The Charles Sturt University Creative Practice Circle’s Crevice Communities Symposium is happening throughout next week (5 – 9 December 2022) in Wagga, NSW. I’ll be attending to present a short paper on my forthcoming book release ‘Ida: Searching for The Jazz Baby’. My thanks to the Australian Government’s Arts and Cultural Development Program, Regional Arts Australia and Regional Arts Victoria who are providing me with travel and accommodation support.
This link is to the Symposium Website and aganda. It’s an interesting program and I think it will be a cracker.
If you are interested in participating, the whole thing will be presented virtually as well as in-person in Wagga. Don’t hesitate to book a place for yourself. Did I mention? It is free to participate. Get on board, here. Just press ‘Get Tickets’ and you’re away!
How to read short poetry – an introduction (of sorts)
Have you ever tried to listen to someone struggling over how to read short poetry? It can be an aggravating experience. In any case, I’ll try to explain why I find it so, in a moment, but first I should acknowledge that short poetry – such as haiku and similar short forms – haibun, tanka and so on, are wonderful, disciplined writing forms, designed to pack a big conceptual and meaningful impact in just a handful of words. I like that concept very much.
I don’t enjoy the strictures and discipline that the forms demand.
For the most part, I also don’t enjoy listening to them being read aloud to an audience.
How to read to an audience – a brief refresher
Many, if not most authors have little idea of how to read to an audience or how to present their work to best advantage in a reading. This is the case whether for live or recorded readings.
It is something of an absent art which I don’t want to address in detail here, but will mention a couple of the more obvious “do’s and don’t’s“. My personal context is poetry reading, but the general principles apply regardless.
Quick Refresher Points
Pace of reading
Speaking too quickly. The golden rule is to read slowly. If you think you are reading slowly enough – go a little slower still. The audience needs time to take the material in and to extract a little meaning from it. Give them that time.
Love the microphone
Develop a love affair with the microphone. The mic needs to be part of an intimate relationship with the reader. It takes time and a little practice, but failure to develop this skill makes for a very dull experience for the listening audience.
Engage the audience
Failure to engage with the audience. The reader needs to look out at the audience from time to time during reading, to let them know that he or she is reading to them and for them. Catching the eye of one or more audience members at different points in the reading adds meaning and engagement with the audience. It can be tricky to achieve initially but needs to be practiced.
Select your material
A failure to select material for reading. This is more a problem for long-form writers – novelists and short stories. I’ve been in many audiences where the writer faces the page and reads – everything. No stopping until the end of page five, at least, of the reading. By this time the audience is all fidgets and is hearing little beyond a constant droning.
A reading goes much better with a selection, perhaps a few paragraphs to introduce a character, perhaps another few paragraphs to highlight an aspect of him or her, in the context of the story.
The audience wants to engage and the author can do worse than to share an anecdote that illuminates character development, rather than chapter and verse. They should buy the book to get that!
Pace of Reading
Read slower. Just because you thought you were reading slowly doesn’t mean that you were. Learning the pace to read at is a key part of the craft.
So, enough of that more general discussion. What I was really meaning to focus on was how to read short poetry. I’ll move on.
Reading poetry, in general, and in short
My experience of reading poetry in general is that it is a short form of writing. In my own work it is rare for a poem to span two minutes in reading time from start to finish. This most likely developed as a result of my early experience with open mic readings where the poet puts his or her name on a chalkboard to have their turn at reading three poems in five minutes (or less). If any one poem was too long, the poet had less time available to read more pieces on the day.
Focusing my mind on getting as much meaning as I could into relatively short pieces of writing shaped my writing. Most of my work, now, requires about one minute (more or less) to read to an audience.
That is a very short period of time in which to communicate what you want a listener or reader to take away with them. Imagine how much more difficult it must be to successfully master how to read short poetry.
Drawing again on my experience from open mic readings, it is very difficult and few master it (myself included).
Also from my experience from open mic readings, it is very difficult and few master it (myself included).
So, how should short poetry be read
After such a big build-up, I have to fudge my answer a little bit. I’m not aware of any one ‘right‘ way to do it. How to read short poetry remains in the domain of the writer, but I do have a couple of small ideas that perhaps serve as clues.
