After the Poems

I have immersed myself in poetry for hours,
and now my head wanders like a traveller
with a broken compass, through loves
and lives and the things people collect
to make themselves happy.

Every word is a picture of someone –

the electricity between thoughts and colour

– and every ending is a breath of cloud

plucked from the place dreams sneak out from

like naughty children. They are loosely tied

together and rarely double-knotted.

I wonder what happens to them once

they are done and forgotten,

whether part of the magic is that mystery

of forgotten things and the words

we write with our fingertips in their dust.

We can touch someone else’s scribbles in a margin

but like a mirage, we waste the play

of imagining who they were by stepping so close

that we see the sand falling between the pages.

At school we analyse and deconstruct

these glimpses into the swirl of another’s iris,

forgetting they are more than captions

beneath photographs, clinging to context.

We pull them apart like the same old

Lego bricks, and restack them again and again

in different shapes. Sometimes we create

windows. Done, miss.

But after the poems I see an ocean tossing

up the colours of a hundred choirs,

the light of a mid-afternoon fracturing them

like stained glass projections throughout a room.

I’m dizzy. Read me again, they say,

and look through a different moment,

in a different time, and see the reflections

of a thousand voices and shadows in a rainfall

which once filled my poet’s mind.

*

More of a musing than a poem, but whatever. I've been reading lots, writing less, and have spoken to some inspiring people about poetry and all the strings people tie it with. Found a love of graffiti poetry - I love the idea of writing on walls.

Also, Tumblr is to blame for the neglect of this blog. :3

And hello to my Russian readers - you're now the greenest place on my readership map, congrats. :)

Expression?

Today's been a rather dull day. It’s funny, I only noticed today that I’ve never actually posted anything personal, about me, on this blog, whatsoever. Sure, my drafts are full of musings I’ve begun about Life or Specific Crisis or the occasional Unfairness Rant, or just Rants in general. None have been posted longer than four minutes before I’ve deleted them, most never even got posted in the first place.

So here I am, with something personal, sort of. My mum said something today about expression. She wanted to know why I write poetry about things that don’t matter to me, or are about me. I told her that my poems are all, in a way about me. They come from my mind, so I guess they must be, anyway. She didn’t press for a further explanation, even though I don’t think she thought my reply actually answered her question, but it got me wondering about my expression of myself.

I personally, don’t think much of myself. The world is bigger than I am. Muchmuchmuch bigger and people who think the world is small always seem to end up bitter about their life, or disappointed that they didn’t live enough. Nobody can live in a space that’s too small or live enough in a space that’s too big. Look at the stars, look to the horizon – the edge of sight is flat, the curve of the earth so subtle in its extent that we cannot see we are on a sphere until we no longer stand with our feet on the ground – remember how small you are, explore the vapour you’re apart of before the wind blows, and be happy. It's as simple as that to me.

People, however, seem to think a lot of me, which I can never really get my head around. I find compliments hard to deal with. My friends say I’m smart. I’m not. I absorb things that interest me, bits of stories, ideas, quotes, poetry, history. But I struggle every day with lessons and understanding. Odd that I find I can understand people far better than I can understand what they say. I don’t like speaking out loud and I don’t like it when people think more of me than I am, it means I’ll always end up disappointing them.

Expression, though, is not something I’ve thought much about before. Art, in itself is expression. I paint, write, isn’t that expression? But if I’m expressing myself in these mediums, then what is it I am expressing about myself? My mum thinks it’s nothing. Just meaningless, hollow poems about things and stuff and nothing. Yet there must be something of me going into them -- I spend hours writing just one, and while I’m writing, I do find myself thinking about things that do matter to me. The people in my life, the past, my childhood, worries, regrets, the usual ‘stuff’ I suppose. How much does content reflect the writer, though? I’m pretty sure that Stephen King, though he writes about murder and horrific-nesses, isn’t actually a murderer. He’s probably a really nice guy. So what does his writing show about him?

