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joanne burns

Not Another Poem...

(on the craft of poetry)

This was first published in the Spring 2004 issue of Five Bells —
the quarterly journal of the New South Wales Poets’ Union.

i. dreadlocks ?

After more than thirty years of writing poems [with a view to publication] one of the strongest impulses for me at the moment — and it’s quite a long moment — is not to write. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to write, it’s more that the urge to resist writing is often the stronger imperative. It’s not that I feel it especially hard to sit down and write a poem, it’s that a part of myself recognises a flattening familiarity in the ideaswordsfeelingsvoicerhythmsimagesblahblahblah that the poem generates or gestures towards, in my head or on the page. It’s a ‘been there done that’/ ‘more of the same’ predicament. Poetry by template; join the dots poetry. This sense of repetition is certainly not the ping of deja vu, nor does it involve the almost lethal maze of ‘dreads’ that Blanchot writes of in his essay ‘From Dread to Language’ *. It’s closer to the banal irritation that a stream of market research phone calls provokes : sorry, not interested.
[hang up on that poem before it’s had a chance to open its mouth any further].

ii. no fixed address ?

When, however, I do write my writing practice is generally without discipline or routine — and that’s the way I seem to like it. I have no regular place or site where I write though I rarely write outside my home, unless I get a pressing idea or line which needs to be jotted down on whatever is in my bag or pocket. But more often than not if I get an idea or a line/ image when I’m out I store it in my head, working from the belief that if it’s got a spark or bang to it I won’t forget it. I don’t keep a special notebook or journal. If I do record any hints of a possible poem it might be on a small or large piece of paper, in a pad or maybe in a folder. Right now I have several poems begun up to a year or so ago which lie waiting to be completed. I’m just not in the mood for them, but I haven’t forgotten them. I just have to wait for the right moment to get back to them. I recently completed a poem I had left lying under a pile of papers and books for around twelve months or more, after reading a Judith Beveridge poem that had a moment in it with a connection to my unfinished poem. In a couple of hours one afternoon my poem was finished. I’ve learnt patience with writing. If the poem’s still breathing it will resurface. There’s no use forcing oneself to complete it. I want writing to be a freedom, not an obligation or duty.

While routine is not for me, I do have one fairly fixed writing habit. 99.9999% of the time I write by hand. I like to almost scribble down the words in a small sometimes semi-indecipherable script, crossing out as I go. It’s a tentative process, the writing just a hint or a possibility, a whiff of a poem. I will continue to handwrite the next drafts until I’m satisfied there’s something ready to be typed into the computer and polished up. The rituals of drafting one reads about in accounts of poets’ processes often bemuse me. For example R did 15-20 drafts of a poem. Are these individual, separate drafts. Usually my drafts wouldn’t reach more than half a dozen, but then I read and reread a draft, crossing out and revising on the same sheet/ s of paper. Is this one draft or ten? I wonder whether poets exaggerate the numbers of drafts a poem took to complete, due to the pressures of a version of the old Protestant work ethic : poets are otiose creatures, layabouts, dilettantes and dreamers who don’t work hard enough [not like those novelists who grind away from 9 — 5].

One place I don’t write at is ‘the desk’. I have avoided such a writing site as if forever. My ‘desk’ is always full of other ‘papers’ — correspondence, bills to be paid, reminder notes, xy zeds. No room for writing there. I write from a place of no fixed address. From an armchair, a kitchen bench, a clutter-free dining room table, lying on the bed. I find the horizontal position particularly good for catching that first flutter of a poem, where the spinal chord, the solar plexus are not bent over, where the channels of energy/ awareness from the lower to the higher chakras through the manipura chakra [round the navel or omphalos] are smoother, more unimpeded, relaxed. Of course pen and paper by one’s side are a help. One could call this way of writing the ‘drift and sift’ style. I sometimes wonder why I have this ‘roaming’ proclivity. Perhaps my first desk I received at the age of five or six is a clue. It was one of those sloping lift-top desks decorated with an galleon ship coursing across boldly moving waves painted in thick black strokes and flourishes. It may have given me the idea that a desk is an object or place of permanent motion, determined by the winds of one’s mood.. A while back I got into a brief practice of waking up at one or two in the morning and writing poetry for an hour or so sitting on a stool at the narrow kitchen bench, then going back to sleep, and later forgetting that I’d ever written these poems. It felt like a double life. This writing process didn’t last long and it’s not something I’d ever plan as a ‘project’. But I enjoyed it, the way the impulse to write just came out of the blue, or rather the dark.. To make a habit of it would have made me groan ‘O no, not another poem!’

Occasionally though the ‘not another poem’ feeling does transform into ‘another poem!’ The one you’ve been waiting for. The poem that’s an auto-tonic. Around the beginning of last summer, after a trip to the Caravaggio exhibition, I wrote a poem called ‘an illustrated history of dairies’. Art and dairies? Actually it’s art and icecream.. A summer poem. One that made me feel about twenty poems younger.

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