How to Grow Your Own Poem E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem'… Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written – their own poem. Kate's big secret is a simple one: to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn't ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

Leseprobe

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.

Her BBC Radio 3 programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize. In 2018 she was appointed MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019, she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experiences as a teacher; it won the Orwell Book Prize for Political Writing 2020. In 2023 a second anthology of her students’ poems, Friend, was published.

She tweets as @KateClanchy1.

SWIFT PRESS

This edition published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2023

First published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan 2020

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2020

The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the Author of this Work has been assertedin accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The permissions acknowledgments on pages 235–8constitute an extension of this copyright page.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751828

eISBN: 9781800751811

NOVELS

Meeting the English

POEMS

Slattern

Samarkand

Newborn

Selected Poems

The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)

England: Poems from a School (ed.)

Friend: Poems by Young People (ed.)

NON-FICTION

Antigona and Me

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

SHORT STORIES

The Not-Dead and the Saved

Contents

How to Use this Book

Chapter 1Getting Started

Put It All Down: A Place for Your Feelings: ‘The Table’

Summoning Yourself: What Only You Know: ‘Some People’ and ‘Things I Learned at University’

In General: Don’t Try to Rhyme (right now)

The Way You See It (and no one else): ‘A View of Things’

In General: If I Borrow a Shape is it Still My Own Poem?

Permission to Write: Join the Conversation

Room to Write: Make Room for Your Poems – and for Yourself

Chapter 2Images

Image Generating: The Surrealists’ Game

Sharpening Your Images: The Five Senses

Giving an Image Away: ‘Sometimes Your Sadness Is’

In General: First Edits: Make Your Poem Fresher Not Grander

Little Movies: Extend Your Images

In General: Don’t Hang Around with the Gerunds (they’re just trying to glue up your poem)

In General: Titles

Home Movies

In General: How Far Can You Go?

Put Your Images through the Rinse Cycle:‘A Guide to Love in Icelandic’

Move Right into Your Metaphor: Your Heart and My Heart

Permission to Write: Read Like a Poet

Room to Write: Room for Your Poems: Get Hold of Poetry

Chapter 3Building Your Writing Process: Lists, Plots and Turns

Finding Your Writing Process

(Growing) Your Inner Checklist: The Furniture Game

In General: First Lines: No Time to Clear Your Throat

(Silhouette) Self-Portrait in a List: ‘I Want the Confidence of’

In General: Leaving a Poem to Rise

In General: Last Lines: Keep Out of the Pulpit

Rhythmic Lists: ‘Wasp’

A Turn for the Better: Build in a Volta

Oh! Lists of Three and Their Enduring Magic!

In General: Seeing Your Poem Freshly

The Heart: A List

In General: Are You Stuck but Know that There is More Poem to Write?

Permission to Write: Believe in Your Future and Your Past

Room to Write: Your Poetry Place, Your Poetry Palace

Chapter 4Summoning Spells: Elegies, Letters, Odes and Things that Get in the Way

I Don’t Remember (except the images)

In General: How True is Your Truth?

Missing People ı: The Elegy

In General: Sounds that Tell You Something

Missing People 2: Ode to a Magical Object

In General: Does Your Poem Want to Be About Something (or Someone) Else?

Missing People 3: The Letter

In General: Poems Have Plots

In General: The Storyboard Test

Permission to Write: Defeating Your Inner Policeman

Room to Write: Private Space

Chapter 5Finding Your Sound

Your Sound: ‘I Come From’

In General: Finding Your Own Rhythm

Faster and Greener: Sounds of the Summer

In General: Where Your Rhythm Breaks

Finding Your Local Soundscape: ‘On This Island’

In General: Punctuation: Poetry Percussion

Calling in Your People

Permission to Write: Sounding Right

Room to Write: Listen Out

Chapter 6The White Space: Time Travel

Form and Shape: Time and Space

Writing Slo-Mo

Line Breaks and Breath

In General: Edge Words

Time Travel: The Stanza Break

In General: What Track is Your Poem Making?

(It’s lonely here on) Couplet Island

Couplet Island 2

In General: Capital Letters

Time Travel Boxes: Regular Stanzas

In General: Find a Rule from Inside Your Poem

The Segue: Like This

More Practice: The ‘Water’ Challenge

The Ring Road: A Poem with No Stanzas

Permission to Write: Are You a Poet Yet?

