NGONGE Posted March 11, 2005 March 11, 2005 Poetry: why your metre will never run out Daisy Goodwin In the 19th century, most educated could write poetry. Today hardly anyone even reads it. T2 explains why it's never too late to become addicted to this neglected art form - and to start writing it yourself I HAVE a confession to make: ever since I started putting together anthologies six years ago, I have always said that poetry was best left, like tiling or car maintenance, to the professionals. I love reading poems and have a pretty good understanding of why they work, but have never felt the urge to write the stuff myself. Or so I thought, until the other day when clearing out a cupboard full of teenage memorabilia I came across an exercise book filled with torrid verse. One poem begins: The heated seconds of our passion/ broken by the wit-sharp knife linger on/ until they fashion a blind-loved life. Too much Dylan Thomas is clearly bad for 13-year-olds. I was attempting to write poems about emotions that I had only read about other people having. But as I leafed through the books I realised that there was a time in my life when I had tried to turn all the things that mattered into poems. It was an impulse I put away at about the same time that I gave up ra-ra skirts and nightly applications of Clearasil. But lamentable though my teenage versifyings were, I regret having given up, because nothing would give me greater pleasure now than to be able to write a good poem — “to put the right words in the right orderâ€, as Coleridge put it. A hundred years ago, a well-educated person would be able to knock together a sonnet — reading poetry was part of daily life. Now poetry is as tangential to most people’s lives as morris dancing. This is a great loss, because poetry can enrich our understanding of life like no other medium. Anybody who, like me, has come across the right poem at the right time will know how powerful those insights can be. In my case it was a poem by C. P. Cavafy called The Big Decision which I read when I was contemplating a career change. It contained this line: “He who says no, does not repent, but that ‘no’ the right no, drags him down all his life.†Those lines gave me the courage to start a new career. There is a great poem about the importance of poetry by Marianne Moore. “I too dislike it. Reading it however with perfect contempt for it, one discovers after all, a place for the genuine.†Poetry is the only art form left that isn't trying to sell you something. It is never too late to get addicted to poetry. Fleur Adcock quotes the example of Lauris Edmund, a New Zealander who was first published in her fifties and 11 books later won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize at the age of 66. I was a judge on the Forward Prize a few years back and was surprised by how many of the first collections were by poets in the prime of life. Indeed, given the fact that the number of volumes of poetry published in this country is increasing while the overall sales of poetry are in seemingly inexorable decline, it would seem that the urge to write poetry is at least as strong as the desire to read it. I run a websitewhere I publish new work and I am always astonished by the volume of submissions we receive, hundreds of new poems a week. Sadly for poetry publishers, many of the people who submit poems to my site and to other avenues open to unpublished authors, have clearly not read any poetry since leaving school. Poetry is as susceptible to fashion as any other medium; you can’t expect to be taken seriously as an aspiring poet if you can’t find your way from Armitage to Zephaniah. Everybody needs influences. The trick is to make your poetry diet as varied as possible. A serving of Plath should be balanced with a side dish of Larkin, binge on Emily Dickinson and you will find yourself — writing — Just — Like — Her. Reading is just the beginning, though; there is a huge leap to make from writing for yourself and writing “poetryâ€. Quite a number of poets I know found the confidence to make the transition after joining a writing group or through some kind of creative writing class. Sophie Hannah had been writing since she was a child but it was not until she got to university and started showing her work to her tutors that she felt she was a poet. “My tutors said that poetry didn’t have to be serious. Poetry could be the stuff that came easily like writing funny poems about my exes. It was tremendously liberating.†Fleur Adcock had written poetry all her life, but it wasn’t until she joined a writing group in her mid-twenties that she discovered her voice or rather, as she says, “the group found it for meâ€. Once you have found your voice and have written some poems that sound like you, start sending them into magazines. I remember a now famous poet telling me that nothing in his much-fêted career compared with the thrill of getting his first poem accepted by a magazine. “It made it official,†he said. Much further down the line is the first collection, not even worth considering until you have a proper track record of publication. But bear in mind that writing poetry is not going to make you rich or even famous. Announcing to people at parties that you are a poet is not always wise. In fact, most poets I know tend to call themselves “writers†to avoid the Fotherington-Thomas floppy collar connotations of the word “poetâ€. On the upside, writing poetry, whether it is published or not, can make you happy, and that’s not just the pleasure to be had from constructing an ingenious rhyme; poetry can actually be good for your mental health. A recent study conducted at Bristol University showed that people suffering from depression who were encouraged to read and write poetry recovered faster, and with less recidivism, than a similar group who were prescribed antidepressants. Playing with words appears to keep your brain fit. I have no scientific proof for this claim, but I have never met a poet whose mind has been dulled by age, not a sober one anyway. Real poets are never complacent. So if you don’t want to solidify as you age, give up golf and take up poetry. Daisy Goodwin chairs the London Book Fair Popular Poetry Masterclass at Olympia on Sunday, featuring Christopher Reid, Sophie Hannah and Fleur Adcock. Tickets www.lbf-masterclasses.co.uk DEBATE Is poetry important? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk Are you feeling lucky? Source Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
