On Poetry

Yesterday Jen Campbell started a discussion about poetry on twitter, asking what poetry meant to you, whether you like it now or at school, and what your relationship with it is. It got me thinking.

I don’t read a lot of poetry; in fact, I realised I didn’t even include it in my reading habits post last week. I’ve been thinking about why that is, as I love reading and do enjoy poems when I do bother to sit with them. I think it’s partly to do with how poetry is taught at school (at least, how it was taught to me) and partly about what makes poetry different.

At school, poetry is generally about mechanics. You learn to look at poems and deconstruct them according the techniques used and how meaning comes from those techniques – like, “here’s some alliteration to emphasise the darkness is the room blah blah.” I suspect this is mainly because of exams, points mean prizes after all, but I don’t remember much in the way of learning/discussing connection to a poem, or meaning, or whether you even like the damn thing. I think it makes poetry seem much more abstract than it is, and that without these ‘tools’ of deconstruction, you can’t understand or get anything from it – i.e you can’t just read it, you have to study and analyse to get anything from it.

All this means, I think, when you grow up and forget all those terms you learnt in school, poetry becomes this unreachable thing that you’re too ignorant for. So you (I) don’t bother with it. It’s a different kind of puzzling out that poetry needs – a kind of emotional puzzling out that there’s no space for in exams/school. It’s not that the mechanical puzzling doesn’t contribute to understanding, it does, but it’s not the only or most important thing. It’s a massive shame really, because if we were taught that you can just read a poem and like it or not like it, and feel things or not feel things, without needing to know what techniques contribute to that, I think more people would continue to read poetry after they’ve left school.

I read a lot of short stories, so it’s weird that I don’t read a lot of poetry as I kind of put them in the same, or at least adjacent, boxes. Both, by nature of their length, are fragments or fleeting moments, but those fragments are actually whole. They are tardis-like in speaking of ideas much larger themselves in a magically small space. The problem (or brilliant thing, depending on your perspective) with poetry is that it’s generally more abstract than short stories. That means you need more patience with it, to do the emotional puzzling out and take it in and let it simmer. I think this is my main problem. I expect too much too quickly, and then when I don’t immediately ‘know’ I think it’s beyond me because I haven’t studied literature formally for a long time (back to that school-deconstruction thing again). I give up, and go back to nice cosy prose. But, crucially, a lot of prose is lyrical and not immediate, but somehow the context of sentences means it’s not as scary. Poetry isn’t that many steps beyond a lot of what I read in terms of abstract thought. Weird, huh?

So, thinking about all this, I feel like I have to re-train my brain. Re-train it not to worry about feeling ignorant of technical terms, and to sit with poems and just feel the feels. I am definitely going to make more of an effort to read more poetry, as, probably, the less you read the further away it seems. Any suggestion of poets / poems you love or recommend would be most welcome.

(The picture at the top is Jen’s collection, The Hungry Ghost Festival, click through to her website to get it)

The Fault in our Stars by John Green

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings”

Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

 

Hazel is seventeen and has terminal cancer. At her cancer support group she meets Gus, who lost a leg to his cancer but is now in remission. (I am bad at summarising books without being massively longwinded or making them sound lame, but stick with me on this one).

It’s not a book you read for the plot – all of the ‘twists’ can be seen a mile off – but that doesn’t matter. You read it for the characters and the little snippets of loveliness scattered throughout. It’s about small infinities and big infinities, about how you can leave a legacy without leaving a mark, about all the Cancer Cliches you have to deal with as a Cancer Kid and about how, even though you hate it, you will hurt people because they love you and you will die.

I loved Hazel. She’s funny and thoughtful and clever and I wanted to be her friend. It took me longer to warm to Gus, but that seemed to be about him moving from being a showy ‘Augustus’ to a much more real ‘Gus’.

It’s funny and sad and I loved it. It gave me a book hangover – sure sign of a good book.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

Great House is made up of four stories connected in varying degrees to each other and to an oversized writing desk with many drawers. The stories are split over the book – all the first halves then all the second halves.

All the stories are told in first person, but the voices aren’t different enough from each other to make it work. Had each story had its own strong voice I probably would have enjoyed the book, but as it stands I got bored and confused when it all just mushed together in my head. I think it’s also why I didn’t feel consistently emotionally connected to the characters, which is pretty key when a book is more about people than plot.

I also wonder whether my lack of knowledge about Jewish culture and traditions meant I missed a lot of hidden story. I could see symbols/metaphor tucked in there but unfortunately I don’t know enough to connect them to anything.

There were points where the writing was quite beautiful and I was taken into the story, but eventually my mind always wandered. If I hadn’t been reading it for a book club, I probably would have given up on it in the first half, which would have been a shame as the second part, particularly towards the end, was much better. I have read some great books that were more people/ideas with little plot. Alas, this wasn’t one of them for me.

Reading habits

Inspired by (definitely not stolen from) Scott Pack (Meandmybigmouth) – I decided to share my reading habits:

1. I always have one novel, one non-fiction book, and a couple of short story collections on the go at one time.

2. I always have to have a novel in progress (small gaps between story collections/non-fiction are ok). If I’ve got a ‘book hangover’ from how amazing/traumatising the last novel was and can’t start another one for a bit, I have to decide which one I’m going to read next so I still feel like I have one.

3. I can’t read more than one novel at once. If I am reading two, it’s because I don’t want to finish one of them and it’s a way of slowly edging it back to the shelf without acknowledging I’ve given up on it.