I’m studying William Blake at college at the moment (I’ve had readings of his poems on a loop for the past four hours . . .) and Blake, is one of those people who always seemed to write about things that really mattered to him. If anyone’s read his work, a lot of it is about how children were treated in his time, the corruption in the church, poverty and other such issues that not many people in the upper classes at the time gave much thought for. His opinions on these issues are very strong and apparent in his work, which shows a lot about the kind of person he was and, supposedly, that he was a caring person who thought a lot about people below the poverty line.

One theme in my work a couple people have mentioned to me is fathers. Several people who’ve read my work have told me I must have a good relationship with my father because I write about good relationships with fathers or have some kind of nostalgia thing going on. The irony is, I haven’t seen my father for well over a year and I really don’t think much of him at all. Fathers aren’t important to me. So, how true is it that Blake really thought much of the issues he wrote about? Did he perhaps just think they were good subjects to write about in a similar way I think father-child relationships are? Or maybe it was a kind of absent thing? Or perhaps he really did just write about what meant a lot to him and this is a bad example. Who knows.

At this point I’m aware there has probably been some big Blake-inspiration research-y thing and comparing my vague inspirations to a famous poet's who was part of a movement, probably is a seriously bad idea . . . Also, I don't believe Blake’s writing came of absent ‘what shall I write today’ musings like most of my stuff does. So yeah, bad example.

Anyway, my point was simply that, how do we know what we read in poetry is actually important to the writer? How much of ‘you’ do you express in your work, and how?

In prose, I think it’s maybe easier to express yourself. What kind of person you are might depend on how well you treat your characters, the kind of relationships they have, how morals are presented, the way people communicate and how actions are used to illustrate stuff, what angles and biases you may purposefully or absently use to make something seem good/bad, etc, etc. But then again, these might also not be expressing ‘you’ (such as horror writers), especially as everything that is written – prose, poetry, whatever – can be interpreted differently by whoever is reading. So what do we express about ourselves when we write?

Ha, rambling is fun.

Ekphrasis

Chaos-6 ~ by Narcisse-Shrapnel (Deviantart)

A child, with arms wide, paddles

in the slosh of a shallow brook after rain,

humming, humming,

and wondering

how far waves can roll upstream from the sea.

Everything is grey.

        

Her hat is too big – it covers her ears

and makes her tune hollow

and far away.

The forest doesn’t listen anymore.

When she was smaller, her father hung

yoghurt pots in the branches

to amplify her voice. On a shingle beach,

crashes of waves

e c h o a n d e c h o ,

trembling through plastic, roots and bone.

        

Now the trees close themselves

around her and shake their rusted leaves,

trying to shed

their ashes.

        

She carries a bucket of red paint;

one hand bleeds the bank-side bushes

with a sable-hair brush, like rapping

a stick along schoolyard railings.

                                        

Marching now, she imagines the city

with waters running through its streets

and the beaded amber streetlights paddling

in a shimmer

of sliding reflections.

                        

Fallen from her pocket, dried apricot pieces

float by, half-coloured red

like flowers timid for summer.

                        

In noisy places,

it is hard to remember a half-forgotten tune,

though it might murmur with the patter of rainfall

and whisper like a boat along threads.

She would paint fish and musical notes

on the skyscraper roofs

where the telephone wires knot like dead lighting,

 if she could reach,

so that God might see  

her talent            and give her more colours

to paint all

that she

half-forgets

and all the rain washes

a    w       a          y

on a greyer

yesterday.

Finding your Perfect Writing Forum

Lists of ‘good’ writing forums on the internet always seem to have the big bustly websites listed first like a popularity contest. As the list goes down, the size of the forums listed usually gets smaller, most of the forum-world gems being lost, save to those expert Googlers or those who chance across the whispers floating around the interweb grapevines.

As an amateur writer myself, and a forum-er of four years, I've found smaller forums  with closer critique values work much better for writers, especially ones just starting out or who are interested in actually getting better (believe it or not, there are a surprising amount of writers who don’t seem to want to get better at all). Absolute Write's 35,000 members may be seriously daunting to someone inexperienced with forum life, and unless you're already a freaking awesome writer and have a flashing sparkly avatar or something, you are not going to get noticed among the crowds.

