Ever thought about writing a poem? Why not take the leap?
In a new series, award-winning poet Jessica Traynor shares insights to help you find your voice.
My mum and I are having a coffee and chatting. 'Oh, I want to tell you about a dream I had,' she says. ‘We were in a garden, and we were looking at this beetle. It was beautifully coloured, but had this stinger like a scorpion’s tail. You went to touch it, and I said, "Don’t! It’s an actor!", and then I woke up. It felt so urgent I wanted to call you right then, in the middle of the night.’
We laugh about the fact that my mum is herself an actor. I tell her I'll keep an eye out for both actors, and beetles. But the dream gets me thinking about how dreams are often both quite obvious in their symbolism (a gaudy insect has a dangerous stinger) and slightly weird (the human word 'actor’ gives the insect a more frightening agency). This feels inherently creative to me – a situation made slightly uncanny and more urgent by the idea that there’s a higher intelligence behind the scenes, manipulating us. It got me thinking again about how we can utilise the associative power of our brains to inspire and improve our work.
With poetry, whenever I come up with a subject I want to write about, I spend a lot of time thinking about my approach. Say I want to write a poem about a beetle, because the image of a beautiful beetle is stuck in my head. What do I want to say about this beetle? And how do I want to say it? Do I simply want to capture the wonder of this beetle, an unloved but intricate creature in a busy world – and create a kind of pastoral? An eco-poem? Or do I want to reach out in some way to the human world? Do I in fact want to write a poem, not about a beetle at all, but about an actor? Often, before I put pen to paper I allow my mind to range over the subject in question, and explore my own associations. When I picture the beetle, I am picturing both a jewel-coloured scarab, and a hunched man with a bowler hat (the latter, likely, an amalgam of author Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa and the cartoon Mr Ben). Which of these images is more useful for the poem I want to write? Which will surprise the reader more?
Watch: Kafka's The Metamorphosis, read by Aidan Quinn
Often, when I’m giving poets advice on how to fix a problem in a poem – if the problem is bigger than simply a few tweaks in the mechanics of the poem – I’ll suggest that they try to go back to their own associative mood board, the one that lies in the shadow of every poem. Here, in the realm of personal association, we can access a vast palette of images to use, each with a symbolic value. Some of them may add depth and intrigue to your work, and some may not have a place (in the atmosphere of my imagined beetle poem, I can find a place for Gregor Samsa, but not Mr Ben). But if we figure out how to revisit this wild realm of association throughout the writing process, we have at our disposal a hotline of symbolic imagery. And symbol, of course, is the currency of poetry that shows, and doesn’t tell.
