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.
It's frogspawn season and in the night, frogs have visited the tiny scrape in our back garden we call a pond. A few weeks later when the sun struggles out from behind the clouds, I spot a mass of tadpoles flitting through the water like drops of ink. We never see the frogs arrive or depart, and this makes me think of how a poem is formed – a mysterious visitation that we try to capture and keep. Ted Hughes had his thought fox, I have my frog poems.
Watch: Jessica Traynor's Onion Poem, performed by the poet
Once I'm visited by the idea for a poem, the most exciting next part is trying to pin it to the page. It’s a difficult process; poems twist and change, and their borders can be permeable. Sometimes we end up stretching them completely out of shape and they sit there completely drained of whatever life they had. The question of a poem’s shape is often as much about the music of the poem as the 'look’ that you want to achieve. Consider what elements of the poem you have, already – the single line or couple of lines that have come to you. What rhythm are they suggesting? What metre? You don’t have to know your pentameters from your hexameters in order to shape a poem, but it can help to have a sense of what rhythm your current lines are dictating. Following lines should either chime with this, or disrupt it, depending on your choice. If you don’t feel confident enough in your rhythmic abilities to count the beats in the line, you can simply count the syllables. Lines too cluttered up with syllables will often unfurl across the page, distorting the shape of your poem as much as its music.
Watch: A Demonstration by Jessica Traynor - a poem celebrating Dr Kathleen Lynn
Aside from the music of the poem, another thing to think about is whether the shape of the poem is supporting your imagery. Do you have complex images, evoked using similes or metaphors? Do these images come thick and fast in the poem? If so, are you giving your reader enough space to process them, or are you hitting them with a deluge? If the poem is a meditative piece where you want to take your reader on a journey, more white space on the page can function as breathing space for the reader – you can try breaking the poem into regular stanzas and see how that helps to parse the poem’s imagery. If your poem’s emotional energy is a little frazzled, and you want to communicate that, you can try a denser, left-aligned column of text. (On a slight aside, I tend to recommend avoiding centre alignment in poems unless you have a very specific reason – these tend to evoke Hallmark cards, or funeral or wedding services.) Caesurae, little gaps between words in the line, can suggest blankness, hesitation or absence in the text depending on their usage and can also be fun to play with.
Watch: Jessica Traynor reads her poem Liffey Swim
If in doubt at any point, try to go back to those first lines that came to you when you began to write the poem and revisit their music, tone, and imagery to see if it feels like the completed poem’s shape is staying true to these. If not, it could always mean the poem has outgrown these source lines and become something else – in this case, you can identify the new heart lines of the poem and see how the shape is holding them. Without this safe holding space (this pond in a suburban back garden) the frog/poem can’t survive.
