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

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I love to play with metaphor and inhabit that strange landscape where ambiguity holds you. I try to hover in the space that is not the poet or the reader but the creating of the poem, or maybe the poem itself. These are two short poems. I have included the whole poem because I am talking about the overall 'message' rather than technique in a line or two.

In the poem 'Five Thirty am' the poem is about the process of writing the poem, and the interaction between the poet and the cat, and their different view of what is going on. The reader interacts with the writer through reading, even as the cat interacts with the writer. Somewhere between them all is the 'verbal icon' of the poem. The poem doesn't need to say 'I am writing,' because there the poem is, as evidence.

 

Five Thirty am

 

In the utter darkness the fine piping of birds begins another dawn.

The insistent cat pushes between my fingers and the open page.

There is a meaning in the poise of my face and pen before the page,

But the cat has no knowledge of it.

 

She pushes her whole black purring self across my face.

Her paws step softly on the paper.

She thrusts her head against the moving pen.

She speaks in liquid murmurs, a tremble in her purring.

The meaning to her is between one living thing and another.

 

Nothing to her, the travelling of a pen across a page.

 

Another poem which plays this way is called 'Poem'.

It takes a metaphor of the poem enhancing the page, or the speaker seeking to become lovely; and by asking if the loveliness is there waiting to be discovered, it explores ideas about where the poem comes from.

I use fairly straightforward language, like someone talking, but I look for speech rhythms, and disentangle common metaphors that are almost cliches. Not everyone likes this sort of word play, but I enjoy it. I break lines on breath groups. That was Walt Whitman's term.  This makes the voice more direct. This poem is about the poem, and you end up wondering what the poem is, then realise you have just read it. I like to surprise the reader.

 

I was just this piece of paper

And I wanted to be a poem.

I lay there, white and silky

Letting this guy write on me.

-His words, his anger, his conceit.-

Till he was totally frustrated

Crumpled me into a ball and threw me down.

 

I was just this crushed up bit of paper.

The others said, “You’re all screwed up.

“You’ve got to straighten yourself out, somehow.”

I was full of anger, and conceit.

 

This woman picked me up

And began to smooth me out.

She didn’t much like what she saw,

But she didn’t blame me for it.

 

I said, look, I’m just this bit of paper.

All scribbled on, and crumpled.

But she said no, you’re a poem. Listen.

And she read me aloud.

 

I said - who wrote that?

She said, “It’s just you.

But it’s me, as well.”

 

I dont always write like this, but I do get a lot of pleasure out of achieving this effect.