Liquid Architecture

If architecture is frozen music is poetry liquid architecture?

To Marlow on Monday evening for a writing workshop. I hadn't realised until the day itself that it was in fact a poetry workshop (my bad for not bothering to look at the preparatory materials until pretty much the last minute). Not that there was a problem with that. I've long felt that no matter what kind of writer one wants to be it, one should study poetry - and at least try to write it. Poetry is language at its most concentrated, condensed, distilled, reduced. It is about the sound, rhythm, meaning and feel of words. And these are things we should - must -care about as writers. Reading poet and writing it stretches literary muscles that don't otherwise get stretched and stretching those muscles will make us better writers regardless of whether we are writing litfic, paranormal erotica or monkpunk.

The tutor was Kate Foley. She hadn't been expecting a chap among her tutees, but this didn't seem to affect the flow and we were soon to business. I managed two poems or, rather, attempts at poems. For me, it is difficult to get over the feeling that there is a particular language, subject matter and tone that is proper to poetry - the elegiac (in fact, I could go further and say that it is elegiac nature poetry that is real poetry), but I did manage in one of my pieces to at least address this issue. I think it will take a while to get over it completely, but it is a start.

It would be a good to go a course at the City Lit or Arvon or somewhere, but not going on one is no excuse for not starting to do something more on the poetry side now. I have the Penguin English Verse audiobook on tape. At some point I will have to convert to a form that is more maintainable over the long term (I also have the cassette of James Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). And, of course, I have innumerable volumes of poetry at home. I could read some of them.

Poetry reminds me of science fiction in that most poetry, like most science fiction, is about itself, but also in that the poetry world reminds of the science fiction world. Although science fiction does not have an equivalent of The Poetry Place (and such a place would be unbearable if it did, I fear), if one goes there and browses through the various little magazines one finds lying around the cafe tables one is reminded of nothing so much as fanzines as well as the hermetically sealed world of science fiction: poetry, like science fiction, talks (largely) to itself (it just has easier access to the book pages of the broadsheets, school and university literature syllabuses and Arts Council grants). The Wikipedia page on the British Poetry Revival reads like an account of the history of the fandom - only the names have been changed. Of course, there is a poetic sensibility that some people possess just as there is a science fictional one, so one might only be able to go far, but surely there is potential for interesting things to happen at the interface.

For me, wanting to study poetry is complementary to wanting to learn another language. Being able to read another language fluently gives you the literature of that language - including the poetry of that language. And poetry in another language, the densest, deepest form of that language, helps you get at language itself from the inside out, which is to be at the very core of what it is that makes us human. And that something towards which all writers, whether we are writing in Cornish, English, French, Japanese, Volapük or Warlpiri should aspire. Everything is Connected.

Comments

[Celestial P C C Weasel]

Your challenge is to sum up Anathem and/or the philosophy of Husserl in a short cycle of sonnets.

I remember there was a book (possibly self-published or maybe even smuggled onto the shelves by the author) in what used to be the Paperback Bookshop which was some sort of SF novel in verse. My dim recollection is that it was about a generation starship.
I didn't buy it. Possibly it is famous but my Google Fu fails to come up with anything.

[Paul M. Cray]

That'll be Swedish Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson's "Aniara" I shouldn't wonder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara_(poem)). A new English translation was published in 1999. It doesn't appear on Amazon suggesting that it was a small press/self-publishing effort of the kind that might have turned up in the Paperback Bookshop (there was also an earlier translation in your memory is earlier than 1999).

[Celestial M Weasel]

Yes, it wasn't the Paperback Shop long before 1999, I would have thought. This is more like the early 90s.