Cry what shall I cry?
What I Do That's New is a series of articles in which poets share their trade secrets with the rest of us i.e. they describe aspects of what they do that is either innovative or just plain clever.
If you would like to feature in a future article in this series then contact feature editor Dermot Glennon dermot@writeoutloud.net
Reading and attending events hones your poetic sensibility - it’s like musicians listening to music to develop their musical ear. No musician would say ‘I don’t listen to music’ (as some wannabe poets have said of poetry). It’s plainly daft to cut yourself off like that. What follows is possibly obvious: to get better at what you do you must find people who are doing it better than you. All athletes need a coach. All musicians start off with a teacher. This article is about mentors.
I have taken poems to informal support groups of three or four poets in both Liverpool and Lancaster. You could say I have taken this search to the nth degree because I left work to pursue an MA and am now doing a PhD. My answer to the question ‘why are you doing a PhD?’ is: ‘I want to get better at what I do. I want to find the connections between writing poetry for the page and writing for radio. And I want to be qualified to teach Creative Writing at university level’. I appreciate that academia is not the route that everyone wants (or needs) to take. There are other routes: attending performance workshops, applying for roles (paid or voluntary) with festivals, generally expanding your experience. But the underlying principle - find someone better than you - works for all of us.
My supervisor at Lancaster is Paul Farley (now a Professor). He’s great. We chat about poetry, gigs, books, plays, radio - and Liverpool, which is where he grew up. He also comments on individual poems of mine. Spending one-to-one time with someone who knows their stuff is incredibly useful. But you can get this boost from attending a local writing group; by submitting work to critique groups online (see Write Club, the new WOL one); and by reading poetry books and poetry magazines.
Last article I used an extract of old work to illustrate a point. This time I want to use a new poem, that is still being worked upon. ‘The Price of Legs’ is a long poem, with a reading time of fourteen minutes, based around The Little Mermaid. Over Christmas 2008 I thought I would write about Rapunzel and went on the web to do some research.[1] But during this period I was also reading Moniza Alvi’s book Europa (Bloodaxe, 2008), and Eavan Boland’s Irish history Domestic Violence (Carcanet, 2007). I had heard Alvi read at the Wordsworth Trust in the autumn and was impressed. Europa is a sequence in the poetry collection about the myth of a girl being abducted by a bull (a God in disguise). The cover of Alvi’s book doesn’t show the bull, but a painting of a mermaid with her tail split in two - like a fish being gutted; you can see red flesh and her spine. The mermaid has her arm across her face and, unusually for a depiction of a mermaid, she has dark hair. This picture really disturbed me, and when I read Hans Christian Anderson’s version of the story I got quite angry about the incessant bargaining that goes on, and his tacky ‘spirits of the air’ ending. Without this heavy-handed moral ending The Little Mermaid is one of the few fairytales where there is no happy ever after. (Forget Disney: they changed the story from about half-way through.)
If she swallows the potion that will give her legs
she will walk on knives and suffer such pain
as she cannot imagine now, beneath the waves,
beneath the blue. But she longs for human love
and the redness of the sun crossing an open sky. So
she blocks out the warnings, denies the curse:
that if she cannot win the Prince’s love,
the day, the following day he marries another,
her heart will burst and she will be as nothing;
as slight as the froth of foam on the cusp of waves
that break on the faraway shore.[…]
But the price of her legs:
it will be as if a sword passed through you.
(From "The Price of Legs" by Cath Nichols)
The mermaid started to get under my skin and the poem ended up as a long narrative, in couplets, and a commentary, in quatrains. There is a refrain (‘She cannot tell the Prince she saved his life’) and a recurring half-line ‘the faraway shore’, which keeps reminding us how far from home she has travelled.
She drinks the potion, agrees to have her tail
broken, have her tail severed in two.
We think of this magic as a soft unzipping,
a revealing of something within. But it was not,
it was a ripping, a violent undoing. It was
as if a metal blade passed through her and the wound
stayed open, the sword hilt pressed beneath her pubic bone,
its tip at the base of her throat. Unable to speak
she is cast up, naked, on the faraway shore.
(From "The Price of Legs" by Cath Nichols)
Two images run through my version: the sword (not mentioned in the original except as above, in my italics) and the magic knife that may save her from the bargain/curse she agrees with the Sea-hag. These images pleased me a great deal even though they are brutal. By the time I was writing the ending a fresh image occurred (after the story’s climax when the mermaid refuses to kill the Prince with the knife to save her own life):
I open up my mouth and find
I can sing -
the sword that pierced my core has all but gone.
What’s left glints: a silver tongue between my teeth.
I cry out -
and do not cut myself.
(From "The Price of Legs" by Cath Nichols)
The lines are delivered with the mermaid’s own amazement at what has come to pass. These lines felt exactly right at a number of levels. The mermaid has been mute throughout her ordeal as a human, and I was thinking that trauma can cause a person not to talk. A person might not ‘want to talk about it’, thinking that going over old injuries will only ‘open up old wounds’. This is commonplace language for us to use; we all know what it means. But the mermaid can ‘speak about it’ at the end of my story if she chooses, and not hurt herself in the process. The knife/tongue image fits this and it works that the knife in her mouth is a remnant of the sword which originally did her the deep injury (cf ‘whatever does not break you makes you stronger’). Finally she lets go of the sword that pierced her and sings with a great roar. For me, the story now has a psychologically powerful ending, though not a classic ‘happy ever after’ fairytale ending. She gets her voice back.
I would also add that though the work has a sense of a feminist re-working, it could not have been written if I had sat down and said to myself ‘I must re-write The Little Mermaid as a feminist fairytale’. Whilst I am a feminist the impetus to write has to come from something deep and visceral; an empathy maybe, or a rhythm, a half-line or musical impulse. I believe this works across all manner of political and theoretical positions that we might take. If the poem only comes from the intellect (for example, the feminist, Marxist, or eco position) then whilst people might applaud and agree with the sentiments expressed, the poem will not grab them and shake them up and get under their skin. It won’t be truly memorable. We need more than our own (however passionately held) convictions and opinions to write good poems.
I see the transforming imagery of the sword and the knife as a breakthrough in this poem. It surprised me. I don’t think breakthroughs in my writing would happen unless I simultaneously wrote and immersed myself in other people’s writing. We create new metaphors and surprising images in a poem that satisfies us. It’s what used to be called ‘divine inspiration’ and is now, perhaps better understood as synchronous psychology and paying attention! I believe the most surprising and ‘right’ metaphors must spring from deep, but previously unknown, connections being made in our subconscious. All we can do as poets is to try and aid these connections and let them through when they happen. Reading widely and listening to other poets improves the wealth of material in your conscious and subconscious. Being open to possibility can also nurture the magical connections.
Having had the surprising image we do not then rest on our laurels. The more conscious process of editing begins. My poem is nine pages long and there are a fair number of mistakes: rhythm needed correcting, and the commentary passages had become quite prose-y. I am not sure if it is finished yet. My next act is to let the poem rest for a few months before coming back to it with a fresh ear and eye.
[1] www.surlalunefairytales.com holds the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson versions plus lots of notes and links to other European versions of fairytales
