Spoiler alert: your nemesis wins.
Try writing a poem without ending a poem.
[A title in action]
There are thousands of reasons to give a poem a title, and I’ve just been told nearly all of them.
But there is at least one reason NOT TO, and that’s the one I told you. [Stop Giving Poems Titles, 6th April]
I just wanted to make poets think, like they make me think.
There’s a significant difference between suggesting my students try something for the two years they’re working with me - it arrives in their minds as a suggestion though it leaves my mind as a demand - and insisting that poems should never have titles…
So yes, in answer to your thousand questions, I do think you should try working without titles for a while. You get to emerge from the white space like you’re making your words do, you touch the fire that made you, and the substance that will cover you over when the silly game is done.
You get to meet your partner, your shadow, your nemesis.
Your Partner as in - can’t do without.
Your Shadow as in - can’t do without you.
Your Nemesis as in - it wins in the end. Try writing a poem without ending a poem.
The same applies to poems with stanzas of irregular length. I genuinely believe students would benefit from making only regular verses for a while - regular tread on the earth - evidence of creature passing this way while on a necessary journey - towards water, shelter, company, sustenance, love.
[Evidence of creatures in action.]
But I’m thinking of something else right now.
I have been developing an ethos, a philosophy of poetry. These games and exercises and illustrations are simply facets of it. What began in youth as instinct - I like this, I don’t like that - evolves into an aesthetic - how what I like makes sense - and ultimately an ethic - how what I like is true.
I’m not saying I’m strolling with the great writers on poetry, but they all did the same damn thing. Whether Coleridge or Eliot, Auden or Jarrell, Brodsky or Rich or Levertov, on some level their critical judgments clear a space in which their own kind of poetry makes sense. Even the wrong ones do this. Their wrongness rots their prose, but that’s for another time. They’re all trying to rationalise their own desires, a process as creaturely as the footprints above.
You don’t have to agree with even half of what I suggest - let alone demand - in order to work with me: yes the Poetry School is a school, but it’s a school for the open-hearted and open-minded.
It’s a place, by the way, it’s not just in my mind. Here it is. Those fountains are poems without titles.
***
It’s time there was a silly game.
Here’s one to bridge us back into the Poetry and Psychotherapy Conference, which will come to an end after Easter.
When at the end of 2023 I finished Silly Games the book (archived on this site) I thought it would be fun to write a biographical note that said everything there was space for, but named nothing. It would sound like a life of someone terribly long ago.
[People terribly long ago in action.]
150 words exactly, no names or proper nouns of any kind. All true.
“I was born in the late autumn, sixty or so years ago in a new town twenty miles due north of an old city. My parents were from west of here, I’m the second of three brothers. I went to school, then university, then another university far away where I met famous poets. I started writing poems that got into books and plays that got on to stages. I married for a while and had a daughter who has a daughter too. I taught poetry near and far, and now I teach in a grand stone building on the north bank of the river running through this city. I read old work and new, I make up games which I call silly but I know what I mean by silly. I am on a course to help people who ask for help. I live one storey up beside a canal.”
Who am I?
I just added that because if you write anonymously you end up sounding like a riddle. Riddles being, of course, the oldest form of English poetry.
Why don’t you try this?
I’d be interested to hear how far this form could be taken, mine is just a try-out. Wouldn’t psychotherapy be interested in…
1 - what you choose to say,
2 - what you choose not to,
3 - why it feels so strangely soothing…
[Soothing in action.]
***
[and again.]
I was born after my brother and sister, each of us a gestation period apart. They called our village, “The home of lost reputations” and so it was. I learned easily at school and found university difficult. There were so many people to talk to. I have worked in false places, falsely. I have four children who are each world-conquering heroes, in my eyes, as they each find a way to make some sense of this world. My second husband is truly able to walk with me. We pattern the ground together. When I was middle-aged, words came to me unbidden and described me. Now, I’m not sure what to do with words. In a small room, I sit with others and listen as fully as I can. I am thinking about what role playing games has, in these encounters. My first thought is “none”, but that’s too simple.
I was born in a town that I didn’t grow up in, grew up in a place where I wasn’t born. With my brother and sister (both born in other different places) I grew up on the edge of a midlands market town. An above average, bottom of the top set, good enough for polytechnic and a 2-2 degree sort of a boy. A ‘could do better if he tried, or concentrated or did his homework’ sort of a boy. Interested in the arts but with a scientific brain I took to computers and made a good career out of them while always wishing I was a writer. I started reading poetry, literary fiction, short stories and plays. Didn’t tell anyone. Eventually in my thirties I submitted, won, joined a group, started doing open mics and slams. Now, in my mid fifties I’m taking it more seriously. Maybe too late.