Begin the Beguine
by Barbara Smith
The real poetry I’ve discovered over the last while is mostly due to a confluence of influences – the blog and the internet. God bless high speed internet access. There are some real gems if you’re prepared to spend time cruising from one link to another. I am here to help you in that voyage of discovery, and cut down on some of the time spent online fruitlessly, so let’s get going.
First off, I’m pointing you in the general direction of Rob MacKenzie. Rob I came across via a Open University student who partook of PFFA (and was a damn fine writer too). Some explanations are in order here. MacKenzie moderates for Poetry Free For All, a poetry workshop website, devoted to the critiqueing of poetry. I can verify that the standards of critting and writing on this forum are high, and are getting higher. You can begin in the General forum and work your way through the various levels as your confidence and knowledge begins to increase.
Why crit? I hear you ask. For the same reasons as face to face work-shopping improves your writing. It is very difficult to keep writing in a vacuum. You learn to read a piece using the technical jargon, and can strip down elements in a poem easily, seeing how the sum is made of its differential parts. Critting then improves your own writing. You can see quicker what won’t work way before you go to the forum. PFFA can offer valuable readings of your poem, showing you that people don’t always see things the way you do. It helps remove the ego from the writing, and lets the writing do the talking instead.
Back to MacKenzie, however. In his blog over a period of time, I have seen his writing, sending out and getting poetry published, winning praise and a reputation for his work. His blog is interesting reading too. He often reviews collections or poets, and likes to raise issues outside of poetry too – see some of his archived posts on Celebrity Big Brother.
How about his work, then? I’d describe Rob’s work as using metre and form, as well as very vivid imagery. Metre is where there is an underlying rhythm – tum te tum te – or te tum te tum- they are the most basic units of analysis, the te is the unstressed word, the tum is the stressed, where the eye or voice lingers slightly longer. Form is where the poem is organised into stanzas or compartments.
Traditionally you organise a particular idea into each one –so that a poem is like a train with compartments joined together by the direction the train is going in and the rhythm, the noise it makes on the tracks. That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it is generally a lot easier to spot in other peoples work than in your own! Rob has a pamphlet available sampling some of his work, and I hope it won’t be too long before we are seeing his first collection.
Rob’s pamphlet The Clown of Natural Sorrow was published in 2005 by Happenstance Press. It contains a muscular grouping of twenty six poems. The main themes linking them are places and people. His way of looking things is quite unusual and he treads a fine line between showing and telling, the two main tools of writing. Showing is when the writer uses the actions of the protagonist or subject to allow the reader the impression of what is going on behind the scenes. Telling is when the writer just straight up and tells you, leaving no room for building your own impressions. An example of showing from MacKenzie’s work:
From ‘The Hedge Artist’
The latest caller wants to shape my hedge like a Great Dane
to dunk the Scotch Terrier across the road
in shadow. He works for both sides. […]
Instead of just going for ‘my dog is bigger than yours’ McKenzie introduces the idea of a go-between, the hedge artist. This seems surreal and makes the reader think about the situation beyond the normal social context. He shows us this by building up the telling details, and letting the reader read between the lines. Where we get the confirmation of this is at the end of the poem:
[…] he says to drop the work
would leave someone else worse to pick it up. Of course,
all I care about it keeping up appearances.
That last line is telling the reader, giving the final clue as to the thrust of the poem.
I spoke earlier of how McKenzie uses form and metre in his poetry, so here’s a look at a sonnet that he has in The Clown of Natural Sorrow:
Girl Playing Sudoku on the 7.15
I sit down opposite. She doesn’t blink
or cough, her pencil-scratch the only noise
beyond the train’s dull chitchat. Teenage boys
slouch up the centre-aisle, unleash to the stink
of Lynx. She keeps on scrawling to the brink
of suffocation. I admire her poise,
open windows, plumb my brain for ploys
to start a conversation. I can’t think.
Our eyes squint out of synch. Although I stare,
I don’t dare interrupt her concentration
and when she finally completes the square
I focus on the floor. One hesitation
begins a hesitation. I set up solitaire.
The train heaves on, already past my station.
Firstly look at the rhyming scheme at the end of lines. This sonnet uses end-stopped rhyme: blink/stink, brink/think, noise/boys, and poise/ploys. The first eight lines are grouped together making a stanza of eight lines or an octet. The rhyme scheme is also abba abba. And those rhymes because they are one syllable long, are called masculine rhymes (they just are, okay?). Two syllable rhymes like station, hesiTATION, concenTRATION are called feminine ones. Because the scheme is abba abba in the first octet, this looks like it could be an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. Looking at the second stanza or sestet (six lines) will show is whether that is true.
The sestet scheme here looks to be stare/square/soliTAIRE , which we’ll call c and the opposing rhyme we will call d. So, cd,cd,cd – this is a variation on the expected format of the Italian sonnet which can be cdd cee or any other variation of cde. It is not an English sonnet, as they usually end on a couplet with a brand new rhyme: gg. Still with me?
After looking at the rhyme scheme, it’s time to think about the rhythm. Well there is a gentle te tum, te tum, going on there, with variations. I don’t want to get too hung up on this aspect, but it is enough to say that the metre is loosely iambic pentameter which is stress based. An iamb is a foot, usually consisting of a light stress, a dot, and a heavy stress, a cross, pattern:
I FOCus ON the FLOOR. One hesitation
. x / . x / . x / etc.
The stresses in the early part of line are my emphasis – and I may well have it wrong. Read it out loud for yourself to hear where the stress falls. If you’re very interested in metre and rhythm, there are some great books out there particularly by Mary Oliver. Google her Rules for the Dance and A Poetry Handbook.
Putting together rhythm and rhyme in this sonnet then, can add a lot to our enjoyment of it giving extra meaning under the surface of the poem: the rhythm suggests the rocking of the train that the narrator is on; the rhymes emphasise the figures that the narrator mentions: the sheer concentration of the other passenger: blink etc. the teenage boys; and also effectively places the narrator of the poem in the reader’s mind. We can see and feel through the narrator, this train and the fascination with the Sudoku completer. These work additionally with the imagery that MacKenzie has created.
I hope you might enjoy this enough to lend some support to Rob Mackenzie and try out his poetry for yourself – there is a common maxim these days that everyone who wrote poetry bought just one book each, there would be lot more riches for poets to share. Whether that is true or not, being able to illuminate what makes poetry so interesting beyond the internal ‘hmm,’ is great fun. Next time out, we’ll look beyond the shores of Europe to see what else is out there.
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Barbara Smith’s first collection of poetry, Kairos, published by Doghouse Press is available now.
Barbara blogs at Barbara’s Bleuuugh!