Back on the open mic stage, from time to time a short-form (usually haiku) poet would mount the podium in a way that held audience attention. This was difficult enough to achieve for the best of readers, because the sessions were always held in bar rooms, with a room full of self-centered poets all waiting their own turn at the mic, and not necessarily interested in other self-centered poets having their moment on the stage.
These few occasions caught my attention because I was interested in my craft and wanted to know everything.
What I learned at Open Mic
Engage the audience. Speak to them, catch their attention, perhaps give a little context for the reading. If the audience is listening before the poem is read, there is a good chance they will hear it as it is spoken.
Read the poem, the first time, slowly. A haiku can be read in about 5 seconds flat, or less. What is the point of that? Go slow.
Read it through a second time, equally slowly. The first time through, with a short poem, the listener is being asked to hear the structure and flow, the rhythm. A second reading allows the content and meaning to be taken in. If the reading is introduced in this way, and the audience invited to listen in that way, the reading becomes a very much richer experience.
Perhaps allow a moment of silence at the conclusion of the poem and before launching into the following poem.
That, I think, is how to read short poetry.
Some examples
Now that I have your attention . . .
No, I’m only jesting as, for all I know, I have already lost my audience by dragging this discussion out too long. Such things happen, but I have scoured through my Seventeen Syllable Poetry blog for some examples to read, just to see if the views I’ve expressed hold up in practice (I don’t get to open mic readings any more).
I’ve done these poems with a blank image background for the first read through, and the words superimposed for the second read through.
must be
must be is a short poem from a collection I worked on called ‘From NASA with Love’. The series came about in a period of delight after I discovered that the NASA Image and Video Library had been made available for access by the public.
must be – How To Read Short Poetry
worshipful
worshipful comes from a short series of poems written to celebrate a number of images I took – photographs – of mornings. I had in mind, and still am interested in pursuing, a book of morning poems (and a book of cloud poems, and a book of flying birds poems . . .).
worshipful – How To Read Short Poetry
bee sweet for me
bee sweet for me is a poem that comes from simple delight, and the desire to join with the image and the moment in some way.
bee sweet for me – How To Read Short Poetry
at the last
at the last comes as the final poem in a series I wrote on a walk. Just a random walk, in this case, taking photographs and later trying to match some words to them.
at the last– How To Read Short Poetry
Conclusion – thank you
That concludes my attempt to discuss and describe a few thoughts on how to read short poetry. I hope you found it interesting, amusing, provocative or outrageous. If so, please feel free to let me know.
If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on writing and poetry, you might enjoy these articles, or perhaps these.
In the last few days I’ve made some inroads toward getting the collection of poetry that arose from reading Gaston Bachelard’s writings (which I’m referring to as the Bachelard Interpreted series) into presentable shape. I posted on my poetry blog a little while back that it was a massive undertaking.
I’m delighted with progress.
The Complete Bachelard Interpreted – Table of Contents
The image above shows the complete Bachelard Interpreted collection structure. Usually with my books I have listed the poems, just as though they were chapters. I can’t do that here, because there are hundreds of poems.
Bachelard Interpreted – Index of Individual Poems
I’ve gotten around the issue of the number of poems by creating an Index and alphabetical listing that will sit at the very end of the book.
The printer (Ingram Sparks) can’t accommodate 1,700 pages in a single volume, and that is just as well, because I doubt that I could manage such a big book comfortably.
I’ll take a look at that issue later today and perhaps create several volumes for this purpose. I’ll mock up a cover theme to go with it/them later today as well, I hope.
Why create books that may only ever be for personal use?
I have a number of reasons for wanting to see Bachelard Interpreted (and other collections) in print form. I’ll list a few:
The poems have not been edited for print. I’m arrogant enough to believe that they are all nearly perfect, of course, just as they flowed from the pen, but realistic enough to know that is not true and they each will need attention.
I find the prospect of reviewing so much work on-screen to be quite daunting. A paper copy will allow me more freedom to work, I think (and hope).
The poems in the Bachelard Interpreted collection are laden with imagery. Or should be!
I want to try to experience the work as the reader of my imagination would – book in hand while having a lie-in in bed, or with a coffee.
I feel a sense of urgency to have my work produced in book form.
Much of my life is bound up in what I have written over the journey and, while I still have access to it online, in my computer and blog archives and here and there, computer records are not proof, in the way that a physical book is proof.
