Hail!

An irreverent deconstruction of poetic process, polylingual poetry, the Magic Circle, a bunch of other shit.

I’m always fascinated by the ‘process’ behind poetry, and seize on any content that picks it apart, as baffled and beguiled by my own as anyone else’s. It’s still largely a mystery to me, though I’m settling into some kind of style I suppose, a little old-fashioned perhaps, particularly for American tastes, in its use of rhyme and stanzas of usually equal length.

A sometime builder, I often come across ruined or not so ruined farmhouses round here, hidden in the woods, and quickly fall to wondering why or how the original masons did this or that, what problem they were trying to solve, how they used the resources available to them, as is the case with poetry. You might sense I was losing confidence in that metaphor, (I was) but I think I just about brought it around.

I once pulled up in a gold classic Mercedes coupé outside the headquarters of the Magic Circle in Euston, in a fairly fancy coat, (I must have thought I was the shit) to pick up my partner from her nearby office. A man in a cape (I kid you not) stepped out and asked me if I was a ‘circle member’. I wonder what would have happened if I’d said yes, would I have blagged my way into seeing all the smoke and mirrors, learned what happens to the lady sawn in half?

This anecdote hasn’t much point to it really, I’m suggesting that poets, like magicians, maybe have some kind of not-breaking-the-fourth-wall omertá. Well, bollocks to that, say I, I want to see where the rabbits are kept before they pop out of the hat. Besides, almost no one will read this beyond other poets, and they’ll probably scroll on to other content, if they haven’t already. I see you.

I take a fairly gleeful, what I sometimes describe as ‘know-nothing’ approach to poetry. I do whatever I like, lo que me sale de los huevos, as we’d say, and enjoy doing it. Perhaps I disrespect the craft. I don’t labour long over my work, it comes fairly readily from the inspiration close at hand in this wild country. I fiddle a bit, tweak, switch and swap, then abandon the poem to its fate with a ‘fuck it, have it’ sort of energy.

It is the musicality of poetry that I enjoy, hence the midline rhyme, the cheap trick that is alliteration, the not-as-clever-as-I-think trick of (usually accidental) misdirection. Occasionally, when people are kind enough to say nice things about my output, I’m stunned at what they deduce or surmise from close reading. Almost invariably, something interpreted as intentional was just a happy accident. Still, I’ll take it.

To this end, and at risk of self-absorption (aren’t all poets teetering on the brink of self-absorption, even narcissism?) I thought I’d throw open the cage where the rabbits are kept, show you what happened to the lady sawn in half, pick apart the process of a poem I wrote yesterday. See what I did there? Sustained metaphor. Go me.

I see I’ve written before on here about process, so I’ll try not to repeat myself. As the repellent podcast bros like to say, let’s get into it. Here’s the poem.

Hailstorm

It came with sparks and sheets of tarnished pewter, pressed

across the plain. The orchards first, it pitted the peaches, advanced to

batter the vines to a line of balded rumps, each field in its path a crop

of stumps. Potatoes; ruined, tomatoes; ragged, fruitless, palm-high stalks.

It climbed the hill, and sat for a while above the town,

worked its heartless faenazo, wrecked the roof tiles of the campanario.

That’s when I saw her crumpled grand jeté down in the gutter,

spill of her tulle, a folded stork, my broken, bloodied bailarina.

It’s a fairly workaday sort of a poem, not likely to set the world on fire, that sprang out of a violent hailstorm yesterday and the memory of another I saw from a hilltop scrapyard, sweeping and destroying all before it. I was scrambling down from a pile of scrap cars, looking for a handbrake light switch for a shabby Audi, if you must know.

Originally I titled this ‘Cigueña’- the Spanish word for Stork. This is a frankly lazy thing I do, resorting to Spanish or Catalan words for titles. But then I realised the hailstorm wouldn’t be immediately obvious, so I thought briefly of ‘Pedregada’ but then just decided I’d lay it out flat. ‘Hailstorm’ it is.

