The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

tetractyses

are welcome to them, far as I’m concerned

and I really cannot see the virtue

in flipping them:

too heavy

on top

no?

Mr Stebbing is a serious and accomplished poet, and if he believes his form to be the new native haiku then I wish him well. An even arsier form is the NONET:deathto thosewho composesuch wastes of breaththey have no gracesat least in my poor eyesthey suggest useless tracesof ancient forms more pure and wisewhen people start to count, true verse dies.

The syllabic count starts at one and increases until it reaches nine. Mine, in desperation, rhymes. Syllabics? Silly bollocks, more like.

ACROSTICS

ACROSTICS have been popular for years; nineteenth-century children produced them instead of watching television–those who were lucky enough not to be sent down chimneys or kidnapped by gangs of pickpockets did, anyway.So you want a dedication then?For you I’ll do my very bestRead the letters downwards, darling, thenYou’ll see I’ve passed your little test.

What is going on below, you might wonder?age is areal buggerso few yearsending up whitewrinkled weak as strawincontinence comes and ipiss myself in every way–stopeternity’s too short too short a time

That is a DOUBLE ACROSTIC, both the first and last letters of each line spell out the same defiance and physical disgust. I haven’t highlighted the letters; you can trace them down yourself. In case you are wondering, I have not reached that stage yet–it is an imaginative leap, we are allowed those from time to time: all functions working smoothly last time I checked. You could in theory spell words down from the middle of a line–this is called a mesostich and is just plain silly.

The French seem to be the people most interested in acrostics and other poetic wordplay. Salomon Certon wrote a whole sonnet omitting the letter ‘e’: this is known as a LIPOGRAM. Not the same root as liposuction, as it happens, despite the apparent similarity of meaning. These days, you might feel, a poem that never uses an ‘I’ would be a real achievement…

PARONOMASIA is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these: ‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.

Keats slips most of the name of his hero into a line in the poem Endymion: this is known as a PARAGRAM:

…IWill trace the story of Endymion.The very music of the name has gone

There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practitioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, -dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, -swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliché has it, they are my friends. I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle. I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries, that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none.²⁰ It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork–art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence–but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.

In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed…

Poetry Exercise 20

Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.