Love how you combined those 3 haiku to form a poem, they work beautifully together. I've recently exported all my writing from another website. Flicking through 100 poems and I still don't think I've found my own style.
Aw thanks Treasa - yeah, its amazing how much a bit of time and distance (or 25 years of it!) can make you see how a poem should have been haha. Oh cool - love having all my work in one place so I can look over it - must be nice to have such a substantial collection to work through. Yeah, style is a funny thing! It's elusive, and it changes without warning. And it can be evasive! And it takes time. I don't think I've fully found mine either, and I think maybe that's the point. It's something you can only know in hindsight, when looking back. It's really difficult to predict, or shape. But I think in the attempt, we can find out more about ourselves as poets hopefully. :-)
That's reassuring to know, I've been writing for about 3 years so maybe I shouldn't pigeon hole myself into a set style yet. You've inspired me to work on a little project, I'm going to sift through the old stuff and compile my short poems in one space. I entered lots of competitions on that other site, 20 word challenge etc. It could be fun.
Oh definitely! I think style is something that comes over a long time. And personally, I still experiment continuously, and try to "break" with my usual "style" as much as possible to see if I can find paths I haven't been down yet. I mean, it was only a few years ago I started writing the occasional rhymed poem. Before then I would have been dead-set against it, and probably said I'd never do such a thing lol. But now I really enjoy it. And just this year I am starting to appreciate meter more and more! Never would have predicted that.
I really love your idea of compiling a bunch of your older short poems together - that is something I am really big on for myself, and find it lots of fun. Every few years I try to track down all the poems I've written, and then select the ones I really like, and put them together, laid out like a book. Not for publishing, or for anyone else to read (apart from maybe my writing partner) but just so I can appreciate them together, as a body of work. And that always helps me move forwards, even if I don't consciously think about it. It's like my brain gets a picture of what I have done, and then unconsciously/subconsciously starts working on what I might do next. It always reinvigorates me anyhow. And the other part of it is I think we (poets I mean) spend a lot of time grinding - gotta write another poem! Gotta write a better poem. But sometimes its just nice to look back, let go of the judgements and pressures, and enjoy what we've done, without worrying about whether it's publishable, or good/bad, or anything like that. To just enjoy that we made poems. And that is a part of who we were, and are. There's something lovely in that I think. :-)
Really interesting reflection on style. A bio or preface can sometimes be better written by a another person, for example.
In the early piece I posted in comment below I can see early signals on something that might form part of what perhaps might be described as style. Hard to say.
Agree that style is something that evolves, but also maybe anchors in something intrinsic in us that doesn't change? Soulprint for want of a better term.
Also, I'm wondering is one's own style something another writer might put better words on for you? It's so hard to see who you are... to others. The observer and the creator feel separate to me. But perhaps we'd have a knowing. (Expressing it is quite another thing it seems!)
Thanks - glad it has been enjoyable! :-) Absolutely - I always prefer someone else to write a bio or preface, than myself. If only, because it's much more interesting to see what other's think, than just repeat what I already know I think haha.
For me, I think "style" is something which plays between surfaces and depths, but is ultimately learned, I think, rather than innate. When we come to writing and language as children, everything we know about it we learn through reading and talking with others. It pre-exists us. And then, depending on the cultures we grow up in, from the "big" culture (capital "C"), right down to the culture of your family-life, etc. we start to learn what "style" is. The "intrinsic" self, whatever that may be - the part of us that anchors our sense of "being-here-continuously" - while I think that impacts out approaches to style, I dunno that it is "style" exactly, if that makes sense? And I only say this because if it is true that everything we know about writing is learned, then I feel that even the parts of our style that stay the same are also learned things, rather than intrinsically a part of us (whether we call that soul, or spirit, or whatever, etc.). But I am definitely not disagreeing with you - just musing. :-) As always, if anything is useful, yay. If it isn't, discard, haha!
