I started writing poetry when I was at school, at about the age of fourteen. I was very influenced by lines like these, from Dylan Thomas in Fern Hill, ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/ About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,/
The night above the dingle starry…’. It was immediate, it sang, its images were as things truly were. Or these, from Wind by Ted Hughes, ‘This house has been far out at sea all night,/ The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills..’. I was fascinated by how ordinary experiences like growing-up, being in a storm could be rendered extraordinary by choice of words, line lengths and patterns of sound.
My own writing was full of similes and metaphors-too much so to start off with, probably, and something to keep a check on in your own work. Similes and metaphors are useful devices for adding another unexpected dimension to a poem but they need a light touch to avoid being too trite and clichéd of the ‘green as grass’, ‘blue as the sea’ variety or being over-laboured, and actually making what you want to convey more obscure.
Be curious about poetry; read widely to see how different poets use language.
Many poets have been influenced by Sylvia Plath, an American poet whose poems are often read as episodes of personal confession. Plath certainly draws on the experiences in her life as, I’m sure, do all writers, but her poetic voice is distinct. Plath is an exponent of the startling image. In Morning Song, she addresses her newborn baby, ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch.’. She begins Winter Trees, ‘The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. / On their blotter of fog the trees/Seem a botanical drawing…’, and in Mirror, as the voice of the mirror, she says she is, ‘The eye of a little god, four-cornered.’ These images are fresh and striking. They take the poem in new and interesting directions.
Pam Thompson
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Try Pam's writing exercise...
Write a poem in the voice of an object as Sylvia Plath has done here.
Begin by saying what you are/are not.
Where are you kept? Who touches/uses you? You might want to focus on one person as Plath does here with the woman and describe his/her reactions in your presence. What relationship do you have with this person?
Use the line ‘I am important to him/her’ near the end of your poem as Plath does.
The woman in Plath’s poem is anguished by the daily sight of her ageing self in the mirror. Notice the controlled and powerful use of imagery in the closing two lines.
Attempt a similar effect in the closing lines of your poem.
Then send it to me. I look forward to reading them.
Back to top
|