Room to Write: Opening the Door

Chapter 7Your Poem

Your Poem

List of Poem Titles

List of ‘Permission to Write’ Sections

List of ‘Room to Write’ Sections

List of ‘In General’ Sections

Acknowledgements

Permissions Acknowledgements

For my students, past, present and future.

How to Use this Book

This is a practical book to help with what can easily seem an impractical, even frivolous problem: the yearning to write.

I wrote it because I take this longing very seriously. I believe that composing poetry is a fundamental human activity, like dance or singing, something we need to do and of which, even more than dance or music, we are deprived in the modern world. As a result, I believe there may be a lot of people with a poem-shaped hole in their lives. In fact, I’m sure there are, because so many people tell me so: not just the young people I teach, and their parents, friends and teachers, but all sorts of people of all ages, in all sorts of contexts. Some days I think it’s everyone.

This book is practical because it is based on a teaching practice. I’ve been teaching people, old and young, to write poetry for more than twenty years. In that time, I have accumulated a number of techniques, exercises, pieces of advice and above all, poems, which I have found to actually work: by which I mean they consistently seem to help people write more fluently and confidently, more as themselves. The very best and most useful of them are assembled here.

I have sorted this material into sections so that we have separate segments at the end of chapters on the theoretical Permission to Write and the more tangible Room to Write. Bits of writing advice, meanwhile, have been attached to poems where they seemed particularly relevant, but also have their own headings so you can find them again for a different context. I’ve ordered the book so we begin with directed, supportive exercises and end with challenging, free-form ones. Inevitably, though – since writing poems is a multi-dimensional, holistic activity, and so is the process of helping someone with it – everything overlaps.

So, though this book will make sense if worked through from end to end, it can also be read forwards, backwards and sideways while making your own connections, much as a poem can. It can also be mined for teaching ideas, or enjoyed as an anthology of poems, or as a collection of thoughts about poetry. I hope, though, that most readers will use it practically, and get on with the writing.

Because when people tell me they want to write, I’ve found it best in practice not to linger on what is stopping them – that will always emerge later – but to show them a poem and invite them to answer it with one of their own. Your invitation is over the page.

Writing a poem takes a lot of confidence. You have to believe that you and your experience belong in a poem, and are worth taking time over. Almost nobody finds that easy.

Here are four poems to get started with. Think of them as magic spells to build your sense of entitlement and permission.

‘The Table’ by Edip Cansever

‘Some People’ by Rita Ann Higgins

‘What I Learned at University’ by Kate Bingham

‘A View of Things’ by Edwin Morgan

All these poems work because they have strong rhetorical structures. You can borrow them, and, like scaffolding, they will hold your writing up.

Put It All Down:

A Place for Your Feelings: ‘The Table’

Edip Cansever was a poet who also ran a carpet shop in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. He mixed his real, tangible trade with his intellectual life every day and believed that poems should also come from life and find their own forms. This beautiful, deceptively simple, poem is the fruit of that way of being.

This poem will not let you down. If you use its frame to hold your own experience you will create something beautiful.

Start by reading this poem several times, possibly out loud.

The Table

A man filled with the gladness of living

Put his keys on the table,

Put flowers in a copper bowl there.

He put his eggs and milk on the table.

He put there the light that came in through the window,

Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.

The softness of bread and weather he put there.

On the table the man put

Things that happened in his mind.

What he wanted to do in life,

He put that there.

Those he loved, those he didn’t love,

The man put them on the table too.

Three times three make nine:

The man put nine on the table.

He was next to the window next to the sky;

He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.

So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!

He put on the table the pouring of that beer.

He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;

His hunger and his fullness he placed there.

Now that’s what I call a table!

It didn’t complain at all about the load.

It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.

The man kept piling things on.

Edip Cansever, translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast

Your Turn

Now you are going to write your own version. All you have to do is bring your own experience with you and be true to it. Nothing is too mundane for this poem – look how much Cansever gets out of a beer and some keys.

—

Start with someone coming home – a man, a woman, a boy.

It can be someone you know, or yourself, older or younger or right now. Even if it is you, though, use the third person (he or she or they) because that will give you a bit more distance and ease in the poem.

Who is coming home? How are they feeling?

