Why I write Poetry

Why I write Poetry

I fell in love with poetry. When I remember my childhood, and hearing humorous verse, like Spike Milligan's 'Silly Old Baboon' or Pam Ayres, 'Oh, I wish, I'd looked after me teeth'. I liked limericks and the Nonsense of Edward Lear, Connecting later with bleaker and more haunting work, through Richard Adams Novel, 'Watership Down'.

I later wrote my first poem, for an assignment in 2^nd year English, about a crow, settling on a branch, in the midst of a wind storm. As instructed, I used all the alliteration, and similes I could think of, as I tried to ape the melancholic style and bleak imagery of Richard Adams. For me, at the time, it was oozing with metaphor. I have the feeling now, that my teacher may have thought it oozing with the pus of pretentiousness. However my predominant feeling, on writing this masterpiece, was not dissimilar to the feeling I got when I first tried to ride my bike with no stabilisers. Though wobbling all over the place, with huge potential to career into the road and the path of an oncoming truck, I was thinking 'I can DO THIS' 'I AM doing this. I am a poet!!'

And a year later, Studying poetry for GSCE English, the work of Ted Hughes and Wilfred Owen, in particular, blew me away. Ted Hughes in the unpicking. You had to take it apart to see how it worked. I loved the discussion of the ideas behind his poetry, I hoarded the gold that mining his verses gave up. It took my breath away. Two poems in particular. The Thought Fox, which I used for my GCSE art project, and 'The Warm and the Cold', which remains my favourite one of his.

And then Wilfred Owens 'Dulce et Decorum est', For the exact opposite. It did not need explanation. It needed experiencing. The raw power of it, the violence and shock of it, the righteous anger behind it, and the killer punch at the end, "My friends you would not tell with such high zest, to children desperate for some ardent glory, the Old Lie, 'dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori."

I fell in love with the very idea of being a poet, from these lessons onwards. To be able to express yourself with such potency? That was something of merit.

And a few years later still, when my talented friends were branching out into Music and Art, poetry became MY thing.

I started to self define as a poet. And yes, I probably WAS pretentious, but it connected me to a creative side that hitherto had been left untapped. I began to carry a pen and a bit of paper with me everywhere I went. And in that rather teenage unconscious way, I would frequently stop whatever I was doing and pull out the folded bit of A4 from my back pocket, and start to scrawl.

And I kept on scrawling. With varying degrees of success. It is not so much that I went on a poetry journey, but rather that poetry became my constant companion on my journey through life. And the A4, and the occasional back of an envelope, eventually became a note book, which became a Lap-top, and then a phone. But every now and then, an envelope still comes in handy.

I began to see in my life that poetry was everywhere, that, As the poet Pablo Neruda puts it, the 'Heavens unfastened'. That the world was indeed an awesome place, and by that I mean full of awe, and poetry helps us revel in the wonder of it.
And, as many poets I suspect will resonate, some of the most painful moments of life are poems that never reach the land and evolve, never grow words, font, syntax and verse, but are reclaimed by the sea of forgetfulness, from which we failed to rescue them, dragged back into the receding tide of memory. Good ideas for poems, like the biggest fish, are usually the ones that got away. Let me tell you. The great Poetry I haven't written. You would be amazed.

And like I said, Poetry became my companion on the journey, but it became more than that. Through all life, it became a way understanding, of giving form to a yearning, be it spiritual, social or sexual. It was the means, in part, by which I processed my loss and acquisition of faith, and the bereavements of my Mother first and then my marriage.

It became a way of marking the miles. It punctuated the otherwise long and monotonous sentence of my time-line. Poetry became my diary.

And it allowed me a voice. Often, in private, I would write things I could never say socially. I could re-imagine conversations, I could add caveats to ones in which the last word was denied to me. I could express doubts about all kinds of things. Probe the darkness a little. Shine the light of verse into the shadowy recess, and see if there was a monster lurking there.
And those seed thoughts that we all have at times? I could explore them. Poetry has been a joy and a gift to me.

And just occasionally, what I love about poems, is they can reinvent you. People who have heard you read a poem, often find that you are not quite the person they thought you were. If we dare risk it, poetry can pin the heart you have kept in your pocket all these years, back on your sleeve.

