Since coming to France I have been writing a lot more poetry. I’m not sure why this is, but I think maybe it’s about having the time and distance in which to explore my writing.

Because I have been writing both prose (my new novel) and poetry I have been thinking a lot about the parallels between the forms. In my attempt to learn more about poetry and to improve what I write I have been struck by how often advice that is given to poets applies equally to the novelist. Take for example the problem of over writing or too much description – it is a problem many writers, including myself, come up against particularly when they are starting out and are writing their first novel – we are in love with our words, we can’t help it!

But too much description, no matter how well done, will hold up the narrative, slow the pace and can bog down the reader.

Lavinia Greenlaw who I think offers some of the best advice for would be poets says –

‘Every word should count – for its meaning as well as its music. Every image, however fantastical, should make complete sense within the context of the poem. If something you have written particularly impresses you, question it all the more.‘

Charles Simic says, ‘Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don’t overwrite.’

It’s sometimes very hard to edit out words or phrases that we particularly like and I have been struggling with this in my poetry. However I know I am beginning to learn that sometimes, although I may think the words are great, they have to be sacrificed because they do not have a place in the poem -or perhaps because they obscure rather than promote clarity – and in a poem every word has to count.

Sometimes of course they are good and can stay! We have to be careful not to throw out what is good -or sometimes they work somewhere else in the poem or as part of a title.

It is of course different with the novel’s more expansive form but there is a similar need for caution when using description – the maxim more is less comes to mind (see earlier post)

So now to some poetry – this is a poem I began not long after I came and I have been working on it for a few weeks now. It started off being a lot more complicated. It began to form in my mind after I saw a man, a vagrant, on the canal path. I started thinking about him and what his life might be like and how I really knew nothing about him

Like any poem it is a work in progress, something to come back to after time, after it has rested – to be improved, changed.

Presumption

On the thin pathways of the

morning I see him

by the canal, sometimes the bridge –

two dogs, two ropes, two bags

one on his back

two pairs of trousers one cut

above the other –

in the thick green soup of the

afternoon I see him

by the river sometimes the boats

two broken-backed boots,

ankle high and slow

moving to the lazy paddle

of the flat black turtle

two coats and matted hair

dogs hair matching I see him

sit in needles of light

beneath the roosting pigeons

that coo the voices of regret

and the presumptions

of sorrow

I see him step aside

give way and kneel,

in the hollows of courtesy

to the confusions of belief,

while around him the

nightingales call to prayer

in the quiet silver light of the

evening – I think I see him –

lying curled between his dogs

in the olive groves.

For more discussion on description in your writing and some good sound advice for writers you might like to go to Writing out West