A man full of . . .

A child full of . . .

Comes home.

—

Now you need a place to put things down – a sofa, a bed, a floor, a peg . . .

—

And puts his bag on the . . . it doesn’t matter, but it does have to be a real place, or thing.

—

Now, he/she/they puts stuff down. They are concrete, tangible things. Things that are actually in the room:

keys . . . a phone . . .

She puts them down on the floor/bed/sofa . . .

—

Then he puts down some memories:

The sounds and touches and smells of the day . . .

What are they?

Make sure they are all real sensual things. Things that exist, that can be tasted or felt or smelt or heard but are not there in the room right now. The weather. The hum of the computer. The sound of the stairwell. There might be some memories from further back, too, but make sure they are all concrete and clear.

—

Now he can put down some things that ‘happened in his mind’.

Things that aren’t in the room, or that happened that day but are floating in the memory nevertheless.

A wish.

A sum.

A formula.

A recipe or instruction.

A line of poetry or a phrase from a song.

Someone’s name.

A worry.

A person – someone the protaganist loves or hates, what they said.

Your poem is getting quite long now, and the pile of stuff is getting big.

The pile is made of:

Things in the hand,

Remembered things,

Things of the mind.

—

But you can pile on more.

If you like, you can go for something bigger, more abstract – pain, or longing, or death – after all, Cansever has ‘endlessness’.

But balance it with something small and concrete (the longing for a beer), and make sure it goes down safely on your peg or table.

One more big thing . . . maybe just one more . . .

Something you’ve always wanted –

—

But this pile is getting big.

Let’s go back to the concrete: the table/peg/sofa.

What is it doing under all this weight?

—

Talk to it. Congratulate it. Thank it. Show it to the reader.

It’s doing well.

—

So are you.

You have a poem.

—

Read it through.

Type it out.

Keep it safe.

A couple of encouraging examples. These are both ‘table’ poems. Michael dashed his off in twenty minutes, as usual.

The Never-Ending Pile

An old lady filled with the satisfaction of living

Put her walking stick on the table,

and stood up young and strong.

She put her jacket covered with snow on the table

She put her shopping trolley on there too.

On there she put the voice of her dead husband.

On there she put the mole she had cut off.

On that table, her first kiss and her last,

The one bitchy friend,

And the one she had tea with, an hour ago.

Tick, tock, tick, tock, the sound of the clock –

She put that on the table.

Reaching up through the sky

She grabbed the moon

And smiled at Armstrong

And put that on the table.

And her wish for wealth and freedom

And for grace and for quickening the pace of world peace,

And her future, a tombstone,

All on the table.

A crackle here, a crackle there

But the table stood like her, young and strong.

Her never-ending pile grew.

Michael Egbe (sixteen)

Mohamed was a young refugee from Syria, just beginning to learn English.

Bin

When I go back home

I throw all my stuff on the floor:

my bag, my jumper, my trousers, my shoes,

my tie and my tee-shirt; my feelings,

my memories, the smells of life

all on the floor.

I put 2x2 and my 4 ideas

on the table;

the stupid words I learned from my friends, in the bin.

I think about playing football,

and when I will play more,

and I put this thought

under my pillow,

because I need to keep it with me.

Hey bin, you’ve got

all those stupid English words in you.

Mohamed Assaf (twelve)

Summoning Yourself:

What Only You Know: ‘Some People’ and ‘Things I Learned at University’

When you look at your ‘table’ poem, you will probably notice one or two little details that somehow seem to work. In Mohamed’s poem, it’s the football dream that has to be kept under the pillow; in Michael Egbe’s, probably the miniature Armstrong the old lady plucks from the moon. Those are the details that unexpectedly move us, the ones we are willing to trust, the ones that just seem true: the authentic details.

Authenticity is something we all recognize and admire in other people’s writing, but not necessarily something beginning writers appreciate in their own work, not because they are stupid, but because they lack confidence. It’s very easy to think that your own experience doesn’t belong in a poem because, well, it happened to you, and you’re not a poet, are you?

But if you are going to create a sense of authenticity in your own poems, you will have to draw on your own life. This doesn’t mean only writing down things that actually happened, or exposing your diary entries to the world – many of the truest-seeming things, paradoxically, are partly made up – but it does mean visiting your lived experience for precise observations and telling details.

