Another Poetry Writing Lesson

I'm always interested in little exercises to inform the hidden poet within (in my case so well hidden, internal thermal imaging cameras combined with extreme endoscopy probably wouldn't find him, it)). But here is another from the series: 'how to become a poet.'  It's about the avoidance of cliche and provides ways in which one might hone oneself to become a natural at always looking for the original and the sloughing away of the stock phrase.

Lesson: How to Improve a Cliché
I will take the cliché “as busy as a bee” and show how you can express the same idea without cliché.
(presumably someone thought that bees looked about as busy as anything they'd ever seen before -plus of course Bee begins with the letter 'b' which helps make it snappy and memorable.  But its time is done).

Determine what the clichéd phrase is trying to say.
In this case, I can see that “busy as a bee” is a way to describe the state of being busy.
Think of an original way to describe what the cliché is trying to describe.
For this cliché, I started by thinking about busyness. I asked myself the question, “What things are associated with being busy?” I came up with: college, my friend Jessica, corporation bosses, old ladies making quilts and canning goods, and a computer, fiddlers fiddling. From this list, I selected a thing that is not as often used in association with busyness: violins.
(so not for this writer 'busy as a bee'  they are looking for something of their own.)
Create a phrase using the non-clichéd way of description.
I took my object associated with busyness and turned it into a phrase:

(And here it is) “I feel like a bow fiddling an Irish reel.”

This phrase communicates the idea of “busyness” much better than the worn-out, familiar cliché. The reader’s mind can picture the insane fury of the bow on the violin, and know that the poet is talking about a very frenzied sort of busyness. In fact, those readers who know what an Irish reel sounds like may even get a laugh out of this fresh way to describe “busyness.”
(so homework!) Try it! Take a cliché and use these steps to improve it. You may even end up with a line you feel is good enough to put in a poem!

As mad as a hatter. As white as snow. As hard as a rock. That kind of thing.  Like with the example I won't simply look for a new simile, but to resent the figurative comparison in different ways. Irate and red-faced he exploded himself through his front door with such venom he called easily have left a cartoon shaped hole of himself behind.  I could still hear his rage-filled shouts and animal snorts five minutes after he was gone. Actually I might have got rather carried away there - mad as in hatter means bonkers not rage. Perhaps he turned up wearing a tartan pair of shorts attached braces, long luminous socks, ballet pumps and a sombrero and little else. He seemed to be having an argument with himself. People turned their backs when ever he approached lest they caught his eye and were drawn into an unwanted conversation with someone who seemed if harmless, slightly mad. Not sure how that would sit in any poem - but I suppose the idea here is to work at cliche killing for whatever purpose.

The War Against Cliche

You should murder your darlings,
don't love them too much. You
must harden your eyes
and stiffen to kill your little ones,
who sit prettily born but formless, still.
Before the blood has dried,
before your knife of blue and blood has dried,
slash and slice and cut those sleep-filled
fillers, squat and squalidly sat, 
pregnant with old meanings,
relics now spent of energy. 
Ghosts of imaginations.

Grand Theft Poetry Experiment

The idea behind this experiment is that you should be able to construct a coherent - doesn't suggest good - poem out of the lines that have been chosen completely bat random.

I would go a bit further and say that you need to extract a subject of sorts first.  So, looking through the blocks I notice a number of things. In the words tempest, howl, cold, mist, dipping, twirling, gurgling, floods, black and waste - it is possible to imagine being able to construct a poem about the current floods that are effecting large swathes of the UK at the moment. The theme could be how bad they are and what suffering is being endured by the people most affected by them.

The farmer strolled
across the sleeping green between
the twelve tons like mist in a valley,
trying to reach his destination
hiding behind  thick set ash-trees
restlessly in the flood's black waste.
His stick twirling in his hand, a withered spray
blacker upon the looming gurgling flood
where arose the howl of weakened stock
dark lowers the tempest overhead
cries in the cold, himself no friend.

