My Struggle* (*better headline required)

I do struggle with poetry. It’s not that I don’t like it, I love listening to it and the rhythm of the words as they dance and float about can make me as contented as a bunny on a spring morning or weep like a gutter on an English summer’s day, and I’m prepared to bore you to tears on the genius of every single letter and punctuation mark of Dylan Thomas’ work any time you like.

I do struggle to write it, though. Somehow the form eludes me, despite having tried and tried (and even bought the Stephen Fry book) somehow I just can’t grasp the form. Maybe the answer is not to try and find the form, but just to write. Maybe some of the dialogue extracted from the plays might sound like poetry out of context; maybe the monologues can be read like a poem. However, if I sit down and say “today I’m going to write a poem” …nothing happens.

I’ve never been a fan of analysing poetry, either. Somehow all that “why did the author choose this word?’ or “what was he trying to say here?” kind of debate leaves me feeling inadequate and ignorant and slightly bewildered. I’d just rather hear the words spoken, listen to the sound of it and come to my own conclusions about what I think it’s about.

Uh-oh! There I go seemingly dismissing the whole discipline of Literature studies in a paragraph. I wouldn’t dare. I have the deepest respect for those who can analyse it and find the deeper meanings of it all or tell you precisely what Wordsworth was actually thinking as he tripped through the lanes that sunny morning, but for me that somehow strips the magic away from it, and weaving poetry seems like magic to me because I simply can’t do it.

Maybe it’s the fact that it has a label that causes the problem for me. "Poetry" with a capital "P", with such a huge imposing history of genius. Other prose forms generally hold no fear because I can hide my many shortcomings in a sea of waffle and blather. But poetry? Terrifying! Perhaps I need to remind myself that songs and even many advertising jingles can be  considered to be poems of a sort, but of course, repeating “We buy any car” until your shoe goes through the TV screen doesn’t count as poetry in any form I can understand it, even if I’ll now never, ever be able to forget that I’ve always got somewhere I can sell my car, should the need arise.

Some of the old hymns I still remember from those dusty old Sundays of my childhood feel more like poems than anthems in my head, and I suppose that even free form monologues are also poetry in their way, if you respect the rhythm of the words they will usually seem poetic in their performance.

I’m told that listening to the writer or playwright just speak can help actors tune in to the rhythm of  the works, so it’s a great shame there aren’t any old surveillance tapes from the time of Shakespeare. There is a (possibly ridiculous and - even more possibly – made up by me) theory that stonework and glass can remember the vibrations of everything that ever happens nearby. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we had the ability to access that? Hear all those old conversations and performances as they were heard before the age of recording devices, and before those unique voices were lost to us forever, becoming just another part of history left mysterious and unknowable. When you see a name on a gravestone do you wonder what that person was like to talk to and what they thought about their life? Do you also wonder "What did they sound like?"

One long ago evening I went into town for a poetry reading evening and a row broke out because someone was performing a piece about social workers and one of the audience strongly disagreed with the sentiments expressed. A few awkward moments followed as we all stared at our drinks, wondering quite what was going to happen, but inside I was secretly delighted to find that in this (or rather that) day and age you could still go into a bar in a big city and hear genuine passionate and uninhibited debate about something like the content of a poem.

No discussion on the delights and mysteries of poetry would be complete without at least proving that I have no skill in the artform. Once, in an effort to try and understand poetry more, I did start to write a play in iambic pentameter but it was so truly awful, so mindwrenchingly bad that it remains to be the one file of my writings that I have ever permanently deleted, although even it had worth, as it did leave me with masses of respect for the sheer genius of what Shakespeare achieved. Instead, I can only humbly present these two short poem(ette)s from many moons ago:-

“Ode to a lost pet”

 My cat

“Fruitbat”

Went Splat

And that was that.

“Answerphone poetry”

(To be read in as deadpan a John Cooper Clarke-ish way as you can muster)

 You are talking to a machine

For I am nowhere to be seen

So leave a message (keep it clean)

And in time it will be seen… to…

(ah yes, “Answerphone poetry”. What a gift to the world that was…)

Mindless moribund musings on a melancholy morning

The problem I have with attending the writing group is that the sudden mental stimulation after all the apathy and lethargy – coupled with the adrenaline and caffeine of course – means that the words start tumbling out of me which means a night of insomnia as I try to get the words down on (metaphorical) paper and leads to a quite groggy morning after for both me and the long-suffering beloved (who holds no truck with social networking sites, wishes no part of it, and will probably never be mentioned again in these less than hallowed musings).

