What's Going To Happen Next

A short while back I referred to 3by3by3, a site devoted to collage-y types of poems. The remit for the poems, which I declined to explain then but which I will now, is this… and I quote:

Pick 3 stories from Google News. Using only words that occur in the first few paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story.

I’ve since had a couple of my own tries at this published there; Rupert Loydell is also a frequent contributor.

Over the years I’ve tried collage poems numerous times, but I think you could count on the fingers of a hand the number of poems I’ve made this way that I would regard as successful and which have appeared in magazines or books. Well, maybe two hands, but no more than two hands.

Often I’ve had recourse to found materials, or collage, or other exercises when I’ve been going through a period when unbidden poems are just not happening. Not writer’s block – a phrase that pisses me off, to be honest – but dry periods, nevertheless. The results have usually struck me as uninteresting, and on reflection that’s probably because the necessary driving motive behind the poem has been lacking or mis-directed. What do I mean by the necessary driving motive? For me, I think it’s the simple (sic) desire and pleasure in making a poem that I feel comes from the good part of me, with the usual mix of honesty and enjoyment and wonder and bewilderment and trust in that part of my brain I don’t understand but which clicks into gear when I make (what I think is) a good poem. If I’m doing an exercise to irrigate a dry period, something of those elements is missing, and is replaced by a “must make something” design and small degree of panic which is not so helpful.

The collage poems that I’ve done in the past and which have been successful have, I realise, been written in moments of happiness, or confidence, and periods of buzzing creativity – not when I was dried up and fishing around for ideas.

Which all sounds to me like it makes sense, but nothing in the creative process abides by any guidelines you might like to try and fix. A few months back, after I published some flarf poems here by Sharon Mesmer, I was not writing, and I tried my hand at that method, and came up with a few things which I let sit around for a while then decided they stank. So far, my theory (such as it is) holds. But then instead of throwing them away, one day when I was back in gear as it were, I took these smelly poems and completely reworked them, threw out a lot of the flarf principles and stuck my own words and phrases in various places, and came up with some poems I really liked. I’m not even sure now which bits of the poems are the found things and which bits are my own. And those poems, which started out in somewhat rotten circumstances but were finished in good ones, I think are very ok and will, as it happens, be appearing in a magazine online in the not too distant future.

So, as always, I just don’t get this writing business. It’s full of surprises. Except I know that for me I have to be in a happy and positive frame of mind to write what I think are good poems. Get me low or tired and I may as well go and try and build a wall as make a poem. As for the poems at 3by3by3, I’m happy they are out there; they are not exercises or throwaways. I got a buzz off doing them and get a buzz off the finished product. I did one that ended up in the waste bin because it was shit, but the two there now I will stand by. And interestingly, the newest one turned out very differently from what I was expecting: I picked some texts that contained positive elements and language, and intended a positive, upbeat, even funny poem. And look what happened! Well actually, I’m not sure what happened…… which is why I love this writing business. I love to not know what’s going to happen next.

Comments

[Ben Wilkinson]

Hi Martin, I've only just discovered your blog (linked from Rob Mackenzie's) but I'm really enjoying it; interesting and witty insights and comments into the world of poetry. I particularly enjoyed stumbling across Rupert Loydell's 'A Motion Sends A Postcard Home' in the archive: a decent and funny parody piece, I reckon. Anyway, if you fancy checking out my somewhat less interesting and comprehensive blog, the link's below.