As Alan Ginsberg said, Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

And while I am quoting a great poet, why not let us see what some other of the finest poetic minds have to say on the subject of poetry and it's purpose.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Soren Kierkegaard (Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author)

and somewhat less flowery, T. S. Elliot asserts;

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

Salman Rushdie has an even higher view of poetry,

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Salman Rushdie

I think I may have just about managed to take a few sides here and there, maybe even started an argument. But Poetry can wake us up. It can shape our world, and in shaping us, then those around us. And it can challenge. Oh yes.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Robert Frost

It seems to be the translation of the soul to paper

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg (American Poet)

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

John Cage (American Composer)

I just threw that one in for contrast....and humour.

Leonard cohen, perhaps one of the most poetic of lyricists, and a poet in his own right, as this quote will demonstrate says; Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.~ L. Cohen

And this is the sense that I want to get hold of, in my own writing, and for all of us tonight. Life converts into poetry. Life is poetry. Poetry, if not life itself, as the singer asserts, is evidence of life, It is not separate as we sometimes suppose. Cohen makes this vital connection, but of course, he is speaking AS a poet. We are not ALL poets though....are we?

John Fowls, a novelist, who brings a brings a word-smith's sensibility, to his understanding, and speaks with a poetic heart when he says;

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles (Novelist)

Which brings me back to a vital question. What IS poetry?

I sometimes feel like a poem is whatever you want to call it. I recall a discussion, in my first year music class, on what was 'music', and my teacher told us of an experimental record, in which, on both sides of an LP, silence was recorded. We were asked to discuss if THIS was music.

My music teacher concluded that Music, was whatever it's creator defined it to be. He argued and noise, or lack of it, if it was used intentionally to create 'music' was worthy of the name music. He hastily added, of course, that doesn't make it GOOD music.

The same arguments exist around art, of course. There so many views of what constitutes art. But following my Music teachers principle, anything that is used to create art, can be considered art, because art, like music, is in the intention.

So if Life is poetry, and poetry, in some sense, is life, what makes poetry? The writing and composition of poetry gives expression to something that pre-exists, because it is the substance of life that inspires us. It comes from somewhere.

Can John Fowles be right? Do we all write, unwritten poems, save the poets themselves, who occasionally commit them to form. What Fowles is saying is that our lives ARE poems.

This is a high view of poetry, indeed.

And here is my last quote from Michael Franti (An American rapper, musician, poet, and singer-songwriter.);

He is quoted as saying “Every single soul is a poem~”
 

Although Franti was born in the sixties this idea he is espousing is just a little older than he is. I am a believer in Jesus and I regularly read a certain book that is ancient in origin. A book full of, and bursting with poetry, the intentional expression of the heart behind creation. St Paul espouses a concept that sits not too uncomfortably with greek mythology, which states that within each of us humans, is the 'spark of Zeus'. St Paul in Ephesians 2:10 says that 'WE are God's workmanship',

The word 'workmanship' in Greek is Poiema. Sound familiar? Poiema, I am informed, is the route word from which our word Poem, is derived. Workmanship can also be translated, as Masterpiece. A work of art. So then we are a divine poem. And, from my perspective, the divine creator, placed in us, at our core, a longing for creativity.

There is a sense in which we are a creative expression of the divine heart, a poem, written not on screen or paper, but on 'the tablets of human hearts'. And through our lives we are shaping that poem.

And so our written poetry is the intentional expression of our hearts, and connecting our emotions to thoughts, and our thoughts to words, is the most human of things to do. To write is to pertain to a sense of wonder at the world, and sometimes, to express our dissatisfaction with it....and everything in between. Poems can be written about all life. About a chewed up bus ticket, or a cheating partner. It can be about the lifting of depression, or the simple beauty of a raindrop. It can express frustration with a late train, or it can lament the death of a loved one. It can rage against the elements, or serenely accept its fate. Poetry encompasses and enhances life. All life. And it gives a voice to whomever finds it. Because 'Every single soul is a poem', then 'every voice is valued'. Poetry is a way for us to register our arrival and presence on the planet. It says 'I am here'. And that is why I write.

(Written as an essay to be delivered at 'Speak Easy'.  A gathering of poets.)