National Poetry Month 2021 Writing Challenge
Here are links to all the poems I wrote for the April 2021 National Poetry Month Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, set by Paul Brookes using art work by Jane Cornwell, John Law and Kerfe Roig.
Wikipedia describes the word ekphrasis, or
ecphrasis, as follows: "it comes from the Greek for the description of a work of art
produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined."
In this case I have sometimes done this, but mainly I've allowed the art to inspire a poem around the subject of the piece, often tangential.
I don't usually create and publish poems at speed so I consider all of these as drafts and they will almost certainly be edited, revised or left in their original form if they are beyond help. I've decided to look back at each of them and describe what they are about and why I wrote them - if I can figure it out.
April 1st - mummy's gone
My immediate reaction, looking back at this, is how arresting the drawing is. The child in the poem is perhaps younger than the one in the picture. Children, and indeed adults, have a place they go when things have got really bad and this is how I saw this drawing. The event itself isn't obvious - more likely to be the mother leaving than passing away, I think. I deliberately used lower case throughout, and no punctuation, to emphasis the age of the narrator. I think this one can work without the drawing and just needs maybe a little tweaking.
April 2nd - La Luna
I'm not sure whether the artist intended this to look like a corrupted moon, but that's what I saw.
The form is a sonnet, with some half-rhymes. These are often used when something is amiss. The turn isn't really obvious, probably comes when you realise it's only the narrator that can see this. Is the narrator mad, or is everyone else not seeing the problem? I think the poem can stand without the picture, but the picture adds to it. It's hard to edit a sonnet, but I may need to have a look at this one again.
April 3rd - Chysanthemums
I did a bit of background research on this flower and it raised the question of flowers as a symbol - often opposite things in different cultures. In this case of a failed marriage. A simple 2 stanza ABBA rhyming scheme in iambic pentameter. I quite like this one. It's miserable, though. That's 3 doom laden poems in a row.
April 4th - Digging a Duck Blind at Spurn
I like this one. I've never been
to Spurn but I have a mental image of it, and I quite like the idea of
places that are remote, and the emptiness of river deltas and marsh land
near the sea. I'd jotted a few things down and then the first line came to me, and I wanted to hook the poem around it. So much that I used it twice. The idea of land masses ebbing and flowing over long time periods also appeals, although now it seems that rising sea levels will mean this only goes one way. It's a free verse poem, and I think still needs some small tweaks, but it's a keeper.
April 5th - Orbiting
This was the first day I struggled to get something out. The art work intrigued me, and I wanted to write something about having fractured images. The second one (the alien one) came first and I gratefully wrote it down and kept it. It's not particularly original, though. The first one is closer to what I wanted to say, but will be something I may work on again / change / expand rather than keep.
April 6th - Homeless
This definitely feels like a draft - it's too much like prose in parts and isn't the best homelessness poem I've written. The ideas are OK I think - there are two ideas in one poem though (the fragility of a secure job and home, the reality of homelessness), and maybe it's best to concentrate on one. It's also structured into stanzas, but whether it needs that or not I don't know.
April 7th - Granite
This one's nice and short, and I think with a bit of work it could be OK. The subject is definitely that of experience and wisdom being ignored. I realised after I'd written it that, buried in the poem, it might be more personal than I imagined. Despite how good the drawing is, I was struggling a bit for ideas at first so I used the technique of just writing down any words that came into my head when I looked at the image and then incorporating them into the poem.
April 8th - Guacamole
This simple painting of the ingedients of guacamole made me think immediately of the markets in Spain - the non-standardised vegetables and fruits. I can almost smell them. This has the feel of a draft - more prose than poem - but I like some of the bits. Probably too much exposition at the end.
April 9th - Selkie
This is inspired as much by Nancy Kerr's song Fragile Water as it is by Jane's artwork. Selkie is the name given to creatures who shape shift between seal and human forms and is Scots in origin. In many of the folk tales the selkie is female but I decided to twist that. If they lose their seal skin they can be stuck as humans. It's written in Anglo-Saxon rhythm, which relies heavily on alliteration and is better when read aloud than it is on the page. I quite like this one, but it probably needs some work. This will entail recording and listening back as much as reading it. If you know Beowulf, there are some references or "borrowings" from that too.