If you’ve never been a member of a forum before, regardless of how long you’ve been writing, you may find it a rather different experience than you may have initially thought. Some forums can be nice happy places full of friendly people and others can be a cut-throat world of surviving out the older members. Some can be writerly havens and others can be abysmal lairs of ego-stroked pre-teens waiting for you to tell them their Twilight fanfic is fantastic literature . . . it happens. Telling the difference is easy, though, so no worries, but the main concern is what you want to get from a forum.

I joined my first forum when I was fifteen, knowing nothing about them, and I know that I certainly wouldn't be the writer I am today without that forum and the others I joined. I dread to think of where I'd be now if my first stop-off had been the Young Writers Society (YWS) which, unfortunately falls under the category of a far from constructive forum. So getting the right one for you, is crucial. If you're a young writer in your early teens, concerned with meeting writery friends, then YWS might work for you, but keep in mind the doors - if you want to be a writer you need to always be learning. There is no such things as the perfect writer and if you’re serious, you’re going to have to convince more than just your parents and friends you’re good.

If you're perhaps a bit older (should I say mature?) and more serious about being critiqued by people who seriously know what they're talking about (and not afraid of receiving constructive criticism) then Critique Circle are fabulous. However, I wouldn't recommend CC to a newbie writer - these guys mean serious business. You’ll need a backbone and decent amount of knowledge in the craft to return the favour to whomever critiques your work. Critiques for critiques, fair game, right? You don’t get something for nothing.

Also, as I’ve jumped in the deep-end with the ‘best’ sites (in my opinion) I’ve had the experience to nosey around, this one’s for poetry-peoples:  Tin Roof Alley Poets, which, though has a few downfalls in some members being utterly awful human beings, is great for receiving genuine, honest and very detailed critiques (have a backbone, though or you’ll probably find your poetry crippled at the knees rather than manning up) and will certainly help you improve your work and educate you in poetry-ness.

Another thing I always find with lists of writing forums is that they never seem to include are forums for younger writers, which, as I’ve been a member of about twelve different forums, possibly even more, and witnessing the births and deaths of some, I think I can comment on a few.

Young Writers Online and Teenage Writers are both excellent forums (Dear any possible readers hailing from either forum: I LOVE YOU BOTH SO NO ARGUING *coughs*) for young people. Though very different from one another, in both atmosphere and community, they both offer a great community of mixed ability writers focused on helping others improve through critique. The latter also has camps where more experienced members teach others about the different crafts, and the former has many competitions and events throughout the year. There are no better forums for young writers (age 12-25) on the interwebs. Trust me, I’ve been on almost all of them. I should note that these two are *coughs* rivals, though that may be an understatement.

When it comes to forums, as I think I’ve said before, the best thing you can do it ask yourself what you want to gain from joining them. If it's just to make friends with like-wise minded people then smaller less critique and more discussion-focused sites will work better for you as you won't get lost in the struggle to be noticed, as in bigger forums. People on those forums are generally friendlier and for lack of a better word, spammy, so it’s usually very easy to fit in to these kinds of places.

Some examples:

Poet's Graves Workshop (all ages)
Legendfire (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Fictionpost (all ages)
Hortorian (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Kids' Writing Club (young writers, only)

Also, if you’re already a member of a critique-heavy forum, sometimes it’s just nice to pop by places like these for a little breather. A slower pace, new faces to talk to, teach, and learn from. There are many kinds of writers and you should always be looking to learn from others. I personally, like a balance, but that might be just me. I’m a member of both critique-heavy forums and more lax ones, and I find that this works for me. The thing is to find out what works for you.

If what you want is to get better at writing, learn something and be critiqued, then you need to look carefully before joining a forum. Many forums may boast awesome critique prowess, but rarely do they deliver *sigh*. A swift glance through some of a site's fiction and poetry forums is usually enough to confirm whether or not they are worth your time. Questions to ask yourself: are the 'critiques' mostly/all one-line comments or a couple sentences, do they say anything constructive or just stuff like 'zomg I love your work, post more!', or even worse . . . do they tolerate chatspeak? If so, these are the places to avoid posting your work, for you will not improve, and the people there are probably not overly interested in improving or already think they’re the best thing since Marshamallow Fluff. So it will be a waste of time joining. Look for places that more often, or even always, give good, detailed and honest critiques. By ‘honest’ I also mean, harsh where necessary.

