#520: Keepers at the Gates of Dawn

or, Did I just have a VERY PUBLIC, Major Epiphany about poetry?

So, there I am, in Week Two of my Poetry Course, completely failing to write a sonnet. It wasn’t just a small fail, my brain frankly refused to have anything to do with the form. Looking at rhyme schemes, listening to Other People doing a very decent job of making it look easy, I start getting upset. It is no wonder, considering how much work had been completed yesterday. My brain was exhausted.

Then we moved onto a Ghazal. Critically questioning my life choices, serious thought is given to quietly logging off and walking away from the PC until a Raymond Antrobus poem turned up and blew my mind.

I have always considered poetic form as problematic. In a certain light, it is very easy to consider it as intellectual gatekeeping, especially if your brain is inherently wired differently to many other writers. Listening to far smarter and more accomplished people make light work of the academic is a sure-fire way of making me doubt my own ability to be anywhere near capable or indeed relevant.

Except last night it occurred to me that form should be there to be fucked with, to be ripped apart and put together as poets see fit. If other writers decide to judge my poetic ability on whether they can identify an education in my wordcraft, they’re not seeing the real me. It’s like a musician being told he can only sing the parts of his back catalogue that the Real Fans decide are ‘the best songs’.

You can’t be experimental, because all these people want are the same chords.

Abstract and experimental art still do my head in, because I was taught to accept the conventional as the only acceptable benchmark. People who live exclusively in the work that they dictate and create are not ‘proper’ artists, I was repetitively told, because only by surmounting the chaos of the world around us and stamping our humanity on the narrative can we demonstrate our superiority.

What a load of arrogant bollocks that really is, that somehow humans are more relevant than the majesty of the planet. It is also one of the most dangerous systems of control, that we are better than the earth that created and nurtured us, and that we now pillage and destroy without consideration. It has taken many years of picking apart the fabric of myself to know I cannot be that person.

I know why the imposition of form makes my skin literally itch.

We will return to a poetry warm-up here after this week is done. Tonight, I teach a writing workshop for the first time to a live audience. I have no idea how things will go, but we have made it simple, with lots of room for discussion. Talking to strangers is hard, but the benefits of allowing yourself to be open and curious can never be understated. Every day is a school day, remember.

Tomorrow, I will spend the day completing submission work. There are some fascinating windows currently open, which my unique skill set will be well-served to complete. If this was a world that ran only on order and precise forms, I would struggle, but fortunately it is not. This is a very good time to be creating poetry that challenges the normal and hints at a wider reality than that which is reported.

I am very much looking forward to the process of creation.