Open letter about Poetry

An open letter to Avril

‘I want to sketch stories in as few lines as possible. I want to be as vague as I dare. To leave gaps of description and dialogue.’

I long ago forgot the author of the quote but I never forgot the quote. It says exactly what I have tried to do with my writing over the years.

I began creative writing out of school when I was eight. I had a cousin who stayed week-ends and together we invented lands and castles and armies.

During the week, apart, we added to our constructions and brought them together each week-end.

The writing was incredibly detailed. If ‘Nordred’ had a shield then you got size shape, decoration, sword dents and all. I was in love with words and bugger the boredom.

We never wrote of the real.

Writing as we did in the back bedroom of a terraced 1930s house there wasn’t a lot of romance or adventure in the real. Certainly not enough to excite two eight year old lads.

I read at school. Of course, as did my cousin. But our home reading was comics such as The Wizard, Hotspur and Rover.

In later life I read scathing criticism of comics. Racist, sexist, jingoism; and they were but as a kid I lapped them up.

The 1039 war had just begun and the dirty Hun deserved all he got. The style of the comics influenced me greatly. No villain ever just bled in my tales. It spurted or gushed. Everything was very black or white and bugger the greys.

At eleven my cousin and I went to separate schools and he stopped staying week-ends. Without an audience I stopped writing.

Homework, sport and soon those strange creatures – girls, filled my time and imagination.

I also found religion. My new school mates all went to a Youth Club attached to a Church. Entrance to the Youth Club was paid by attending Sunday Mass. The Vicar of the Church plied me and anyone else he could corner, with books. He gave Dickens and Howard Springs, firstly.

By the time I finished the second book I was writing again.

I devoured books. I consumed in huge gulps everything from the ‘Song of Bernadette’, to ‘Sons and Lovers’.

I wrote a novel. Partly Hemingway, partly Lawrence. I began to understand that the less I said the better. The gushing of comics was not for me any longer.
The novel was full of torment. Love, politics, anger, male clashes. A truly awful book it led me to write a few final pages that were mine and no one else’s.

Writing as me I sold a story. I met writers and producers and they taught me the importance of the space between the words.They also taught me the drama of plain words when placed in the right order. Most importantly they taught me the weakening effect of qualifiers.

I took work with the WEA as a tutor of creative writing.

The pits were closing, steel works empty, women shoring up the picket lines.
Writers’ Workshops were born and ex-workers came to do something they hadn’t done from leaving school.

They wrote often about them and the work that had made them, often in street language. They also wrote poetry, often in fairly substantial lumps but using learned format.

All my reading life I have had a problem with many poets. I found myself arguing with the contrived similes. Clouds are rarely lonely and Wordsworth was a bit too substantial to be wandering.

Many poets create fancies, sugar-icing phrases that have life only as a poetic usage.

And poets tend to plug all the gaps with strained qualifiers.

There are wonderful exceptions. Philip Larkin is not afraid of plain spaces.

Simon Armitage writes in very ordinary ink.

I admire, applaud even, the cleverness of many poets. I can jaw-drop at the manipulation of rhyme and rhythm.

But these skills can be dangerous. The jam-sponge can become a wedding cake and the truth can be lost in the decoration.

Amongst the poets I am wary of are writers of genuine talent. Their feathered quills often find gold. The caution then is not to bury the vein under pretty rubble.

The constant use of the restraints and disciplines of poetry must surely arm the writers with a spear that plunges deep and clean.

To return to the opening quote, ‘To be as vague as I dare,’ I read that to mean as vague as I can be without losing sense or meaning.

Some poets I find present us with their personal Rubic Cubes. I feel such work should be labelled ‘For amusement only’.

Finally, in my attempt to write good prose, which demands rhythm, I understand only too well the danger of terminal embellishment.

By Brian Sefton ©