Discovering Poetry

I HAVE always had a love affairs with words. From a young age I was passionate about their sounds and meaning and saw them as pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. I was intrigued by how combining them in different ways they made a whole, telling a story, painting an image, relating an experience, describing a scene or an event. And yet …. and yet when it came to poetry it seemed like another language to me. The same beautiful words which were able to create a gripping tale seemed disjointed, cold and incomprehensible when set to verse in weird patterns I didn’t understand.

I came to loathe poetry. From early on in school we had to learn poems off by heart and then recite them to the class a week later. Their meaning was never adequately explained to us, nor were we taught that their rhythms were really an essential part of their character and how they, like traits in people, made them interesting. I suspect the teachers were merely following the curriculum and were themselves little more enlightened or enthusiastic about the subject than we schoolchildren were. So all we could do was learn the poems parrot-fashion and then lead them to their execution in that mind numbing manner of regurgitating lines as though we were running a marathon and about to suffer a heart attack, rushing to the end of each line and resting heavily on the rhyme before preparing for the final sprint to the end. To an excessively shy child this was torment, not made any easier by the fact that my mental retention for anything that didn’t interest me was practically zero.

In secondary school things became worse still. We were given a theme and then told to write a poem as homework. I had no idea how to create rhymes or other more complex poetic shapes. The result was utter humiliation in class, having pieces of chalk hurled at me by the teacher and being ridiculed and laughed at by my fellow pupils. The experience gave me nightmares for the next thirty years and, as bizarre as it may seem, produced in me a real phobia for this form of writing.

Then, about ten years ago came a life changing moment. I read or heard somewhere the expression ‘free verse’. What was that? Clearly it wasn’t about a place which gave away books or pamphlets without charging for them. Through a little research I discovered that free verse wasn’t so new at all. In fact, it had been around since biblical times (the ‘Song of Songs’ or ‘Song of Solomon’ in the Old Testament is written in what is now popularly termed free verse) but it had really come into its own during the mid 19th Century under the American Transcendentalist movement. Poets, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg felt liberated to experiment with what to them was a new form of expression, offering far greater freedom than so-called ‘traditional’ poetry, yet still needing sufficient structure and containment that it could be seen as innovative and categorised as an art form. It had as much do with the flow of the words, the beauty of their sound, the imagery they portrayed as it did with how poems were set out on the page.

The influence of those Americans quickly spread to Europe where many great poets of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (among them Jules Laforgue and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) began writing free verse. In Britain poets such as Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot and Gerald Manley Hopkins adopted the form. In contemporary poetry free verse has almost become the norm and has, in my opinion, played an important role in the resurging interest that poetry is currently enjoying.

And so, to cut a long story short, soon after I made my discovery and came to realise that there is life beyond rhyming poetry, I sat down and penned several poems of my own in quick succession. Those early efforts probably left a lot to be desired and I’m sure I have improved over the years, but even back then I felt that a seed had been planted within me which would before long grow into a genuine love for poetry. It was to become as important a form of writing as all the others which I practice. These days rows of poetry books, traditional as well as modern, line my shelves and I am as likely to pick them up as I am a favourite novel. I am currently compiling a wee anthology of some of my best examples with a view to sending them off to a few publishers. It would be great, of course, for one of them to show an interest, but for the moment it’s really just an excuse for sorting through the hundreds of poems I’ve written during odd moments over the last decade, putting the decent ones into some sort of order and getting rid of the rest.

25/05/09