I have little experience with bigger adult forums such as Absolute Write, so I don't feel I can accurately describe their services. I know YWS is lost in its own size, which, though is nowhere near as big as AW, comes under the description of a site filled with prospect, but saturated with no learning, no effort, ego-stroked members, and generally awful critiques, meaning that their prospect is mostly sadly wasted (can you tell I'm biased? :3). I guessed this could be the case with super-sized forums such as AW, but after joining and having a poke around I found the critiques were mostly helpful, and most work did actually get looked at, though navigating that place was interesting. It wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I suppose it depends on who you are. Size shouldn't be a deciding vote one where you join though.

Look around before joining somewhere that will get you nowhere despite years of posting, unless you want to join a forum more for the friends and discussion than for betterment and helping others. On that note, I must say, most of the places I've linked will require you to do your fair share of work to receive critiques in return, even the less critique-focused places require you to comment on others work - but critiquing, especially detailed critiquing will help you grow as a writer, too, so that shouldn't be a problem, should it? :)

Anyhoo, this is getting rather long and rambly. Feel free to contribute your opinions or any info you have on sites mentioned, or any others.

EDIT 12/12/12 (ha): Someone asked me for the link to this today, and reading it back, I'd like to just unreccomend teenagewriters.com (TW). Unfortunately last summer the place was taken over by a businessman who kicked all the staff and older members off, killing the site. There's still a lot of useful stuff in the archives I recommend looking for, if you want to learn about writing, but the site is no longer active and has nobody moderating it.

Waking up in Venice

Haven't posted in a while, gave up on Nano (usual excuses), here's a new poem I wrote at lunchtime on Thursday, when I should have been revising. Usual meh-ness.

We woke up in Venice, once.

Spent lanterns hung from threads in the doorways

like failed nightlights, doused by arteries

we traced on a map, noting where they split

from the body and became sewn in with the fabrics

against our skin. You always liked simple linen

because of the heat.

Straw hat and sunglasses, such the tourist.

Our breakfast in bed was disturbed

by an early-riser, singing from a boat below to the lady

in the room above us.

She closed her window,

and told us later she preferred the voiceless Einaudi,

direct to the soul, you know?

That morning, some of the neighbours hung

bunting between the houses, window-to-window

like little Chinese washing lines,

tying the fourth storeys.

I sent a postcard home (hello, Albion, miss me yet?)

and bought some olive bread

you said tasted like the smell of cut grass.

I remember the bar: a pokey little place

beside a bridge grown green in the centuries,

and like everything, barely floating.

Two glasses of flat wine each. Risotto, just because

it’s what’s done.

Outside the wind tore at the colours

flapping in their zig-zags and pulled them from the windows

so they streamed in ribbons down the streets.

Poetry for the rejected lover in his boat.

We fed the birds with baicoli crumbs,

watched the canals grow dark,

and counted the fireflies burning holes in Venice’s

new curtains. We fell asleep and woke up

in someplace old

where aeroplanes flew overhead,

and the jet streams faded

like the memory of dreaming.

4. Silverskin

tiny white flowers grow in the gash

of a silver birch, tendons split between the reaching

of roots which traverse upwards over old scars,

towards a branch shadowed with grey

and flaking skin.

leaves fall from origami twists

into the lap of a prince who, as an old man,

sits beneath this tree to confess his years into the quiet

of summer: loves, lives, losses

and a lingering thought

that his name means nothing.

in mornings passed, the prince would climb trees

and wade through the froth of sky, searching

for a fortune stories told him he’d find in the heights

of life. he’s a man with eyes

as old as the tree he sits beneath,

only he doesn’t look,

he breathes.

but this tree misses youth, too, and if it had eyes

it would gaze at each new shoot – green as eve

– with wonder. silver skin peels like the scales of armour

or notes on battle for excited archaeologists.

but beneath it all are the wounds

of old men, old crowns, and old hearts,

and a thousand rings of silver dust.

