National Poetry Month (or why I’ll never write a limerick again)
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
‘Never write a limerick again.’ This is the advice one friend gives to me following the ignominious collapse of the blog I’d been keeping through most of April, America’s National Poetry Month. (For some reason, no one seems to do anything for Britain’s – which is October, for the record.) The premise for the NaPoMo challenge is simple: you write a poem, every day. Every day, you write a poem. EVERY DAY. It’s harder than it sounds.
I start the month in decent, if pretentious form, taking a book of local legends out of the local library on which I intend to base most of the material, and write a poem called ‘The Town That Wasn’t’ about Stamford, Lincolnshire, being left behind by pretty much everything. Stamford’s the town I went to primary school in, and it’s got enough interesting history to it to milk a few poems from its Georgian stone teats – for a while, at least. The poem has a fairly lassez-faire approach to rhyme and refers to too many things that people outside Stamford have no reason to know or care about, but it’s meant to be a commemoration of the unacknowledged, and I’m fairly pleased with it.
I set up a blog called ‘Pages and Pages’ to share my experience, drafts and the occasional bout of creative self-loathing. It’s going OK, so far, and the first few days are a honeymoon period, though my comments at the time suggest otherwise. I try to break the tyranny of subject matter with a group of poems about extreme shrimps, Samuel Beckett,19h century noise pollution and the miracle berry plant. A few of them are still about girls, of course, but at least they’re evasive about it. My favourite is a poem called ‘Éand Other Games of Physical Skill’, featuring a neat if simple rhyme scheme and an extended metaphor where the game Kerplunk stands in for a love triangle, albeit one in which two of the sides don’t really want the third to be there – essentially more of a love compass hanging out with an over-eager ruler. The title, like much of the month’s inspiration, is plundered from a Wikipedia article. I feel as if I’m, like, bringing poetry into the modern age or something.
Day Seven signals the downturn. Stuck for ideas, and needing to write something, anything, I turn to a prompt on the Guardian website to imagine a celebrity in an unexpected situation. ‘Roger Bannister In Love’ is the clumsy result; it starts with the somewhat melodramatic ‘I know you didn’t mean to break my legs’ and begins to dissolve. It’s not terrible, but it needs editing that I don’t have the time to do, and it’s not even close to the way I wanted.
In the second week, I get drunk and reference Coast. There’s a couple of good formal exercises where I shoehorn stories from the Stamford book into tight formal patterns, like the mind-breakingly difficult villanelle about an old woman drowning in a vat of porter, with which I turn out happy if a little confused, but there’s also a tragic decline in quality control that climaxes in a ‘rollicking’ ‘homage’ to traditional ballads containing ‘death was in the darkness/and the distance and the fear’, the most empty lines I can ever remember writing.
In the third week I write about talking heads – not the band, and not well – with the line ‘It’s Stamford, not the fucking book of Kells’ for a reason that I can’t currently recall. I buy a dictionary of astronomy for 50p from a Salvation Army shop and plagiarise half of a shoddy sonnet, and then I write about what it’s like to come home for the holidays and see your old friends differently. Then I go outside and shoot myself. I don’t, of course, but if I ever write that poem again I might. I manage to squeeze out something weird but workable about Stamford bull-running, in a kind of a feeble last-hurrah, and then term starts.
I summarise Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway and Brighton Rock, for revision. In limericks.
Don’t go looking for these. They’ve been deleted, as has everything else past Day Eighteen. Oxford and the poem-a-day project don’t mix. I erase all traces of the last four or so poems that I write before abandoning the whole idea, like one of those Soviet photographs where Trotsky was never there. What have I learnt? Well, no more or less than when I do this every year, except that it doesn’t work in Oxford. It gives me some of my best work, and some of my worst. One of my poems, from Day 8, is below, unedited, unexpurgated, and possibly unreadable. I leave it at it is so you can judge for yourself what the process of turning yourself into a poetry machine does for the quality of your output. This isn’t the best idea I’ve ever had – it tries to make Bob Dylan’s voice a sexual metaphor, which probably hasn’t occurred to anyone before for a reason – but it could be worse. You haven’t seen the limericks.
Songs About Louise
There’s something close to nakedness
in hearing one another sing.
You know now how my weak vibrato
tenor trembles like a virgin,
and your pure tone’s a dress
that slips from shoulders far too
sleek to see your fingers trilling
down the zip; Baez and Dylan
found a way of harmonising
side by side in Rolling Thunder.
You and me can keep in key
but if we start to slide asunder
I can set your teeth on edge, the rising
hum from sharp to flat through every
nerve from neck to knee, the jangle
in the beating blood that’s tangled
up in you and blending red
with blue, ascending from your chest
to head and fending off serrated notes
that catch it by its messy
hair and scratch the air above the bed
that’s empty, to the open throat
a breath away from pure whistle –
cactus flower, fruiting thistle,
wild and thin as mercury,
and every freckle spiking grace
from G to F to middle C,
and into bass. Your face
is spreading like a semibreve.
It’s over now, Queen Jane, Johanna,
Sara, Lily, Rosemary.
Sad-eyed lady. Lonesome sparrow.
Absolutely, sweet Marie.
(By me)
Richard O'Brien
Richard O’Brien is one of Pomegranate’s two submissions editors. He likes to think of himself as Charlotte Geater’s glamourless assistant.
He was born in Peterborough in 1990 and has returned only for weddings and funerals since starting at Brasenose College Oxford in 2008. He has also returned for holidays.
His first pamphlet, ‘your own devices’, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2009, and his first play ‘Instead of Beauty’ was the winner of the 2010 OUDS New Writing Festival. He enjoys the humiliation of directing autobiographical musicals. Other interests include travel, museums, travelling to museums, and walks on a long beach.