Steve_Bamlett_blog

Andrew McMillan and a Poetry Workshop. A model teacher opens up poetry to others as a potential in themselves (if they want it and carry it forward). At Todmorden book Festival, The Todmorden Baptist Church, Halifax Road 2^nd November 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Why write up one’s experiences in learning at all? In my case, I do it because having retired, memory seems less stable and experiences get lost and less retrievable for all kinds of reason, that I’m loathe to attribute to an aging brain alone. If I feel I have learned something I want to record that so that I can prove to myself I’m ready to try new experiences and do that with no need to see the outcome of the experience as its main driver. What comes out is what is! It seeks (and gets) no audience as such but it certainly helps me to figure out some things for myself. In re-reading I might find some kind of prelude to little developments emerge. They may go nowhere, even for me, in the future (long or short term) – the likelihood is they won’t. But again, they are indelibly there.

On this day I’d booked for an event by Andrew McMillan, a poet I read for the worst of reasons, that he has made art of experiences I somewhat recognise. He will no doubt find new subjects in the future that won’t have that same resonance and which I’ll read then in a fairer less driven way for themselves alone.

But how to record what was in fact a pedagogic exercise in persuading writers, not-yet-writers and non-writers to write for themselves. I place myself in the last category, as I said in the self-introductions, having originally booked this event on a misunderstanding that it was a poetry reading by Andrew. After doubts on finding out the true purpose I’d determined not to come until urged by Geoff, my husband and friends staying with us in our rented cottage. I walked ‘unwillingly to school ..’ in the rain. To find …

The time flew, the group was a group of open and friendly people – mainly local to the area – and that I had just loved it. No-one was forced to share but having nothing much to lose in being a self-defined non-writer, I often wanted to complete a kind of experiment for myself. I’m adding my response to Andrew’s exercises here just to give reality to the experience myself but certainly not because I felt them good. I did benefit from the comments and quote some. They show though how a good teacher can help a non-writer to write. I can’t put other poems by others, nor their remarks because I’d need their permission – poetry often being felt to be so personal. I  have left these in unfinished state with no editing other than that completed in time allotted. In particular I refused to use the technical levers that I’m used to using in such exercises, such as syllable-counting, iambics, & looking for sound effects overtly, including rhyme.

The poet started by introductions, explained the overall plan to give exercises for private reading and optional sharing, prelude some of these exercises with discussions of zeroxed poems. And to be open to questions.

The events went thus – with my contribution used as an example only. If I read it I give a general sense of the group responses where I could use it.

• EXERCISE: Think of an emotion and write it down. Then think of a place where you meet people. Share these. After sharing, write in any form about meeting that emotion in that place. Say what the emotion wore, looked like and walked like or other physical detail.
  • FRAGMENTARINESS
  • The theatre

I met my fragments

In the theatre.

They came together I thought

But I wasn’t sure.

One face hid another

And then its opposite, or something in between.

A shuffle of clothes combined

In bits that didn’t impress,

Couldn’t match – not yet.

They walked, when they walked

With hasty-tardy grace

Banging leg to foot to eye

And danced or lumped or cried.

They were brown, green

And read my insignificance.

To them it was not me

But someone else who shuffled

In. Further in and in and on until

I couldn’t tell which was which

Or what they were wearing

For this event.

I did not read this ‘poem’ (the fright marks suggest a problem in definition I felt). Others did and I admired their more realistic effects in symbolising together in one image the place and the emotion, sometimes in the everyday. Andrew spoke about this exercise as starting us off in suggesting the whole – in terms of the emotion and situation – that a part. Particularity I thought was missing in my piece, which functioned surreally, although that sounds too grad a word for the simple beginnings here.

EXERCISE 2: Choose another emotion different to that in 1. Then think of an object. The aim is to write about the emotion in terms of the object. Not what you feel about it but the feelings that are imagined in the object.

Blankness

Stone

The stone looked

At its reflection on the water

Flat and with some shade

And light – but on the whole

Without anything sharp or smooth

To describe itself by –

Just merging onto a blank

Surface. No depth that

Could hurt or scar or wound

Just itself drained into the water around it.