I feel that seeing the work in book form, on a library shelf – even if it is only my own library in my own home, represents the practical recognition of the thing that I have been, or tried to be.
Further to the previous point, I’m a bit of a sentimental old fool, at heart. That in itself is a reason.
With each experience of assembling written materials into book form, my skills in this area of black art improve a little. It is necessary, though, to keep practicing to keep improving.
Finally, a reason particular to Bachelard Interpreted. I have a feeling that I may never write better than I did when I was under the spell of Bachelard, through reading his translated books. I want to find out if I still believe that is so by reading them in a book.
What next for Bachelard Interpreted?
Next will come a decision about how many volumes to cut this big assemblage of poetry into. Probably three volumes, I think, but I’ll look at it a little later.
After that, a cover for each volume.
It’s tempting to make a very utilitarian and simple cover for this set of books. Perhaps plain black, with white cover printing, in keeping with their status as ‘working volumes’, but I’m not sure. Cover art is still a mystery to me and I’ll take the opportunity to play a little with a couple of ideas I have.
Store
In the meantime, don’t forget that I have a number of books that can be purchased through the usual online outlets.
If you are resident in Australia, paperback copies of all my work can be purchased through my store. I’m happy to sign or inscribe these on request.
I won’t speak about Harris so much here, other than to say that I was introduced to her work in about 1975 or 1976 and have not wandered in my belief that she is the purest interpreter of other people’s songs, and a superb songwriter to boot. My choice for best Emmylou Harris song harks back to that era, and is Boulder to Birmingham.
Now that is a love song!
She has consistently, my favoured and favourite artist over all those years, and I incorporated my admiration for her as an artist in the poem titled and again in the Walk Away Silver Heart collection, the first part of my A Love Poetry Trilogy.
How does music inspire? Meet me at the Wrecking Ball . . .
Wrecking Ball, when it was released, came as a mood shift and a mindset change. A resonant confrontation with feeling and emotion.
The year twenty-twenty is a time made for such confrontation. Truly, no cuckoos, no sycamores. No Harlan to go back to at all, really. We seem to be living through such grim times that it is hard to find good reasons that are strong enough to dominate their counterparts.
Of the songs – stories, in truth – on that Emmylou Harris album, one of them in particular swirled in my mind and became a driving force in a writing project that I did not know I was undertaking (in 2018) until it was almost completed.
Neil Young wrote the title track with great poignancy, and at a time when I – who consider myself to be a private person – was striving for publicity and recognition in order to establish myself as a poet with a public persona and some credibility, the incongruousness and irreconcilable nature of the undertaking resolved as lines in my head, playing over and over:
My life’s an open book You read it on the radio
Interview after interview, publicity post after publicity post. Public reading after public reading. And, eventually, in poem after poem to invoke an opening mood that ran consistently through each poem, and across an entire collection.
Writing fantasy for the first time
I had an opportunity during 2018 to contribute a poem to an anthology based on the dual themes of rain forest and fantasy, which eventually was oublished as Short Stories of Forest and Fantasy, by OzTales. I’d never deliberately written fantasy prior to this opportunity and set to with enthusiasm, eventually contributing a post-apocalyptic, dystopian themed piece called blue dog.
I kept writing.
The poetry traversed simple fantasy within a forest to encompass life on a mining asteroid, and fighting a war while mounted on the back of a dragonfly named Isosceles. Many miles swept up in dreams of alternative experience, escape from the mundane, explanations for the inexplicable, all driven by the lines from Wrecking Ball that I held in my mind as a guide through the wilds of my imagination.
What happened to the fantasy collection?
Where is that collection, now? Well, the only answer I have for that is to say that it is waiting. It has a name or, more true to say, several names. I have called it Od Ovo and other stories, after a teenaged character who’s name is drawn from a place that is so constraining it can only be that inferior location ‘from here/from this’, even if here is on another place in the cosmos.
It has also been named ‘abacus the stars’ to reflect the limits of calculation, and the pull of home on a journey across the universe.
In truth, though, I don’t know what it may be called, in the end. I’ll publish it one day, whenever its turn comes. Until then, it remains as a small beacon shining in my mind, entwined with the songs of the Wrecking Ball album and Emmylou Harris. A warm place to stumble across from time to time.