I very much like Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Football at slack’, particularly its description of how the ‘rain lowered a steel press’ which was exactly how the advancing hailstorm looked, though I preferred the dull, dense grey of tarnished pewter. The sparks speak for themselves, obviously, but after the pewter I found myself stumbling into the possibility of over-egging the alliterative cake. Pewter/pressed/plain/pitted/peaches. Is it ok? Probably. Onward.

I was pleased with ‘vines/line’ but unsure about ‘balded rumps’. Originally they were stumps, but such a flat sound deserves repetition with its intimation of destruction. ‘Lumps’? Nah, Jesus, too much. So I switched the rumps and stumps around. Besides, ‘crop of stumps’ has a Heaney-esque vibe and I’m totally here for that.

The last line was again a fairly flat and straightforward description of ruin. ‘Fruitless, palm-high stalks’ came from a hailstorm that destroyed my first attempt at a vegetable garden here. Tomato plants a metre high and fruiting, were battered in a matter of minutes to four-inch sticks.

‘Un pam’ or a ‘palm’ is a common countryman’s measurement here. I wondered, if not worried, whether the reader might think of palm trees. Let me know, if you can be arsed. Ending the stanza with ‘stalks’ was…tricky, it didn’t really sit well in the attempted musicality of the poem, but I decided I’d stick with its surprising incongruity of sound, because I could pretend it was a deliberate misdirection, an indication of the avian tragedy to follow in the second stanza. I might yet edit that out in some way.

I enjoy unemotively narrative streaks in my poems, so here the storm climbs the hill and sits over the town. Hmmm, ‘faenazo’ from the Spanish ‘faena’ or work, used here because of the Catalan ‘feina’. The ‘azo’ is an augmentative suffix, common in Spanish, hence ‘faenazo’ is a big job. At the end of the line I originally used ‘basilica’ but the rhyme with ‘campanario’ was impossible to resist. Alas, it meant the last line would be orphaned, sonically. I might well fiddle with this again. Or not.

It’s a strange business, writing ‘polylingual’ poetry. I had to defend it once from a rather pointed accusation that it was an affectation. I’m doubling down on it, because Spanglish is the language I speak with my kids, so deal with it. It means I get to rhyme words like ever/cueva and that’s fun, so shoot me. Almost no non-Spanish speakers will know ‘faenazo’ but I’m assuming they’ll deduce that a ‘campanario’ is a bell tower. I dunno, you’re reading this on your phone. Look it up.

Around about this point I wondered if it would be a longer poem, I was stuck with the memory of a man, turning his black beret in his hands as he described how a hailstorm had destroyed his entire crop of peaches and the hard financial blow this would be. Much as I would have liked to celebrate this horny-handed son of the soil, and lament his loss, I decided it was the image of the poor and irresistibly poetic stork I saw, battered from her nest and bleeding dead in the street, that had to prevail.

She reminded me of a ballet dancer, her head bent sharply back, so I looked up ballet moves and ‘grand jeté’ was perfect, thrown as she was, from the nest. French now? I know, but don’t blame me, blame ballet. Tulle was…ok, I put feathers in, took feathers out, thought of the poet Wendy Allen. I wasn’t sure about ‘folded’ but I was tired of it by then, and was impatient to get onto ‘broken’. I switched the wording of that last line around quite a bit, I’ve no idea why the stork is ‘my’ broken, bloodied ballerina, perhaps I liked the whiff of romance. In the end I went with ‘bailarina’ in the Spanish, because, well, ya que estamos..

Sharing this with the deservedly ascendant and astonishing poet Victoria Spires, we laughed about the ‘things are like other things’ principle that underpins much, if not all poetry. I hope you read this irreverent, hopefully not too provocative deconstruction of my fairly unremarkable poem. It’s supposed to be a bit of a laugh, there’s no money in poetry, claro, so we might as well have a little chortle.

Enjoy your Sunday, Abrazos

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