I had some good news.
A poem I’d submitted for the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize was going to get an honourable mention.
One of 10 out of around 2,164 entries.
When I this found out, I was on the 68 bus, heading away from Waterloo — which was exactly where I’d been when I wrote the poem.
It’s called ‘A Clarification’ — is a love poem for Leigh — will appear in the Fish Anthology 2024.
And so I thought today I’d write something about writing poetry, as a way to get better at writing prose.
I have been writing poetry at least as long as I’ve been writing prose. Since I was around eleven years old.
For English homework, I wrote a poem about going to the dentist —
You sit there, staring up his nose,
as the tension grows and grows…
Aged around thirteen, I was a surrealist poet, then a Beat poet, then a new romantic.
The first novel I wrote was intended to support me as I continued to pursue a career as a poet.
Those words, career and poet — I think, together, they suggest how things went.
But when I moved to Prague, in 1990, I was writing around 100 poems a year.
Most were never published, and I’m glad of that. And glad of all the time I spent — and still spend — on something as intense as writing poems.
Writing and reading and re-reading poetry is still the best and most obvious way to improve your sense of language — of your language, both the one (or ones) you grew up in, and the one you are working toward using as a means of expression.
I may be wrong, but I think I can tell whether a creative writing student has ever written poetry.
There’s a certain kind of prose that has been produced at the laptop — in silence, apart from the clicking of the keys — produced to make basic sense, tell a story, get the job done.
It hasn’t sounded in the writer’s head. There’s no real sense of the pleasure that one word coming up against another can give, especially if their similarity or difference is paralleled by or pranged by consonance and dissonance.
Gary Lutz’s essay ‘The Sentence is a Lonely Place’ is the best expression of this — in prose — that I know.
Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.
Which, you’ll have noticed, is very similar to what Virginia Woolf was saying yesterday about sentences interpenetrating — steeped in meaning and suggestion.
To find a way into this secret garden, to even begin to realise you can go there, the most obvious doorway is rhyme.
nose/grows
To the side of this are alliteration and assonance, also big doorways, and often pointed out by the much-maligned guides who are literature teachers.
But alongside this, although maybe a bit more hidden, are all the other gates and portals such as vowel music, modulation of sounds, half- or slant rhyme, letter swapping and anagrams.
All of which makes a writer hear their writing better but also see it more clearly.
The shapes of letters become apparent. Whether you’re using lots of ascenders (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) or descenders (g, j, p, q, y). Or whether you’re writing flatly with a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z.
It’s harder to avoid spotting that same noun or conjunction appearing in sentence after sentence — which is fine for Hemingway and those aping Hemingway but not great for those wanting to write simply and without or beyond Hemingway.
Becoming aware that you’ve started five consecutive sentences with ‘I’ or ‘The’ — a poet, or a writer who has begun to feel language as a poet, they’re not going to miss that. Because they’ll realise they’ve made something a little duller, a little more dink-dink-dink, than it needs to be. The dance has momentarily stopped. (I’m only going to mention rhythm, syncopation.)
Most of all, writers who have learned from writing poetry know what the wholeness of an individual sentence can be, but how it should depend absolutely on what comes before and after.
They know how a favoured phrase within a paragraph, when too dense, can overbalance or sink it.
And they know that whenever a sentence rings, if you tap it with your fingernail — you should just stop fussing with it, thank the gods, and step away.
Yes, that's great to hear. Even if they don't publish it, I think a lot of prose writers do something that's more about sound than sense, even if they call it warming up or going over the top.
A while ago I noticed that a lot of my favourite prose writers also wrote poetry, and it certainly shows in their work. It led to me reading a lot more poetry which I am very thankful for.