How to Write a Long Poem 13 - the Annotation Mode

 

13

Annotation mode and the art of inventing your very OWN wheel!

The idea of this mode of writing is simply that art inspires art so poetry inspires poetry. If you can be inpired to a poem from a work of visual art or a piece of music, then why not from a poem itself. 

In the presence of a poem - of any art - more art can come! 

In the presence so a poem comes!

In the peripatetic mode one gathers lines while afoot, on the track, off in the wilds. Later, at the desk, one may process these lines, by stages into a poem. The more forays the more choice of materials to quarry for a poem.

In the annotation mode, the wandering is done on the margins of someone else's page. So the first qualification for this activity is iconoclasm!  One must lose one's fear of desecrating the blank of someone else's page! After all, it's blank. It's just made for you to scriblle your notes in! Other people's long thin poems are best for this activity (wide margins) but any poem will do.  In fact starting with Shakespeare's sonnets or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (note, I haven't done this!) could be a good kind of training. 

Long poems often involve the exploration of topics and themes that have been well visited by poets or other artists in the past. So visiting those works can give you guidance and inspiration. It can show you where the gap you're here to fill -- the place in poetry where no one has yet been! 

Just as in the annotation mode, visiting the same place twice may give you a different impetus/inspiration, so visiting different approaches to the same question/topic may make your work more balanced, more nuanced, more of a conversation. 

So try to call - in annotation mode - on the works of a few different poets who have visited your chosen theme.

And of course you can adopt the annotation mode as a way of finding your topic. While there's no such thing as 'writer's block', getting among the successful (or unsuccessful!) poetry of others is a great way to work out what it is you ought to be writing about.

In the annotation mode can often generate excellent work simply because you dislike or disagree with what you're writing. Or you feel things could be done differently. Or you feel things haven't been explored properly, or fully. Or that, in some way, there is a next thing to say. Because there always is a next thing to say. That's because poetry - in any language and also between languages - is part of the great conversation in which humans are permanently involved. And poetry is a conversation in its own right!

Think of the annotation mode as a kind of hunting and gathering on the printed page. Of course you can do this from screen to a piece of blank paper too, but there's something about the tactility of being on the page - something about the audacity of scratching around on someone else's page - that gives your making an extra push!  It's like following footprints along a beach, perhaps with the urgency of beating the tide too! The annotation mode makes you a kind of detctive.   

Personally, I like to go back to my annotations in someone's book and type them when i'm not sure what I'm writing next. It's a little something up my sleeve, a rabbit I can pull out of the hat. 

Never feel that there is a pre-determined way you are supposed to respond to what you read. You are reading as a poet, not as a critic, not as a theorist.  It's not about being kind or unkind, fair or unfair. It's about making something new - a new work of art - from the art that already exists, that already has the reality of the printed page. How to respond? In a friendly way? Angrily? In the form of an argument? As an extension of what has already been said - an il/logical next step? Taking things to their nth degree or il/logical conclusion?  As the spirit takes you! 

If you know of a book that is on a theme and you want to create a poem on a similar or related theme then annotate the whole of that book. Go back a month later or a year later, type up your annotations.

Remember, what you're about here is not to plagiarize but to make sure that you don't plagiarize. So take care to know what is yours and what is not when you work in this mode. 

Take care! Great minds do think alike... and yours is one of them! 

Remember that famous line of Jorge Luis Borges - 'to speak is to fall into tautology' ... i.e. it's all been said before. The way around the risk of simply repeating what has already been written is to pay close attention to what has already been written. The annotation mode, correctly attended to, is a prophylaxis against plagiarism.

And as for the book you've just desecrated with your scribble? Well, maybe, down the track, it will TWICE as interesting for someone who picks it up. Offering the later reader the poems in print and the inklings of the next poems in the conversation!

If you want to invent your own wheel, it's best to spend some times with the ones that are already rolling around!

I suppose this should lead on somewhere later to the question of allusion - referring to the works of others ... also related - epigraphs, quotations in quotation marks in poems ... and the borderline between all of these legitimate practices and plagiarism.