Word games

There’s more to writing poetry than fitting words into a pretty pattern

If you get a group of writers together, it’s pretty much impossible to come up with a definition of poetry that they will all agree on. One of my personal favourites describes poetry as “the genre where the writer exercises more control over the presentation of the text on the page than the layout artist does”, but I’ll admit it isn’t tremendously helpful.

This quote from Phil Roberts is another of my favourites:

The most complex and ‘adult’ word-game of all: the poem.

Perhaps this idea of a “word-game” helps to explain why, at poetry writing workshops, tutors so often set game-like challenges to get the participants writing.

This can be useful, but it can also draw unnecessary attention to the mechanical, puzzle aspect of writing: strict forms such as sonnets end up being reduced to syllable counts and stresses arranged with mathematical precision and the results completely fail as poetry.

Many years ago I came across a challenge that involved hiding words in the wrap between line breaks. This was my response:

Have you seen the hunters? Riding
whip-like, along the horizon –
tally ho! — after the fox.

Trotting now; slowing; walking the horses; waiting;
listening as the Master of Hounds whistles
to panting dogs. Now, once more, they’ve caught the scent:

bottled energy detonates and they’re off
springing, bounding, jumping over fence and hedge,
rowdily baying pursuit. Disappearing at last from view:
points fading into nothing. The curtain closes.

Although I realised it wasn’t anything special, I remember being quite proud at the time that I had managed to produce a reasonably coherent piece of writing that had all the right tops-and-tails run-ons between lines without unnatural twisting of word order and without too many clichés etc.

Re-reading it later, I began to see just how badly it fails: the overt text is facile and doesn’t fulfil its role as a poem as I was much too focused on contriving the run-ons between lines. These are correctly placed and the piece even loops back on itself, so the text fits the mechanics of the puzzle template. But it fails as a poem.

One of the things I love about poetry is the possibilities of using it to show deeper truths — the layer upon layer of ideas that careful wordplay, punctuation and line breaks can reveal to those who read closely. And, reading with that criterion in mind, what I wrote here contains no actual poetry. What’s more, there’s no consistency or elegance between the way the embedded words are formed, and they fail to connect, or add insight, to the poem as a whole.

The complete list of hidden words — riding-whip, horizontally, fox-trot, waiting list, whistle-stop, scent bottle, offspring, hedgerow, view point, close shave — clarifies nothing, reveals nothing, and adds nothing to the simplistic overt text; they don’t even work together as a group to offer a stand-alone parallel story. So the text I wrote fulfilled the terms of the challenge, but in an entirely superficial manner. It’s as if I’ve completed the crossword grid using the simple clues, not the cryptic, as if I played the children’s version of a word game: the answer is technically correct, but it doesn’t show any sophistication or adult wit.

This is one of the problems of writing poems in response to prompts and challenges: it’s easy to get bogged down in the challenge details and forget that the aim is actually to write poetry.

I’m not suggesting we should reject this kind of prompt completely, but we shouldn’t force ourselves to follow arbitrary rules if they aren’t helpful. Workshop exercises are often good as starting points, but they aren’t necessarily going to be more than jumping off points.

In this case, I could have gone back and written about the topic in a less simplistic manner, ignoring the idea of hidden run-ons. Or maybe there’s an image I could explore — perhaps even one of the ones I had to reject in order to complete the challenge. Maybe that odd collection of hidden words could trigger a more interesting line of thought that’s worth pursuing.

It’s far too late for this piece now: I won’t go back to it, as it didn’t really interest me even at the time: it was never more than a mechanical construction. Even so, it’s a useful reminder that the overriding aim of the poet should be to write good poetry. And poetry isn’t a simple word game.