Saaaaame! Hate writing bios - and sort of believe that it's the one thing that whoever needs the bio should do. So many magazines, for instance, don't pay for submissions anymore, which is totally fair, given the world as it is, but I feel like they could give something back by writing a bio for you haha. I am probably in the minority with this view. 😂
Really enjoyable reflection, Dick. Beckett’s comment about ripping the veil of the temple out of language (alluding to the Passion) must have Nietzsche in mind: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have Grammar”. I share your dislike of the word artist btw haha (or at least its casual use). But to your question. Some years after I left university my parents asked me what to do with my clunking old computer still lodging with them. It had all my undergrad poems on it, I thought for a moment and then decided - throw it out. Except in odd moments of nostalgia I don’t regret that - the poems were bad - though reading your youthful work (which I like) I wonder if there might not have been something salvageable there. I believe there is a poem from a still earlier stage, my teen years, in a school magazine somewhere... perhaps some time I’ll try to look it out...
Aw cheers Thomas! Glad it was enjoyable. Ya never know, going back over old work. Ohhh - that's a great point about Nietzsche - nice observation, and a great quote. That's one I will come back to time and time again. Yeah I have certainly dumped a bunch of stuff along the way. I think letting go is definitely part of the process as well. Sounds very freeing, and like it was the right decision for you! I guess part of what made it nice to go back this time for me is that I didn't see the poems as good or bad anymore, but simply as extensions of me, a much younger me. And I am trying to be kinder to that younger person, who really didn't know what they were up to. :-) Hope you do look it out! Would love to hear about it.
Interesting Dick. Did it free me? Maybe. I remember some time later reading DH Lawrence, who said he had abandoned his first love (the one he writes about in Sons and Lovers) as a deliberate act of self-creation, to become a writer. Perhaps he was rationalising it after the event, but I certainly never did anything so deliberate (or, I hope, hurt anyone so deliberately). It was a bit of a wrench giving the poems up, but then it was done. The story from Lawrence did make me wonder though - what do you have to do to create properly... not enough to change my behaviour, just to wonder. It’s an odd thought that many of the poets I admire had a completely different experience of their lives than their myth would suggest - “here lies one who’s name was writ in water”, as Keats said.
Super interesting Thomas. Thanks so much for sharing. Yeah, wow, Lawrence sounds like a dick haha. I think using others for your growth as a poet, or any kind of artist, is pretty crummy. I'm not saying I haven't done that, both knowingly and unknowingly, I am sure. But I certainly, like you, really try not to. Yeah, working through the myths is a hard one, but something I think is really important. There is so much myth-making in histories and reflections, and so on. Dam - that Keats quote is amazing! I love it. Seems to pair nicely with this monostich, sometimes attributed to Dryden, and at other times Milton, as a second part to the thought: "The conscious water saw its god, and blush'd." :-)
Yeah - its a weird line with a weird history (originally comes from a Latin epigram) - I have an essay on it that I'll probably publish on here some time. Oh wow - that's cool. Ohhh, that means its a monostich - awesome! I have been compiling a book of monostich for a while, and hadn't come across this. Makes me wonder how many other 1-line epitaphs exist, particularly on poet's graves? Hmmmm....
I've yet to try Haiku, this has inspired me anew. Thanks Dick. It's so clean.
I happened to record audio today for an old, very raw piece I wrote setting out here on Substack. Which was around the beginning of my very recent writing journey. I've included it below.
I will look this link up and give it a whirl, thanks Dick. Really appreciate.
Hopefully my work has evolved a little from earlier pieces, but it was interesting to look back, and coincidental you were looking back yesterday too. Serendipitous.
I have almost all of my earliest poems from the early 2000s, which won't see the light of substack since they're bad, but that's par for the course when starting. I look back at them not to wince at them but to take note of the unfiltered passion in them and how to apply that to a more experienced and purposeful pen.
Yeah definitely - I have some early poems from a little later that have a lightness of touch I can't really achieve now, and I hope I find that eventually again, and as you say, with more experience see what I could do with that technique. Hahahaha - obviously I am very selective in terms of what I put into public of these early works - so much bad! Most of which has been thrown away throughout the years, or reworked. I assume the other 5 poems I couldn't find must have been bad enough to suffer that fate at some point haha.
Yeah, it is weirdly. I wasn't sure if it would be, and have been pleasantly surprised. Ah, yeah, I definitely know the throw-it-all-away vibe too. Understood. :-)
Nice - that must be a great record to have. That's such a good part of old work - it always turns up new things you'd forgotten or abandoned really quickly without realising. I have never been able to keep journals for any length of time unfortunately. I always really want to, but it never works out.
