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 or readers to navigate the work themselves, to find their own meaning, a meaning that may change with each reencounter.
But I have found it psychologically excruciating to even allow myself to think about writing poems these last few years, and unlike Van Morrison I am an apprentice, not a master. This essay is for everyone grappling with their own inspiration, and trying to find a way to sing through their jungle of words.
We start with a short poem I published on Monday when I launched the Analogue Sydney Substack. It is about two women painting a shopfront, Concert.
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 a poem when read aloud is paramount to me: I must appear mad when writing them 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 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, leaning straight 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 “pex” is so satisfying to say — something clipped and conclusive. There are many reasons to write poems, and many ways to define poetry, 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.
The first draft from 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 beat of the extra word “silver” — which provides a falling rhythm to the line ending “ladder” — make the first two lines “sing” better, at least to me. The point is not that I am in some sense “right”, just that trusting your own ear when you listen to poetry adds an extra dimension. We understand this subconsciously, of course, which is why we like songs, but even just sounding out the words and rolling them on your tongue gives you a way to “sing” your own phrases and poems.
Note also that 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 that there are no (or at least, very few) wasted words. Small and perfectly formed, making something you think is beautiful, and that sounds beautiful: that is one way to understand poetry. There are, of course, many others.
Here’s the second stanza as I first wrote it:
It rained soft, but under the awning She and her shop-mate licked Neat paint like washing cats
There are (at least) two interesting things to note. Firstly, the “washing cats” metaphor (strictly a simile) has already appeared. For me, this is the key image of the finished poem, better even than the human clock on a ladder. I had just finished writing a different poem with a cat metaphor (in which a woman had “cat bright” eyes), and so cats were on my mind! This made it easier to connect the firm brushing motions the two painters made with the licking, grooming pushes cats make on themselves or their kittens. Again, the success or otherwise of the metaphor is subjective: the point is that it is deliberate, and it seeks to surprise or delight or even startle the reader with something (ideally) original. At least, that’s what I am trying to do. But I am not thinking all that at the time, I am just letting my mind make connections — as doubtless your mind does all the time too — and then writing them down, and revising them.
And revision is the second thing to note about the original stanza two. Even as I wrote it I knew “shop-mate” was too awkward to stay, but I didn't let that stop me writing down the cat metaphor before I forgot it! I am not actually in love with “fat and soft”, but “it rained soft”, while an entirely accurate description of the rain I was watching, finishes a bit short; it’s missing a beat: hence the also accurate but clichéd “fat”. I could keep working on an alternative to “fat and soft” but the poem just “seems done” to me now, so I will leave it.
You can see I also added “unrained” to the second stanza after the first draft, which is not even a word! Strictly, it should be “un-rained” but I didn’t like the look of that hyphen there so cut it out. So much of how your poem finishes up will be about your own taste, and your taste is developed by reading, or listening, to other poems and poets. I wanted to say “unrained” because it did start and stop raining the whole time I was watching, but “It rained and stopped raining” didn’t scan the way I liked (and “It rained on and off” is a cliché) and I lit upon “unrained” immediately. Doubtless there are ways of fixing the rhythm without making up words! Clive James in The Fire Of Joy talks about Yeats’ famous poem Sailing to Byzantium where he uses the phrase “perne in a gyre”, and James lambasts Yeats for trying to force the neologism “perne” upon an unsuspecting world, ultimately unsuccessfully. But it’s your poem, you can make up words if you want to, your readers will decide if they like them or not! I like the little tension that the clearly novel, but somehow familiar word “unrained” introduces, but you can decide for yourself if it is successful.
The third stanza of the finished poem includes the cat metaphor we have already discussed, but it is also made up of shorter lines which only have two or three beats each:
They LICKED neat PAINT Like WASHing CATS In FIRM and STEADy rows
And here the beats arguably mimic the brush strokes themselves. Did I think consciously about that when I wrote those lines? No. But you can see that “licked neat paint like washing cats” exists in the first draft, and there is a steady, short rhythm there that inspired the finished stanza three. These sorts of connections are often pointed out in poetry lessons but I am not sure about the degree to which poets are consciously aware of creating them. Doubtless some are, but I keep coming back to my ear when I say it out loud, and I really like the sound of the first three lines of stanza three when read aloud, and any connection to actual painting can flicker in the mind of the reader, or not.
I want to say two things about the fourth and final stanza. Firstly, it’s full of beautiful words and phrases used to describe windows! I knew “architraves”, and knew of “mullion” but not what it meant, so I looked it up. “glazing bars” was new to me as a phrase, but makes perfect sense. These are evocative words, they sound good, and have a vintage texture since you do not hear them so much any more. And maybe that conveys a little about the age of the shop itself, which seemed to be either 1920s, or possibly Edwardian. A photograph of the shop would allow an architectural historian to be definitive about this, but that is not the point here: we are not doing history but writing a poem! We need not cleave entirely to objective truth or facts; instead we seek to paint pictures in our readers’ minds, and our tools are just words, and their sound and the rhythm together.
Secondly, stanza four contains “little grace”. I originally tried “trim” (which would have been a repetition, which is sometimes good and sometimes lazy) and “pale”, and several other ordinary adjectives. But just a single syllable there felt like I was missing a beat, and I wanted to avoid a cliché, hence “little”. I am moderately happy with it: the shop itself was little. But while the last two lines have a bouncy cadence (the first is iambic pentameter, the second is a beat short), they seem a little pat rather than fully emotionally resolving. But this was a modest poem and sometimes enough is enough.
A final comment about “Her wife” and “that flower shop”: these, in contrast to my anonymising claims about “her” above, are rooted in fact: it is a flower shop, and — I learnt after somewhat fervently pressing a first draft of the poem into “her” unsuspecting hands — the painters are married. It could have been awkward but when Georgie gripped and pressed the damp page full of pencil marks to herself in delight that such a thing had been made — and as I expressed my delight at just the making — something else was made in the world: A shared joy, brief and unencumbered. The next morning I wrote a second draft to change “Her sister” (I was thinking of two cats my wife once knew) to “Her wife”, and pushed it under the door. They sit now, one atop the other, pinned to Georgie’s notice board, outside that flower shop.
I do not think artists need to explain their work, and their chosen silence should be respected: the work speaks for itself. But explanations may encourage the creative impulse in any of us, and I think there is nothing more precious in the world, or more neglected, than our individual creative impulse. Steven Spielberg said something profound that has been the tiny bell in my ear these last few years, as I have dared to try and write even just one line of a poem, and then maybe another:
And I’ve always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to—your instincts, your human personal intuition—always whispers; it never shouts.
I have spent a long time shouting in my life, but I am whispering now.
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.
I think the only old word (as opposed to something novel like “mansplain”) 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.
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.