Long words part deux
Since yesterday’s posts, I’ve been thinking a bit more about ‘our’ * attitude to long words.
I have a line in a poem about Phosphorus’s creatures. I used the proper noun because I was desperately, twistily trying to avoid using phosphorescent, which sounds puke-makingly strained and pompous, I think. Probably because it’s been much used in the past, along with evanescent (and maybe because it sounds like evanescent) – the past probably being late Romantic verse, or maybe being 20th and 21st century verse that wishes it was late Romantic…
I also used the proper noun because it sounds a bit like those tendencies I vaguely remember in literary writing of the, say, 16th to 18th centuries; where the abstract or inhuman is personified.
And Mercy came down from her seat on high and looked upon the city of Londinium, decrying the daughters of Filth and sons of Squalor she saw in every cranny…
No, I’m not quoting anyone there, I just made it up – who am I imitating (badly) though? Pope? No idea – must look it up. Anyway, I used to really enjoy reading that kind of stuff, and liked the whiff of oddness the phrase gave to my poem.
I do like Phosphorus’s creatures, but I think my own embarrassment at the poem’s elevated tone and my twisty-turny attempt to shy away from grandness and swooniness (it’s a love poem) is as bad as saying phosphorescent.
* Who do I mean when I say ‘our’? Me? Other poets? Me and other poets when we get together? People with whom I have workshopped creative writing? I’m already foundering…
Long words
I’ve been perusing Frances Leviston’s blog, Verse Palace, thanks to the Poets on Fire who first alerted me to it. It’s a very fine thing, full of interesting essays on writing and reading poetry.
The one I’ve enjoyed most so far is Matthew Sperling ’s on using long and imported words. Being a fan of the strange words that are the residue of English’s ancestor languages, I think he asks some interesting questions about the contemporary poet’s attitude to them.
Doesn’t give any answers, though. But at least now I know that the plural of metropolis, strictly speaking, is metropoleis.
Bellerophon and the Golden Bridle
He had to catch Pegasus, our Bellerophon, and couldn’t. As Pindar tells it:
[Bellerophon] once strove in vain beside Peirene’s spring, and suffered much, seeking to yoke the snake-haired Gorgo’s offspring, Pegasos. Till Pallas [Athena], goddess maid, brought him the bridle and golden headband, and behold a dream was truth.
(Pindar, Olympian Ode 13. 63 ff, trans. Conway as found on the wonderful Theoi site.
So the Goddess gives him the means to catch and ride the winged horse. In his series of Harvard lectures, collected in book form as The Lyric Impulse, C. Day Lewis identifies this as a description of ‘the creative process’. I remember his point about the complicated dance between Bellerophon and Pegasus every time I’m having trouble with writing. He says
Bellerophon would not have been granted the bridle if he had not spent all his energy and skill attempting to catch Pegasus: we may even imagine the golden bridle as a magical object woven out of all his complex, unavailing manoeuvres.
1965, The Lyric Impulse, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 131.
So, using his analogy, then, I might say that my poem is made of the wily and the wild (the unconscious?), the gift of the Goddess (chance? inspiration? confidence?) and my own, lumpen effort.
Incidentally, my own bridle – the charcoal one, that I have been trying to finish for so long – will be appearing in the next issue of The Rialto. Still not finished, I think, but definitely paused in an interesting place. (Who said that? Some painter…must look it up…)
Crap
Sophie Nicholls made me laugh today. Read her post about Russell Brand, “Letting Go” and pooh.
I think she has a very good point!
Hooray for…local artists and craftspersons
I went to the Christmas Market at my local church hall today. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much; a few cards, some bad art, maybe. Was that assumption ever trashed! I’ve picked out just three of the local “makers” to illustrate just how good the standard was. Take a look:
Old Bean Design (Clare Nichols) makes beautiful wood engravings. I bought two sets of cards but really could have snapped up her entire stock.
Katie Birdie makes really cute accessories and things. I was much taken by some colourful bags and zip-up purses.
Jane Kendrick is a photographer with a really interesting eye, particularly for colour. Her business card features a detail from a building I used to go past on the bus in to Walthamstow, but it took me ages to realise where I had seen those colours!
Lastly, though not local to E11, she’s not far away; the fabulous, Epping-based Ladybird Beads is worth a look. Lots of exquisite jewellery stuff.
Happy shopping! (I haven’t done ANY of mine yet, but since my family are all giving and receiving soap this year – I kid you not – it shouldn’t be too arduous…)
Hooray for…Urban Sketchers!
Thanks to the lovely Chrissie for this. Aren’t these people amazing?
For the rain it raineth every day
Lear’s Fool had it right. I woke to rain this morning – again – and thought fearfully of our friends in Cockermouth with their baby twins, and my family driving to work across the flood plains of Gloucester. I love rain usually, but our bedroom is starting to smell of mould and the puddles on the pavements are permanent and getting bigger…
Difficult not to get all apocalyptic…and why oh why have our TV channels been baton-passing The Day After Tomorrow from schedule to schedule recently? If I see Dennis Quaid looking resolute one more time I’m going to start building an Ark.
Fits and Starts
It constantly bewilders me, this process of writing. How is it that some weeks, nothing goes on except staring out of the window and other weeks, like this one, several poems morph out of all recognition into something very like their finished bodies?
I know, I know…it’s like I said in that earlier post….staring out of the window IS writing. It’s my “invisible practice” etc. etc. etc. But that still doesn’t explain the sudden fit of speed, the manic thousand beginnings of a draft, the hand-over-hand climbing feeling I get as the words race across the screen, changing as they go…
Perhaps it’s linked to confidence. I’ve just had a couple of really nice things happen to me recently; the offer of some poetry-related work, some encouraging comments about a difficult-to-write poem. I definitely feel boosted. Turbo-boosted! Only one poem to rewrite, now – and then I really will be at the tinkering and ordering stage with the manuscript.
Oh God, and then there’s all the trawling round publishers to do, the vainly-trying-to-interest-the-hard-pressed-editors stuff (blood runs a little colder). Let’s not think about that. It lives in another room. I’ll stay for the moment with my teenage self in one of the poems I’ve just finished:
…swallowed by rain and the head-height weeds and the gap
full of shadow lain quiet inside for years.
Here’s wishing you a bit of quiet this weekend, too, should you need it.
Wodwo
Up until this week, I had never read it, Wodwo – neither the collection or the poem itself that gives the book its title. Here’s the ending of the poem:
……..I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking
Ted Hughes, Wodwo, 1967, Faber & Faber, p. 183.
I love it. The lack of conventional punctuation. The repetition – that childlike, comic roots / roots roots roots roots.
The throwaway, still-searching ending. Wodwonderful.
