Poetry and Lockdown Brain by Sandra Horn

So here we are at the beginning of month three of lockdown. Strange times. I lose track of the hours, the days. My brain has turned to mush. I’m baking too much. We’ll all be spherical if this goes on much longer. I meet with the choir, the book group and the Writers via Zoom, which is better than not at all, but oddly unsatisfying. I haven’t a single coherent thought in my head, so I will just maunder on about poetry, as usual.

I’ve taken part in Apples and Snakes write-a-poem-a-day-in-April challenge, and I’m having fun with Live Canon’s poetry treasure hunt and their online course on exploring poetic forms. It’s all to the good and stops me wandering into the kitchen and knocking up another batch of buns, cheese straws (or cheese planks, as we know them), cakes, biscuits…nothing lasts long, as you would have been able to see from the photos below - half a pear and almond cake and four cheese planks - but the server won't let me load them and I don't know how to sort it. Sorry.

The Apples and Snakes thing was fun. Every day something new to try. Some of it involved ‘found’ poems - cutting words out of magazines or whatever and constructing them into a poem, or using a black marker to delete words in a document or whatever and making a poem from the remains. I’m not usually a fan of that kind of working – it feels a bit like cheating, somehow, but I did it and discovered that I liked doing it. The deleting one was a letter from the Inland Revenue. Mutilating it was curiously satisfying, although the result was not very inspiring.  Here’s the cutting up effort, from the RSH  magazine and i newspaper

To help us

make sense of

cloudy days

the greyness and grimness,

we are determined,

whatever happens,

to replicate the experience

in a slightly different way,

search for balance

without growing weak and pale,

‘vulnerable’

need support to stay upright,

be able to sleep.

Or, in the same season

2021,

we may only be left with

cloud-pruned coral

More interesting were the ‘golden shovel’ and  ‘a gram of &s’ methods of making poems:

Golden Shovel: choose a line or lines from a poem you admire and use each word as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. I chose a line from Louis Macneice’s Western Landscape: (from the) broken bog with its veins of amber water.

Grey heron

She stalks on legs which seem to be half-broken

at the knees. Wary, she skirts the bog

lifting a long skeletal foot with

finicky care, spreading its

taloned toes where blue veins

pulse, mere vestiges of

bones uphold, poised, stilled, over amber

pools of quiet water.

Then there was ‘a gram of &s:

11 lines. Each must end in a word of at least 4 letters, all taken from letters in the title. This one was given, but optional. You can’t use plurals as one of the 4 letters in your end-words.

Going somewhere

This ruined house was once somebody’s home

We wonder, briefly, who those people were

like burglars we creep from room to room

Looking for clues about them, finding none.

The cupboards yield no stash of vintage wine

No under-floorboard gold or diamond rings

Wardrobes are empty of the clothes they wore

When they departed, they left nothing here.

Outside, there is a broken plaster gnome

Smashed flowerpots, a coil of rusty wire

An open pack of sweet peas, never sown.

It was a bit like doing a crossword puzzle. I think ‘rings’ was OK because the ‘s’ wasn’t one of the four letters.

I could go on all through April, but you’d have lost the will to live long before we got to day 30. It kept me working at the words every day, and that was what mattered.

The treasure hunt is still ongoing and is as enjoyable as ever. We’ve sampled poets from Samoa, Jamaica (in patois), Australia (the first woman Aboriginal poet), America, etc. ancient and modern – yesterday was Carol Ann Duffy, today Robert Carver.  

As for the course on ‘Exploring Poetic Forms’ it is terrific, but a real brain-stretcher! I’ve written sonnets (Shakespearian and Petrarchan), haiku and tanka and managed to keep up, but last week’s task involved getting to grips with terza rima. Eek! It was all very well for dear old Dante – with all those Tuscan words ending in ‘o’ he wouldn’t have had to scrabble round for rhymes – but in English it’s bloody hard work, let me tell you. In ‘Omeros’ Derek Walcott uses it so beautifully, throughout the whole book. The rhyme scheme is hardly noticeable. It reads like flowing prose. He uses the rhymes very loosely sometimes – he was a master of his trade and a genius. I just about staggered through the exercises given on the course and was reduced to a limp rag. And there are still villanelles and suchlike to come!  Maybe after lockdown ends my brain will empty itself of sludge. I can only hope.