Trial and Error

Trial and error is pretty much the basis for most forms of activity but as this is a site based around poetry let’s stick with the writing of a poem. I don’t know what the ratio of poets starting a new work on a computer screen or with a blank piece of paper, pencil and rubber are, but I’m of the latter persuasion. A4, Lamy mechanical 0.7 mm lead and rubber.

But, obviously, not a choice that could be made a hundred and more years ago, although I’ve just thought of typewriters. Surely not for poems?

Back to the subject. I reckon there are two methods of addressing trial and error. The first is by oneself and the second by an input from another’s perspective. With the presumption that one knows there is an error to be taken care of in the first place. Not necessarily the case.

I’m starting with Walt Whitman, one of my heroes, and his collection entitled ‘Leaves of Grass ’. He self published the first version in 1855 when it contained a mere twelve poems and then spent the rest of his life altering and expanding the collection until he died in 1892, when the collection contained over four hundred poems.

Among the poems in the early Leaves of Grass editions (albeit sometimes under different titles) were "Song of Myself", "Song of the Open Road", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Later editions would contain Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The only known extant manuscript page of the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass ' shows the trial and errors needed to get to this:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft.
The carpenter dresses his plank. . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, . . .

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass revisions

For someone who looked for advice from someone else then it’s hard to escape from the influence of Ezra Pound on T S Eliot and the writing of The Wasteland.

He advised Eliot to cut the original draft of around eight hundred lines to 433 plus he told him to change the title from ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices ’ which came from a Dickens character in 'Our Mutual Friend ' who was noted for his ability to imitate the voices of the police in crime reports. Eliot thought it was brilliant. Pound insisted it was cut.

Here’s an image showing revisions made by Pound and Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, to The Wasteland's  "On Margate Sands" stanza.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(ll. 300–02)

revisions to Eliot's On Margate Sands stanza in The Wasteland

And in the note accompanying the information it states that "After straining one of his hands rowing while at graduate school, Eliot preferred to write by using a typewriter where possible".

Pound told him to chuck an entire opening section set in a Boston saloon with stuff like:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,

and start with this:

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

TS Eliot and Ezra Pound

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Bring on the fighting kids

Nicola Adams

By Sheilagh Dyson

Desperately casting round for something to write in this week’s post, I gratefully received this gift from Carol Ann Duffy via Saturday’s Guardian. I was at the time feeling exhausted, elated, proud, angry, heartened, depressed, exhilarated, overjoyed, resentful, comforted from three magical days remorselessly tramping round London and the Olympic stadium and park. I had seen the mighty Mo run in the 5000 metre heats. I had heard the stadium crowd cheer to the rafters every British competitor – and reserve the warmest applause of all for Sarah Attar and Waroud Sawalha, Muslim women running for Saudi Arabia and Palestine respectively, both finishing last in their 800 metre heats – but both there, competing, representing their countries with pride. I had enjoyed the thoughtful, exuberant planting of wild flowers all around the Olympic Park and the serene canalside walk in the shadow of the Stadium. I had revelled in the comradeship of a shared experience, the smiles, the tumult of humankind, united in a maelstrom of celebration.

I needed someone to sum it all up for me – the joy of the sporting competition; the anger at the fur coat no knickers juxtaposition of the money lavished on the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ with the shrinking number of playing fields and sporting facilities for ordinary kids in our country; the euphoria at another medal hard-won with years of sheer grind and dedication; the contemptible ease with which the money men have made ordinary people pay the full price, take all the blame for the spivs and crooks who litter the financial markets and play roulette with our lives; the renewed pride in being a member of one race, the human race; the unexpected feeling of being proud to be British (but not xenophobic), able to wave a Union Flag without feeling queasy about its hijacked connotations.

Lacking the energy and wit myself and with all these contradictions churning around in my punch drunk brain, I was relieved to find, of course, a poet to put it all into good humoured, rational perspective, to make some sense of the wonder and frustration of the last two glorious weeks. (This is why Carol Ann Duffy is the Poet Laureate and I am a student on the first rung of the ladder!)

I think her poem admirably captures a moment, a mood, a spirit, a defiance and I love it. It also exhorts us to reject the craven, weasel words of the government and to take back the power from those who have ruthlessly grabbed it from us to shore up their own undiminished wealth and privilege. The fighting kids will show us the way – hooray.

Translating the British, 2012, by Carol Ann Duffy



A summer of rain, then a gap in the clouds

and The Queen jumped from the sky

to the cheering crowds.

We speak Shakespeare here,

a hundred tongues, one-voiced; the moon bronze or silver,

sun gold, from Cardiff to Edinburgh

by way of London Town,

on the Giant's Causeway;

we say we want to be who we truly are,

now, we roar it. Welcome to us.

We've had our pockets picked,

the soft, white hands of bankers,

bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;

we want it back.

We are Mo Farah lifting the 10,000 metres gold.

We want new running-tracks in his name.

For Jessica Ennis, the same; for the Brownlee brothers,

Rutherford, Ohuruogu, Whitlock, Tweddle,

for every medal earned,

we want school playing fields returned.

Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,

austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;

we got on our real bikes,

for we are Bradley Wiggins,

side-burned, Mod, god;

we are Sir Chris Hoy,

Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,

Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,

Olympian names.

We want more cycle lanes.

Or we saddled our steed,

or we paddled our own canoe,

or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;

our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;

Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,

Valegro (Dujardin's horse).

We saw what we did. We are Nicola Adams and Jade Jones,

bring on the fighting kids.

We sense new weather.

We are on our marks. We are all in this together.

           

So, is that an example of free verse? Blank verse? Who cares - I’m on my hols from college and not in the business of stylistic analysis just at the minute! The poetic form doesn’t really matter, if I enjoy the language and emotion of a poem. Increasingly, poets tend to agree. Ezra Pound, writing in 1916, said ‘To create a new rhythm – as the expression of new moods – and not to copy the old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty.  We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional form. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.’  In other words, it is down to the poet how they wish to express what they want to say, in the form they want to say it. And that is the strength and beauty of poetry precisely.



Woroud Sawalha

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