Free-notes

I’ve come to the conclusion over the last couple of weeks that my approach to writing poetry is best described as ‘free-noting’ rather than ‘freewriting’. I tend to start with a big A4 sheet of lined paper, write a rough one line precis of what I am aiming for at the top, then add lots of jottings below. I might note down what form the poem could take – sonnet? sestina? vilanelle? I can make notes about the important happenings in the poem, images, descriptions, lines that occur to me, words from my Thesaurus, trial rhythms … all sorts of stuff. I end up with a whole page of notes and scribbles that contain the beginning essence of the poem.

Then I let it ’simmer’ quietly for a day or so, returning occasionally if a thought occurs to me that I need to add to my freenotes, adding words or ideas.

I have several pieces in this sort of freenote format, none of which have taken on any real form as such, but are really collections of thoughts and jottings just waiting to be moulded and polished.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading lots of poetry – as widely advised both by the course team and fellow past/present students – and become quite disheartened at the brilliance of what I read and the paltryness of what I write.

No-one ever said writing poetry was easy and a LOT of people have said that writing poetry is damned hard work!

Relief at last …

AND my nails survived the prolonged wait

My tutor didn’t get home until the early hours of this morning and so didn’t manage to get by TMA back into the system until just before 10am. I checked in ten minutes after to get her message and dashed over to the OU site straight away.

It was a huge relief to discover that my fiction TMA (which had been a long hard slog) had improved just a few marks on the first TMA. Having ready the various posts by unhappy students who had dropped 15 marks from first to second TMA, I was able to heave a deep sigh, make another cup of tea, print out the saved marked TMA then sit down to read and inwardly digest. I could have kicked myself for not indenting the dialogue and I got a few commas in the wrong place, but overall that was only a minor self criticism. She said the story worked well, I’d created believable characters and the plot was good. I even managed a reasonable commentary but she advised me to make more reference to my notebooks and more about how I was influenced by external sources.

Now I feel much more positive about the poetry module

Delayed till Sunday

Thankfully I received an explanatory email from my tutor this morning to say that a family crisis had occurred and she was away from home under difficult circumstances. She had taken her laptop and had marked my TMA but she has no way of getting it back into the eTMA system until she returns home on Sunday evening.

So I have another forty eight hours of ‘not-knowing’ ahead of me and it is so frustrating knowing that my TMA is marked and waiting to be returned to me. But everyone has unforeseen crises and my sympathy goes out to my tutor.

I just hope my nails survive …

The Agony of waiting

TMA02 was due on January 4th 2008 which has raised more than a few grumbles from the autumn intake students since it clashed horribly with Christmas, New Year, family visits, trips away, unpleasant ‘lurgies’ and heaven knows what else. So I gather that a fair number of students – like me – had extensions. My agreed extension was a week but I managed to submit only six days late – so that was Thursday 10th January 2008.

On January 18th, our tutor posted a message in our tutor group to say that she’d received a fabulous selection of stories and that we would be pleased to know that the TMAs were marked and returned …. but that “those with extensions will be returned in due course”

It’s now Thursday January 24th and I’m desperately haunting First Class waiting for that ‘plink’ that indicates a missive has appeared in my inbox. I’ve even taken to checking the eTMA system several times a day in the hope that my returned TMA will appear there before the missive arrives.

However I’m not filled with confidence.

The number of A215 students who have been shocked by their TMA02 results seems to be worryingly high. Some said they’d dropped 15 to 20 marks! Others have pointed out that TMA02 is marked much more rigorously than TMA01 which is a fairly easy ride as an introductory TMA (and only worth 10% of the continuous assessment marks anyway). But TMA02 is worth 30% of the continuous assessment marks – officially a one-and-a-half-times-weighted assignment which is a real burden when it has to compete with Christmas and New Year for a student’s study time

I’ve been working on my poetry but it’s getting harder and harder to be positive when my TMA02 result is bogging me down and worrying me. I’d really like to get it, read and inwardly digest it, then move on smartly.

Oh, I do hope I get my result soon!

Poetry!

OK, so like many other A215 students both past and present, the poetry module of the course is proving to be very heavy going. I’m sure Professor Herbert is a very learned, experienced and talented poet but he doesn’t seem to ’snag’ a student’s attention with his chapter on poetry.

In fact, I found Prof Herbert’s initial insistence on freewriting left me feeling powerless, adrift, overwhelmed and lost – faced with a page of A4 prose, I found it incredibly difficult to dissect out the bits that might be fledgling poetry. So I ploughed onward to the end of the chapter, making a few notes and highlighting a few relevant sentences before setting the Big Red Book aside.

Then I fetched out my copy of  “The Ode less travelled – unlocking the poet within” by Stephen Fry which I bought at Waterstones in Birmingham on one of our recent trips. What a difference!

I can highly recommend the Stephen Fry book – especially since he lays out very tongue-in-cheek rules and insists that poetry is FAR better when read out loud. The whole book is written exactly as if he were talking directly to you – that could be intensely irritating for some people but I could just hear his voice. He deals with a section then sets an exercise, first giving you his take on the exercise before letting you loose. Some of his poetry just cracked me up and made me laugh out loud. Even better, he starts with all the intricacies of metre and rhythm using nice simple words like ‘Ti-tum Ti-tum Ti-tum Ti-tum Ti-tum’ to help you tap out iambic pentameter and other metrical rhythms before he moves on to rhyming, and along the way he takes in Greek poetry, Anglo Saxon poetry and, a poet I studied for A Level English Literature – the incomparable Gerard Manley Hopkins.

So my inspiration for poetry is now restored and I leave you with a rather messy poem that I wrote as a direct result of the above. In fact, I caused some puzzlement in the A215 cafe because I assumed that most people would be able to identify the second red book as Stephen Fry’s “The Ode less Travelled” (also a paperback book in a red cover) since it came highly recommended by previous A215 students as being an easier introduction to poetry than Prof Herbert. (The ’scarlet ring’ foxed someone too – it’s a lifebelt)

A Poem about Two Red Books

I sag beneath the Big Red Book, it weighs
me down, extinguishing my timid spark.
My awen lost. Yet still I search the maze
and stumble onward searching for the light.

A scarlet ring just misses me!
I grab it quick. What can this be?

“Come, travel now”, the dulcet tones
invite and tempt, “The Ode awaits
to be unlocked. We’ll open gates
and set essential awen free of chains”

I laugh out loud. I tap the sheets
and count out joyously the beats.
He pulls me onward, breathless leaps
to roars of mirth and rhythmic treats.

Frying tonight?
You bet!

[1] awen, a Welsh word poetically translated as ’sacred inspiration’, the literal meaning is ‘flowing spirit’, the essence of life, creative energy, part of Druidic beliefs.