'Do you understand now why I can't let this poem go?'

Says Time so let's listen...

Stop talking, enough with the coffee and the croissants and the pains of chocolat, let’s play THE BATTLE OF FORMS!!!

There are 84 reasons to write poems and here are some of them I made earlier. This is what people at this Poetry & Psychotherapy Conference play in the evenings in our strange hotel.

The question posed by psychotherapist Louise Ordish - ‘What is going on here, when we take away the words?’ - put me in mind of the way I teach poets to grow in the craft. So this is my presentation.

We all have our own reasons to write poems - our own ‘Matters’, as I call them - and you can’t make people change those to suit your cultural, social, political inclinations. You can teach How To Write, you can’t teach What To Write. The only element that is universal in poetry, and can therefore be taught, is FORM.

What did you do, what did you choose, and why.

So essentially the thing I teach is how to find the right form for what you want to say: how to find the right Means for your Matter. It’s my belief that all poems that outlast their maker, or even the time of their maker, are poems that found the right Means for the Matter.

I understand that some people don’t believe poetry necessarily ought to last, but I’m not interested in that kind of soil. Any work I do on a poem - on mine or someone else’s - is in the service of its lasting longer in the memory. It does seem to me to be the point. I don’t think catering to the short attention span is going terribly well. I’m happy to part ways here with such as don’t agree.

Here are more of the 84* reasons.

*I’m joking about the number. I made these games in lockdown, that time when we finally had time to finish the jigsaws from our childhood Christmases, or make the things we were shown how to make on Blue Peter.

In The Battle of Forms, every player is randomly dealt three of the blue cards in the pictures above, and chooses from those three cards the Matter they would like to write a poem about.

They may truly need to write this poem, or are curious about that subject, or perhaps it makes them laugh. Whatever the reason, they choose and must keep to their choice.

Now for the Means…

In lockdown I made 60 of these yellow cards.

Each of them has a factual description the form of a famous poem, a key to where to find it in Something Else I Made Earlier…

…and a subjective description of the poem relating to its mood or tone.

[I made these cards because - see Blue Peter, above - but of course you can simply choose the form of any poem that has a form. You can’t go wrong with canonical poems, simply because you know that whatever they did, it worked.]

In the basic version of the game, one has a choice of FOUR of these SIXTY poems. So, you might have decided to ‘praise the beauty of a passing stranger’ for your Matter, and, once chance has played its hand and four cards have been drawn, your MEANS might be the following:

To write it in the form of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’…

or the form of Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’…

or Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’…

or John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’…

You simply decide which one of the four is the best form for your chosen subject, the right Means for the Matter. It’s fun and in fact fruitful to play in a team, as you have to think about your form in order to make a case for it, and you learn from the cases your team-mates make, battling back and forth in play. Your conversation might happen around, for example: does it help to have rhyme, does it help to have strong metre, or a pattern, or should it be freer, less structured? How long should it be? How lyrical? How colloquial? How funny?

You can do this about any poem and any subject, any Matter and any Means.

What it makes you do is listen to form.

So when we play this game, whether in class or at play in some workshop, same thing, I ask the players to listen to the poem for its form, not its content. Listening with eyes closed is the best way to do this, but, at the very least, listen without looking at the poem.

It is, of course, a subjective and speculative act. This doesn’t undermine it in the slightest, but there is certainly consensus to be found. At the very least, if you discover the unspoken truths of an old canonical poem - by hearing its form - you are hearing the voice of Time and it is saying:

‘Do you understand now why I can’t let this poem go?’

It isn’t easy to listen to form. So listen to a reading of an old poem in a language you don’t know at all, then you’ll get what I mean.

I say an ‘old’ poem not because I think only old poems are worthwhile, of course I don’t, I just mean listen to a poem that has stood the test of time. Time is the wisest and deepest of all readers.

The poem will have a vivid form of some kind: even if it’s what you might mistakenly think of as ‘free’, it will, if it has survived so long, have intricate formal patterns within its lines. These you can hear without knowing what the words mean. This is direct communion between creatures making memorable sound.

Here’s what I hear in the four examples. These are off-the-top-of-the-head and simply my own:

‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ - someone knows of what they speak. A strong pattern is forming, and one soon realises one is being held, held in a structure, the same formulae appear. The regularity of the constants amplifies the humanity of the ‘free’ matter. The poem ends with the constants lined up as if they mean never to be forgotten. When the same lines have come and gone so many times, identical sounds are not the same at all, they are deepened by their own past.

**

‘Phenomenal Woman’ - the voice has a friendly, conversational rhythm, lines are ribboned with rhyme, but the rhymes come and go, are different lengths, the choices sound like a creature relishing its capacity, its flexibility, and as the lines shorten they arrive at a deep claim, they unearth a strong silence. Then they start again, and I can trust the dance of the rhythms towards that strong claim once again, a claim so strong that soon there will be nothing else to cry but that.

**