Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by MYRA SCHNEIDER
| Poem: | Becoming | |
| Published by: | Second Light Publications |
In the middle of the 1980s I was talking to my father on the phone about my writing career when he cut me short and said: ‘You are secondary.’ He meant that I and my writing were secondary to my husband and my teenage son, that my real job was to look after them. On the surface I found his Victorian attitude laughable but it struck home. I was painfully reminded that this had always been his view of how I fitted into the scheme of things and the thought of not being me in my own right filled me with a sense of suffocation. At the time it didn’t occur to me that his words and what lay behind them was subject matter for writing.
In fact the idea of writing anything about him only began to surface several years later when he was in a retirement home and in the months after his death I wrote three poems which showed in different ways how dominating he was. Two of the poems also showed positive aspects of his character and expressed sympathy for him as well as anger. Then in 2002 I read the 1901 census for the house in which he was a baby and learnt things about him I’d never known. I began to see him in a different light and, very moved, wrote a sequence of four poems, the first two of which were about his childhood. I experienced the final poem as one of reconciliation. After a while though those words which demoted me still rankled and at last I realised that there was something here I wanted, needed to address in writing.
It seemed to me that I’d produced enough direct poems about my father and in any case I didn’t believe I could convey the impact of you are secondary in a first person poem. I’d already written two long narrative poems, one of twenty-five pages, the other of thirty-five pages, both of which had some focus on women and their identities. I’d found it satisfying to write these compressed novels and it was releasing to use other voices within the mode of poetry. If I wrote a new narrative poem, it seemed to me, I could take the essence of my experience, fictionalise it in a different framework and also look at the way other women had found or failed to find themselves.
Excited, but nervous because I was going to be dealing with key material, I starting planning. I made the father a violinist and the conductor of an ensemble. His daughter, Clary, was to be a flautist whose career and musical training had been under his guidance until she rebelled. My decision to use a musical background was influenced by another idea I’d had but abandoned. This was to write a long poem round the life of Clara Schumann. I still had a few notes about her and it struck me that these could be worked into my new poem. I was pleased with these initial ideas and started drafting with no more than a very sketchy outline.
I was immediately beset with problems. I had decided, that the poem, like the previous narrative, ‘Voicebox’, should be written almost entirely in the voices of its main characters but that I would particularly centre on Clary and her stream of consciousness. In spite of this intention my first mistake was to allow her father, Harold, to be the speaker in the poem’s opening section. In fact he took it over so that Clary had almost no presence at all. Perhaps I had a need to show my father, just once and in detail, at his hectoring worst but the section failed in every way as my main poetry critic was quick to point out to me. I came to the conclusion that Harold should be presented through Clary – his words and behaviour filtered through her. My next mistake was to give Clary a new career as a music therapist. I did a lot of research but this setting didn’t work. I found myself introducing characters who worked in the field and this gave therapy a prominence which was a distraction from the main theme. There were other false starts. I kept introducing irrelevant background material about minor characters, and making Harold convincing yet keeping him in check continued to be a problem.
During this time though I turned Clary into a secondary school music teacher who showed great flair in running a percussion group for children with special needs. This felt much more convincing but I was still struggling with the minor characters and it dawned on me that I had started to write before I had fleshed them out and worked out how they would integrate into the main story. Six months had gone by and I was wondering about giving up when my good friend, Mimi Khalvati, looked at the first three sections and said: ‘It’s not right but I am sure there is something important here.’ Her words encouraged me to keep going.
I concentrated on the characters I needed to develop. In particular I thought about Bob, a clarinettist and leader of a quintet, with a catholic taste in music. This contrasted with the tastes of Clary’s father. I also considered Greta, a retired doctor who worked as a volunteer in the school where Clary was teaching and Debra, a pupil with learning difficulties. These three helped me to define Clary further – her talent for improvising and composing and her sympathetic nature – and when they became real people to me the poem began to bloom. I established that the sections in Clary’s voice should be fluid in free verse, fairly short lines, sometimes with breaks mid-line as her thoughts shifted. This form seemed to work well for following her thoughts. Debra’s short sections, which were very conversational and often reporting what her mother said, seemed to ask to be put into rhyming couplets and I was pleased with the tone and flow of these. Greta and Bob’s sections I mostly wrote using stress-metre and in stanza form.
In the next seven months I produced a full draft of the poem. From early on I knew the you are secondary conversation needed to be near the end of the poem and I was pleased to find it fitted well into the last part. However, the conversation round it was difficult to write and I went on re-drafting this until the poem was in its final stages. I was extremely well supported by feedback from four poets as the poem went through something like three or four more main drafts followed by further revisions to make adjustments. Most of the longer sections were pruned hard and I introduced about six short sections. Three of these were for characters who had not yet been allowed to speak for themselves: Clary’s mother, her father, Harold – now the poem was established I could allow him to speak for himself – and Debra’s abusive mother. The other short sections I inserted were to foreground incidents or moments which had previously appeared in the poem only as references.
In the late stages I adjusted the visual imagery I’d used to give an impression of Clary’s musical ideas, and I cut down on the poem’s flower imagery which gave it a softness I didn’t want it to have. Finally I made further small cuts throughout. The Clara Schumann references, in the end, were very few but central and I think some sense of her lies behind the whole poem. After three years, during which I took a few breaks, I believed ‘Becoming’ was working and the feedback I received encouraged me to think it was worth publishing it.
Myra Schneider is a British poet, a poetry and writing tutor
and author of the widely acclaimed Writing My Way Through Cancer
and co-author of the bestselling handbook Writing for Self-Discovery.
Please see Myra's website for further information on readings,
tutoring and purchasing a copyof Becoming and her other titles.