Yeah definitely. :-) I think with artworks and stuff though - there's always a tight lens being put on it - it refines memory in a way. Journaling seems much more intimate, at least the times I have done it for short bursts.
I love early work in poetry. The wonkiness of the aboutness and the thisness, the inevitable weird punctuation, the bumps and the polish in the wrong places, which are so often really the right places. I want to write about Alexander Pope's early literary manuscripts on here some time -- the ones where he carefully inscribed his fair texts for the printer in a painstaking imitation of Roman type, by hand -- partly I think because he just couldn't wait to see what it would look like, how it was going to feel to be a real poet, for the first time. Some poets can summon that freshness and excitement from nowhere their whole lives through. Always on the hunt for a scent of that in the archive.
Same :-) Ah nice - I love that! Sounds like it would make a great read! I really relate to that story about Pope. I always make my poems into books, not for publication, but for me - I just like to see them as they would be if they were a book. Whether or not they actually are, that doesn't bother me a lot of the time haha. The final stage of editing a poem for me is always using very particular fonts, and laying it out as if it were going to be on a page in a book as well. I hope I still feel poetry freshly in my older years - that's the aim anyway! :-)
I just had a similar experience today, looking at poems in folder of poems that I considered "dead/old" and discovering that there were a few possible gems in that folder.
Love how you combined those 3 haiku to form a poem, they work beautifully together. I've recently exported all my writing from another website. Flicking through 100 poems and I still don't think I've found my own style.
Aw thanks Treasa - yeah, its amazing how much a bit of time and distance (or 25 years of it!) can make you see how a poem should have been haha. Oh cool - love having all my work in one place so I can look over it - must be nice to have such a substantial collection to work through. Yeah, style is a funny thing! It's elusive, and it changes without warning. And it can be evasive! And it takes time. I don't think I've fully found mine either, and I think maybe that's the point. It's something you can only know in hindsight, when looking back. It's really difficult to predict, or shape. But I think in the attempt, we can find out more about ourselves as poets hopefully. :-)
That's reassuring to know, I've been writing for about 3 years so maybe I shouldn't pigeon hole myself into a set style yet. You've inspired me to work on a little project, I'm going to sift through the old stuff and compile my short poems in one space. I entered lots of competitions on that other site, 20 word challenge etc. It could be fun.
Oh definitely! I think style is something that comes over a long time. And personally, I still experiment continuously, and try to "break" with my usual "style" as much as possible to see if I can find paths I haven't been down yet. I mean, it was only a few years ago I started writing the occasional rhymed poem. Before then I would have been dead-set against it, and probably said I'd never do such a thing lol. But now I really enjoy it. And just this year I am starting to appreciate meter more and more! Never would have predicted that.
I really love your idea of compiling a bunch of your older short poems together - that is something I am really big on for myself, and find it lots of fun. Every few years I try to track down all the poems I've written, and then select the ones I really like, and put them together, laid out like a book. Not for publishing, or for anyone else to read (apart from maybe my writing partner) but just so I can appreciate them together, as a body of work. And that always helps me move forwards, even if I don't consciously think about it. It's like my brain gets a picture of what I have done, and then unconsciously/subconsciously starts working on what I might do next. It always reinvigorates me anyhow. And the other part of it is I think we (poets I mean) spend a lot of time grinding - gotta write another poem! Gotta write a better poem. But sometimes its just nice to look back, let go of the judgements and pressures, and enjoy what we've done, without worrying about whether it's publishable, or good/bad, or anything like that. To just enjoy that we made poems. And that is a part of who we were, and are. There's something lovely in that I think. :-)
Really interesting reflection on style. A bio or preface can sometimes be better written by a another person, for example.
In the early piece I posted in comment below I can see early signals on something that might form part of what perhaps might be described as style. Hard to say.
Agree that style is something that evolves, but also maybe anchors in something intrinsic in us that doesn't change? Soulprint for want of a better term.
Also, I'm wondering is one's own style something another writer might put better words on for you? It's so hard to see who you are... to others. The observer and the creator feel separate to me. But perhaps we'd have a knowing. (Expressing it is quite another thing it seems!)
