A Poetry Meme and a Project

 

Cam tagged me for her lovely poetry meme and even since I’ve been over-excited. As the girl who was always the very last person to be picked for a sports team, I’m always disproportionately pleased to be chosen for something. And this was such an interesting meme – I had to really think hard about some of my answers.

 

What’s the first poem you remember reading/hearing/reacting to? I have a very vivid memory of being 11 years old and hunting about in my parent’s bookcase where I found a poetry anthology. I was leafing through it, when some unknown compulsion made me stop and read Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ from end to end. Well, once I’d finished I shut that book and put it back on the shelf faster than you can say ‘precocious trauma’. It was the most disturbing, chilling, corrupted piece of writing I had ever come across in my short life, and for a little while it haunted me. Years later, when I gave a lecture on Plath and Virginia Woolf I read it again, only of course this time I saw it’s twisted brilliance and could accommodate its ugly, resentful anger. I think that, to this day, it’s one of the most startling poems I know.

 

I was forced to memorize (name of poem) in school and… I’ve been searching through google to try to locate the first poem, but without quantifiable success. I remember it was about the Eve of St Agnes, but having looked at poems by both Keats and Tennyson, I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve found it. The Tennyson was a tiny bit more familiar. I suppose what has stayed with me over the years is Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. When I was a teenager I had a really good memory, almost photographic, and I learnt the first act to limber myself up for my exams. I can still pretty much do Portia’s ‘The quality of mercy…’ speech.

 

I read/don’t read poetry because….. I do read poetry, but not as often as I would like. I believe it was P. G. Wodehouse who said that there was so much wonderful literature to be read in the world…. And then one’s eye tended to fall on the latest Agatha Christie… I often get distracted from poetry because it feels like it might be work rather than play, and I need dreaming space in which to properly appreciate it. But when I do get that time, I find it rich and rewarding and think I should do this more often.

 

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favourite poem is…. Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke. I’ve waxed lyrical about these before. The concentration of passion in this poetry will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Rilke really goes for it; love, death, suffering, selfhood, spirituality, it’s all bound together to the music of the spheres. Extraordinary.

 

I write/don’t write poetry, but…. No, she says very firmly, I don’t write poetry. Even a limerick or a haiku would be beyond me. I don’t understand how poetry works internally, although I can admire it from afar. I need to be explaining something when I write, which involves channelling words in a completely different direction to poetry, which pushes them, very elegantly, upstream.

 

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature… I began my literary career as a prose addict who was afraid of poetry. It only became clear to me much later on that the joy of poetry is that you can say anything you like about it. It’s the most freestyle form of literary criticism there is. Of course for some people that’s awful – guidelines and constraints are tremendously comforting. But once you see you have licence to be as creative in the reading of a poem as the poet was in writing it, well, it’s a kind of open sesame to the mind. That being said, my favourite form of poetry is the prose poem, as I think it enjoys the best of both worlds.

 

I find poetry…. Electrifying, at it’s best. A wonderful line of poetry is like a shot through the heart. However, that being said, I’ve got into amusing poets of late, like Wendy Cope and Sophie Hannah.

 

The last time I heard poetry…. Was on a BBC television programme. There is a series of poetry anthologies out at the moment edited by Daisy Goodwin all entitled something like: ‘101 poems to help you understand men and women’, ‘101 poems to help you survive’ and so on, and they’re really very good indeed. There was a brave television adaptation of these collections, with actors reading out their favourite poems. The format was a bit naff, but the readings had a sweet piercing quality to them that meant I watched with a very big lump in my throat indeed.

 

I think poetry is like…. ‘superbly condensed verbal theatre’. I wish those words were mine but, alas, it’s a quote I used in a book I wrote and I’ve now lost the source. But I still love the description.

 

I’m tagging…. Bloglily, Courtney and Sharon at Ex Libris with this. Enjoy!

 

I’ve been a bit under the weather for the past couple of days, and there’s nothing like being forced to sit around daydreaming for making you reassess your life plan. Anyhow, in a nutshell I’ve suddenly begun to wonder why I’m waiting for the future to happen, and I’ve decided to have a go at writing a non fiction book about literature and life, the same old mishmash of nonsense that you get here, really, only expanded and dressed up a bit. I mean, why not give it a go? The idea is to write a couple of chapters in the first half of next year and try to find an agent with them over the summer. This is very easy to write but fraught with pitfalls in reality that I can only hope will turn out to be blogworthy anecdotes at the very least. I know you will keep me excellent company through the experience, and maybe I could prevail on you to read a little of what I write early next spring? I cannot think of an audience with a more discerning eye, and I’m going to need all the help I can get! But I also feel a deep, quickening excitement at the thought, like another, faster, heartbeat. Even if nothing ever comes of it, I’m relishing the thought of having some fun with a new project. What have I got to lose?