Shores

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 

Isaac Newton is meant to have said this but what his reasons were is unclear. He was not exactly a straightforwardly modest man. When we look at those vast expanses of grey or if you're lucky blue sea, what do you think?

 

 

 

As poets we should go beyond the everyday of Newton's solitary rambler, try and make it fresh. In his time the Victorian scholar Matthew Arnold did just that with his famous poem Dover Beach (available in lots of places). Looking for the fresh metaphor, the new way of seeing is what we're about, what he was doing.

 

For Arnold it was turbulent problems of faith which he linked to the tide's withdrawing roar. I think we should be on the lookout for such newness as we walk along our shores. Don't you?

 

Thank you for reading. David Riley

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Poems Have Feet

Poems have feet. At least according to a lot of people. They are the units, some say, out of which lines of poetry are often constructed. In English (and many other languages) they relate to syllables and analysts look at how these are either stressed or unstressed and link them together in groups, over which, once again, there is only a limited amount of agreement. This becomes basic to other important areas of poetry  - so it’s not just a matter for those who want to analyse poetry. It links to rhythm and rhyme.

Rhyme (like most things) has been argued over forever. Some of the greatest writers do not rhyme; Shakespeare’s plays are in the main in blank verse. So is Milton’s work. Others including some from the 20^th and 21^st centuries use rhyme but until you look closely it can remain hidden. See much work by Auden and Larkin. Contemporary poets interested in these formal matters also introduce rhyme - see Sinead Morrissey for example. Another Irish great, Seamus Heaney, is famous for his use of half rhyme. Please look them out and follow this argument up.

This is intimately related to syllables which as Ruth Padel says, are the molecules of a poem, linking the whole structure together into a whole, a journey - and you need some sort of feet for that journey.

You could also say you have to feel that journey, feel the beat of the poem. Once again this is to do with syllables and indeed feet. In doing so, you, as a poet, take a journey and take others with you. You may walk a very familiar path yet take yourself and your listener or reader with you. They, more often than not, don’t want to know about the end point of that journey you’re writing about but what it tells them about their own travels, so don’t be afraid to leave things open. Your auditors will fill in the gaps and they may understand their own journeys much better. Now, that’s a good thing wouldn’t you say?

A couple of books that say more on these matters:

S. Fry, The Ode Less Travelled, Arrow Books, 2007.

R.Padel, 60 Poems for the Journey of Life, Vintage, 2008.

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Asking the question why

For the short version of this blog read Don Paterson's poem The Day. I take it to be about searching. What do you think? You can find it at:

http://readpoems.tumblr.com/post/2580666255/the-day-don-Paterson

For more, read on.

You remember the game, always asking why? How did it end? Not with an answer but mostly with someone getting fed up (probably an adult) and you being told go and play. Now we're too old to know better, what if we played the game again? Quickly we'd see we live in a place with no answers, the quantum world writ paradoxically large. We live in a world of probabilities, where you have to decide but can't possibly have enough [information] to do so.

Can poetry help us? It gives us a way to see a little bit further into the dark wood to choose a path. It can't take it for you but it's always searching, asking the question why.

 

Thanks for reading.   David Riley

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