Writing Poetry – can it be taught?
Now that I’m in between writing novels and have returned to my other love, poetry, I was inspired to find out more about the Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, whose centenary celebrations were held this year. I wouldn’t normally be attracted to TV programme with the word ‘Fishing’ in its title. The fact that it also had Billy Connolly and Poetry, didn’t attract me either. I like all kinds of poetry, including the humorous, and enjoy do enjoy (smallish) doses of Billy C, too, but this suggested an hour of slapstick.
To my surprise and delight, it wasn’t like that at all. There was humour, tenderness and beauty and enough food for thought to keep me going for weeks.
For me, the programme was at its best when MacCaig spoke directly to us from the dead– via photos and old TV programmes. Hearing him recite his own poems has given me the voice with which I can hear any of his work that I’ve managed to track down.
I’ll buy a copy of at least one of his (20?) books published between 1943 and 1988. The images he uses hit me with surprise before I find myself breathing out in recognition. Here’s one I love, from True Ways of Knowing: “You let me know/The way a boat would feel, if it could feel,/The intimate support of water.”
And how about this, from his poem ‘Stars and Planets’:
“It’s hard to think that the earth is one-
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,”
I found this one, along with Treeless landscape, on this site
It’s wonderful the way so many people share pictures and information freely (I do try to acknowledge anything that I use here on this blog). I found this short poem on YouTube presented against a picture of Tony Blair in parliament, which seemed a very apt setting for these words, which are recited by the poet himself:
Smuggler
Watch him when he opens
His bulging words –justice,
Fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
Peace, peace. Make it your custom
To pay no heed
To his frank look, his visas, his stamps
And signatures. Make it
Your duty to spread out their contents
In a clear light.
Nobody with such luggage
has nothing to declare.And here’s another Youtube, with more poems, and pictures of Maccaig’s favourite place, Assynt, and another of MacCaig’s poems, In Praise of a Man on a site called ‘The Scottish Patient’“The beneficent lights dim
but don’t vanish. The razory edges
dull, but still cut. He’s gone: but you can see
his tracks still, in the snow of the world.”
As an amateur poet and a creative writing tutor, the title of this post is a question that enters my head from time to time, so I was fascinated by his reply to interviewer, Jennie Renton, quoted in full on Frost’s Meditations with several more of MacCaigs poems and other articles about him and his work.
Here’sMacCaig’s answer: “When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous. I’d always been suspicious of ‘Creative Classes.’ However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird. And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.”
That seems a bit dismissive, but his explanation of how he does, in fact, help the students is exactly the type of input which I find most useful – and which I often receive myself from the members of SoundsWrite, the inspiring poetry group in Leicester that I attend whenever I can.
“ A very common thing was to find a line I just couldn’t understand, and I’d say, ‘I don’t understand that line. It’s very boring to ask, I know, but what does it mean?’ Extraordinarily often they’d say, ‘Well as a matter of fact I don’t know.’ And I’d say, ‘What’s it doing there then?’ And they would say, ‘I liked the image.’ I’d say, ‘So do I. But I don’t know what it means. It’s a nice line. Remove it. Make it the start of a new poem.’ “
Fat heroines for fat women and 3 categories of books
In both of the talks that I’ve attended recently by writer, R.J. Ellory, I was fascinated to hear the way he describes three categories of novels. I realised that even if I hadn’t classified them so clearly before this, I recognised that this is actually how I view them too:
1: the ‘airport ones’ that you might take on holiday with you, or curl up at home with on a cold wet day. These are escapist entertainment, often following an established formula. They are quickly devoured, enjoyed, and as quickly forgotten. They do ‘what it says on the tin’ and serve a specific purpose. They are ‘give-away’ items that you can pass on to friends or charity shops without a qualm.
2: literary fiction, which is often described as ‘style over content’. These books might sometimes need a bit more thought and effort while you read them, but they will make a long-term impact on the reader, and will often be re-read quite soon, not because their plot has already been forgotten, but in order to savour the beautiful phrases and sentences and admire the sheer skill in the use of the English language. Each subsequent reading is likely to reveal more treasures.
3: a combination of 1 and 2 – beautiful and skilful use of language, but more commercial, with, perhaps, a more immediately accessible and gripping plot. R.J. Ellory aims at being in this category, and it is certainly where I’d have placed his novel, A Quiet Belief in Angels. (the only one I’ve read so far)
I was reminded again of these categories a couple of days ago, when I came across the link to this article on the on-line BookSeller:
I don’t tend to read Chic Lit myself, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the dress-size of its protagonists. It’s the formulaic plots that don’t hold much interest for me. (Having said that, I used to adore Georgette Heyer’s predictable Regency romances in my younger days, and their heroines were always beautiful, and they always won the dark, sardonic hero in the end.)
Nowadays, I prefer to feel that I’m learning something new from a novel, whichever category it might fall into. I’m currently nearing the end of a very enjoyable novel (on CD) Amenable Women, by Mavis Cheek. One of her themes is the importance (or not) of beauty for a woman, particularly how plain women are perceived in our culture now, and in Tudor times.
I was particularly interested that Mavis Cheek had chosen this as a key theme in her novel, because it also plays a part in my new novel, Paper Lanterns.
There seem to be a few themes in this particular post: categories/genres of novels; possibilities of lots of sub-divisions in each of the three I’ve named – and a whole lot more to say about what people are looking for when they pick up a novel.