I did read this but feel ashamed of having the brass neck now in retrospect as I look back. However, at the time I felt supported by the group. In contrast with others who read, the object wasn’t very realised and the poet suggested that the abstracts ‘hurt’, ‘scar’ etc. could be things that just sounded good but were in fact empty words. This I agree was something to do with the fact that these words were a private meaning escaping from a personal interpretation of depth. When I look at all this I wonder if the term ‘objective correlative’ is at the essence of what we were to search for – emotion and thought plausibly attached to the nature of the object or its aspect in the view of a realised onlooker. I’ll think about that.

• Exercise 3:
  • Andrew handed out copies of Selima Hill (https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/selima-hill) Modest Acts of Extreme Slowness. The group discussed this poem. Andrew followed opening discussion by relating what was said in the group to the preponderance of negative description in the poem – in that it discussed what its objects were no NOT what they were. This creates he said a kind of ghost poem where the feelings and the object itself were somewhere else than in the poem.
  • The task was to write about something in terms of what it was not. Andrew helped here to give that meaning for us, but for me, overinfluenced by the wonderful Hill poem to look, as she does, at the levels of fallacy in early ‘romantic’ love, perhaps locating myself in a fictive set of my days as a student with those days’ fictive lovers:
  • ________________

He may have once said

What he did – but did not know

Know what or if he did in fact.

It wasn’t his body that gave

But performed in that empty space

A graceful act

I thanked him for

But was not what I

Wanted. For him

It wasn’t the force of things

Coming to sudden meaning,

It wasn’t the short endurance

Of pain, but long slow

Acts of forgetting:

Fictive suns not warmed by rain.

The group discussed this in useful ways but I didn’t offer to read this poem. Those who did taught me something. A colleague recalled that wonderful line from Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode, that was also swimming round my head:

I see not feel how beautiful they are.

• Exercise 4:
  • We read and discussed November by Maggie Dietz (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89599/november-5750abeaa77b4)
  • Our task was to write about a month in a tone that was not commonly associated with that month as Dietz did.
  • I did not want April, which first came to mind because in doing this it came submerged in a wash of reminiscence formed by both Chaucer and T. S. Eliot.

July came in faded

Blends and coloured in

Its face. Its height

Of sun too cold to feel

The nuance of wet skin.

Too much of heat to feel

So hot and not enough

To bring two joints together

Kneeling sweet and sweating

To a kind of fruition

Together! Take it away!

And give the dead and dying

Chance to breathe

A chance to harden over

Its fullness sometimes,

Its triumph sometimes:

Its brief summer fame.

I read this out with others. It was an enjoyable exercise. Maybe this could be progressed by editing. Whether I will …..!!!!

• Exercise 5:
  • Andrew read George Square by Jackie Kay (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/george-square)
  • We talked about how this achieved  what it did. My own responses complicated by the fact that I had read on Twitter that morning Jackie Kay saying her father, who appears here, died two days ago.
  • The exercise was to attempt to capture someone from one’s past by a partial memory.  For me the politics of JK’s poem had to come in in my own present confusions of past and present, my family’s politics and my left-wing psychocultural self-definitions.
  • _____________

My mother donned her glasses

And read a poem in a singsong

Way; that taught in school

Off Boy’s Lane, Halifax, near the mill

That worked out her bones.

The voice she had now’s gone

And its cracked resistance

To the world, now shouts from

Banners of the Right unfurled

But they are wrong. Fear fosters

Hate, but that was not she.

A tight and strangled love

Can sometimes in these latter days

In red hope run brilliant,

Vein oozing from a mineral stone.

I think this was thought to have gone too far into an abstract politics after beginning more appropriately in something that could be realised. I agree but it was what I had to write I think. JK’s political past being something like a dream of my own present not of my working-class past. I was surprised I could write these things and these contradictions. I realise they could only be so for me.

If you can attend one of these workshops do. If it is with Andrew McMillan do it without a doubt. His presentation is self-effacing but confident, funny but serious in intent. If you end up writing more- great. If like me, you end up just feeling invited to write for the moment and for yourself. Do that too!