The poems below come from a sequence I now finished titled 'How they Speak'. After a prologue, the first 'to speak' are the inanimate objects and the external environment: both triggering and provoking a journey of memory which I had not wanted to take. The sequence then moves to reveal the real 'they' speaking - the lost voices of my parents and aspects of my own language and behaviour; the culture I grew up in.
Last Orders - Prologue
How the Rooftop Speaks
How the Ashes Speak
How the Grass Speaks
How the Garden Speaks
How the Mountain Speaks
Caledonian Road Bridge - Epilogue
I think this sequence came about the way it did because I trust the instinctive moment if and when it arrives and especially in terms of inner feeling being suddenly represented by an aspect of the natural or external environment.
What is important is to then re-write over and over after the initial burst of enthusiasm. I 'go back to school' every time I write, now. I re-read university texts on metre and verse form. I consantly read other people's work and experiment until I hit a form (it may be a composite of several with variarion and contradiction). I constantly challenge my own material with questions:
"In the poems I have been reading, the imagery is complex and original. Where is mine too literal and and where could it engage the reader more'?
I had to ask this to make the above sequence work - the danger of relying on the moment of emotional truth, an emotional punchline if you like, is that you can often render a scene too literally and pay insufficient attention to the imagery and the form. What really encouraged me to continue with the sequence was the poem 'How the Rooftop Speaks' because it had sub text and allowed the reader's own intelligence in, to feel their way between the lines. It took mundane objects and looked at them in an alternate context which evoked the meaning, rather than it being too literal. It felt as if the subconscious drove the desire to write this as well as the concious act of sitting down with practical determination and I think a combination of the two are neccesary.
I hear many refusing to notice their own ability for subtlety and subtext and I have made and will probably repeat the same mistake myself at times. We sometimes seem to shy away from it at precisely the time it is about to significantly advance our progress. Take the leap into the amibguous moment!
I also hear many writers rejecting form without having learnt it first and I dont think this is as effective as rejecting form for known reasons. Have you ever seen the early, paintings of Dali? He was a master of impressionism because he understood form. He deviated from preceeding form successfully on that account.
I was looking for an epilogue for the sequence 'How they Speak' . A natural consequence of coming through a period of loss is to emerge from the other side of that journey with an enhanced perspective of passing time or rather how we sit within that. I am keen at the moment to look at ideas which express a sense of eternity or connectivity between things - not to cosily find reasons we connect as humans necessairly but to challenge the view that the human being is at the centre of everything, when our view is extended over universal time. I find the thought that we are not at the centre of everything, more forgiving, more exciting and provocative. This hit me at once in the poem 'Caledonian Road Bridge'. It began as a failed attempt at a sestina hence the enjambment and mid rhymes which sound almost like repeated words - a sestina in a car crash which is the best place for them. The reason for the nature of the rhythm is to follow Bhuddist logic which often associates insight and enlightenment with the control of a single breath.
Not sure about the last two lines of this one as yet but I wrote it for the tree outside my window in central London. It picks up the theme of other forces being at the centre of our world:
Cherry Blossom Tree
I find it odd that I wrote this in the 21st Century, more than one hundred years after the Romantics, while I was looking at the landscape, asking how nature sits with the digital age and the concrete city, on the end of a spontaneous, heightened perception triggered by nature.
Can't say this one permits me to lay my hat in the arena of postmodernism! I mention this because I think it is important at all times, in the development of a voice or style, to query where you sit and to defend your position once you have found it. There's only one place we all agree with each other; and the view above our heads at that point is only soil and headstones and I've never been too keen to get there in advance.