dark Place: Sorlil's revised draft

*

A Dark Place

Gravelled highway manned by poplars.
In the far distance memorials rise up:

Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant.
So many children, a school excursion.

A sea of slabs, rectangles like plant beds
but instead outlines of barrack bunks.

The camp guide offers to take
my photo at the gate. It’s smaller than I

imagined. I think logistics:
how did they all fit?

I dreamt of the chimneys in black and white.
And now a daughter of a survivor can’t stop

talking, a town in Bavaria can’t stand
the connotations and you flinch when I say

“I caught the bus from Dachau”.


Sorlil
Poetry in Progress
*
Sorlil's comments on the revision process

"I've not changed a great deal, mostly just the format. I can't say I'm particularly happy with it, it feels rather bland and screams of being exactly what it is - an exercise poem!

Interesting exercise nonetheless. I tend to work more methodically even on first drafts and perhaps I need to practice 'loosening up' to allow the poem room to grow before constraining it with a critical eye."

You can read the first draft of this poem here.

Sea Cave: some thoughts on the revision process

Firstly, many thanks to Julie for following this exercise and then bravely sending her two drafts in.

APOLOGIES. THIS POST HAS NOW BEEN EDITED TO REMOVE WORK REQUIRED FOR PUBLICATION.

I gave a few reactions to Julie's first draft in the Comment box below the First Drafts post and, since she asked for some clues, suggested how she might go about revising it. So you might want to look at that too.

Working with First Drafts
As Julie points out, this is not so much a first draft as a collection of sensory responses to an idea or vision she had after reading my initial post.

So a workable first draft needs more than a collection of single notes to support it, otherwise it's likely to run into problems during the redrafting process.

Better to keep such running drafts in your head rather than putting them down on paper before they are properly 'formed'. These proto-drafts can be played with mentally whilst doing something slightly mechanical like driving long distances, walking, doing the washing-up, or making love (only kidding!), where your subconscious can work behind the scenes on finding the best shape for them - a shape which will eventually become your first draft.

Second Draft Behaviour
The second draft of Julie's poem is an excellent example of what happens when revision pulls in on itself - probably due to this lack of structure in the initial draft - and sucks the movement out of the poem, or shifts it 'away from epic narrative', as Julie says in her accompanying note.

Quite rightly searching for a structure for this poem, since one didn't exist in her first draft, Julie has imposed a structure on the poem which doesn't fit her original vision. For this, she has chosen a default structure, if you like, based on the tight metrics of a two-beat rhyming couplet.

The original draft was free and loose, and displayed such traditional traits only in its dying moments; a last minute shift, by the way, which is classic first draft behaviour, rather like a lifelong atheist suddenly professing a belief in God on his or her deathbed - just in case!

If that happened in my own work, my first instinct would be to mistrust an impulse which led me to start rhyming and formalising a previously free piece of writing. Julie has done the opposite - not necessarily the wrong thing, in every case - and jettisoned the free writing to concentrate on the more formal part of her first draft, seen emerging in the last few lines.

My instinct here would be to unpick the stitches by returning to the initial draft and beginning a second 'second' draft, i.e. putting the first 'second' aside, and reserving the right to return to it later. This third draft would probably shift to the opposite extreme, looking to expand rather than contract the poem.

Postscript
Again, many thanks to Julie for allowing me to use her poem as a pincushion. Whether you agree or disagree, please feel free to add your own observations below.

Remember, it's never a good idea to believe someone's advice if it goes against your own instincts as a writer. It can go against your pride, your ego, even your sense of identity, but never your instincts.

This post has been about under-writing as much as anything else; see David Morley's blog for some well-expressed thoughts on the opposite problem of over-writing.

Julie's Second Draft of 'Sea Cave'

SEE CAVE
(revised draft)

steel shadow
whispered whine
stooping darkness
saturnine
hiss of sea air
dying light
lucid blindness
winding tight

livid silence
velvet claws
hells guano
gaping jaws
rippling water
pearly tide
phosphorescent
Charon's ride

*

Julie's comments on the revision process

"I wrote the first draft Sea Cave almost immediately after having my imagination fired by Pont du Gard; based on the visual image and sense impressions of various sea caves or flooded underground mines I have been in. Wrote it straight off in fifteen minutes, plus a few minutes tweaking, trying to nail the impressions with words.

Second draft – Read your comments, thought about what you’d suggested rather than considering the poem itself, then came back to it after 48 hours.

Cleared out one of my static blogs, posted it, and used red to highlight what was going to be slashed, and blue where I worked in a new idea. Tried to hold the title in mind, but rework the image suggestions so the bats are suggested etc and moved it away from epic narrative. I haven’t had as much fun in years.

