Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

English is a language suited to poetry like no other. The crunch and snap of Anglo-Saxon, the lyric romanticism of Latin and Greek, the comic, ironic fusion yielded when both are yoked together, the swing and jazz of slang…the choice of words and verbal styles available to the English poet is dazzling.

Think of cityscapes. In London, thanks to a mixture of fires, blitzes, ludicrous mismanagement and muddled planning, the medieval, Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and modern jostle together in higgledy-piggledy confusion. The corporate, the ecclesiastical, the imperial and the domestic coexist in blissful chaos. Paris, to take the nearest capital to London, was planned. For reasons we won’t go into, it managed to escape the attentions of the Luftwaffe . It remains a city of grand, tasteful boulevards laid out in a consistent style where, with the exception of a few self-consciously designed contemporary projects, the modern, commercial, vulgar and vernacular are held at bay beyond the outer ring of the city, like barbarians at its gates.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane: each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

This is partly what is meant by the flexibility of English: it is more than a question of the thousands more words available to us, it is also a question of the numberless styles, modes, jargons and slangs we have recourse to. If by poetry we mean something more than the decorative, noble and refined, then English is a perfect language for poetry. So be alert to it at all times.

II

Poetic vices–ten habits to acquire–getting noticed–Poetry Today, a final rant–goodbye

Poetic Vices

LAZINESS is the worst vice a poet can have. Sentimentality, cliché, pretension, falsity of emotion, vanity, dullness, over-ambition, self-indulgence, word-deafness, word-blindness, clumsiness, technical ineptitude, unoriginality–all of these are bad but they are usually subsets and products of laziness. Laziness in prose you can get away with. There are, it is true, Flaubert-style novelists who search for ever for le mot juste , but they take their inspiration from poets and try to claim for novels precisely the same linguistic diligence and perfectionism that is an absolute essential in poetry. The real reason why McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge’ is such a disaster is that he did not have the first idea how much labour goes into the making of a poem. I do not believe that he was even dimly aware of the extremes of effort and concentration that poets a hundred thousand times more talented poured into their work. Much easier to indulge in the belief that the world is against you, that everyone else is a member of some club whose doors are closed to you because you didn’t go to the right school or have the right parents, than to realise that you simply do not work hard enough .

The first Golden Rule you signed up to when you started to read this book emphasised the necessity of taking time with poetry, as a reader and a maker of it. I emphasise that rule again with redoubled force.

I have shown you some techniques and forms of poetry, and discoursed a little on diction, but I am in no position to tell you how to write poetry that will provide you with an audience for your work. Beyond technique, the call to concentration, linguistic awareness, hard toil and the taking of time, with all the benefits of developed taste and judgement that these will bring, there is, of course, such a thing as talent. I cannot give you that and only you can judge whether you possess enough of it to make poems that others will want to read. For me, the pleasure of the thing is enough. Here, though, for what little they are worth, are a few more things to consider before we say goodbye.TEN HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL POETS THAT THEY DON’ TTEACH YOU AT HARVARD POETRY SCHOOL, OR CHICKENVERSE FOR THE SOUL IS FROM MARS BUT YOU ARE WHATYOU READ IN JUST SEVEN DAYS OR YOUR MONEY BACK

Concentration and total commitment to language are far and away the most important qualities needed for poetry writing. These other pieces of advice I have for you, hedged about with ifs and buts as they are, offer little more than obvious common-sense observations. They may seem too simple to be attractive. A complicated regimen is easy and (for a while) fun to follow, but the plain dictum don’t eat so much , while an infinitely better way of losing weight than any diet ever devised, is much harder and usually less fun.

1. CONSIDER YOUR READERS: it is only good manners to do so. Are you giving them a good time? Are you confusing them, upsetting them, boring them? Maybe you are and this is part of a deliberate poetic strategy. Just be sure you know what you are doing. This leads to my next suggestion…

2. KEEP A JOURNAL: sometimes only by talking to ourselves do we discover what we are up to. ‘Today I wrote a poem that was confusing and incoherent. But it was what I meant. Or was it? Hm. I must go back to it.’

3. CONSIDER THE VOICE OF YOUR POEM: who is speaking? You or a pretend authorial version of you?

4. READ POETRY: I did warn you that I was going to be obvious. Most popular musicians I know are fans first and foremost, owners of enormous record collections. I do not know of any poets who are not readers of poetry. You are allowed to hate some poets and be indifferent to others. But get to know as many as you can. Variety is important or you end up as an imitative shadow of your favourites.

5. TRUTHFULNESS: are the emotions (disgust, joy, anger, terror and so on) in your poem really felt , or are you feigning them for effect? Readers can tell bullshit and pretence as easily as we can detect it in someone we meet at a party. Of course, artifice is a part of poetry but again, be sure you know what you are doing.

6. CONTROL: ‘All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. Which is absolutely not the same as saying that all genuine feeling produces bad poetry, or that all good poetry springs from false feeling. But genuine feeling is not enough in poetry any more than it is in painting or music. Genuine feeling which isn’t pressed into some sort of shape is a tantrum or a sentimental mess. Negative capability and the objective correlative are (rather hackneyed) phrases you may want to check out, via the glossary and your own researches.

7. ENJOY YOURSELF: poetry might be a need in you, but it should not be a penance. Unless you believe yourself to be cursed by an unwanted vocation, the labour involved should be one of love.

8. FORGIVE YOURSELF: everyone writes shit from time to time. Don’t get all hysterical about it. Keep your poetic toys in the pram and start again when you feel better. Write some light and stupid verse to take the taste away. 9 THE MUSE IS CAPRICIOUS: the Greek idea of a real, living Muse whispering in your ear is a good one and it works quite well. Sometimes it truly is as if we are inspired. The work flows, we concentrate yet we are supremely relaxed, beta and theta waves are active in the brain. We are in a true creative state–the Muse is at our shoulder. BUT: next morning we may well discover that she has poured not wine but ullage into our ears. You never know with her. Our own judgement cannot go to sleep. It is the same with writing when under the influence of drugs or alcohol: we may think they are giving us poetic nectar but it can turn out next morning to be prosaic arse-gravy.