It’s been a pleasure to read the three new chains of poems which have been added in February, from Zoë Brigley and Meredith Andrea, Rebecca Farmer and Jane Griffiths, and Helen Mort and Charles Johnson.
Each chain has its own way of working. Helen began in Cuba and was taken to Somerset by Charles; when the voice in Helen’s response leaves there, ‘my footprints barely follow me’, and Charles takes them to Carnegie hall: trading places seems to have been one way the two poets have worked. A strong (female) character, among several, has emerged between Rebecca and Jane, for whom dates and times seem to have been more fecund than place. Meredith elides a vowel to take her chain with Zoë from ‘tin soldier’ to ‘tin solder’. Their poems are linked by play on subtle rhymes, sound patterns and metallic details.
Zoë and Meredith have taken on couplets for their first three poems, then, broadly, four-line stanzas for their last two. Other poets have mirrored each other’s forms, too, to give their whole back-and-forth a discernible form. I wonder how much they are conscious and how much they just happen, like slipping into another’s accent in conversation. I wonder what to call these grander forms.
A big thanks to all the poets. I look forward to seeing how Helen and Rebecca finish their chains – whether it’s by continuing with a character, or shifting place, or something else. And naming those new forms.
Tags: Like starlings, Recent chains
I found most interesting in this process the brewing of a narrative. This began at the beginning; one source of Zoe’s poem is a Hans Christian Anderson tale from which she takes her title. I took the late Romantic sentiment of the story as a given, but I felt the need to import a certain irony; just as I can see that in her last poem Zoe felt the need to locate her voice in a particular time and place to counteract my historical vagueness. In some ways making the chain was like writing alternating chapters of a novel – but with the much greater freedom and airiness poetry allows. This works because we seem to take a shared pleasure in various kinds of formal patterning, which holds it together. I feel as if we started moving, through free play, towards an expanded consciousness that’s in some ways truer to experience than conventional notions of character allow. I don’t normally write poetry this way, but I have found it fascinating, and I do think the outcome amounts to a special animal.
Thanks for setting up the opportunity.
Thanks Meredith. I’m fascinated to hear it from your side.I hadn’t seen the Anderson reference either.
Have you ever read the unfinished poem by Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Vague poem’? Your first poem strongly reminded me of it. Partly because of the ‘metal rose’, but also it seemed to work in a similar way as the whole conversation did. Here’s some:
‘I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again
[...]
rose-rock, rock-rose…
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock , unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal’.
I found Helen’s initial poem a challenge – not sure whether to respond to the Cuban geographical setting (and if so, how? I could either accept it and try to stay there, or rebel/react by going elswewhere – in the end I rebelled by refusing to leave my own back yard) or to the story line with its two boys unseen on a roof, or to the cigar implication.
In fact, I tried to mirror the “city above the city” with a village below ground level; the cosmopolitan city setting with a rural village one. And I wanted to match Helen’s number of lines (to save me from my usual formlessness) but with a variation in their disposition.
The snow poem took me by surprise, not least by its shortness. Fearing a descent into haiku-land, I felt I should be more expansive. For some reason I had seen the boys in Havana as lying on their tummies at the edge of the roof, which triggered a memory of tickling for sticklebacks on a Birmingham canal bank. Then Sunday afternoon television plus some of Meredith’s responses to an initial draft supervened, and I finally lapsed into a lazy stream-of -attention cut-and-paste.
I’m pleased by your comment. A huge admirer of Bishop, I think it was The Bight I went to here in my head, the gasplant…I don’t know her Vague Poem though; not in Complete Poems (probably because it’s incomplete…) Where can I find it?
Hi Meredith. The poem’s in ‘Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box’, which is a volume of Bishop’s previously uncollected stuff.