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…)