Thanks - glad it has been enjoyable! :-) Absolutely - I always prefer someone else to write a bio or preface, than myself. If only, because it's much more interesting to see what other's think, than just repeat what I already know I think haha.
For me, I think "style" is something which plays between surfaces and depths, but is ultimately learned, I think, rather than innate. When we come to writing and language as children, everything we know about it we learn through reading and talking with others. It pre-exists us. And then, depending on the cultures we grow up in, from the "big" culture (capital "C"), right down to the culture of your family-life, etc. we start to learn what "style" is. The "intrinsic" self, whatever that may be - the part of us that anchors our sense of "being-here-continuously" - while I think that impacts out approaches to style, I dunno that it is "style" exactly, if that makes sense? And I only say this because if it is true that everything we know about writing is learned, then I feel that even the parts of our style that stay the same are also learned things, rather than intrinsically a part of us (whether we call that soul, or spirit, or whatever, etc.). But I am definitely not disagreeing with you - just musing. :-) As always, if anything is useful, yay. If it isn't, discard, haha!
This is so interesting! I'm learning so much from listening to other writers. Thanks for taking the time to give this point of view.
A pleasure. Thanks for the interesting convo! :-)
Soulprint. How perfectly put. I dread writing a bio, give me 20 poems to draft instead.
Saaaaame! Hate writing bios - and sort of believe that it's the one thing that whoever needs the bio should do. So many magazines, for instance, don't pay for submissions anymore, which is totally fair, given the world as it is, but I feel like they could give something back by writing a bio for you haha. I am probably in the minority with this view. 😂
Really enjoyable reflection, Dick. Beckett’s comment about ripping the veil of the temple out of language (alluding to the Passion) must have Nietzsche in mind: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have Grammar”. I share your dislike of the word artist btw haha (or at least its casual use). But to your question. Some years after I left university my parents asked me what to do with my clunking old computer still lodging with them. It had all my undergrad poems on it, I thought for a moment and then decided - throw it out. Except in odd moments of nostalgia I don’t regret that - the poems were bad - though reading your youthful work (which I like) I wonder if there might not have been something salvageable there. I believe there is a poem from a still earlier stage, my teen years, in a school magazine somewhere... perhaps some time I’ll try to look it out...
Aw cheers Thomas! Glad it was enjoyable. Ya never know, going back over old work. Ohhh - that's a great point about Nietzsche - nice observation, and a great quote. That's one I will come back to time and time again. Yeah I have certainly dumped a bunch of stuff along the way. I think letting go is definitely part of the process as well. Sounds very freeing, and like it was the right decision for you! I guess part of what made it nice to go back this time for me is that I didn't see the poems as good or bad anymore, but simply as extensions of me, a much younger me. And I am trying to be kinder to that younger person, who really didn't know what they were up to. :-) Hope you do look it out! Would love to hear about it.
Interesting Dick. Did it free me? Maybe. I remember some time later reading DH Lawrence, who said he had abandoned his first love (the one he writes about in Sons and Lovers) as a deliberate act of self-creation, to become a writer. Perhaps he was rationalising it after the event, but I certainly never did anything so deliberate (or, I hope, hurt anyone so deliberately). It was a bit of a wrench giving the poems up, but then it was done. The story from Lawrence did make me wonder though - what do you have to do to create properly... not enough to change my behaviour, just to wonder. It’s an odd thought that many of the poets I admire had a completely different experience of their lives than their myth would suggest - “here lies one who’s name was writ in water”, as Keats said.
Super interesting Thomas. Thanks so much for sharing. Yeah, wow, Lawrence sounds like a dick haha. I think using others for your growth as a poet, or any kind of artist, is pretty crummy. I'm not saying I haven't done that, both knowingly and unknowingly, I am sure. But I certainly, like you, really try not to. Yeah, working through the myths is a hard one, but something I think is really important. There is so much myth-making in histories and reflections, and so on. Dam - that Keats quote is amazing! I love it. Seems to pair nicely with this monostich, sometimes attributed to Dryden, and at other times Milton, as a second part to the thought: "The conscious water saw its god, and blush'd." :-)
Love that line - I’d not heard it before. The line from Keats is I believe his self-composed epitaph and is on his tombstone (in Rome).