So, with all that in mind, I’m trying to make sense of a jumble of thoughts this morning from my thoughts on poetry and my difficult relationship with it or the sheer consistent bulk brilliance of many American TV Drama and Comedy shows (I may share another day…) to “poking” on FizzBok and what it might actually refer to. Then there’s the real story behind the drama piece I wrote called called THE BITTER END, and how it relates to my own social anxiety, which might be a story worth telling one day. Or not.

Switching on the TV this morning to try and distract my few remaining little grey cells has me pondering whether I could buy some storage space at the Chatsworth auction to help alleviate the pressure of the increasing amounts of tat currently scattered about MAWH Towers or whether the cyclists from the Isle of Man’s reluctance to attend the Commonwealth Games in India is symptomatic of a greater reluctance to leave the island at all.

Is a long(ish) critique of the general shoddiness of the editorial policy on BBC Breakfast long overdue? Just tell me the flippin’ news and stop telling me what you “reckon” (Sian and Susannah, I’m looking at you) and while you’re at it, stop asking the “Great British Public” what they “reckon” too. Most of us are so ill-informed anyway that we haven’t got a clue what we’re talking about at the best of times, so giving us a national platform seems to border on the irresponsible.

Of course that’s the way things are in the modern world. “Power to the people” and all that. Ah yes! For ‘tis the age of t’interweb and the Clemeron runs a country where what the people “reckon” really matters. Nowadays we have a Utopian universal forum that’s levelled everybody’s playing field so much that allows even the most radical of viewpoints to find like minds to help them to form a movement with, rather than just being told how daft they are by their mates when they mouth off down the pub. Give an extremist contact with another extremist and suddenly their views don’t seem quite so extreme to them any more. Next thing you know, they’ve got a following and society is off to hell in a handbasket and we’ve “empowered” them to do it. Well done us.

I’ve long suspected that the “I reckon” factor plays a big part in what them there media folk in the big city broadcast anyway. Many of the stories seem to come from that week’s Panorama, or the latest issue of the Radio Times or maybe just a slice of a regional programme that might have a human interest angle, but more often than not you start to think that it’s just a thought one of the researchers had on their way to work that morning. “I nearly got knocked off my bike this morning” becomes an item on the dangers “Cycling in the City” or little Tamsin or Tony gets a bad mark in a maths test and suddenly there’s a report on declining educational standards in the school system.

I also “reckon” (which immediately validates my point of view of course) that the many surveys and statistics they ask come from just asking around the office. “Right, has anyone else nearly been knocked off their bike? Six of us… Right… So out of the eight of us here, that’s… ‘75% of people say they’ve had a near miss whilst cycling.’ What’s that Gavin? You were actually knocked off? ‘and nearly a quarter of those have had a serious injury!’” They certainly don’t seem to go far for their “I reckons” at any rate. Most of the vox pops that BBC Manchester present seem to have the BBC offices in the background or be no further than a quarter of a mile up the road. “I’ll just pop over the road and ask that lot over their what they “reckon”. Back in a sec…”

When you consider their imminent move northwards, I’m also slightly suspicious of the amount of items suddenly coming from the heart of Manchester anyway. Is it practice to ease the film crews into finding their way around the North? Are they trying to get the Southern audiences prepared for news items not being about London? More likely than not they’re linking their trip up North in with a visit to the Estate Agents. Then of course we’re “back to the studio” where an educator making a quite serious observation on the evolution of language gets patronised in a “listen to the funny sounding teenagers” kind of way.

Sigh! Maybe it’s just that I don’t feel they’re talking to me. There seems to be what I can only describe as a “mumsy” bias to the whole sorry spectacle. Maybe from a more “family friendly” point of view the entire thing makes perfect sense. Anyway, in MAWH Towers we’ve taken to turning the sound down until the local weather comes on, which is the only real reason it was ever switched on at all. I used to listen to John and Jim in the car at that time of day anyway, so maybe it’s time I returned to that particular fold, although I will miss Bill talking about his bees…

Bees are cool!