For years the only two poetry books I owned were my dad's old 'Penguin Book of Comic and Curious Verse' and Palgrave's Golden Treasury. I still have them - look!I can't remember a time when I didn't want to write. We are an erudite family and I learned early the rewards (laughter, approval) of saying something clever or funny. But I've always vacillated from one end of the poetry (and fiction) spectrum: 'Henry, Who Chewed Bits of String...' to 'On the Tombs of Westminster Abbey' at the other and often find myself uncomfortable straddling the two.
Perhaps this is where creativity is found... in the awkward middle ground between the comic and curious, between documented history and imagined future, between madness and sanity, knowledge and mystery, confusion and certainty, conscious thought and dream state?
When I perform a poetry set, I mix it up, offering - I hope - something for every taste, varying the pace, and this seems to go down well. I'm currently trying to put a poetry collection together and it's proving tricky to pull off that blend on paper. People ask me whether I have a collection, whether they prefer the comic or the serious and I don't want to disappoint, so I'm ploughing on because I think at the end you have to be yourself.
What do you think? Does anyone else have this problem - is it even a problem?
I've already published my collection Claire (for private and friends) and a friend remarked on the eclectic mix therein. However, I like to experiment and I'm learning about poetry writing all the time so I'm trying out different forms as a way of bringing some discipline and structure to it. This means that I too can go from a limerick to a vilanelle, from funny (witty?) to moving. It's not a problem and I like being myself. In the end I chose the poems for the first collection because they were my own favourites.
ReplyDeleteThanks - that's encouraging. The temptation is to keep to the more serious ones for the page - and I was focussing on ones that had already been published in other places, which tend to be the 'proper' ones - but people love to laugh too and it seems a shame not to include the ones that make them. You're right - I should be myself. 8-)
DeleteI love getting laughs (yes, approval) and enjoy writing and performing the more comedic things, but it is sometimes at the expense of showing off (what I hope is) the quality of my prose. In the end, I perform and publish a balance of the two, but it's a balance that is rarely perfect. The bonus about funny stuff is that it lets people's guards down and then you can really hit them with the moving stuff!
ReplyDeleteThe quality of your prose shines through whatever you do! I also think that the most skillful writers are the funny ones - they make it look easy but it isn't.
DeleteYour last point works both ways too - an apparently moving piece with a witty end gets them every time! Which in the language of emoticons, would be something like this:
8-0 8-D
I know exactly what you mean. I sent off my serious novel to another agent yesterday and was thinking: what if they look up my blog or my youtube videos? Will they think, well, what does she want to do? Serious or comic? I can see your dilemma in putting a collection together. My only consolation, having the same problem, is that sometimes people laugh at what we think ought to be 'poignant and serious' and sometimes they are touched by what we think is just trivial. So, it's difficult to put poems into boxes anyway?
ReplyDeleteThis she calls 'consolation'!!
Deletep.s. I keep mine in a binder!