Contemporary Poetry

As I move through the stages of writing I will reference certain types of poets or writers or playwrites to give examples as to how others over the history of writing have gone about thier business. Today I’m going to give a bit of information on the contemporary poet. Poetry that is written nowadays in the style of ‘today’ is given the tagline as being contemporary. Poets such as Sophie Hannah and Sarah Wardle amongst many bless this criteria and these are the types of poems that you would find in your glossy poetry magazines. Magazines such as the PN Review, the North and even Poetry London.

Contemporary poetry can be something that on first glance and on closer inspection is nonsense. Its almost as if the writers, living in their worlds can write in a way that the mere common man cannot understand or should understand. It is for this reason that contemporary poetry is not enjoyed by the masses. It does not have a clever rhyme scheme or iambic pents and soemtimes it doesn’t even look like a poem. Alot of the time the poems themselves seem pretentious, almost as if the poet has forgotton that poetry is words stripped back to reveal the innermost of language in as few words as possible. But contemporary is all this at the same time as not being any of this.

Whether the poet is trying to be pretentious or not contemporary poetry is the voice of todays society and just as poetry styles are reactive of what has gone before contemporary poetry is just the same. Some techniques that you can use in helping to understand the poems is just take a step back from them. Don’t try and read too much into them in the first instance. Just try and get a feeling for what the poem is talking about. More often than not your first guess is usually the right one. Try breaking it down into smaller bits, looking at certain sections and then moving on once you think you have the gist of it. You could also try doing a bit of research over the poem, seeing if your thoughts are along the lines of others.

In appreciating poetry a large part of what a poet is trying to do is to get the reader thinking about something, or seeing something in a different light that maybe they had not thought of originally. Contemporary poetry, i find, is best enjoyed when you ‘go with the flow’ and almost allow the meaning to soak into your thoughts. Don’t be disheartened if at first you don’t understand it, part of the enjoyment and the feeling you get from a poem is when it suddenly ‘clicks’, maybe a moment of inspiration or a bit of hardwork on your part has allowed this to happen, but when it does the satisfaction is immense!

The Process of Writing Pt4

Journal into Draft – Poetry - Experience into Expression

Now you have a notebook full of ideas and you’ve done well to turn off you inner critic you wonder to yourself how you go about turning your ideas into a workable form. This is the one of the early stages in writing and there are techniques that you can use to get your ideas down onto the page. One of them involves using using Tony Buzan’s mindmaps. These are a good way of getting down words that form part of your idea and expanding on them. This is a way of really underastanding your subject and seeing it in a fully rounded light. It can also help to bring up new words that may help form parts of the poem, words that you may not have thought about originally.

This technique also allows you to begin structuring your poem. It will help you to look at what sounds good on the page and in what order things could go in. At this point you really just want to be getting your ideas onto the page and starting to think about how they work together. Maybe you have a line in mind that sounds really good but now you need to experiment with where this line may end up and what could come before or after it.

One of the most important pieces of advice at this point too is to write about what you know. In poems you may decide that they are going to contain more about your feelings, something which you should know intimately, but if you’re writing about another subject it needs to be something you know just as well as your feelings. One of the most common mistakes of new writers is writing about a subject they are unfamiliar with. When this happens the all important ‘voice’ of the poet is lost due to its inability to really understand the subject and portray this knowledge through the chosen words. If you are unsure on something you can just ‘make it up’ as this makes the rest of the piece unbelievable to the reader. The easiest way to remedy this, and something that writers spend most of their time doing, is research. Make sure you understand what you are saying and you will also notice that the more you know about your subject the easier it is to write about it!

“Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. . . . It is all your material. . . . Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.”  W. Somerset Maugham

This quote sums up exactly what you need to be doing as young writers. You need to experience things. Take every opportunity to be a person that soaks everything up, be like a sponge. Take the chances life throws at you and through the hardships and good times you will become a better writer. Some of the worlds greatest writers, whether they be poets or songwriters have always written about things that have happened to them. What makes their pieces so special is that they reach into that void of language and explain their experiences in such a way that we can relate to them, that we feel what they are describing. This type of writing only comes from actually experiencing those things and then the writer in you takes over and turns them into pieces of art.

HASELER007

Credit where it’s due. Mr Lancaster, your poem is brave in its simplicity: I salute you! Students, notice how Mr L did not feel any need to use flowery language, clever techniques or an overly dramatic tone.

2 questions to consider: why did the poet choose to use the simple language and structure he did? what effects do you think he wanted to achieve and is he successful?

Now, how about some student feedback? Ok, I know my literary character is a rather tragic case, but who is she? Does nobody read the greats anymore? Do we need to rewrite the canon?!

haseler007

Students, I want to show that my character is feeling desperate, lonely and tired in the next section of my blog. In it, she is thinking about her dead baby, which died only a few weeks after being born. She is wondering whether the baby is in Heaven and, if so, how God can bear to see it, as she clearly feels it should still be alive. Help me out! What lexical choices could I make, what types of syntax would suit, how can I create the correct tone?