April 10th - Ethereal Blue
This is definitely a bit different but I'm not sure I like it or even understand what it's about. Still, it's what came to me when I saw the painting. It feels like a dream I may have had, although I don't remember any dream exactly like this. I also use the word "wherein" which I never use. I think I'll park this one...
April 11th - Sylvia
Back on more familiar and structured territory with a villanelle. I had recently watched the (not very good) film about Sylvia Plath and this image, and her story and relationship with Ted Hughes, triggered this poem. She wrote one of the best villanelles - A Mad Girl's Love Song - and the topic of this poem lends itself to an obsessive form. I'm always pleased when a structured poem works so this one will definitely be kept.
April 12th - Pebble Bird
I like this little sonnet. It's not Shakespearean, as it's in 8 syllables, not 10, and it breaks the iambic rhythm a bit. I like the half and near rhymes that stop it being too sing-song. The idea of us all being stuck in a certain limited life, that has its own beauty, until we are washed away is quite nicely handled.
April 13th - The Harbour
This is the best of the bunch so far. A free verse poem that, unusually, started in the middle and worked outwards. I normally either find a line that ends up being first or last, or I just write prose, chop it back and add in the rhythm later. I started with "The tide has lapped to the wooden steps
as if it wants to climb and roam the town." I also like the new first line that appeared later. The last line is the only one that really links to the painting but it still works - there may be better ones but it's intriguing and, actually, appropriate to the numbness of what has occurred. The idea of the tide being a metaphor for the expectation of what should have happened, and its recession matching the reality is pretty good. Very pleased overall.
This is definitely a draft of something I want to develop - there are some good lines and the sentiment is right but this poem isn't there in either rhythm or structure.
Inspired by Jane Cornwell's grim image, this poem treads familiar ground in terms of mortality, but think it manages to avoid being too much of a cliche. Whether it stands alone from the painting is interesting. It only alludes to the hanging tangentially, but the theme of getting old, seeing your friends disappear and having new life continue around you is relevant. At least for some of us.
If I'm struggling with creating something from a prompt, I find a haiku is a good option to get something flowing. That's what I did here - I didn't know which art work to pick either so I wrote a haiku for each. I then thought, why not just create a sequence - this is a variant of a renga form. As with haiku, the true renga needs multiple people and has more rules than you can shake a stick at regarding content and structure. I used a 5-7-5 followed by a 7-7-7 and did at least acknowledge the seasonal nature of this Japanese poetic form. I think it's turned out OK. I also hope that Google has got that title right and it doesn't mean "Disenchanted helicopter"
April 17th - Back from Shopping
Not a poem, really. After so many depressing poems I felt I had to write something a bit more light-hearted. Although it does have a death in it. I don't think this piece will go much further, though. It just helped me to have a bit of a break from the serious stuff.
April 18th - She Breathes
A COVID poem - not much to say about it really. I don't know how the NHS front line staff kept going at the worst points in the crisis, as they risked their own health watching people struggle to breathe. The poem rhymes in two ways - the internal ABAB and the rhyming of each of the extra fifth lines with each other. It also uses one of Paul Brookes' favourite tricks of using the title as the first line. It is a bit clunky in parts but it might be worth trying to rework the bits that don't work.
April 19th - Toads
The idea of a toadstool actually being a toad's stool triggered this poem. Of course the title invokes Larkin and there may be a hint of him in there. I quite like this one, although it isn't necessarily very layered or original.
April 20th - Folly
I decided with this one to research the folly in the painting and include its story in the poem. The second image gave me the characters. I'm not quite sure what the poem is trying to say, but maybe that's the point, since it's maybe a folly itself. It needs a little bit of work but might be worth keeping. I'll revisit it later. It sparked a discussion when I posted it on the workshop facebook page regarding "the dog and he" - it's gramatically correct but sounds a bit forced linguistically, although it scans nicely. The poem starts off in iambic but then breaks into free verse. I need to make my mind up...