Yeah - its a weird line with a weird history (originally comes from a Latin epigram) - I have an essay on it that I'll probably publish on here some time. Oh wow - that's cool. Ohhh, that means its a monostich - awesome! I have been compiling a book of monostich for a while, and hadn't come across this. Makes me wonder how many other 1-line epitaphs exist, particularly on poet's graves? Hmmmm....
Look forward to that essay - monostich was a new one for me btw. Perhaps another essay for you to write...?
I've yet to try Haiku, this has inspired me anew. Thanks Dick. It's so clean.
I happened to record audio today for an old, very raw piece I wrote setting out here on Substack. Which was around the beginning of my very recent writing journey. I've included it below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theseainme/p/dazed-dawning?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=46rss
Nice :-) It's a great form! Yeah, I don't think I would call these haiku anymore haha - but its all relative. I wrote an introduction to haiku a few weeks ago that you might find helpful if you're looking to give it a go: https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/haiku-thursdays-one-plum-slowly-ripens
Really enjoyed your piece :-) The ending especially, very nice:
.
Softly, gently,
that thing you do is dawning
.
Deniably so,
in trust-fall, drenched in everything
.
maybe, just maybe,
I am, what I have been waiting for
.
I will look this link up and give it a whirl, thanks Dick. Really appreciate.
Hopefully my work has evolved a little from earlier pieces, but it was interesting to look back, and coincidental you were looking back yesterday too. Serendipitous.
Nice :-) Love those moments of synchronicity!
I have almost all of my earliest poems from the early 2000s, which won't see the light of substack since they're bad, but that's par for the course when starting. I look back at them not to wince at them but to take note of the unfiltered passion in them and how to apply that to a more experienced and purposeful pen.
Yeah definitely - I have some early poems from a little later that have a lightness of touch I can't really achieve now, and I hope I find that eventually again, and as you say, with more experience see what I could do with that technique. Hahahaha - obviously I am very selective in terms of what I put into public of these early works - so much bad! Most of which has been thrown away throughout the years, or reworked. I assume the other 5 poems I couldn't find must have been bad enough to suffer that fate at some point haha.
It must feel nice to look back to your old work. I threw everything away -- long story, not for here :)
But I must confess that my journals from the last two years are a constant read, I discover something new every time I shuffle them.
Yeah, it is weirdly. I wasn't sure if it would be, and have been pleasantly surprised. Ah, yeah, I definitely know the throw-it-all-away vibe too. Understood. :-)
Nice - that must be a great record to have. That's such a good part of old work - it always turns up new things you'd forgotten or abandoned really quickly without realising. I have never been able to keep journals for any length of time unfortunately. I always really want to, but it never works out.
You keep your poems, artworks and other stuff - still the same. There is something to look back, to dig through, that's the important thing I guess.
Yeah definitely. :-) I think with artworks and stuff though - there's always a tight lens being put on it - it refines memory in a way. Journaling seems much more intimate, at least the times I have done it for short bursts.
You have a point there. Journals contain raw material, if you're willing to dig through them.
Totally. :-)
I love early work in poetry. The wonkiness of the aboutness and the thisness, the inevitable weird punctuation, the bumps and the polish in the wrong places, which are so often really the right places. I want to write about Alexander Pope's early literary manuscripts on here some time -- the ones where he carefully inscribed his fair texts for the printer in a painstaking imitation of Roman type, by hand -- partly I think because he just couldn't wait to see what it would look like, how it was going to feel to be a real poet, for the first time. Some poets can summon that freshness and excitement from nowhere their whole lives through. Always on the hunt for a scent of that in the archive.
Same :-) Ah nice - I love that! Sounds like it would make a great read! I really relate to that story about Pope. I always make my poems into books, not for publication, but for me - I just like to see them as they would be if they were a book. Whether or not they actually are, that doesn't bother me a lot of the time haha. The final stage of editing a poem for me is always using very particular fonts, and laying it out as if it were going to be on a page in a book as well. I hope I still feel poetry freshly in my older years - that's the aim anyway! :-)
Loving the retrospective
Aw thanks Tamsin! :-) I appreciate the encouragement.
I just had a similar experience today, looking at poems in folder of poems that I considered "dead/old" and discovering that there were a few possible gems in that folder.
Ah lovely! :-) Always a good day when that happens.