Poking the poem mystery

How did one little poem get made?

See, I don’t need to explain what I do or how I do it, I don’t need to. Other people might do, but I don’t. To me, it’s OK if it’s a mystery.

That’s Van Morrison, from this difficult Laura Barton interview for the Guardian in 2019, A duel with Van Morrison.

There are strong arguments for artists refusing to comment on their work, or “process”, as a way of maintaining mystery about it and “what it means”. Such reticence leaves space for the listeners, the readers, the watchers, the audience, to navigate the work themselves, to find their own meaning, a meaning that may change with each reencounter.

On Monday I launched the Analogue Sydney Substack with a little poem about two women painting a shopfront, Concert, and no accompanying commentary — my periodic yen for understated simplicity made me do it! But I am going to spend some time explaining the genesis of that poem because, short of writing poems themselves, writing about poetry is the writing I want to do.

The first thing to say is that this is a poem of modest vocabulary. Sometimes I get carried away by verbal pyrotechnics — the sheer joy of using big words — especially if they are apropos. And the importance of following your joy when creating anything cannot be over-emphasised, verbal pyrotechnics or not. But recently I have been writing largely descriptive passages in short, simple words, and have focused on cutting the filler words, and not trying to force anything overly literary or poetical.

I am not sure that “lucid” really is the right word in the last line, although the alliteration with “lines” is deliberate because it both sounds good and feels good to say. The sound of the poetry when read aloud is paramount to me: I must appear mad when writing it because I am constantly repeating lines and stanzas to myself so I can “hear” them: hold them in my finger ears and feel their sound before deciding if they stay or go. And often coming back cold a week later and reading aloud again presents a solution to a “what is the right word in that spot?” block.

I love my subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, courtesy of my primary school teacher David Taylor, who insisted all words one could neither spell nor define be immediately looked up in one of the blue and worn Concise Oxford Dictionaries that sat at odd angles on the shelf above the radiator in our classroom. When I looked up “lucid” I found “lucent” in the thesaurus. This is one of the thousands of words I feel like I vaguely “know”, but never actually say. And I tend not to put such words in poems because when I read the work back they sound forced or false¹.

My way into this poem was pure serendipity: I was sitting at a cafe in Victoria Street, Lewisham, near the train station, and looking straight across the road. A woman was halfway up a silver ladder, painting a shopfront, and I noticed she was leaning to one o’clock. There was something so beautiful about the “A” shape of the ladder plus this slender human, only above the apex from the waist up, looking like the short hand of a clock, just coming around to one. This image was accentuated by the white top she was wearing, in stark contrast to her black overalls, as if a magpie was intently studying the doorframe.

So I wrote the simplest thing: “She leaned to one o’clock”. And it’s worth pausing on “She” as the first word. What a powerful and deceptively simple word that is! Half of all humanity! But “she” also serves to anonymise: the painter is a real person, with a full panoply of feeling and history, but for the purposes of this line she is merely the living part of our clock metaphor — the metaphor is alive because she is alive, so we see both her and a clock. And each one of us imagines something slightly different!

One other thing got me started: “apex”. Such a short and simple word with a precise meaning (OED, Noun, 2.a. The highest part of something, esp. when forming a point; the tip, top, or peak; a pointed extremity). And that “x” is so satisfying to say; there is something definitive, conclusive, neat about the emphasis on “pex”. There are many reasons to write poems, and many ways to define a poem, but for me (again!) the sound of the words is paramount: the pleasure of both saying and hearing them. And when you can marry a pleasing sound to the perfect meaning, as here, it is supremely satisfying. A lot of what I am trying to do in a poem is just that: say what I mean with small, perfect, well sounding² words.

My notebook actually has “She leaned to one o’clock / At the apex of the ladder”: “silver” is missing. Say the original line to yourself several times, without the “silver”, then try it with the “silver”: I only added “silver” because, to me, it made those first two lines “sing” better. Do you agree or not? There is an entire world of learning devoted to the metre and rhythm of poetry, and I am but poorly schooled in it, but for our purposes focus just on the sound at the end of both “silver” and “ladder”: we get a “vah” sound from “silver”, and a “da” sound from “ladder”, and the symmetry of those two ‘ah’ sounds, plus the added beats of the extra word “silver”, make the first two lines “sing” better, at least to my ear. The point is not that I am in some sense “right”, just that trusting your own ear when you listen to poetry adds an entire extra dimension. We understand this subconsciously, of course, which is why we like good singing, but even just sounding out the words and rolling them on your tongue gives you a way to “sing” your own words, phrases and poems.

Now, the entire first stanza could almost be a sentence in a novel; there is nothing obviously “poetical” about it. And I do not claim it is some great or profound stanza, just that it sounds pleasing to me to say, and there are no (or at least, very few) wasted words. Small and perfectly formed, making something you think is beautiful, that both looks and sounds beautiful: that is one way to understand poetry. There are, of course, many others.

I shall return to the elaborate deconstruction of the little “Concert” in a subsequent post.

Concert

She leaned to one o’clock
At the apex of the silver ladder,
And painted grey with the small brush
Along the antique green.

It rained and unrained, fat and soft,
But dry under the awning,
In black overalls and white smock,
Her wife trim and black clad herself,

They licked neat paint
Like washing cats
In firm and steady rows
Upon the lead lights

And glazing bars,
The architraves and lean mullions,
To cover and revive the little grace
And lucid lines of that flower shop.

1. I think the only old word (as opposed to something novel like “enshittification”) I have learnt in the last decade is “recondite” (obscure, esoteric, abstruse (an arguably even more satisfying word!)), and so far I have only managed “recondite is recondite”, which is both pleasing and annoying.

2. I have forced myself to put “Euphonious: pleasing to the ear” in a footnote here, because no matter how sublime it is, it ain’t small.