With thanks for your suggestions, Julie."

First Drafts: 'On Dark Places'

You will find below the first drafts of workshop poems 'on dark places'.

If anyone else would like to follow this exercise (see earlier post, 15 minutes first draft, not incl. thinking time) please email me your poems by midnight, Wednesday 12th December.

Julie (see below) found it tricky, thinking about the project first without writing anything down. That's generally how I work, but I expect it won't suit everyone. I deliberately block out concrete 'lines' during this stage, though phrases which stick in my mind are allowed. It means I can freewheel through a large range of wobbly possibilities - without committing myself or losing momentum through note-making - until I find the image or idea that locks on and forces me, often compulsively, to paper.

A revised draft of my own poem will appear, with comments on the process, within the next week. Plus any other revised drafts sent to me.

*

Pont Du Gard

Stone hall for the shrunken,
black pit interior
fish-scaled in urine.
And the grim shadows of men
blocking the light.
Broad squares of sun-flash,
rectangular access
to blind air and buffet.
Swimmers below
pale fins burning in water.
We sank back into darkness
at the next space,
hands well-worn on stone
blackened with water,
the rough runnels of history.
Corrugated, filigree depths
where the heart struggles to rise.
Pinioned to single file,
we passed through the low-roofed
night haul of the Roman.
Troll-trod, dwarf dominion.
Afterwards, hot dust and olives,
a dazzle of strangers
met on the long road backwards.


Jane Holland

*

Sea Cave

sight dies
saturnine dark
pinnacles
hiss of sea air
nothing

blind blind
blind as bats the yawning jaws
close
hells droppings
Acheron
dreams shrink to nighmares
boats extinguished
rolling ripples
styx to
empty places

darkness wrapping
claustrophobic
tight
winding sheet
jugular
asphyxiated
choked
by livid silence

echoes of miles and miles and miles

rocking bark
slushing tips
oil oil drippling
tallow wax

scorpion fringed
curling fingers
steel blackness
evanescent
tea lights

chill vacuum
cut rock
blind senses
freezing slope
reeling

scraping bone
sinking voices
mole cladding
clawing
edging gripping ledging
tactile stripped
drop

tongue is drying
light is crawling
gloom is rising
searing vision
incandescent
out


Julie
Virtual Journey

*

A Dark Place

Gravel highway guarded by poplars.
In the far distance memorials rise
Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant.
A sea of slabs, rectangles like
plant beds. But barrack bunks instead.

Arbeit Macht Frei
The camp guide offers
to take my picture at the gate.
It’s smaller than I imagined.
How did they fit them all through?

Crematoria.
I dreamt of the chimneys
in black and white. Daughter
of a survivor can’t stop talking
all the way through the chamber.

A town in Bavaria
can’t stand the connotations.
You flinch when I say
I caught the bus from Dachau.


'Sorlil'
Poetry In Progress


*


December. The month of the drowned god.

Milk-water seeps from the clay’s glands,

Clots the forest paths, thickens

Through the veins of the wood.

Late afternoon. Rooks creak

in the darkness, and westward

a tideline of sun is washed by black waves.

Greedy branches crane to cram night’s gullet

With his brief, red fruit.


Bo
Expulsion of the Blatant Beast

*

Poetry Writing Exercise No. 1: On Dark Places

In this, the first of my online writing exercises, I'm going to write a poem on the theme of 'dark places'.

Many poets seem obsessed with death and dark places. It's a common enough preoccupation, and who can blame us? We all know it has to end some day. And what comes after life has been a constant source of fascination for writers, artists and shamen since - I have no doubt - the dawn of civilisation. But, of course, death is not the only source of darkness in our lives. So it's a pretty broad concept.

There are no other rules about content, length, or form, though I am setting a time limit for this, so anyone wanting to join in can do so on an equal footing with everyone else. I shall write for 15 minutes - thinking time is not included in this, so don't start writing until you feel ready!

This exercise, however, comes in two parts. First, I shall write a poem. Then, I shall revise it. The second part is absolutely vital and shouldn't be treated as a formality.

I shall publish the first draft when my fifteen minutes writing time is up. With no revisions or personal comments. I'll then invite others to email their first drafts for publication alongside it. Once any poems sent in are also up on the site, I shall revise the poem within a seven day time limit, and publish the result here. Likewise with any revised poems from other people.

The seven days is to allow time for the poem to 'sink in', which is a vital factor in revision. I haven't set a time limit for the actual revision time, because it's not something which can be hurried. But the poem which emerges after revision will still only be a draft. (In fact, all poems are drafts, even those which have been published. There's something fluid about a poem, which means it can change shape even at a late stage in its development.)



