My love affair with poetry #2
I can thank one of my secondary school English teachers, Mrs Thomas, for protecting the rest of 2H4 from my enthusiasm for poetry – although it was her fault in the first place that I decided to read the whole of The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes out loud to the rest of the class, since she was the one who’d asked us to pick a poem to read! She managed to stop me before they all fell asleep, thankfully. But I do love that poem, for its rhythms and for the images it envokes.
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i’ the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.
I didn’t get as far as that part in my reading though….
Anyway, we tackled a fair amount of poetry in secondary school, though probably not as much as in primary. Nothing in particular stands out for me until my GCSE English Literature classes, although I went through a phase of writing long-winded poems (mostly about animals) when I was about 12 or 13. I do have them saved somewhere, but they are pretty bad and best kept hidden.
But for GCSE English (the age of 14 to 16), we tackled two sets of poems, about which we had to write essays; one based around Love and the other around War. I enjoyed the War poetry as much as the Love even if its subject matter wasn’t as ‘pretty’. My favourite poem of those we studied was The Icing Bus by Roger McGough, with its sweet tale of the littleman with the hunchedbackback who crepto his feet to offer his seat to the blind lady, and its lovely last line of besides you can’t taste shapes.
This was the first time I’d had to analyse the structure of poetry (beyond rhyme schemes) and I finally learnt about iambic pentameter and what-not. Trouble is, I’ve since forgotten most of it, though I think it would be handy to relearn so I can play about with my own poetry now. Can anyone recommend some good resources (books, websites, whatever)?
After my poetry-writing spate in my early teens, I don’t think I wrote much until I reached the sixth form (16 and a bit). By then all the love poetry I read was finally making sense and having a strong effect on me, and I wrote quite a lump of it myself (mostly bad and definitely unrequited). I managed some more mature poems though in my late teens, writing them in the back of the diaries/journals that I kept, and eventually typing them up onto my dad’s Amstrad and then my own first PC (also an Amstrad, in proud possession of a 286 CPU and (I think) 2Mb RAM).
Looking back at these, good and bad, all neatly saved in a file labelled P16-20, I’m both pleased and embarrassed. Some of them only need a bit of work to be brought up to my current (hopefully higher) standards, but there’s an awful lot of long-winded whinging as well. But then I expect that few of us who wrote poetry in our teens can’t say the same…
Here’s the poem I was most proud of at the time; I still quite like it, though I can see its flaws. And I can see my own pretentiousness!
38 Word Poem (with apologies to the Wonderstuff)
A solitary mind,
such as one that is closed
to the light of the world,
Is a great sadness.
A solitary mind,
such as one that is open
to the life of the word,
Is a great joy.
(© 1991 C Sharp)
I was starting to discover more poetry for myself by then, too. I read not only the poems in the anthologies I’d been bought over the years, but I borrowed books of poetry from the libraries I belonged to. No one poem or poet really stands out for me much though, unless it’s Erica Jong – I read her ground-breaking novel Fear of Flying in my late teens, and picked up on a lot of her poetry too. (Well, it was ground-breaking when it was published in 1973 – before I was born! – and it had a hell of an effect on me when I read it, for fairly obvious reasons.) Her themes of love and of being a poet spoke a lot to me then, which is why I Sleep With is one of my favourites, and I know it by heart.
Oh the orgies in stationery stores!
The love of printer‘s ink & think new pads!
A poet has to fall in love to write.
Her bed is heaped with papers, or with men.
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on January 21st, 2009 at 11:37 pm
I want to read “Fear of Flying,” but am awkwardly surrounded by parents who pry into reading habits. Well, if all goes to plan I’ll be leaving home by this September so there’ll be plenty of time. The Jong you quote is sublime: “A poet has to fall in love to write”. I also love to see “a poet” supplemented by a female pronoun.
That “38 Words” poem is pretty impressive! Although you don’t mention precisely what age you were when it was written, it’s certainly far past the standards of my earlier output – probably my current stuff too, actually. In a year or so I’ll be cringing away, no doubt.
Fiendish´s last post: Women Obscure in Their Labour
on January 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 am
I love your 38 words; they recall some of the early Irish monks’ verses to me. (in translation–I make no claim to medieval languages!)
They Highwayman *would* make anyone fall in love with excellent rhythm and a damn good story told so beautifully. For that I love Coleridge, Poe and Longfellow too.
Susan´s last post: Can We Write It? Yes We Can!
on January 22nd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Oh dear, Fiendish. I read it when I was your age, but I was lucky in that my parents didn’t mind what I read – and I’d read a lot of scifi and fantasy that was nearly as explicit and probably a lot more deviant. I do remember looking at the book for ages on the library racks though before I got the courage to actually check it out, because I was worried what the librarian would think (or if she’d even refuse me).
Ironically, these days, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about checking out YA fiction because I’m worried about what the librarian will think of me!
Definitely try some of her poetry though – there’s a lot available on her website.
And I’m glad you both liked 38 Words! I was about 17 when I wrote it, Fiendish (which means I better fix the copyright date). I can actually remember coming up with it in my head – I was in the 6th form study by myself after school, right next to the dusty glass-fronted cabinet with obsolete books (from which I stole Euripides and Aristophanes), with the afternoon winter sun shining on the glass… Hmm, that begs its own poem, I think!