To do that, you have to believe that your life belongs in a poem – and that’s where these next two poems come in. Writing versions of these poems can help because they provide strong rhetorical frames for your experience – shapes. Glimpsing your life in this frame, like seeing yourself in a beautiful photograph, will help you view your experience freshly and value it more.

Do you sometimes feel that your life experience just isn’t written down in poems? That you only know un-literary things?

So did Rita Ann Higgins, who grew up as one of thirteen children in a close family in working-class Galway in the sixties. (The ‘Vincent de Paul man’ dispensed charity.)

Some People

Some people know what it is like

to be called a cunt in front of their children

to be short for the rent

to be short for the light

to be short for school books

to wait in Community Welfare waiting rooms full of smoke

to wait two years to have a tooth looked at

to wait another two years to have a tooth out (the same tooth)

to be half strangled by your varicose veins, but you’re 198th on the list

to talk into a banana on a jobsearch scheme

to talk into a banana on a jobsearch dream

to be out of work

to be out of money

to be out of fashion

to be out of friends

to be in for the Vincent de Paul man

(sorry, mammy isn’t in today she’s gone to Mars for the weekend)

to be in Puerto Rico for the blanket man

to be dead for the coal man

(sorry, mammy passed away in her sleep, overdose of coal in the teapot)

to be in hospital unconscious for the rent man (St Jude’s ward 4th floor)

to be second hand

to be second class

to be no class

to be looked down on

to be pissed on

to be shat on

and other people don’t.

Rita Ann Higgins

Your Turn

If this poem speaks to you, try your own version.

It is a powerful poem for releasing anger, so start your own poem by thinking of an experience you have that most people around you ignore.

To be poor, for example,

to be of colour,

to come from a ‘different’ family of some kind,

to have illness in your family,

to have experienced a miscarriage, or a death . . .

Now,

Borrow the structure directly. Fill it in with concrete details from your own experience.

Your first line is Some people know

Or Some women know

Or Some kids know . . . or

There are those who understand,

or There are those who have seen . . .

Then make lists from your experience using ‘to’.

To be called . . .

To be short of . . .

To wait

To wait.

To be out of

To long for

To wish for

To never

—

End with a bang. Higgins is very clever with this – she puts only the general statements, ‘to be second class/to be looked down on’, right at the end of her poem. Everything up till then is made of (often funny) particular, concrete statements. This keeps her powder dry. Do the same with yours.

End your poem:

And some people don’t

And there are those who don’t

Or . . . something else that you came up with . . .

You have a poem!

There are lots of ways of diminishing your own experience and excluding it (and you) from poetry. Feeling that you are too poor or too foreign is one of them. Feeling that your life is too middle class and privileged is another. This witty and truthful poem boldly ignores that anxiety.

Things I Learned at University

How to bike on cobblestones and where to signal right.

How to walk through doors held by Old Etonians

and not scowl. How to make myself invisible in seminars

by staring at the table. How to tell Victorian Gothic from Medieval.

How to eat a Mars bar in the Bodleian. When to agree

with everything in theory. How to cultivate a taste for sherry.

Where to bike on the pavement after dark. How to sabotage a hunt.

When to sunbathe topless in the Deer Park. When to punt.

How to hitch a lift and when to walk and where to run.

When not to address my tutors formally. How to laugh at Latin puns

and when to keep quiet and preserve my integrity.

How to celebrate an essay crisis. When to sleep through fire alarms.

How to bike no-handed, how to slip a condom on with one.

When to smoke a joint and when to swig champagne.

When to pool a tip and how to pull a pint. A bit of history.

When to listen to friends and whether to take them seriously.

At the same time how to scorn tradition and enjoy it.

How to live like a king, quite happily, in debt.

Kate Bingham

Your Turn

If this poem seems to chime with you more strongly than the Rita Ann Higgins poem, try a version of it instead.

Down the left-hand margin of a piece of paper, write

Five ‘How to’s

Five ‘When to’s and

Five ‘Where to’s.

Then think of a time in your life which changed you, for better or worse, and give yourself a heading:

Things I Learned . . . (at Nursery, Primary School, University, in France, in Bed, at the Sea, at Summer Camp).

Then, working quickly and not too critically, fill in your list.

Finish with a slightly different line: