Category: Napowrimo

I can´t work out how to do a hash sign on a Spanish keyboard. Ho-hum. In fact all the punctuation seems to be in the wrong place. I also notice that on IE version whatever this is, the site is displaying incorrectly. Fucking Microsoft. Why don´t they have Firefox anyway?

It doesn´t seem fair to do napowrimo this way, I shouldn´t have to read my poemy things a whole week after writing them. Here we go.

Who could ever hope to silla
finer city than Sevilla?
The architecture has no pilla.
So let us give three chillas
and have some billas
and Tilla Marillas
and watch the picadors thrust their spillas
into the quivering rillas of stillas.
Tired of Sevilla?
Never filla.
Cordoba is very nilla.

a short one:

The bath is short, so I lie
like a toppled buddha
to wash the sand from my hair.

another short one. Most of them are…

Sometimes kindly reality, to spare us thought,
behaves exactly as we think she ought;
a group of children with untidy clothes and hair
play untidy football in a sandy Spanish square.

A double dactyl:

Windhover Schmindhover
Falco tinnunculus
Angel of Death to the
mice on the hill;

whirring his wingtips so
mesmerhypnotically
scurrying critters are
bent to his will.

no title:

a leaf turns
in the breeze

a leaf turns
in the water

a leaf turns
in the mind

a sparrow bathing in the dust

Finally one *with* a title

The Andalusi Notebook

I know why the sky is blue / and why moths fly into flames.

These are not metaphors.

The caged bird sings for the same reason as the uncaged.
All insight is reductionist.

Whether I believe that is irrelevant.

I am writing this at night, outside a bar next to an olive tree that is claimed to be the oldest in Europe.
I am drinking red wine.
There are horse tethered nearby.

All that is also irrelevant.

Things that have died in my lifetime:
the typewriter;
the Pope;
Yugoslavia.

The death of the typewriter was the death of Modernism.

The death of Yugoslavia was the death of Modernism.

The death of the Pope was the death of Modernism.

Nearly there…

Pour on water, pour on water

St Paul´s is burning.
Slabs of stone fall inward
from the dome.
Swifts twist for moths
among the smoke.

A bronze sword lies in the thick silt.

No title, again.

It purifies:
the slow white heat of the south
that presses on the land
until by afternoon
only the bees are moving
in the thyme.
The soul is left dry and bleached
like the skull of a horse.

and a clerihew for luck:

Federico Garcia Lorca
was a prolific talker
who would frequently recite
long, long, long into the night.

I think there’s a good poem somewhere in the idea of a field-guide. This is not that poem; I would need to spend some more time working out what overall effect to go for. But that’s napowrimo for you; can’t afford to think things through.

Cloisonné Flycatcher Muscicapa umbraticola

L11-27cm Nests in dense clumps of burdock or chervil, under the eaves of hospices, or in the crevices of drystone walls of slate or limestone. A scarce autumnal visitor to Northern Europe; in Britain confined to Renfrewshire and the Welsh Marches. Sometimes seen on migration hunting for spiders along canal towpaths.

Identification Smallish flycatcher with upright stance and fretful manner. ♂ made unmistakable by tarblack head, lilac throat and poppyred primaries fringed with gold. The ♀, a muted greyish-brown, is sometimes mistaken for Concrete Starling, Dingy Swift or Broad-beaked Warbler, but distinguishable by ticcing head motion and skulking habit.

Voice Generally quiet. Alarm call a rasping frep-frep. Song, delivered from a thorn or chimney-top, a slow, tuneless ‘clü-clü.. cli ti titi-tu’ (‘Baker, Baker, tell me where I am’).

Not in good poetry-writing form today, so this will have to do:

Epigram

Footballers are messengers of death;
a few short years from clear-eyed youth
to stiff and out of breath.

Well, here we go again. Napowrimo poem #1 for 2006 is a ‘translation’ of a poem by Antonio Machado. I don’t speak Spanish (I was working with a prose translation and a dictionary), I haven’t attempted to maintain rhyme or metre, and I’ve allowed myself a degree of freedom. I’m by no means convinced by the result, but it was interesting to do. Here’s the original:

Siesta
En Memoria de Abel Martín

Mientras traza su curva el pez de fuego
junto al ciprés, bajo el supremo añil,
y vuela en blanca piedra el niño ciego,
y en el olmo la copla de marfil
de la verde cigarra late y suena,
honremos al Señor
– la negra estampa de su mano buena –
que ha dictado el silencio en el clamor.

Al Dios de la distancia y de la ausencia,
del áncora en la mar, la plena mar …
Él nos libra del mundo – omnipresencia –,
nos abre sendar para caminar.

Con la copa de sombra bien colmada,
con este nunca lleno corazón,
honremos al Señor que hizo la Nada
y ha esculpido en la fe nuestra razón.

And here’s my version:

Siesta

In memory of Abel Martín

While the burning fish carves its arc
beside the cypress, under the utmost indigo,
and the blind boy fades into the bleached stone,
and in the elm the green cicada’s bone-white song
rolls and throbs,
let us give honour to the Lord
– the dark incisions of his good hand –
that ordered silence in the tumult.

To the God of distance and absence,
of the anchor in the open sea…
He releases us from the world – is everywhere –
opens to us a path to walk.

With a glass brimful of shadow,
with this never-full heart,
let us honour the Lord who made Nothing
and whittled our reason out of faith.

Only four days until napowrimo. The blog-chatter is building and there are 54 threads so far in the PFFA napowrimo forum.

A particular shout-out goes to Reen at st*rnosed mole who came up with the idea three years ago.

Thankfully, without Alan Hansen telling me my linebreaks are diabolical.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased. I copped out and wrote chaff – limericks, haiku, doggerel, whatever – more than I wanted (six or seven times, in fact). But there were several things I produced which I actually liked. The bathyscaphe sonnet and the Essex poem probably stand out as the ones which feel most successful.

Other than just producing some poetry, I had two main aims going into this – to write some formal poetry, including at least one sonnet, and to try and stretch myself stylistically. Both were only semi-successful. I did write four formal poems, even discounting the double dactyls and so on, including what I think is my first ever Italian sonnet. But I didn’t exactly produce reams of good formal poetry. I had to wrestle for hours to produce two eight-line poems (House and Crow), both of which I would have liked to be longer but just ground to a halt. ‘long is the albatross…’ is quite successful, but technically a fiddle. Only the sonnet was really pleasing.

On the stylistic side, I think that the exercise of trying to write something differently from usual was valuable, but I never felt I made any kind of mental breakthrough; it felt very artificial (which it was, of course) and the results turned out to be either less different than I intended, or just not very good.

I think the most interesting aspect of the whole exercise is the way it gives you an insight into your own work. The need to take the line of least resistance to produce a poem in time means it becomes very clear what you find easy and what you find difficult. You also find shortcuts – ways to produce something quickly which is superficially effective but perhaps not what you really would have wanted to do if you had more time. For example, I wrote several poems (the albatross one, This Poem is Not a Pipe, and the foody one) which are basically lists of separate images, rather than an attempt to evoke a place or scene. That’s what I meant when I said the albatross one was a bit of a fiddle – it makes finding rhymes a lot easier if the images don’t have to be related. I also found myself resorting to bits of phrasing or rhetorical flourishes chosen because they sounded good, rather than because they were what I really think is ‘true’. The clearest example is This Poem is Not a Pipe, which hints at some kind of metaphysical profundity or metaphor or symbolism. Actually, it’s just phrase-making. I came up with a kind of post-facto justification to do with the Magritte reference in the title, but when I was writing it, I was just picking things which sounded good.

So what have I learnt about my own poetry? Well, on the positive side, I find concision and clarity quite easy. I’m pretty happy about my use of sound, as well, and I was pleased by the number of strong images I came up with. And I was intrigued by the emergence of a voice in some of the poems which is lighter, more collquial, less sonically and syntactically dense than my work tends to be but still felt quite controlled and effective. I’m thinking mainly of the Essex poem, the gas poem, and Poetry in Motion. I wouldn’t want to write all my poems like that, but having produced them basically because of time pressure, I can see some virtues to them.

Negatives – people are really hard. There’s a great temptation to produce poems full of things instead, but real poetry is about people, and people are hard. Have I ever written a poem which features people interacting in a fully realised place? I can’t think of one. The Whistler poem was an attempt to do something of the sort, but even though W’s wife was unconscious on the sofa, it still felt like wrestling mud trying to write it.

More generally, nice though clarity and concision are, there are times when I would like to be able to do something more ambiguous, more stream-of-consciousness. I find that very difficult. In fact I find it difficult just breaking out of the habit of conventional grammar in a productive way.

I also notice a lack of metaphor in my work, in a line-by-line descriptive sense. And while I think that metaphor is overrated as a poetic technique by beginners, and good clear literal description is often better, a really good metaphor is a thing of beauty, and perhaps I need to consciously reach for them more often.

And I tend to produce a moment in time, then stop. The challenge would be something more narrative, or just longer – although napowrimo may not be the best time to try that.

I should probably avoid drawing too many detailed conclusions on the basis of a rather artificial situation, but I did find it interesting.