Afterwards, we can discuss the revisions. Comments on first drafts will be allowed, because some feedback can be useful once the bare bones of a poem are in place. I don't think I'd ever want someone to see a poem at such an early stage otherwise, but this is an artificial exercise, designed to open up debate about methods of revision.

Look out for the first draft of my workshop poem this weekend, and if writing your own, you can email it to me by Word attachment at j.holland442 @ btinternet.com (Only be sure to write Poetry Workshop in the subject line, in case I delete it by accident!)

You can ask for your poem to be posted anonymously, under a pen-name, or as yourself. Links to your blog or website can be included. Deadline for first drafts to arrive will be midnight on Wednesday 12th December.



Theme: On Dark Places

Write for 15 minutes, then put first draft aside. Revise at length. The aim is to produce a more polished draft within 7 days.

Weird fiction, writing methods, and radio plays

The novelist China Miéville has just joined the Creative Writing faculty team at Warwick University and was reading from some work-in-progress tonight at Warwick Arts Centre.

I went along to hear him with my husband, who's a big CM fan and massively well-read in the fields of sci-fi, fantasy and weird fiction. Which is more than I am, unfortunately. I have my compulsive favourites from which I rarely deviate, like most people who read fiction of those kinds, but my general understanding of 'fantastic' fiction is nowhere near comprehensive. So it was good to have him along with me, to answer my occasional whispered questions and to fill me in on China's background and development as a writer.

Yet even though China Miéville isn't the kind of writer whose work I would normally read, I did find the extract from his current ms draft interesting and challenging, and the Q&A at the end particularly useful to me as a writer.

I asked about his basic writing methods during the Q&A. CM explained that he doesn't follow any set pattern or routine as a writer. During some novels, he may write 1000 words a day; with others, as much as 4-5000. And that daily word tally doesn't seem to have any discernible connection with quality. Often, he told us, the steaming 5000 word session has produced excellent writing, whilst the slower 1000 word effort has ended up being scrapped!

Apparently, his methods of revision are equally changeable from novel to novel. Some books have been revised only after finishing the first draft. With others, revisions have been necessary during the initial writing. With some of his earlier books he resisted the advice of editors; later on, he learnt to accept the editorial process and now feels it can be a good thing for writers.

He later revealed that he works with a flow-chart of the novel, preferring to plot his books down to the last detail. The chart is pinned up on the wall beside him as he writes, and if he deviates from the scheme in any way, he marks the deviation on the chart and re-jigs the whole schema to make sure he still knows how the book is going to end.

But the only certain thing he could say about the actual writing of a novel - for the benefit of those in the room who might be struggling with first novels in draft - was that every word you manage to write is one less that has to be written.

So it was a fascinating Q&A session, during which he also spoke at length about the increased focus on politics in children's writing in general, and the background to the writing of several of his novels. He also said that 'Iron Council' was his personal favourite amongst his books to date.

As I didn't take notes verbatim, I hope I haven't misrepresented China Miéville's views and comments here.

I took great heart from his description of varying writing methods, knowing how impossible it is for me to stick to any one way of writing anything. I've always considered it one of my great weaknesses as a writer, but if I can just keep pushing the words out, I suppose it doesn't need to be.

I also met someone who works in radio script development for the BBC, over drinks in the bar afterwards, and spoke to her briefly about a radio play of mine that has been languishing for several years on my - rather over-crowded! - back burner of ongoing projects. It would be good to work on that again, hard graft though it was; a particularly demanding medium, radio, coming close to poetry in its need for accuracy and a fearless grasp of the 'less is more' school of writing.

Plenty of work to keep me busy this winter, then. So much choice, so little time. But as China Miéville said, every word you write ...

Writing Exercises: Should I/Shouldn't I?

Today, I spotted on a fellow blogger's blog - how's that for prose style? - some writing exercises, one exercise per blog entry, which he was first explaining and then attempting. Not an original idea - I've seen it elsewhere - but when the posts are kept short, it can make interesting bloggery.

I'm now considering whether I could/should adapt the idea for Raw Light, i.e. think up some workshop-style poetry writing ideas, then follow them myself, one by one, posting up the results. Not too many, perhaps. But enough to make a sequence of posts which could be linked for those following the exercises. I imagine such a thing would be anathema to some, but fun reading for others. Perhaps it will depend on how well I execute the exercises, i.e. whether the resulting poems are any damn good.

Thoughts, groans, responses?

Photos from Aldeburgh: not poets, but seascape