This is really difficult. I have had to make a few subtle changes to make it flow or at least make some grammatical sense. But perhaps the purpose of this exercise has already been met - I had no desire to write a poem about the floods and yet quickly saw a word theme emerging through the lines I had chosen. The subject then would be the floods and the theme would choose itself - some of the misery that flooding houses and farms in the country in particular would create.

Would I do this experiment again? Yes I would. If only to see if subject and theme suggested itself again. The shifting around of lines is good fun if difficult. But if I bend the rules a bit I'm sure I can always mold the words into a coherent whole. Next time something else will pop up perhaps.

There are other advantages to this practice such as it providing of an opportunity to draw up more words that can be used to poetic effect. It's another version of reading poetry to make yourself either a or a better poet.

GTP Second Attempt.

This is my second attempt at a poetry exercise that involves the random selecting a lines from published poems - drawn from various sources - and trying to make the lines join in a roughly coherent way - then establishing a possible subject and theme from the material. Once I have my subject and theme try to modify the lines around some images that might crop up. I couldn't use all the lines, just like the last time I tried this out - and I had to change tenses and whole words around. In fact the first draft - because in these exercises they hardly get beyond that - what stands at a first poetic effort bears little relation to the original lines, save the initial inspiration, which it exactly what was required.

1   At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
2   saw things that made him long for death
3   when a vast image out of spiritus mundi
4   bid a strong ghost stand at the head
5   they look up at their pale and sunken faces
6   a mystery of peculiar lore and doings
7   like souls tossing in a hell on a grill
8   the jailer of your vanity
9   roasting  rats on old coat hangers
10 two of the 'dead' roll on the ground
11 burning through the cool firs
12 makes manifest his music and his might
13 couched on the bald top of an once eminent
14 moving slowly moving sadly.

A quick read of the above is making think of a couple of tramps subsisting on a road side quite near a cemetery. They are eating rats they've by cooking them over makeshift spit or fire. They are drinking something like mentholated spirits or something they have managed to get hold of (I heard that furniture polish could be drunk if its distilled in a certain way - maybe they picked some up off an old skip or through rooting through dustbins.  Perhaps its a tramps banquet of roasted rat and distilled polish.  The image is there - but why should it be written?  Perhaps one of them in his delirium sees spirits floating over the cemetery who somehow remind him of the life he once had - a kind of admonishment for wasting his life.  

So I might be inspired to write something like this:

The Tramp's Banquet

I heard a quiet commotion
a faint rattle, desultory song
coughing out in strained mirth.
a neon glow of crammed figures
roasting rats on old coat hangers
in a flickering furnace.
A stronger ghost stood at the head
bottle swigging in wide-eyed gasps
making manifest his music and his might.
The group's pale and sunken faces
burning through the branches of
the cool firs. 

One of the dangers of this exercise is falling in love with the original lines and leaving them intact after the final edit.  It's difficult to imagine any line surviving without serious editing, rephrasing, re-words, omission etc - but it has to considered a risk nonetheless - and this could lead to accusations of plagiarism later on. Having said that it's very early days so to the worry about things that sound so improbable such as liking my poem(s)  so much I'm going to enter them into a competitions or submit them to a magazine or other outlet for consideration of publication is probably less harmful than not practicing in this way.

Notes on motivation.

Motivation according to my old Concise Oxford means:  moving or impelling power (and goes on to say) what induces a person to act.

Merriam Webster defines it thus: a force or influence that causes someone to do something.

Dictionary.com provides some illuminating synonyms the best of which are: desire, impetus, impulse, inclination. It finishes off with some interesting associated words:

That's going to take some beating in terms of exactly what I'm trying to say I often lack.

The only reason I'm interested in words is because they are my craft. Or they would be if I wrote more and for a living. I'm always thinking about writing more but without inspiration I'm reduced to free writes, clumsy blogs about travel and execrable amateur poetry.  But this is it - one has to sweat out the dead periods by writing crap. Any crap.

