Petrified by proper poetry
A good five years ago I thought I'd lost my affinity for poetry, though more recently I decided maybe I'd just been reading the wrong kind of stuff. In the meantime I started using haikus as writing exercises but that was as close to writing poetry as I got.
Recently we talked about poetry at an Ilkley Writers meeting. There were a couple of poets present, but a few of us were in the 'frightened of poetry' camp. Frightened of the rules, frightened of getting it wrong, of being found out by 'real' poets, sounding pretentious and making fools of ourselves. We'd all been put off poetry at school, with sonnets and rigid rhyming schemes, then looked at 'grown up' poetry with no rhyme or reason (sorry...) and felt completely adrift. I quite like rhyming poetry, I said, and someone else (who's keen to start writing poetry) agreed. I suggested, if she wants to write poetry and is having trouble, why not try rhymes? Rhyming poetry's for kids though, she replied. And there lies one of the problems.
If anyone's familiar with the Hancock's Half Hour episode The Poetry Society from 1959, they will know where I'm coming from. Proper poetry for grown ups must be deep and serious, must not contain any rhymes, and absolutely on pain of death must not be intelligible to the casual reader on the first run through. If performed, it should be intoned with plenty of pauses and a frown. The casual listener (of which there will be few) should be made to feel like the dunce at the back of the English class.
Thankfully, this is not universally true, as I've been discovering lately, but it's been true often enough (or has seemed true, at least) that some of us have taken it on board and shied away. One of the group (not a poet, but not frightened of poetry, in fact he'd just written a humorous rhyming poem about Charles Darwin's sojourn in Ilkley) pointed out that popular poetry, the stuff that engages audiences and sells festival tickets, is usually funny and may or may not rhyme, by the likes of John Hegley and Roger McGough (he didn't mention Pam Ayres but I guess she's a popular entertainer poet too. Personally, I've never got past her accent but I applaud her use of it - more people should keep their regional accents). A poet in our group told me lots of modern poetry rhymed: WH Auden and Tony Harrison to name two. Tony Harrison had come up in conversation elsewhere that week, to do with dialect (of which undoubtedly more later) so I ordered a book of his poetry at my local library and I'll see how it goes. While I was there I picked up a slim volume by Helen Burke, whose poetry I'd enjoyed at a reading a few months earlier. I may be beginning to lose my poetry fear.
