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I love the works of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage. |
Simon Armitage was asked to give three pieces of advice to aspiring poets and he said, "Read, read and read". It's good advice but I think the poetic impulse arises earlier. It made me think about my own history, how my love of words arose.
'The
child is the father of the man' (Wordsworth) and for melancholic
children there are consequences. I can still recall the first poem
that made an impact on my psyche and tapped straight into a rich vein
of sadness woven through my DNA. Scarecrow :
My poor
old bones, I've only two,
A
broom shank and a broken stave,
My
ragged gloves are a disgrace,
My one
peg foot is in the grave.
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Dylan - understood in the heart |
Recited by
Mrs. Bagley in the second year of primary school it induced such an
exquisite sorrow that sent my six year old self off on lone walks
down the playing fields to contemplate the daisies and ponder the
words that surprised, intrigued and puzzled in equal measure:
'broom shank', 'stave', 'grave'. They had resonance! I berated
myself for my previous lack of empathy with these wretched creatures
stuck in fields. Here was my muse, encountered in melancholy
meanderings through the woods and meadows around home.
At seven I
independently found my way to the church choir. Anthems, psalms and
hymns ignited my imagination. "Jesus, Jesus, Lo he comes and
loves and saves and freeze us" I sang. Bizarre! A little
later I found out that nobody was being frozen but freed! What a
disappointment! I loved the impenetrable "freeze us"; much
more mystery about that. And then:
What
peaceful hours I once enjoyed
How
sweet their memory still
But they
have left an aching void
The
world can never fill.
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Accessible simplicity: Wendy Cope |
I
understood this implicitly. I was an old man trapped in
an eight year old body. I spent an inordinate number of warm summer
days indoors and retreated into books. I remember my mom contrasting
me with my slightly younger brother, "He's always got his nose
in a book. His brother's a proper lad." The neighbours concurred
- I needed to get out and climb more trees. But, I was cultivating
my own aching void.
Hills of
the North rejoice
River
and mountain spring
The great
mystery of the brooding dark North – rejoicing streams! This
was my world!
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Mystic - WB Yeats |
Inspired by
a sad documentary on the life of French chantuese Edith Piaf, I wrote
a sonnet. I pored over the form (in a Shakespeare volume I found in
the local library) worked out the rhyme scheme and really laboured.
I loved the romance of Je ne regrette rein, that insists so
much on regretting nothing that you know the narrator regrets
everything! It was the first thing I wrote that ever felt
accomplished. The first thing that meant more than the sum of its
words. The teacher was sceptical, "Is this your own work?"
Maybe Edith Piaf wasn't a fit subject for a boy of eleven? But
wasn't everything up for scrutiny?
Forget
indulgent prog rock, ignore frivolous glam rock and passing fashion.
It was the 70s vogue for solipsistic singer-songwriters that
entranced and enchanted: words again. Hejira,
Joni Mitchell's gorgeously ethereal pean to the romance of road trips:
There's
comfort in melancholy
When
there's no need to explain
It's as
natural as the weather
As this
moody sky today. (Hejira)
My older
sister had this penfriend. I remember seeing a photo of him dressed
in an Afghan coat with greasy long hair and droopy moustache. I
didn't get what she saw in him. Her romantic fantasies were squashed
flat one day when she received a cassette tape.
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Overlooked: Dory Previn |
I
stepped into an avalanche
It
swallowed up my soul.
When I
am not this hunchback
That you
see,
I sleep
beneath the golden hill. (Avalanche)
Her romance
ended but my love affair with the works of Leonard Cohen continues to
this day! I took to sublime misery and dark humour like a duck to
water. I began a little scrapbook of writing, not so much influenced
by as mimicking or plagarising what I was hearing. And then I
encountered Bob Dylan.