So with that in mind,  I'm going to write about motivation -  a slippery concept that divides writers from non writers and something that will get me going.  Non-writers like me only write when they are motivated to write. An example would be doing a writing course, compiling an email, tackling a competition that kind of thing. It's difficult to respond to any of those things without motivation - but the fact that they exist and need to be addressed creates the motivation  I'm inspired to write because I'm being prompted by events. But what to do when those promptings aren't there. You're not even motivated to imagine being motivated.  The secret is probably to force motivation. Once you know that motivation is the driver and it is - hunt it down, or at least seek it out through any means whatever, even though it's difficult because right at the time you are conducting your search you feel so de-motivated it's at its most difficult. It's the most devilish of vicious circles.  

At times of limited or no motivation  one is apt not to write anything. At other other times one is so keen to write it's as if there is barely time in the day or energy in the body to get all the dizzying ideas from your brain and onto the page. I have had this feeling. I remember visiting the Museum of London a few years back and it was in reading some of those little historical vignettes that are pinned to the walls and protected by glass that got me going, more than anything grand or eye fetchingly contrived.  One of the snippets that had an effect on me was reading about the 'baby farmers' a bleak practice that took place in Victorian England where impoverished women unable sustain their young offspring would use what little money they had to pay noted individuals who would  take the child and nourish and feed them for a small sum of money-  satisfying them as mothers who were unable to do so themselves and would rather give them up than have them suffer. These baby farmers who had set themselves up as diabolical foster parents in effect, would then kill the children and pocket the cash for themselves. There are endless examples:

The case of Margaret Waters for example who was hanged in 1870, was found guilty of  murder as well as neglect and conspiracy in drugging and starving the infants in her care. During the investigation she was believed to have killed at least 19 children. Often these so called carers worked with others: Waters' sister who collected the children on her behalf was convicted in the same case for obtaining money under false pretenses and sentenced to prison for eighteen months. Or the case of Amelia Elizabeth Dyer born in 1837 who is considered the most prolific offender on record who was tried and hanged at Newgate prison for a single murder but was subsequently implicated in the deaths of over 400 babies over a twenty five year period. 

From a notion like this - a free write of sorts can develop. A free write has pretty good credentials as a motivator in itself - but not a patch on a structured free write with a particular subject.  In this case perhaps there's enough to get a few ideas down for a poem or a short story or a piece of descriptive prose as the words are start to come begetting new ideas and something like flow.

Harms that go hand in hand,

the seeking of nourishment

the need for means
forces the hands of

those who have nothing.

You've heard of a way

it can have its swollen
belly filled and raw lungs eased

by benevolent hands.

Wet nurses-fostering, 

taking the strain, the pain

away - or some of it.
The pain is yours alone
more than the wounds you
still tend. Your heart
torn with grief will fill

the void that brings
forward a new Hell.

This is a good sacrifice,
your needs must hide,
they don't matter,think

of others, the weak

the vulnerable, the absence
of those you have borne
are your only balm. 

Or so you thought. 

I am thinking about the psychological and physiological vulnerability of the young women with babies they do not have the means to care for - and the vulnerability of the babies themselves. There's a duel thing here that could be a theme through the poems subject. 

How about a few words that might be of use: 'Pyle Marsh' is the area in Bristol where Dyer was born. It's the kind of fact that can be smuggled into a poem as it is both obscure and factually accurate. Poems I think thrive on this kind of abstruse referencing because they're written to be re-read several times over - perhaps hundreds of times over by the same reader. Plenty of time for reader analysis. 

She eluded the police but was caught in 1879 after a doctor's suspicions about the number child deaths certified in her (Dyer's) care. 

She was apparently so keen to make money she would take in expectant women and advertise to nurse and adopt a baby, in return for a substantial one-off payment and adequate clothing for the child. In her advertisements and meetings with clients, she assured them that she was respectable, married, and that she would provide a safe and loving home for the child.

