For me, poetry began as so many things begin: by being young and foolish and wanting to desperately express myself.
I started writing poetry as a teenager and it was godawful stuff. I’d spend my allowance in the library on the photocopier, making little booklets of the stuff I’d then give out to people at school or 6th form. It was dreadful. But as time went by it slowly got better, and paths and styles began to clarify themselves.
I began writing the funnier more performancy things and got involved with poetry slams and all that excitement, which was very enjoyable and seemed to be something I could do, while at the same time the more ‘serious’ or ‘page’ poetry became more confident and happier to just be what it was out of the limelight. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make better.
I’ve never tried bothering a mainstream publisher with children’s poetry.
My first poetry collections were published by a small press based here in Reading called Two Rivers Press, and they’re handsome objects that I’m fond of.
Because most poetry is sold by hand, at a certain point it made sense to start my own small press for the books I was going to be able to sell at gigs, so I started Quirkstandard’s Alternative to make my ‘entertainments’ – product that reflected what I do on stage.
With Quirkstandard’s Alternative I published a book of children’s poetry, I Eat Squirrels. I do a fair number of school visits, running poetry workshops and showing off, so it’s nice to have something to wave around and, if appropriate sell a few copies of at the end of the day, or at least leave a couple of copies in the school library as a reminder of what just happened.
Curiously that book became the best-selling thing at adult gigs as well (since the sort of poems I do in cabaret and in assembly are more or less the same, just with a little more or less swearing round the outside of them): whether that’s because people are more willing to buy a poetry book if they can say, “It’s for my son, he’d love you,” I don’t know . . . But fortunately I Eat Squirrels has been able to subsidise other books I’ve made through Quirkstandard’s which haven’t yet, and never will, turn a profit.
This is the nature of poetry and small press poetry in particular (though there is, in real terms, no such thing as ‘big press’ poetry publishing – even the big five aren’t shifting units (on the whole, Beowulfs and Staying Alives aside) that would make a mainstream fiction publisher happy . . . I suspect): you’re doing it for the love of doing it, rather than for the dreams of avarice.
My next book of poetry for kids will be coming out with a lovely Bristol-based small press, Burning Eye Books, who specialise in books by performance poets – poets with a route to market (gigs), but who are generally ignored by a lot of poetry presses. They’ve just done my latest book of adult entertainments (odd poems of comic or unlikely intent) and I thought it would be nice for them to have a book that might sell a few more units than that one. So come the summer there will be a new kids poetry book with a super-special secret illustrator that I can’t talk about.
I like the fact poems are generally short.
They’re the snack you can eat between books, but they demand attention. They’re deceptive – they look tiny, but they open windows to dizzying views. They can be small mirrors in which you can recognize yourself afresh, from angles you’d not thought of, or from the angle you’d always thought of but imagined no one else had seen. They do all the things that novels do: make you feel less alone, or totally alone, or understood, or laughing or sad or or or . . .
They, like all art, are a way of interacting with the world. The best poems are like perfect pieces of jewelry: tiny, intricate, dazzling, breathtaking. Probably flawed.
Poems are small, and poetry books are often slim volumes, but they can take years to read. Poems are returnable-to, collections are dippable and re-dippable, they look new each time you open them, there are things lost in the corners you didn’t see before.
There should always be poetry books in the toilet. That is where they should be. You wouldn’t read a novel on the loo, but a poem is perfect. That smallest of rooms is the perfect place to consider the smallest of literatures – it is, after all, a place of thinking.
Dip. Dip and dip again. There’s no obligation, ever, to like a poetry collection, but almost always there’ll be one poem in there that says, “Yes!” to you. And that’s made the entry fee worthwhile.
I like many poets so I’ll just highlight a handful. On stage, live, I think you can hardly do better than going to see: John Hegley, whose work is just full of the joy of linguistic play, rule-breaking, skipping, frivolity and beautifully opening gulphs of seriousness and honesty; and Salena Godden, who is delightfully rude, sexy, sumptuous, full of life and life and life and passion and fun and fire. They’re both brilliant performers, with the goods to back it up.
Two poets who I adore in books might be: Norman MacCaig, the finest, quietest, most dazzlingly surprising poet of nature and philosophy and Scotland whose poems, short and simple, hit the nail on the head, in ways you or I would never have dreamt of until we’d seen him do it (after which it seems obvious), more often than almost anyone I know; and Elizabeth Jennings, who’s a bit of an odd choice for me perhaps, her poems being almost domestic and often religious and always plain speaking, but who I go back to again and again (a poem like Curtains Undrawn, about walking down a winter street, when it’s dark, but people haven’t yet drawn their curtains (a voyeuristic poem, of love and hope) is for me perfect).
I got involved with the Betjeman Poetry Prize because they asked me.
I had a nice e-mail from John Betjeman’s granddaughter asking me and saying I would get to have lunch with Lauren Child if I said yes. Who would say no to an offer like that?
Competitions are funny things, aren’t they.
In a way we should be against them, because poetry, art, life, isn’t a competition, or if it is the only person you’re competing against is yourself, or your last poem or painting or composition . . . but having the chance for some recognition when you’re starting out, to know your work is being read by people who’re interested, who are paying it attention, even if you don’t win, can’t be a bad thing. Can it?
I hope that the winners and not-winners alike continue to write poetry after the competition if that’s what they enjoy doing, and don’t if they don’t. (No one is obliged to enjoy writing the stuff and if you don’t enjoy it, don’t do it.) My biggest fear would be that people who enjoyed writing poetry and who didn’t win are put off and throw the pen aside. That would be a huge shame.
My five tips for aspiring poets would be . . .
Firstly, visit the Betjeman Poetry Prize website where there’s a really good Tips to help you write your poem page, with amazing advice and examples for Kate Clanchy.
Secondly, go to the library and sit in the poetry section and pile the books around you and eat them. Find out what you don’t like, what bores, who says things that interest you or ring a bell and who doesn’t. Discard the latter and look for more of the former. Swim in poetry.
Thirdly, don’t be afraid of copying out the poems you love – by writing them yourself (rather than just reading them aloud) you’ll sometimes find an extra key into how Sylvia Plath wrote it or what Simon Armitage might’ve been thinking when he picked that word. This is the same as when a painter sits in the gallery in front of an old master and paints their own version – it’s about finding out how things are built.
Fourthly, if you want to write, just write. It doesn’t matter if what you write’s rubbish. It doesn’t matter if you never show it to anyone. That’s not important, especially when you’re starting out, beginning, learning. Write for yourself and just get on with it.
And fifthly, if you’re not enjoying it, put the pen down and go do something else instead. There’s no shame in not being a poet, in the same way there’s no shame in not being a sculptor or an acrobat or bank manager. No one should be obliged to write poems, or forced to write poems, or made to write poems if they don’t feel like it. It might be you’re not feeling like being a poet today, and tomorrow you’ll come back refreshed, or it might be you’re not feeling like a poet for the foreseeable future. That’s not a problem; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Go do something that does send the tingle up your spine, that makes you feel, “Yes!” It might take some time to find what that thing is, but that’s why we try different things… with luck one of them makes you sit up and pay attention.
Describe poems in three words?
Try one now.
Photo © Naomi Woddis
Comments