In today’s guest post, Elizabeth Parker considers the elements which make up a poet’s toolkit. Two years on from publication of her second collection Cormorant, she reflects on how the poems make use of traditional tools like form and meter.
Poetry and craft
My late dad’s uncles were patternmakers in a bike factory. His great-uncle was a master craftsman. I can still see my dad kneeling at the sea chest his great-uncle made, stroking the inner lid with its shellac glaze, also known as French Polish, and telling me his ancestor was one of the last to know the technique.
My mum and her sisters all sew. Their mum made her own curtains and cushion-covers. She made her thirteen children new summer outfits each year, the offcuts used for dolls’ clothes, pram frills.
My late sister – actor, playwright, screenwriter, secret poet – sewed, beaded, studded, appliquéd, fabric-painted, glue-gunned. She was partway through painting and beading lampshades. From the a box of stained glass and instructions on foiling amongst her possessions, we guess she was also planning on making a mirror.
My uncle Kevin was both a joiner and a tech wizard. He built cabinets and computers. His wake was in his four-storey, bought-for-a-penny, shambling Victorian house in Bootle, a few of us breaking out to gather in the garage he’d made his workshop. Surrounded by his tools and machines, cabinets, a near-finished doll’s house, I told my cousin Peter, Kevin’s eldest, that I was writing a blog about the idea of tools when writing poetry. Peter responded: ‘There’s a lathe over there you can have!’ and I joked that I would get someone to help me lift it on the train, tell them ‘I need it! It’s a metaphor!’
A well-known poet’s comment still perplexes me: ‘I hate the word craft. You’re not making a chair.’ ‘Not even a Farmhouse Spindle Carver?’ I still ask, years later. Oh, to make a poem with the integrity, strength and elegance of such an object! Marking, sawing, carving, sanding the seat; turning a leg on a lathe. Ornamentation and functionality. An object the design of which gives both pleasure and support. I can certainly see the analogy, the metaphor.
I find it a relief to think of writing as craft, with tools and techniques available to be used as I strive to improve; poetry’s greatest engineers, designers, architects, craftsmen, patternmakers – whatever metaphor you fancy – helping us to escape our habits and tendencies.
Poetry and form
A poet and teacher once said ‘The iamb is a heartbeat.’ Another poet, teaching a workshop, stated that ‘the spondee is underused.’ Tools. To be used.
Many of the poems in Cormorant began as experiments in trying out the tools of traditional forms. ‘I Choose River’ began as an attempt at ottava rima. I didn’t ask myself which form would convey something of the rhythms of walking by the river at night, with a rowing eight alongside, and think ‘ottava rima!’ No. I am not there yet! I had what I felt was a strong refrain line: ‘Tonight, I choose river.’ I had been wanting to try ottava rima and it struck me that this particular form might help me in achieving the tight rhythms and rhymes I felt would help me to convey the experience of the walk.
I scanned my refrain line and made no changes. The iambic ‘Tonight, I choose’ helps in conveying both the speaker’s steadiness in their decision and their footsteps (with humans usually favouring one foot over the other), while the pyrrhic ‘river’ suggests the quickness of the current. I scanned my notes, edited and edited some more until I had a first stanza. I’d aimed at iambic pentameter, but, listening as I edited, I noticed that allowing variations in the meter would convey more detail: the skittering and sweeps over surfaces, the depths below, the flowing river and the concrete walkway along its bank.
I knew, as I reviewed my notes for the poem ‘Stonehenge’, that a traditional form that featured rhyme and refrain lines would help me in evoking my experience of visiting this place for the first time. The interconnectedness of the natural and spiritual world. The birds and the cordons, preoccupying me throughout the visit: there are forms designed – ready-made, if you like – to convey cycles, recurrences, harmonies. I read up on forms with refrains and rhyme schemes and chose the pantoum, as it allows for two refrain lines and the quatrains meant I could include more detail.