3. Painted Caves

There’s something about painting caves

people don’t seem to remember

nowadays. Secrets in the dark press history through stone,

absorbing moments, loves, cultures — feeding

them back to us with the seep of minerals

in a trickle of ancient water about our feet,

and back into a world that has moved on.

The red walls have a strange glow

when you think of the hands that crushed each berry,

moulded the paste, the paint, with fingers and bones,

and carved an image in the gloom.

Firelight, flickering.

A deer might fly inside a cave,

a hunter might throw his spear and watch it sail

for a millennia (or longer), a woman washes and cooks,

waiting for love, birds are grounded

like shadows tangled to their makers,

and even the sun can set in the north, frozen

there, as if to prove it can.

Rocks furred with moss clench at the tide

that tangles itself between the caverns

like drenches of dark hair. Fish and tiny things weave

and pass by the paintings, minds unbent

around their meanings as they’re warbled

with refraction. Slant

figures stoop

and become old,

mirrored alongside younger selves and more

honest smiles, like hoping too hard

dissolves simply being.

2. The Pineapple Trees

In autumn, pineapples fall in the woods

with soft thuds where the dying leaves lay among the needles,

dressed in red and gold to hide their bare bones.

I used to run home at dusk with one in each hand,

grasping at crocodile leaves that had shrunk and changed

by the time I held them before my mother.

My sister is taller than me and sometimes she picks them

too early, and their petal lips flake and fall away;

we take down the summer bunting and spit bitter flesh

(wooden instead of yellow) into the grass, a quarter

-ring is hidden inside for a shortened season.

She’d try to explain how pinecones are different

by putting their corpses near the fire, so they’d open up

and allow their souls to fill with the rain

that patters down our chimney.

Pineapples don’t grow on trees, she told me.

In the October quiet, the leaves fall slower,

revealing their transparency as they melt

into each other: blood and tanned skin,

hanging (barely) in the treetops, a memory of songs

blistering on the threshing floors.

I sit beneath a wintering tree and watch the pineapples

falldecayanddisappear, nature recycling in a second.

My summer dress is stained and sticky with juice

and an empty shell rests in my lap.
Could be a skull or a mask,

in time. Through the branches I see scales falling

in place of leaves, like fruit dragons

shedding their skins.

NaPoWriMo (the proper one this time) and Glass Alchemy

Sooooo, my pre-NaPo failed, as you'll notice if you look back through my posts. I think I got seven out of twenty-eight or something embarrassingly awful like that . . . but this is a new month, a new start, and I'm hoping to achieve more this time round that in February.

My first NaPo was last year, when I was rather bullied into it by a newbie who'd joined about a month earlier and poetry-ised the whole site. I hadn't really done much poetry beforehand, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a go anyway. We shared a thread on one of the writing sites I'm on, and his awesomness made me strive to work harder so I didn't look so . . . rubbishy. :3 But I finished with thirty poems, and that made me happy. :)

This year, I also intend to finish. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm hoping to post up a couple of reviews (for a TV series and a film) in the next few weeks, too, which is something new. They're probably going to be more discussions though, but heh, technicalities blow.

Anyway, without further ado, my first poem of April:

Glass Alchemy

When I was small and believed in magic,

my father showed me how to make little glass coins

from the white beaches collected in my wellies.

In the mornings, I watched him gather light bulbs

of glowing honey onto a dipper, and shape them

into harvest moons, small as my raincoat buttons.

On the walls he kept a hundred jam jars,

each half-filled with coloured powders, while rings

of wire about their necks fused them to the wallpaper

and stone, like captured palms, ever-holding on.

When he added the colours, they moved

in tiny eddies, like spices trapped inside a marble,

squashed flat. My task was to stamp them

and give them all names and faces.

My mother’s name was Laurel;

I do not remember her face.

In the evenings we’d search for seashells,

insert a coloured coin, and write our names

on their lips, might they sing her voice back to us,

instead of crushing waves.

Our footprints once waded out to sea, searching,

but now I’m older, wiser, no longer believe in whispers,

so I tip the glass coins back into the waves,

returning them to sand and old magics.

I sell back my father’s secret:

that beautiful things smash like bones,

and elixirs make the past grow older,

always unchanged.