A sample from the unpublished fantasy collection
I haven’t published any of the poems from the fantasy collection, to date. They bide quietly. Today, though I thought it might be right to share a poem from that set with you.
storm and the sea (bubbles of foam)
I called to joe I said
there’s a boat trying to fly right out of the water
the wind had taken a breath and it was blowing
even as I spoke I saw a wave lift up that vessel
then crash it down like a fragile toy built poor by some clumsy child
there is no light to speak of when you’re staring at the heart of the storm
grey-black cloud green water
the white maybe of salt
even a man is just a pale thing
a dark shape
a nothing at all but the brilliant shrieking song
of a wild wind
joe took me by the arm
said
nothing here
nothing left
there is only the sea
not even a board from the decking made it to shore
not a cry that didn’t hail from the wind of hell itself
At times, the structure of a poem can take a range of forms, and arise from an array of potential inspirations.
This particular poem is drawn from reading about dreams and the movement of air (Bachelard – Air and Dreams), but it starts with a voice, external to the narrator.
come to me I am your singer
I am your song
This is the voice of awakening from a dream. Later we find that it is also the call of a bird.
The bird is Spring.
The sleep we are waking from is Winter.
sing with me
The voice is insistent. It calls us to wake, and to come alive.
It wants us to be as one, with the newness and renewal of Spring. And gradually the answering voice emerges …
I will sing
… from the depths of Winter sleep.
Our voice is found, and we sing.
It is a new season.
goodbye old winter
~~~
the song of the end (of winter)
come to me I am your singer
I am your song
it has been
a long winter
come raise your eyes
sing with me
yes
it’s been a long winter
rain
rain
there has been snow
sing sing with me
such a weighty burden
of weariness
fell
with each fresh coating
of new frost
come along lift your head
all I want
is to sleep
is to slumber on
through the grey
all through
the short light
that is winter
now
this bird
sing
raise yourself into the new light and sing
this chirping bird
sings of light
and sun
that is come again
a resurrection
of
spirit
sing
I will sing
sing along
sing along with you
perhaps
that was the last
of old winter
the bird
sing …
sing …
the bird
perhaps
is more aware
perhaps it knows
more than me
more than me
sing along
goodbye old winter
~
Poem #490 from a series of poems drawn from the imagination and collected as: a Bachelard reverie.
This time, I’ve recorded them, without printed words. Nothing too sophisticated. Just the fun of recording new work to ‘try it out’. Clearly, to me, one piece is stronger. Both would probably shape up better with some work, and if ever considered for a ‘performance’, they’d get some polish in the 1 – 2 weeks beforehand.
Recently, I’ve had conversations with two different writers – one a poet, the other a novelist – about the art and craft of writing. My fellow writers found themselves at something of a disadvantage, as both of them come from non-English speaking backgrounds, while both were attempting to express themselves by writing in the English language.
I find English to be a tricky language. It is not written quite the way that it is spoken, and the rules of grammar focus on sentence construction more than they do (in my opinion, at least) to the way the language is spoken, or the ways in which it is heard by a listener.
How difficult must it be for a writer who has English only as a second language.
Actually, never mind that writer, I can declare that it is more than difficult enough for me, a person who uses it in various forms of written or spoken expression every day in the pursuit of my craft.
It was the experience of reading my work to live audiences that started to seriously impact on the way I wrote my stories and verse, because I found that I could not retain mastery of long passages of writing. I lost my sense of rhythm, of lilt and nuance. I found that a comma was not of great assistance in determining when I should pause for emphasis, or to take a breath. Apostrophes were ruinous.
Music addresses these issues, but written English, in my view, does not.
Take a look at the passage I’ve written into the table below. Above is my group of sentences. Three in total, on two lines, so not such a great mass of writing.
Below, the same sentences are presented in the style I use for my readings.
How often do we pause to breathe? What nuance, what inflection do we use when we speak?
How is it that, when you speak, I hear music?
how often do we pause to breathe
what nuance what inflection do we use when we speak
how is it that when you speak I hear music
Elaboration of reading/breathing style in poetry – Frank Prem
What are the features of the rewritten sentences in the lower pane of the box?
There is minimal or no punctuation to distract me. As a matter of routine, I use only a capital letter for the personal pronoun (‘I’), and an apostrophe for contractions (it is = it’s).
