How to write a long poem - #11

 

11.

The two-page (one opening) slow burn tough it out method

 

You need a big book of blank pages for this. One of those roughly 30cm x 20cm jobs. I think this is essential equipment for a poet in any case.  The busy book! No matter how much you may rely on screens for the making (and certainly the finishing) of poems, I think it’s important to stay in touch with ‘old school’ writing – with pen or pencil or paint or burnt stick. Doing this helps to keep your point of origin in poetry real (as opposed to virtual), anchored in the sensate experience of arriving on a piece of paper of some kind, the kind that functions through the longest outage. After all, on paper is where most of us want our finished efforts to arrive most of the time (blogs and e-zines notwithstanding). Of course things may be very different for succeeding generations.

littera scripta manet !

 

For this exercise, what I’m suggesting is using the facing (initially blank) pages of your notebook to let two distinct ideas or images or questions or assertions battle it out, or cosy up, as the case may be.

Your blank page is a canvas. Your work, in gathering (as opposed to drafting, which comes later) is to fill the canvas with – to the greatest extent possible – IMAGERY! It’s show first and let what you show do the telling!

So, going back to your stock of titles, first lines and last lines (and/or building on them now), head up each of your facing pages with a very different idea or image.

Over a few days, allow notes to accumulate under each heading, without any initial thought of the relation of what’s on one page to what’s on the other. Scratch down what is relevant when it comes to you. Don’t push it, but keep the heading line in the back of your head. Just collect. When you get an idea or image that absolutely doesn’t fit the brief, test it for the possibility of the long poetic leap and if it fails the test, then that’s a heading for your next page in the book.

(Once you get into the habit of letting what doesn’t fit spill on to a next page, you will be amazed at how usefully suggestive that can be for the next day.)

But back to our two facing pages.

Once you’ve done enough collecting on each page, make with the arrows! I mean start drawing lines to see what might connect with what and also to see what order things might go in. Keep an open mind. What you thought of as beginning might actually be an ending or vice versa.

Do this on each page separately to begin, and then try to draw some arrows over the gutter between the pages, always bearing in mind that you might really have two separate poems, and there’s no need to connect them.

But trying to can take things in an interesting and unexpected direction, much in the way material from a dream, if remembered, can take your thinking in an entirely new different direction. (But perhaps we’ll save that one for a later exercise!)

Once you’ve drawn all your arrows it’s time to start drafting – either on a fresh sheet of paper, a page in another book (for the purpose!). Or on the screen by means of keyboard. Or by voice recognition, to get the sound of what you’re drafting or through writing recognition to screen. Varying the mode of making is an excellent way to test if what you’re making works! (In the days of the manual typewriter, I would frequently go back and forth with drafts from handwritten to typewritten a number of times. I think we’ve got much more efficient and fun ways to go now… But whatever modes of production you use, often what you’ve made doesn’t work!  It doesn’t satisfy you. You don’t believe in it! What’s that thing Beckett says – try again, fail better!  Or James Joyce – ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’.  It all depends how you look at it!

But when you feel that what you’ve done hasn’t worked, that’s when you give it a break (and come back later) or make something entirely new from scratch. Or paint a picture, draw, have a hack at the piano, torture a guitar, go for a walk, play ping pong.  Just keep the old pile around at least for a while (skip the wastepaper basket shooting with the ball of paper cliché … that’s strictly for novelists and playwrights).

This method may not lead to a poem initially (it may not ever lead to a poem)… but you’ll never know unless you give it a go.