Jen Hadfield Gets Nine And A Half Out Of Ten!!
Hello once again!
As a prize for winning the Stanza groups competition with 'Daniel Craig: The Screensaver' I was given a 'poetry prescription' by The Poetry Society: a free critique of a poem. I sent them Draft 5 of '1969', which was a mistake, because the person who read it, whom I'll call 'X', obviously didn't get it, or like it. I should have sent finished short poems. Silly of me. How can I really expect someone to get what is still unfinished? However, I do have some bones to pick...
X says the final rhyme, when used over the 20 stanzas of part one, "is getting annoying". I'd agree with this if they were end-rhymes at the ends of sentences or clauses but mostly they're not, they're mid-flow - so they should pass by unobtrusively in the flow of the reading experience. This begs the question, of course, of why these mono-rhymes are there in the first place. I suppose I wanted a kind of 'horizon note', a constant, or almost constant, sound-repetition like the drone of a sitar, over which other sounds play and make other patterns. And I wanted to work out what effects I could achieve by strategically departing from this horizon note. All I've done really is change it when I've moved to a new section so in fact that experiment hasn't been borne out. But there's time yet.
X says 'My immediate reaction is that this works extremely well as a performance piece partly due to the repeated stress patterns and the rhymes'. So X seems to be saying that although this kind of rhyming is 'annoying' it's actually fine if the poem is not to be considered a poem for the page.
X says 'It lacked something on the page'. But X does not indicate what that something is. I can't help thinking that this is a roundabout way of saying that it's not good enough to be a proper poem, but it's ok as a performance piece - because in that context modulations of voice and body language would make up for any inadequacies.
X says "most long poems use a variety of techniques, layouts, meters." This has probably been true of most 'modern' long poems. But surely, when considering the whole history of long poems, this is simply not true at all.
X says "long poems are difficult. If you are to succeed then you have to make this more acceptable to the reader who does not know the 'you' of the poem". To be honest, I don't understand this at all. In what way are long poems difficult?! And what does 'acceptable' mean? I assume X means that I need to give more guidance to the reader in the form of a narratorial voice. This assumption seems to be borne out later when X says " I... wonder whether there should be a directorial figure present to move the narrative on". But surely that figure is right there, isn't he, on page one? How obvious do I need to be? But I take the point. Maybe I need to make it clearer what role the director is playing within the poem.
X keeps referring too to the 'biography' sections, as if the inclusion of the word 'mum' automatically makes it (auto)biographical. I think I told X in my application that it was an extremely personal poem which makes use of real events connected with my life. That's true. But I've absolutely no interest in 'telling it how it was'. Surely - I keep using this word 'surely'! - surely that's obvious by the fact that I have the mum character impregated by a snowflake in part one. That kind of tongue-in-cheek surrealism can hardly be said to be evidence of a biographical impulse! I seem to be coming across the deepseated expectation that poetry is - and should be - an 'outpouring', a 'confession', a 'real history' or an 'authentic representation' when surely (there it is again!) it doesn't necessarily have to be any of those things. Does it? I want this poem to be more like one of those toy kaleidoscopes. I want to make stories dance and mingle and form abstract patterns, ultimately, perhaps, in order to empty the significance and authenticity from ALL individual strands of narrative (including my own). That's why the whole poem obsessively dwells on beginnings and, ultimately, will say that beginnings can never be known. Therefore - to make just a wee philosophical leap - there is no God. And no Self. All there is is randomness, like the randomness of snowflakes.
I also want to say that there's no harm in seeing (hallucinating) beauty, even patterns, even cohesiveness and meaning, within that randomness. In fact maybe we should. Maybe we need to. As long as we know it's just hallucination.
There's a scene in the film 'American Beauty' of a white plastic bag floating randomly in a breeze. There's that plaintive piano melody. And there's just that. Piano. Breeze. Plastic bag going up, down, drifting.... And it's one of the most beautiful few moments of filmmaking I've ever seen.
It's ridiculous that I should expect X to get what I'm trying to do from a few pages of unfinished poem. I should never have sent it. The excitement of getting the critique in the post quickly gave way to glumness and defensiveness. As a poet I'm so egotistical, and so vulnerable. Ha! (LOL) I really can be very silly indeed. Anyway, X did make some helpful points, despite the occasional vagueness, and for them I'm thankful. And I was spurred to write this blog entry too, so it's not all bad...
What have I been reading? Lots of John Ashbery, because I'm intrigued by his larger open forms, his expansiveness and his virtuosic avoidance of meaning. Some Glyn Maxwell, because he seems to be a big cheese on the British poetry scene and I was told he writes about men and manhood. Some excellent love lyrics which I'll reread, although a lot of head-poetry and showy-offy poetry, stuff which is too much in control in a too English kind of way. My tastes will always be with the visceral and ever-so-slightly unhinged. For the Stanza meetings I read, and listened to, Jackie Kay's 'The Lamplighter' which was disappointing - not nearly as good as the jacket blurb would have us believe. (Is blurb always a bit hyperbolic and a bit meaningless?) The seeming conflation of the three female slave voices, and their lack of psychological depth, mirrored their conceptualisation by the slave-owners themselves, i.e. as faceless, interchangeable entities - ironically the very opposite of what Jackie Kay intended, I'd imagine. As a radio play it was part hypnotic, part boringly repetitive, with a few scenes which I felt were too emotionally manipulative. As a poem, I (and the rest of the reading group) just didn't think it cut the mustard. (By Jackie Kay standards, that is - she is, usually, a very fine poet).
In the meeting this morning we discussed Jen Hadfield's 'Nigh No Place' which is joyful and quirky and... well... bloody fantastic, actually. I urge everyone to buy it.
Thanks for reading!
Richard
