Abi Titmuss ITN London Tonight

Writing through the readers' eyes

This post is an extract from an email conversation I had with Henry Stead, which came about as a response to my poem Flight to the Imagination. Some of the early exchanges can be found at the foot of that poem. It got a bit silly to keep posting comments, and I thought this one was blogworthy.

When we write poetry, perhaps our primary concern should be how each word will look to the new reader at the expense of everything else. It's very hard to pretend you're not the author of a poem that you're writing and to look upon it with fresh eyes. But if you can, you have the freedom to depersonalise completely, and leave everything out of the poem that isn't 'affecting'. If you were to get really good at this, it would be like pressing buttons inside readers, making poetry happen in their hearts/minds/pricks/ bits at the instant of reading.

Certain words in a certain order will produce effects different to other words placed in other orders. Now I've always come to poetry with a desire to put myself into it. That's been my standard of 'rightness' for a long time. I tried to describe a sentiment using imagery and pretty phrases that evoke something close to the original feeling. With the new approach, there's no need for personal experience or indeed personal sentiment. You just have to be a wordsmith with a very clear idea of how people will react to certain words and phrasings.

Instead of telling a 'true' story of how you feel, which has it's merits, you can sacrifice this on the altar of effect. Meaning you can write about absolutely anything. Your experiences and feelings will however inform your word choice because your emotional intelligence will allow you to understand how readers will react to that word.

In essence, this is how poetry 'works' anyway, right? That explains why certain poems (and indeed much art and music) have more meaning at certain times in your life. As you say, people bring their own potential for poetry to texts. Some things will only resonate with some people based on what's going on inside their heads (in terms of experiences). I think the best poets tap into this potential for poetry, sometimes subconsciously, on a wide scale, or if you will, a fundamental level. Usually when we talk about a 'great' poet, we're talking about those who 'speak' to most people.

Possibly, members of culture are very similar. We will react in similar ways despite our different experience. The poets who are remembered don't divide; instead, they unite.

With Imagination the buttons I've identified are those that react to rhyme; when back clicks with black something should go crackle. When I spill into the next line but still make that line (vaguely) iambic, something should go crackle pop.

For me at least, this is quite a cool inversion. I feel a dose more humble. I feel it's not about me, but about 'them' - the reader.

Let that be a lesson

I finished Romeo and Juliet over xmas. Really loved the ending, set in the Capulet tomb. I wasn't expecting Paris to die; his was quite an unnecessary death which emphasises the sense of wastage.

Romeo has developed a long way by the time we see him trying to break into the tomb with a crowbar. I'm struck by the contrast with Paris, who by the final scene is starting to fill his boots as a Romantic lover, much in the same mould as the early Romeo. He intends to spread 'sweet water' over the grave and repeat this measure every night. Yet Romeo has become, bleak, desperate and practical in his desolation:

PARIS
What cursèd foot wonders this way tonight
To cross my obsequies and love’s true right?
…

Enter Romeo etc

ROMEO
Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron.

I can imagine Romeo, now totally resigned to fate's direction, storming onto the scene completely focused on the job in hand (his imminent suicide). The actor can emphasise the stressed syllables, turning the iambic line into an irrefutable command.

Paris' earlier appeal to 'love's true rite', sounds, well, more than a little lightweight in comparison. He is however, not far short of the mark (unintentionally) with 'cursèd' though....

Two Gentlemen of Verona is up next..!

Flight to the Imagination

Wings, curling over warming zephyrs
Have won; I cannot rhyme on earth
So leap to flood my new-waxed feathers

In updrafts, rise with all my worth
Canyon high, and rake the ancient rays
In a strafing glide across the sky.

Just the sound of wind, the haze,
The earth a misty emerald eye.
And here, flecked with tigered forest swathes,

There, creased by flowing silver tracts
Flung thundering from hidden caves.
And higher, ‘till the smoking cataracts

Fall away beneath, to where
The West gale drives against the East
Who, in turn, rebuffs the charging air.

Upon this battle plain I feast,
Amid the dark and melding tumult,
Rapturously on golden beams of light,

Slew past Orion’s trilling bolt
And dodge and weave the comets bright
That grid the deep with fire then fade away.

I flow, cooled by trembling breath
In white bliss; and through the nebulae
I glimpse at last the great bronze breadth,

A plain of monumental hour,
Where time through-oozes mossy banks
Crowded with each age’s faded flowers.

Above their silent, swaying ranks
I sweep, on wonder’s starry rail,
And taste the heavy sadness of that host

Who weep with flowing meter’s grace,
Like shadows of the morning’s ghost,
For moon-wide cloud steeps, for the night wind’s bright embrace.

Ahead, dawn eases deepest black
To faintest blue; my wings, weighted
With weary joy and dew must bear me back.

Surging once more, high, elated,
Upon a howling tempest’s fling,
I roar flaming across the galaxy’s page,

Which reads, now broad as Saturn’s rings:
‘Beauty will not age, nor die,
While birds of the imagination fly’.

Choice Cuts

Against the odds I made it to the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain this morning.

His work is immediate, bold and casts a brutal eye over the human form. The vast majority of paintings contain figures, very often transformed beyond recognition into a gory mess.

It’s the faces that are most striking. Skulls protrude; teeth jut out at grotesque angles; sometimes, figures have a set of teeth in place of a head.

But I don’t think we’re supposed to be scared or horrified. My overriding feeling was sympathy for the figures. I pitied their disfigurations, which, by extension are our own.

The Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 triptych was particularly impressive. It reminded me of one of my recent poems:

The Man

Thrown together flesh on a stick
Kebab arms,
Meaty legs,
Laid out on a plate.
White membranes,
Web of bile-ways and tracts
Tear ducts like blunt labyrinths.

Brain in the middle, like a silly pig
Waiting for the Minotaur.

Hair shoved into pores
At awkward angles,
Or locked brutishly across the brows.

Two hammy hands,
Alive with fingers
Glisten-fisted,
Slam and slam down.

The tongue, pegged back behind white gates
Squirms round a squeak –
Wheezed and squeezed from the sponge-lungs
The squeak squirms,
Wriggles out,
Dives beyond the teeth,
Takes flight,
And blooms into a scream.

Nose – a little upturned snail,
Ears like flat pebbles
Clinging to a river bed,
Frog leg lips,
Eyes like two soft moans.

Heart – a rubber wing
Pink, inflated,
Flapping, slopping
Stopping, starting.

Churning blood, not air.

----

‘Well, of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses' – Francis Bacon

Thanks to http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.3.ARTVIEWS.%206%20PIECES.htm for the image.