She went mad during hard labour which provides material for a poem - time to reflect and repent - take in the awfulness of her behaviour. On release she was in and out of mental hospitals.  her killing methods of alcohol and opium based substances administered to the babies. The name 'mother's friend' which appeared as a street name to these concoctions because its origins had been for calming fractious babies. laudanum was also used. Her return to the practice after incarceration and periods of breakdown in between times.  As the story is fleshed out it becomes more viable as a possible poem because not only is it easier to find an angle but also more material can be worked in. 

It's through little pieces of information that writing motivation can be fed. And in the case of me writing this out today I feel my motivation getting stronger as what I am doing is 'sweating it out'. 

A Few Words

To make a running start rather than sitting on this I'll begin by having a little trot around some of the latest offerings through word of the day sites. It should get the word expansion juices going at least:

Courtesy of the site that actually calls itself Word of the Day as well as providing one: Sockdolager: with the offered definition: something unusually large or heavy. Now this doesn't look really that detailed - sufficient to use the word with confidence because of the slippery element that always has to be remembered, context.

According to Merriam Webster it's a 'decisive blow in an argument. '  And if the roots of this word are suggestive that this is really how this word should be used rather underlines why one should be circumspect about taking a word on and using it with the minimum of background information. It certainly can be used to describe a heavy object but why would you? As a winning and final blow in an argument it sounds most useful.

Macroscian: having a long shadow. So says the 'That Word Site.' Already looks useful for poetry - if perhaps slightly archaic and multi syllabic. Interrogating further reveals the following: Talk Talk Dictionary of difficult words defines it thus: A person casting a long shadow, then hints that the person should be an 'inhabitant of a polar region.' Most other online dictionaries seem to agree, more or less.

Merriam Webster's word of day feature is slightly different in the choosing - unlike other sites that seem to delve into the dark corners of their dictionaries to find dusty nuggets that have fallen into dis or non use, MW tend to select words that have cropped up in the newspapers or other media and are therefore current and perhaps already causing some debate. Putrescible I think falls into that category. According its own website it means: liable to become putrid. Another useful one for poetry, though I find it easy to imagine using it figuratively in prose.

First Post

I have started another of what seems to be so many blogs now - each of them accorded their own specific function. Doubtless I will create more (photographs/free writes/ reviews are just three that come to mind),  as I feel more prone to write about specific things and keep them arranged and stored in specific places instead of   writing randomly about things which then look too haphazard and pointless.

This blog is only about words. Randomness is completely allowed. The fact that words will be the unifying theme ensures that it want ever be too loose - even if I do go from German to Latin or from old Somerset dialect to snatches of Elizabethan poetry or concentrate on trades and professions (a wealth of words and all their metaphorical possibilities emanate from the mouths of tradesmen everyday, and are then lost in the wind too slippery and secretive to be caught by writers and shamelessly used to shore a poetic image or firm up a character's traits.) 

So a repository of sorts - words and phrases, quotes and everything in between starting with:   

I heard Pueri pueri erunt recently on the radio. It was from a faux-letter written in to a radio show and read out by the presenter, about how as young boy pupils at a Grammar (hence the Latin I suppose) stitched up an unpopular teacher whom to the hilarity of the pupils wore an obvious wig. I can't remember the story exactly (perhaps in future I should make a better effort from now on to explain my sources) but as a kind of end note justification for making this pathetic teacher's life Hell (wearing an outrageous wig whilst teaching 14 year old boys is surely asking from trouble, the letter writer wrote: 'Ah well, Pueri pueri erunt' or 'boys will be boys.' 

I had never heard that expression so it becomes this blog's first entry.It should be quite easy to remember from  the word 'puerile' (childish) which is something boys - and indeed men - are often accused of being.  If I was to try and memorize this for quizzes and so on I would think: puerile puerile runts which is just about as memorable as it needs to be.