I have ruminated episodically on the trivial issue of whether or not I can claim to be a writer. My provisional conclusion has been that I am an (ex)university teacher primarily, which has of course involved quite a bit of writing, but that I cannot be said to have made my living as a writer. I have always associated ‘being a writer’ with making a living writing fiction. But when all’s said and done I have written a lot and continue to do so! So that’s that.
On entering the first COVID lockdown early in 2020 I found myself – it wasn’t really a conscious decision – turning my hand to poetry. I had on occasion experimented before, but with no success whatsoever. This time however I have found myself in something of a groove. At the time of writing I now have around three dozen poems under my belt (all of which I have posted in the form of blogs on my website: www.grahamscambler.com)).
I cannot yet assess the worth of these varied ‘clutches’ of poems, all of which I regard as in need – if not of abandonment – of stringent revision or at the very least of significant tweaking. I reserve judgement.
But I think I have learned a lesson or two, hence this blog. Whenever I tried to write poetry before I had no clear idea what it was I wanted to communicate. I drifted. I played around with words, unsure even if I wanted to build in rhythms or rhymes. As a result I stuttered and stopped.
In Spring 2020 it was different. I returned to poetry with a much clearer sense of what I wanted to say, even if it didn’t always amount to very much. I will not reproduce them here, but there is reason to recall the first one to escape from my laptop. It commemorates a moment with my ageing father during a last trip to the South Downs.
While I make no claims for the merits or otherwise of this short piece, it broke the ice for me.
‘Can you give me a minute on my own?’
And he froze like a statue, head inclined,
Gazing across the Downs, seeing nothing,
But owning a moment of open space,
Thinking nothing, but feeling to his skin,
Absorbing nine decades of this and that.
‘Ok, thank you, we can go now’, he said.
Why did writing this constitute a small but significant step? First, for me it represented a new mode of communication. I didn’t have to ‘spell out’ what it was I wanted to convey, which is my normal ‘academic’ modus operandi. Instead, I hope I caught a moment and mood that people might well understand and with which they might well empathise. Why? Because many of them have been there too, albeit with a different person in a different time and place. Second, before I powered up my laptop I knew I had something specific I wanted to say, and I think this is critical. My attitude was: well, I’ll just say what I want to as best I can and see what happens. Third, I left it to the reader to do his or her share of the work. Whereas academics, at least in my kind of non-fiction, conventionally try to be clear and unambiguous and spare readers too much endeavour of their own, in poems you can extend an invitation to readers to engage on their terms rather then yours. They can take from a poem more and different; they can extract meanings that had never even occurred to you. There is an exciting openness to a poem. Finally, poems can do ready justice to feelings and emotions; moreover, they can incite them in others.
Of course for literary theorists this is all bread and butter stuff. Nor do I consider myself a poet, even a poet-in-the-making; but I’m enjoying and learning from my experiments with words and form.
I have posted several blogs on my poems now, so have a look. They are, I reiterate, merely works in progress, drafts to be scrapped or revised. They are the unexpected progeny of three lockdowns and house arrests.