I was trying to find a poem I wrote in college so I pulled down the faded blue spiral notebook in which I used to carefully transcribe "finished" poems that I'd written. So I'd know it was my poetry notebook, I cut out and pasted this Far Side cartoon on the front:
The first page contained a poem that was written when I was in high school as an assignment for a Spanish class. It was written in Spanish, and in Spanish it sounded pretty good.
I should have stopped reading at that point.
These poems are bad. Painfully bad. Painfully, shoulder raising, teeth grimacing, ever-so-slightly nauseatingly bad.
It's not the teenage angst, trite subject matter, slavishness to rhyme and meter without any real ear for rhythm or sound, or any of the other hurdles that burgeoning writers must get past that pained me so much. It was that, at the time, I thought they were good. I thought they were good and showed them to people. I thought they were good and showed them to people who were boys. I thought they were good and showed them to the boys for whom they were written.
To all the previous objects of my youthful affections for whom I wrote and read poetry, I humbly apologize.
In hindsight, my main problem was that I tried to write poetry without actually reading poetry. Unfortunately, I was NOT familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda . . . or any other modern or contemporary poet. After my initial revulsion, I re-read some of my early attempts with a kinder eye, thinking about what advice I'd offer the budding writer I was . . . and still am.
First and foremost, I would have encouraged my young self to read. To learn how to write a love poem I would have pointed her towards Cien Sonetos de Amor (one way to get her to study her Spanish). I would have given her books by Billy Collins to see how to walk the fine line between humor and profundity, and introduced her to Mary Oliver to learn how to read the world around her with a poet's eye. I would have told her that you can't write good poetry without reading good poetry. And to find good poetry, I would have introduced her to Bloodaxe Books.
In fact, it was a volume by Bloodaxe, Poetry with an Edge, that ended up being my primer in contemporary poetry even without the guidance of my future self. I can't remember how I stumbled upon it in the first place as even now it's difficult to find the works of this Northumbrian publisher on bookstore shelves in the DMV. Maybe my future self did give it to me and had to erase the memory of the encounter. However it happened, I'm glad it did. From Fleur Adcock to Benjamin Zephaniah, Bloodaxe has published many of the brightest and best poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. In particular, their anthologies are like the crown jewels of contemporary poetry. Each collection contains individual gems that dazzle when taken as a whole.
So I would have told my young self, like I'm telling you, check out Bloodaxe books. In addition to buying their books, it's also worth spending some time playing around on their website. You can hear poets reading their work in the video section and get recommendations for possible new-to-you poets on their "new to poetry?" page. If you are an American poet I'd recommend steering clear of the "Want to be published by Bloodaxe?" page (abandon hope all ye who enter here) but the the little photo of a fox vaulting a sheep on their home page is alone worth the click
No comments:
Post a Comment