4. In fiction books, I always read the thanks/acknowledgements first, but skip over introductions/forewords.

5. I can’t read a non-fiction book without reading the foreword first.

6. I always dog-ear my books, but use random bits of paper / train tickets for bookmarks in library books or those borrowed from other people. Dog-earing books that aren’t yours is a sin (but spine breaking is fine).

7. If the spine isn’t broken, it looks like it hasn’t been read, so I break the spines of already-read ones that don’t look broken enough so they look more loved.

8. I don’t like hardbacks – they’re too unwieldy and heavy and you can’t read them in the bath. I wish publishers would release the paperback at the same time as the hardback when the ‘new book excitement’ in blogs/reviews is still around.

9. My bookcase is vaguely organised into non-fiction, poetry, short stories and novels but with no system within that other than books by the same author sit together. I like looking for a particular book in the disorder and then finding something else that I didn’t know I wanted.

10. I don’t have an e-reader and don’t want one because

                a. I like the aesthetic and feel of real books (incidentally, I’m a bit in love with the production department of Scott’s Friday Project – their books have awesome texture)

                b. It annoys me that you can’t flick ahead on an e-reader and see what thickness of pages is left until the end of a chapter

                c. Reading on a screen for long periods of time makes my eyes squiffy

Have you got any of your own?

More Short Stories for Breakfast

I thought I’d do another Short Stories for Breakfast, but this time for stories in online mags so you could read them too. I’ve been alternating novel-reading and short stories in the morning recently, and I feel full of good stuff (though I wouldn’t recommend the McCarthy while you’re eating porridge).

In Hanneke’s Room by Kate Brown in the Swansea Review – An English woman, living in Amsterdam and starting to feel closed off from her young children (who speak Dutch), begins to take an old woman out for trips. Quiet and multi-layered.

A Drowning Incident by Cormac McCarthy. Holy crap McCarthy, that was kind of horrible. A young boy discovers the puppies weren’t sent to a new home, but were instead drowned in the river. (You can find the story in the 1960s section of the PDF, linked near the end of the website)

To Do by Jennifer Egan. A murdery story written as a list. It’s awesome.

Mars by A. Werner in NANO Fiction. NANO only publish stories of less than 300 words. I really like this one – about fear of the new and it leaving you behind.

In The Time It Takes Me to Forget You My Hair Will Grow Back to the Way You Like It by Maddy Raskulinecz in Word Riot. I really like the voice in this one – meandering but totally on the point at the same time.

Happy reading!

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

Harold Fry is retired and feels life has been a disappointment.  He and his wife, Maureen, no longer sleep in the same room and barely communicate; while she finds odd jobs to fill her days waiting for their son to visit (who hasn’t been in contact for twenty years). When Harold learns his old friend, Queenie, is dying, he sets out to post her a letter.  As he walks to, and beyond, the post box, simply posting a letter begins to feel inadequate, so he decides to walk all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed from Devon as a way of saving her. The walk opens up space and time for Harold and Maureen (still waiting in Devon) to remember how they came to be a couple who don’t communicate and how and why Harold couldn’t connect to his son.

I absolutely loved it.  It’s the sort of book you want to hug and squeeze.  I ached for Harold and the people he meets along the way. It’s beautifully written and exactly the kind of writing I like: complex, full characters and emotion in simple understated prose.

It’s a quiet book, but (if you’ll allow me a cliché) impossible to put down. Funny and touching and hopeful and sad.

Argh, so gorgeous.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I’m not a fan of the ‘misery memoir’ but I wouldn’t put Why? into that category. Yes, there are details of a difficult childhood, a breakdown in adulthood and struggling to allow herself to be loved, but it’s much more than that. It’s not a book snob thing – that somehow because she’s a ‘proper’ writer writing ‘proper things’ it can’t possibly count as just misery – it’s more that so much is weaved into the book, about place and literature and love.

I wondered whether it would be the same as Oranges are not the only fruit (the fictionalised account of her early life) but with a kind of ‘reveal’ of what was fiction/fact.  It is and it isn’t. Why? feels more like a re-examining of the past with older eyes. For example, her discovery that Mrs Winterson had prepared herself to adopt a boy, Paul, but then ended up with Jeanette, makes more sense of a few of Mrs W’s cruelties (the ‘Wrong Crib’). The hurt, the long-lasting effects, the facts don’t change, but the story around it does.  Essentially, that’s what Why? is about – the stories or narrative you have about yourself, and how it feels to be disconnected from one – in Jeanette’s case being adopted and feeling unwanted – and the process of searching for one. It’s how that narrative links with a sense (or lack of a sense) of identity. It’s not about truth versus fiction – but fiction as truth when that’s more appropriate or makes more sense. A couple of times she says she’d rather read herself as a fiction than as a fact. I think sometimes it’s easier to find truths in fiction – a good writer finding the perfect way of articulating something you’ve never even been able to put into words before. This is maybe why Mrs Winterson thought fiction was dangerous – ‘the trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’.

The style becomes more fragmented in the second half the book when she’s writing as events are occuring in the search for her birth mother.  It feels like trying to make sense of what’s happening along with her and I liked it.

Stories and poems kept her alive in the dark times, particularly growing up, and this book is also about the joy of books and how books can be a home. I move fairly frequently and, apart from making a bed to collapse in, my books are the first thing I unpack.  It’s just not home without them.