April 21st - Art
This appears to be a mining poem and it was inspired in part by a drawing of a miner by John Law. However its main thrust is around the concept of art, what it is, and who judges it. the same may well apply to poetry. I quite like this one as a stand-alone piece as it is but probably won't develop it further. Warning: Contains swearing!
April 22nd - Strange
This is the most deeply personal poem of the 30 in this challenge. Jane Cornwell's drawing happened to coincide with the date on which both my Mum and Dad died. I probably would have made any artwork connect with this, subconsciously, but it seemed very appropriate to put the idea of this poem down on paper. Electronically, at least. I don't think I'll change it much, if at all. From a poetic standpoint I like it's simple structure and the bracketing of the core of the poem with the matching, although not identical, start and end lines.
April 23rd - Magic Afoot
Shakespeare's birthday inspired this, and it borrows shamelessly from the Scottish play. My words do have links to Kerfe Roig's collage, though. Not much to the poem other than that really. I'll leave it up to you as to whether the interleaving of two poems works or not.
April 24th - Snipe
I had to resort to haiku again, but this time it's just 3 standard 5-7-5 form haiku. I quite like the idea here of linking the snipe and the sniper. I may have to extend it outside the haiku form, but maybe I'll leave it.
April 25th - April Shower
I quite like this - I'm not sure why it's laid out as two line stanzas but it seems OK. There may be some parts that could be refined - for example I'm not sure the snake simile works.
April 26th - Apparition
If I remember, I was struggling to connect with the 3 pieces on offer so this was almost a stream of consciousness based on what I saw in Kerfe Roig's interpretation of the Tarot card. I'm not really happy with what came out so this will probably join the pile of "never rans".
April 27th - The Trap
This is written in the "Mirrored Fib" form, based on the Fibonacci
Sequence. The Fibonacci Sequence is a mathematical sequence seen often
in nature, and many spider's webs have the spiral form linked to it. See
the blog for full details. The form requires you to expand from extremely small lines (1 syllable) to very long ones then back again - it's easy to expand out and much harder to slam the brakes on. I used internal rhyming on the long lines to make them sound less like prose. I'm not totally happy with the words at the end as it still sounds a little forced. I'll keep this one but probably have another go at the ending.
April 28th - The Hill
A strange ghostly one, written in blank verse. Definitely needs work, or perhaps rewriting in another form. The Latin's probably wrong too.
April 29th - Ikaros
Ikaros is the Greek spelling of Icarus, who in mythology flew too close to the sun in the wings his father made of feathers and wax. He fell to his death. The birds in the painting are waxwings (see what I did there?) and this triggered the story. The poem is intended to be in the style of Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet of the early 20th Century. Or, strictly speaking, in the style of one of Ian Parks' translations of Cavafy. I quite like it, but can probably ramp up the Cavafyness a bit in places.
April 30th - The Death of Dignity
The painting for this seemed Victorian so I decided to go for a Romantic-style ballad form with personification of human traits, where a famous example would be Shelley's Masque of Anarchy. The rhymes are not always full, and sometimes quite tenous, but this is deliberate to keep it from being too smooth and to focus on the somewhat grim message. It's appropriate as I had a friendly Twitter exchange yesterday with someone who said we should just all believe in Britain and not worry about being exploited and robbed by the ruling class.
Here is my personal ranking of the poems
Ranking
1 - The Harbour
2 - Strange
3 - Ikaros
4 - The Old Tree
5 - Digging a Duck Blind At Spurn
6 - Sylvia
7 - April Shower
8 - Pebble Bird
9 - Chrysanthemums
10 - La Luna
11 - Art
12 - Granite
13 - Toads
14 - Folly
15 - The Death of Dignity
16 - Selkie
17 - She Breathes
18 - Snipe
19 - 孤独な月
20 - The Trap
21 - mummy's gone
22 - Guacamole
23 - Sheffield 1979
24 - The Hill
25 - Apparition
26 - Magic Afoot
27 - Back from Shopping
28 - Orbiting
29 - Ethereal blue
30 - Homeless
