Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by ANNE STEWART
| Poem: | Body Language | |
| Published in: | Ten Hallam Poets, 2005 |
Body Language had a rather contrived beginning. I started it with the aim of writing to a specific form and I'm sure that the form took an active role in it.
I was still fairly raw at poetry. I was trying to get to grips with form, thanks to Mimi Khalvati (and I do mean "Thanks" to Mimi Khalvati) and to her Versification - Beginners course. I'd plunged recklessly out of work to find out whether I really was a poet or not and had just begun to attend Sheffield Hallam University on a Creative Writing MA with yet another intimidatingly high-powered poet, Sean O'Brien. I was terrified.
Mslexia had not long since started up; I was a founder subscriber and always got very excited when it arrived and when those themed submission dates came hurtling on. I was careering down the poetry path with no regard whatsoever for the excellent advice Paul Hyland had given me by way of his book Getting Into Poetry :
"... but don't be in too much of a hurry. Don't be in a hurry. Don't hurry. I could fill a page with those words and an impatient poet would take no notice. Still, I've said it three times and that makes me feel I've done my job".
I am an impatient poet. So I was terrified and excited and impatient. In short, all fired up. But what on earth was I going to do with the latest Mslexia theme, Fur , where they suggested going for 'body hair'? I felt more squeamish than inspired but reckoned it was always a worthwhile exercise to at least put pen to paper.
And I was reading every living poet I could get my hands on. Vicki Feaver's The Handless Maiden was the collection that had me hooked at the time and, although I wasn't really aware of it, her poem Oi Yoi Yoi was talking away at me, under my skin, so to speak. This is the second stanza:
Saturday morning, the submission deadline a few days away (no drawer time for me back then!), I sat down to write and the pen took over. Body Language was the third poem (and the third form) in. The first 3 lines of the poem came virtually complete, right down to the pace and tone of voice. When I realised I was writing a retort to something in Vicki Feaver's poem, I didn't want to be rude about it. She, after all, was a 'real' poet. So I found myself taking more care with every line, with every word. It seemed important that each line said what it did without being churlish or full of my usual brashness. I thought I knew where the poem was going. I thought I was writing about not wanting to have choice denied me. I hadn't really appreciated why I was taking exception to the premise in that stanza.
After that, I became engrossed in the pattern, based on the terza rima form but without the weave of it, and in trying to keep it true. I don't often wear perfume or make-up (not since my dad told me, ten minutes before my first date, that I looked like a pillar-box), so I tried to keep to those scented things I would actually use i.e. lip balm rather than lipstick, bathing soaps rather than perfumes. I'm not in the habit of talking about intimate parts of the body either, so I used the language I felt I would use in the event of serious thought, rather than discussion i.e. oxters , the word I was brought up with, rather than underarms or, heaven forfend, armpit (and yes, I think underarms are intimate parts of the body!) I think arms are intimate parts of the body...)
I remember spending what seemed minutes but turned out to be a couple of hours just on the second stanza. It was the name of the scent in the second line that kept pulling me back. I just couldn't seem to hit the spot with the coverstick. But why was it so important to get exactly right? It was only a made-up name, wasn't it? Eventually, when the right name came, I fell in. No, it wasn't just a made-up name. It was the very heart of my concern, and that's why it had to be bang on. Men are constructed to pick up that scent. Take away a woman's right to 'manage' it and you take away her right to self-protect. You take away her right to say 'No' ; to repel those men who would simply take. That was what was bothering me. Aren't the streets and homes and workplaces dangerous enough?
Once the name was right, I got to play around with the flow and the scents and colours of the poem, and the way it moved, using the pattern of the scheme to let it sashay, it seemed to me, towards - well, wherever it was going. And when the word 'vulva' arrived on the page I had to wonder if I knew what it meant, exactly. I couldn't recall ever having heard it, read it, or used it and, as to the item itself, I tried to imagine tracing it on a chart, but couldn't quite put my finger on it... I didn't get too far with home-research either. It wasn't listed in any of the books in the house, not even the Pears, or the All About the Human Body, and it wasn't explained in any of Microsoft's help screens... It seemed that all the www knew about it was that what I probably really wanted was something I could get arrested for. I phoned a friend. She thought she knew what it encompassed, roughly, but went that extra mile (thank you, friend - you know who you are!) and found it in one of her books, which she sent me and I've studied and I'm still not precisely sure of its components, but I do know that it is exactly the right word.
At the last stanza, I still didn't really know how the poem was going to end. Here is where I think form can free the mind: I became so engrossed in the scheme, the poem threw out everything I tried that wasn't right.
The title came after the poem, not before, and the poem feels like something of a 'signature' poem for me. I had faith in it through 1 short-listing and 8 rejections. It went on to be published in The Interpreter's House. Merryn Williams nominated it for the Forward Prize. I've created a graphic background for it and had rather snazzy postcards made of it ('available from me', she says hopefully). Mary Michaels discussed it , rather impressively, I thought, in part of her article How does your poem smell? published in Connections in Spring 2005.
I learned a lot, and not just about writing, from this poem. That's what I love about poetry. Writing it or reading it, it is a path to enlightenment.
Anne Stewart lives in Kent and completed the Sheffield Hallam MA
in Creative Writing in 2003. Her poetry is included in Ten Hallam Poets,
an anthology of poetry from Mews Press. Stewart was the visiting poet
at a London care-centre for over two years and is the founder of poetry p f,
an internet-based resource for poets, and the poetry p f imprint.