I have inserted a line break at each point (to my ear) of emphasis or inflection, equating to a short – sometimes almost imperceptible – pause.
I have employed a stanza break where I believe a pause is needed for breath.
What I’ve found in practice is that this use of short line structures and the search for emphasis points allows me to also find the music that is inherent in the language. Remember I trade in the craft of free verse – no rhyming to set the rhythm and cadence. The free verse form needs to find the music that is hidden in the song of day-to-day speech or it becomes difficult to read as poetry.
I have also found that when inviting a member of the audience to join me on stage (as I do, sometimes) the experience is less daunting for my unwitting co-reader, and quite straightforward for them to read coherently and without significant stumbles.
I think about this in a context that I recall, of children trying to read aloud while standing at the front of their class – book held up high, nose down low to the page and an unbroken gabble of words pouring out. The pause being, generally, to allow a moist, nasal sniff, as the reader comes up for air.
What advice did I offer to my two writing friends each with their different language backgrounds?
Listen, first, to your native speech. Listen in order to find and hear the music hidden within it. The cadences and metre of speech and the song that belong to that language.
Then, listen to English. Break it down until you can find your own sense of song in this language. That is when your English writing will begin to run more smoothly.
Recently I had opportunity to participate in a writing exercise run by Australian Speculative Fiction, and requiring a complete story to be written out of the contemplation of a photographic image posted on their ASF Facebook site.
Writing to images is an activity that I have done a great deal of in recent times and I find contemplation of images is a rewarding pastime that can add an extra dimension to a piece of writing. For example, in my work I seek to create word imagery. I like my reader to be able to come along on a journey, with just the words to steer them along. Listeners can close their eyes and experience a kind of travel.
With the use of a picture – an image allows a pre-existing point of contemplation. This in turn becomes a point of departure for the poem, and adds a requirement for the reader to revisit – the picture – the poem – back to the picture, and so on. Potentially, form of enhancement of the reading experience.
Going back to the example I referred to above, the good folk at ASF chose a poem I’d written to publish on their web site (among a number of other high quality responses), for which I am very grateful, but that was the second piece I had written for that particular image, and it set me to thinking about the nature of these contemplations. Where looking at an image today produces one piece of work. The same image tomorrow results in a completely different contemplation and poem.
I found that I wanted to give each poem an airing, rather than discard the non-selected piece. After all, what do you do with a piece of writing that is particularly derived from an image when a brother/sister piece is the chosen one? Discard it?
No discarding today. What I thought I’d do is put the two poems side by side beneath the picture, as an illustration of the varying possibilities that arise out of ongoing contemplation.
I’d be most interested to chat about or receive any thoughts you might like to share about this.
The playground image provided by ASF to provoke the writing experi
George
only the wind (is free)
I know where
this mist
comes from
I know the reek
of lizard
I know the heat
that moves the air
to make a swing squeak
aloud …
so mournful …
my armor snug
my visor low
I have a lance
I heft the weight
of Sword
the balance
in my right hand
trusty
good
my right hand
now
is the time
to bend my knee
to bow my head
my helmet
whisper a prayer
for safety
and an end
to all the things
that are
this lizard
the things that are
all lizards
I know the smoke
that drives away
the innocent
and the naïve
the nostrils of this worm
make for quake
and quiver
but
not me
not I
I am strong
in heart
great in thew
and
I know
where the reptile
lies hiding
end my prayer
I
end my prayer
with murmur
then a shouting
so loud
it is the dragons turn
to whimper
uttered into this foetid air:
my name
is george
yea
yea
MY
NAME
IS GEORGE!
~
here
in the graveyard
of abandoned dreams
the ghost
in the wind is free
to play
listen …
the squeal
is the rhythm
of a swing grown too rigid
to back and forth
by wistful breath
the rattle
of the branches
speaks
urging
come on
come on
but the ghost remains
opaque
even as it moans
a hollow
to the sky
oh oh
oh-oh
the slide
is a shriek of shivers
of a fingernail
and a drag
from the top
right to the bottom
of the cry
and somewhere
disappearing
is a remnant
of the laughter
of a child
ha-a ha-ha-ha
ha-a
ooo-oo-ooo
oh
the ghost in the wind
is in
the mist
and in the fog
