Collage Poetry #2

You’ve sat down at your desk, the pencil (Lamy propelling) and rubber positioned just so, the light is perfect and there are no distractions to stop you starting the new poem. Except one thing. That blank sheet of white A4 paper.

An hour later you are still staring at that blank sheet of paper.

I expect that most of us have been in that situation. Searching for an idea that just won’t come. But there are ways to kick start the process. Not guaranteed but let’s have a look at a few.

As the theme of this blog is Collage Poetry that’s as good a place to start as any. If you have a particular interest in, for instance, nature, science, railways, politics or whatever then you probably have a magazine lying around on the subject. The poet and artist Kate Eggleston-Wirtz (of this Parish) has explained how she took her Nature mag and cut out headlines which she then arranged to form poems based on the same subject i.e. nature. She says that by using this method she was able to generate a range of ideas that would never had occurred to her otherwise.

If you look at sites like the Poetry Library you will see lists of upcoming competitions. Some of them will have themes. There is one posted at the moment for poems on ‘A Whole New World’. I’m not suggesting you have to enter the competition as some of them are mind-bogglingly expensive and many have entries counted in the thousands, but it is an idea you could work with.

Family and friends’ birthdays are spread over the months of the year. And they are an incentive to get something done. Not only is there the pleasure of being able to send an original piece of work but you will have some tales or info on the person ready to hand and if written carefully it is possible to open up the poem to a general audience. If you’re lucky and get the poem published in a magazine then it’s a lovely feeling to experience the reactions of the family member or friend when they read it. I’m talking a positive reaction here.

For the past ten years or so I have been swapping poems with my friend Julie Maclean in Australia. We call them ‘reply poems’ and the idea is that she sends me a poem. I have to send her a new poem back that has been triggered by a word, phrase or line in her poem. And then vice versa. There is a time scale of roughly a month to respond. I still can’t believe the places this process has taken me. The Ice Age, Morse Code, Detection, Geometry... Here’s an example: the last line of her poem entitled ‘Caseus Magnus – Big Cheese’ was ‘of not being there’. So I took that and used it as my poem ‘On not being there’ about a trip to the cinema in Preston. I’d never written about this particular type of visit to a cinema before.

I always carry a notebook around with me (small enough to slip into my pocket and crucially with a space in it for my pen). And it’s for moments like staring at that flipping blank piece of paper. It’s surprising how much one forgets about wandering around places or being on journeys. A few words scribbled in the said notebook can bring back why one made the note in the first instance. And that can get you going.

I’ve never used the following but I have heard that some people get ideas from opening a book or in one case a dictionary and placing their fingertip on a random word. Which could work unless the tip lands on ‘crocodile’ as I have just found out by trying the method.

And then, of course, there are themes set by a person who runs a blog.

Years ago I was walking along a coastal path and this poem came about:

Dorset View

Putting down bread and jam is one thing,
picking up a telescope is several others
some of which are not as easy
as letting our lenses meet
neither of us blinking as we compromise
on the movement of the sea
where I’m hooked by the passage
of a fishing boat heading west
both of us dodging spray
anxious to clear rocks

just as I’m about to shout
the man in a brown jumper
moves the tiller, spits and looks up

I head south quickly into the sun
which causes several effects,
confusion, pain, temporary blindness,
a reflex action to less stressful views
such as Downs destroyed by craters
and a Bay used for target practice.

Trying to get back sight
and avoid the laughter of friends
a horizon is useful
blue above and blue below,
which may not seem useful
but the difference is there

and so is the shimmering ship shape,
New York bound for sure,
so I enter through my porthole
into the romance of it all,
the wind swirls my scarf to a bowtie
my boots are polished and light
and I step to the sound of a foxtrot
played by a twenty piece band

until stopped by a tap on my shoulder
a request but not for a dance
the nod that I make sufficient
to confuse things even more

for there on the ship I was someone
but I’m here on the cliff as well
and I know the Laws of Physics,
I know about focal lengths,
but being in two separate places
still seems a mystery

and I know that one’s an illusion,
my brain’s been tricked by light,
but somewhere in a nowhere
is where a universe begins
or strands of DNA combine
or the colour of a quark attracts
the other halves of a half formed image

a line of poetry exists
or light itself is squared
and the mystery expands
past gods or other certain truths
and as my eyes take back the day
I pass the telescope on
thanking my friend
while reaching for a flask of tea.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q