Thanks, MH.

An example – war poems

My nemesis Mr Haseler tells me he is going to give some information for yr9 students on war poems as that is their current area of study. It reminded me of a poem I once wrote for a magazine. It was way back in my artistic heyday when not only was i walking around with my notebook in hand I also took to carry a sketch pad around with me as well. Art had always been a bit of a passion of mine and having had a couple of pieces in galleries I was always much encouraged to keep doing it.

Anyway the magazine had asked if i could do something war related as they were doing a special on modern and contemporary poems on war and conflict. This was ok, I’d thought, because I’d been toying with the idea of some sort of war poem. I’d recently read stories about eastern european countries where they had massive ceremonies when their soldiers went off to war. During these ceremonies the soldiers would walk through pebbled towns as those they left behind, wives, children etc, lined the streets and would throw flowers down at their feet to celebrate the fact that the men of the town were going to fight for them. This picture stuck in my mind so I put a couple of notes down but no more. Then when I had been asked to write this poem I went back over my notes and started to think about the kind of voice that I might use for the poem. I could have chosen one of the by standers, maybe a wife. It would certainly have given me something to work with. I could have looked at her feelings, was she happy the men were going off to fight or was she sad, angry about it. There could have been a conflict in her feelings and this could have played out against the conflict of war itself. I started to work along these lines but nothing clicked. It wasn’t until i changed the voice to that of one of the soldiers did things start to sound like what i was trying to create.

Part of the reason for this blog is to help people learn about the process of writing. In seeing how a poem is put together hopefully it will help show this in action and give a better understanding. As you can see below i changed the voice to that of the soldier. I kept, as most war poems do a feel of marching to the poem with short staccato sentences and repetition and played on the idea of the conflict going on in the soldier. He knows what he is doing is both wrong and right. There are also some political views about how an army is viewed – not as individuals but as one and the fact that those controlling armies view them as this. In future posts I will continue to explain the processes of writing with examples.

When the Bell Tolls

 

When the bell tolls

I will go

Not turn my head

for those I leave behind

 

When the bell tolls

I will go

Not shed a tear

for those I meet in the future

 

When the drums roll

I will follow

Standing tall

feet carrying me away

 

When the drums roll

I will follow

their pounding

carrying me forward

 

When they march forward

I will join

Swelling their ranks

emptying my mind

 

When they march forward

I will join

with tunnel vision

seeing only the head in front

 

When the bell tolls

remember me always

 

When the drum rolls

be proud

 

When they march forward

forgive me

haseler007

If purity is the only issue at stake, how can I argue? Can one pollute oneself? Surely the means to defile are only learnt, so how can one ever be morally culpable for their own fall? He has lost me and I must return to him, him. Not for love, for nothing, yet for a need, a need we all have and all must make allowances for.

Alec, do not forsake me. You always said I could come to you…

The Process of Writing Pt3

So now you have your notebook and a world of possibilities in front of you. Everywhere you turn there are ideas, things you could turn into stories or poems or plays, but how do you start? It’s all well and good having a good idea but how do you turn it into a working piece of decent material? The answer is probably a long and complex one and one that many people have spent a long time searching for. The truth is there is no right or wrong way when you start to write. You may find that one of your first drafts of an idea turns out to almost be a finished product, or you may find that it takes ages to define an idea, to work it and finally make it into something resembling a finished piece. Another poet friend of mine can actually take a year on some of his poems, refining and ‘cleaning’ poems till they are in his eyes perfect. I on the other hand find this rather boring and tend to go with the moment when writing. I’ll then spend some time tidying it up and doing a couple of drafts before I feel free to leave it for a while before coming back and seeing if there is anything else i can do with it. Coming back to a piece is brilliant as you really do see it in a different light.

But.. we are skipping ahead of ourselves slightly. Before we come to do all this one thing that we really must do is turn off that little voice in our head that tells us that anything we write or do is rubbish. This little voice is you inner critic and although it is extremely useful at the end of our wiriting process at the very beginning it is not needed and only gets in the way of the creative process.

There are many ways in which you can get rid of this voice, as time goes on you may be able to do it automatically but in the beginning it can seem quite hard to do. But like I said there are some writing activities that you can employ to help. The first is free writing. A lot of psychologists use this technique in finding out their patients inner thoughts but its always used by writers over the world to rid them of their inner critics and also to help them beat writers block. Free writing is when you take a pen and piece of paper an just write. Dont take your pen of the page just write whatever is in your mind. It can be doodles or sinlge words, sentences or phrases. It can be anything, but you’ll notice the more you do it the easier it becomes. What you put down might mean nothing and not make sense but the point is you have written with no consequence and no worries. That is the frame of mind that you need to be in when you start your writing journey.

Next time: thought to words…