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.
On a cold day, around a decade ago, I spent the day at a poetry festival. I was there with a group of my contemporaries, all poets starting out, and we were surviving the frigid atmosphere by drinking a lot of mulled wine that a volunteer was stewing in a slow-cooker. I was having a great time, but my aural memory of the day is of a funereal drone filling the space. This is the sound of poets, reading. It's a sound some will be familiar with from mass – a sound that evokes either a sense of mystery and ritual, or one of stultifying boredom.
Watch: Dominic West reads The Second Coming by WB Yeats
In Ireland we tend to read poetry in liturgical tones. It’s one of those unusual occasions where we can blame something on both W.B. Yeats, and the Catholic Church. But performance choices aside, the tone is often dictated by the words we choose to put on the page. When writing a poem, it’s important to ask yourself: who am I talking to? Am I writing as if I’m speaking to an audience in some hushed, sacred space, or as if I’m talking to a friend over a cup of coffee? I’m not suggesting that one of these modes of address should be avoided altogether, but I do think we should know why we’ve made one choice over another. Many of us are shaped by the poetry we read when we were in school, but this selection of poetry covers centuries of literary tradition, from Shakespeare’s time to the contemporary moment. Each of these poets, throughout the centuries, was making choices around language in order to communicate ideas to people in their own time. As writers, we owe it to yourself to find the voice that reflects who we are, now. We don’t need to channel Shakespeare, or Keats, or Hopkins – or even more contemporary poets.
Watch: Jessica Traynor reads her poem Ease
So let’s think a little bit about some of our preconceptions around poetry. Often, we tend to think of it as writing that uses language to beautiful effect, and communicates complex emotions. But that doesn’t mean that our language needs to be ornate, or complex in itself – rather, the effect on the reader should be complex. We can do this using language as clean or as complicated as feels right to us. The beauty of poetry often resides in its subtext – in the current of truth running underneath our spoken language, which we try to touch as it rushes by. I’ve been thinking about the poem Animals by Frank O’Hara with its often quoted final lines 'O you/ were the best of all my days’ – words that feel so timeless that they could have been spoken by a poet in almost any century. The poem opens with the lines: ‘Have you forgotten what we were like then/ when we were still first rate/ and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth.’ It’s these lines that set the tone of the poem while capturing something of Frank as a person; what it must have felt like to share a conversation with him over a coffee (or a can of Coke). The simplicity of the language and the specificity of the imagery – a day as plump and promising as a roasted pig – allows us to build towards the loftier tone of that rapturous ‘O’ at the poem’s end. Somehow Frank is leaning across the table to us at the beginning of the poem, and singing to a Carnegie Hall audience by the end, and all this is achieved in a poem where the longest word is the unabashedly modern ‘speedometers’.
Watch: Frank O´Hara reads his poem Having a coke with you
When we’re writing poems, we’re pulling thoughts and images from the most intimate spaces in our mind and memory. Let’s imagine, when we’re writing, that we’re delivering them to the friends who know us best.