There were end and internal rhymes in my notes, full and partial, expressive of affinities and harmonies, as well as pointing up contrasts: rhymes I felt would be patterned to powerful effect by the rhyme scheme of the pantoum. The quiet harmonising of partial and internal rhymes sounded the interconnecting currents, above and beneath the surface, visible and hidden, of spirituality and the natural world: ‘Sentry crows scouted from fence posts, / pecked carrion, mobbed a carcass near the Alter Stone. / I understood hunger, bones picked clean, hands casting seeds. / I didn’t quiver. Ley lines failed to pluck my blood.’ Though it can be strenuous, on this occasion I found the form a natural fit (give or take a few end rhymes and alterations to the refrains).
An adventure with the rondeau redouble helped me hugely in the making of the poem ‘Saturday’. I had encountered the form in a workshop and had been intending to have another go at it. My mother had told me about her Saturday outings with her mother and sisters in 1960s Bootle. I felt these details were so evocative – in their specificity, their turn of phrase and the sense her words gave of a particular time and place – that they could all be refrains: ‘We were always running for the bus. 56./ Do a reccie, look at the material in Lewis’, / George Henry Lees, / finish off in Marks’ for Sunday’s tea.’ I had notes on my own Saturdays in lockdown. The rondeau redouble allowed for four refrain lines and the quatrains gave me another three lines in which to juxtapose details of my Saturdays with my mother’s. The alternate rhyme connects the lines that express my experience, sounding the distinction between my lockdown Saturdays and my mother’s recollections (which form the refrain lines): ‘I watch the walls, the cast of light. A year since / the decorator sanded, layered cream. / I am stranded on plains of ‘slipper satin’. / Do a recce, look at the material in Lewis’.
Another poem inspired by my mother’s memories of her girlhood is ‘Doll Hospital’, which began as a roundel. I had been reading about the roundel, which uses a partial refrain – a phrase rather than whole line – and felt the noun phrase ‘doll hospital’, particularly in the context of a recollection of girlhood, was rich in connotation and would evoke varying emotions and meanings were it to recur in different positions throughout the poem.
Cutting detail and altering my mother’s wording in order to keep to the form, I ended up with what I felt was rather a thin piece, with the riches of my mother’s telling returned to the notebook. In this instance, I broke the poem out, but the endeavour was far from a wasted effort. The concision of detail gives a sense of the tightness and textures of the space, as well as the editing and wearing away of memory: ‘The stairs. Bare wood. / All our houses were modern. Carpeted. / These were little. Rickety.’
Knowledge of the origin and history of a form often guides my choice. It would, I felt, have been a missed opportunity not to work notes for a poem inspired by a Renaissance polymath into a Renaissance form. ‘Dear Leonardo’ is a quatorzain, but I had been trying for a sonnet. In trying for a sonnet, I achieved an effective volta – expressive of a shift in time to an imagined future – and I had compacted details into longer lines, thereby creating, I feel, some sense of a few brief moments loaded with impressions and meaning, the harmony of these moments heard in the chime of alternate rhymes: ‘She will return to this: your anatomies, the child’s curls / shining on his temples, his every nerve, every fibre / wandering your lines, asking with more than words.’
In ‘Sonnets of Separation’, I try to convey my experience of having a baby during the first lockdown – a baby no-one but myself and my partner could hold, make a fuss over, as the rules of lockdown, people’s fear and my own, kept them at a distance. This sequence is actually a series of quatorzains but ‘Quatorzains of Separation’ doesn’t quite trip off the tongue! Again, working with the sonnet form resulted in effective stanza breaks (originally voltas) and alternate rhymes that help to convey the enclosure, the tight spaces of lockdown, when the textures and parameters, the touch, of the shrunk spaces we were allowed to exist in became so familiar to us. I feel that the rhymes of the piece help to convey the closeness and interconnectedness of these spaces and our daily lives within them: ‘My warning glare, willing the air to defend us – willing Sue, bringing smiles, best wishes too near; / Bob, approaching the front wall of his drive / with a joke about leper colonies, / to feel the hard borders of my fear. Your cries reel / across crowdless stadium, parked up street.’
Using your tools
I believe you learn a tool by using it. Scan your lines, mark the metrical feet. Be proud as you notice your technique, the tools you’ve used already. Be excited about dipping into the toolkit and having a go at the ones you’ve yet to use!
Elizabeth Parker