He became
an obsession. I spent hours trying to decode Blonde On Blonde but
the mystery only deepened:
I just
can't fit,
I
believe it's time for us to quit,
When we
meet again,
Introduced
as friends,
Please
don't let on that you knew me when,
I was
hungry and it was your world. (Just Like A Woman)
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Sylvia Plath |
I gleaned
two things from this. First that some things are understood in the
heart and not the head and second the importance of hearing
words - phrasing, timing, rhythm and rhyming. The way Dylan alights
the word 'hungry', stretching out the phonemes, 'hungaareeee',
whatever he means you know he means it. I heard Dylan was mercurial
and decided I would be too and my new policy was never to give a
straight or predictable answer to any question. It got me into
trouble but it also sharpened the poetic use of language.
1975:
Dylan's Blood On The Tracks spoke volumes on the subtle use of
words:
Say for
me that I'm alright
Though
things get kind of slow,
If she
thinks that I've forgotten her,
Don't
tell her it isn't so. (If You See Her Say Hello)
Why
shouldn't she be told? Vulnerability to painful to admit?
Embarrassment? One carefully chosen word can encompass so many
possibilities. How much better than a simple instruction to "tell
her"?
Open
your eyes and ears and you're influenced.
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Sublime: John Keats |
Pete
Brittan & Evelyn Fitzmaurice, two inspirational teachers
influenced and encouraged in equal measure. They introduced me to
Shakespeare, the Liverpool poets, Wordsworth, Keats, Harold Pinter,
Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, William Blake, John Betjamen Eliot, Auden, Jane Austen.....
a world of words and ideas. Their enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge
was infectious. I just absorbed as much as I could and learned many
works off by art. I can still recite most of The Wife of Bath's Tale
and the Prologue to the Cantebury Tales!
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Stevie Smith of pop - Morrissey |
Form is a discipline that for me, aids writing. When a poem just isn't working
I will often try it in a different form. Changing a sonnet to a
villanelle or vice versa sometimes improves the expression of a
theme.
The
songwriters I loved pointed me backwards to their influences: Lorca,
Pound, Woody Guthrie, Whitman, Rousseau, the Bible, Poe, Rimbaud and
latterly classical Greek stuff. At different points I wanted to be
all of these people – I was good at mimicking style - but the
common message of all their lives seemed to be that we should all
find our own voice: write what we know.
Occasionally
I read my own stuff & I hear echoes of others. Indeed I revised
For A Second I Forgot partly because one stanza strayed to close to a
Cohen song:
I'm
lazy, weak but harmless
this
much I admit,
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Joni Mitchell |
tighten
up the harness
you
win and I submit. (Me – For A Second I Forgot)
You're
weak and your harmless
Sitting
in your harness
With
the wind going wild
In
the trees (Cohen – Light As A Breeze)
But sometimes I only hear the echo in
retrospect.
Take this:
The
fine wines of the purple line
Leave
a bitter after-taste (Me – Apolide)
and
The
snows of the Tyrol and the clear beer of Vienna
Are
not very pure or true (Sylvia Plath – Daddy)
I left this in as a kind of a homage, a
nod to Plath, but I don't expect everyone will hear it and Plath's
line is better anyway. Incidentally, if you have an interest in
Plath's work, seek out the BBC recordings from the 1962. Her
recitations of Lady Lazarus & Daddy are hugely
impressive, her phrasing and stresses bring new layers of meaning. I can recite these too in Plath's voice!!
Morrissey – the Stevie Smith & e.e.
cummings of pop – wrote:
If
you must write prose and poems
The
words you write should be your own,
Don't
plagarise or take on loan.
There's
always someone, somewhere
With
a big nose, who knows (Morrissey - Cemetery Gates)
But Joni Mitchell wrote:
A
part of you pours out of me
In
these lines from time to time (Mitchell – A Case of You)
Lately I've been re-reading W. B. Yeats,
poring over Simon Armitage's back catalogue, mourning the loss of
Dory Previn and rediscovering her in the process... revisiting some
well known Auden, thinking how much more profound later Roger McGough
is, taking in some Wendy Cope whose apparent simplicity conceals
depth charges. Read, read and read.