Clive James on the ordinary becoming extraordinary

Continuing with some (late) summer reading, I've been poring over one of several excellent articles by Clive James on The Poetry Foundation website. The feature in question, titled A Stretch of Verse, is especially interesting when addressing the question of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. Here's a short quote as a sample:

Being in the right spot can make a phrase powerful even when it might seem frail heard on its own. Consider the placing of Louis MacNeice’s lovely phrase “the falling London rain.” It comes at the very end of his poem “London Rain” and seems to concentrate all the phonetic force of the poem:

My wishes now come homeward,
Their gallopings in vain,
Logic and lust are quiet,
Once more it starts to rain.
Falling asleep I listen
To the falling London rain.

This is the least obvious version of the hit: when ordinary words become extraordinary because they are in the right spot. The most obvious version is when one or more of the words is doing strange work. 

You can read the piece in full by following this link.

Dennis O'Driscoll in Poetry Ireland Review

I might be absurdly late to the party, but my discovery of Dennis O'Driscoll's poetry has been a joy over the past few months. 

On the back of that process, I sought out examples of his prose online, and stumbled on an excellent article by him from Poetry Ireland Review. It's well worth a read in full (see link here) if you've got a few minutes free over the summer, but here's a thought-provoking snippet as an initial taster...

"...Many of the techniques of poetry can be acquired and improved through practice and emulation. What cannot be taught, what must already be in place, is an individual perspective on the world. We want the poet's own version of life, not a rehash of Dylan Thomas's or Sylvia Plath's world. The personal rhythms, obsessions, linguistic quirks which readers and reviewers may initially deprecate are the best foundations on which to build a poetic talent. The poems which the editor rejects may become your cornerstone..."

Jonathan Totman's new poetry blog

Jonathan Totman has recently started a new poetry blog and it looks like becoming an top-notch addition to the scene. Using his expertise in clinical psychology as a point of departure, his posts provide a focus on poetry and mental health, offering selected poems by the likes of Ramona Herdman alongside reflections that are informed by his counselling work.

There are already five excellent posts awaiting you, though I'd especially recommend the latest one on loss and fearing joy, which also features a terrific poem by Sue Rose. You can read it here.

Interview with Di Slaney from Candlestick Press

Di Slaney and Kathy Towers are doing a great job at Candlestick Press. There's an extensive interview with Di up at The Friday Poem today, and it's well worth a look. You can read it in full via this link, but the following quote should give you an excellent taster...

New readers are who we’re primarily aiming for – the people who don’t currently read poetry but who would love it if only they could find a way in.

Till, until or ‘til?

First off, a clarification: from my perspective, poets shouldn’t rule out or discard any linguistic resource, nor should they label one as being superior to another.  In such a context, this post simply aims to provoke thought about how we use these three terms: till, until and ‘til, all of which can serve different purposes in a poem.

If using everyday, accessible registers, I’d suggest till is the ideal choice. It’s certainly my default selection. And if playing with registers or going for a more formal tone, I sometimes plump for until.

However, I often see poems, written in an approachable tone with contractions in their verbs, etc, that suddenly throw in an until instead of a till to no specific semantic or syntactic effect. Why has the poet chosen to make this decision? Is it for musical and/or metrical reasons? In these cases, is until being used as syllabic padding?

And then there’s ‘til. I encountered many hurdles during the editorial process of my first full collection with Eyewear back in 2017, but one of the toughest was an editorial intern’s unilateral and systematic imposition of turning every single till into ‘til throughout my ms. I had to put my foot down at that point and refuse to continue unless they accepted my tills. From my perspective, ‘til is only acceptable if the poet wants to strike an explicitly colloquial tone.

But what about you? What’s your position on till, until and ‘til?

A new poem on Bad Lilies

Issue Fourteen of Bad Lilies has just gone live, including a poem from my forthcoming collection. You can read it by following this link. 

To contract, or not to contract, that is (or that’s!) the question...

The decision whether to use a contraction (e.g. who is or who’s) might seem insignificant at first sight, but like any syntactic choice, it’s pivotal to how a poem works. As a consequence, it’s one of the initial things this poetic geek notices when reading a poet’s work for the first time, taking it as something of a signpost to how they treat language, to their love of detail.

For a start, one thing appears clear: we should never turn our back on any resource when attempting to achieve poetic effects. There’s no fundamentalism along the lines of always going either for the full or abbreviated form. Instead, the strongest poets seem very aware of the importance of their choice in each case.

A major factor, of course, is register, i..e. contraction for an informal tone and avoidance of it for a formal turn of phrase. Mind you, some writers like to mix their registers up for specific effect, dropping a contraction into a formal sentence or avoiding one in an informal line. This can work well, generating tension, making the reader pause and have a linguistic think, although it can also appear scattergun unless kept under control.

However, on certain occasions, I can’t avoid the feeling that the poet has made their decision on arbitrary grounds. Or they’ve chosen to contract or not purely on the basis of scansion or musicality. At that point, especially if the long form has been selected, a risk of syllabic/metrical padding kicks in, and certain editors would be readying their red biro.

All in all, this supposedly simple issue becomes a poetic hand grenade once we start looking at it up close! But what about you? Do you contract…?