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Torturing a poem

Philip Pullman has been busy writing – in October he released two new books. The first is the beginning of a new series which will be a sort of prequel to His Dark Materials. The second, released on 26 October, is his first non-fiction work, Daemon voices. You may have been listening to this on BBC Radio Four, where it has been adapted into five fifteen minute readings as Book of the Week, still available on iPlayer. (You can find the programme here, if you’re in the UK)

Daeman Voices is a book of essays on storytelling, in which Pullman talks about his experience of writing, reading and plotting stories, and imparts, almost by-the-by, the wisdom of a writer who is both experienced storyteller and acclaimed author.
Pullman has always been a slightly controversial figure, both for the themes he employs in his works of fiction, and the opinions he expounds in press articles. But I found these essays hugely insightful and inspiring, and recommend them to all creative writing students. The book itself is a treasure, but the glory of the Radio Four series is listening to Pullman’s voice, which helps compound the sense of what he wants to say.
Pullman talks about the start of any piece of writing…out of the welter of events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that you experience in your head…one of your sentences is going to be the first…and recalls how Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended science lectures to renew his stock of metaphors, suggesting that…Science is damn useful to steal from…something that Pullman has never denied doing. He also points out that our own wealth of memories add particularly to the events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that are growing in a writer’s head. He remembers being a student at Exeter University, crawling along a gutter behind a parapet and get the next staircase. He says…some of the pleasures of writing fiction is that you can sit at your desk and make up what you are too lazy to go and find out…and when I find something interesting but irrelevant to my immediate purpose, I save it up and invent a context to fit it.
We can take this piece of advice any way we please, by attending talks, reading widely, listening to speech radio or the internet (I particularly recommend the randomness of TED talks, available on Youtube) continuing to add all those accumulate, if disparate idea to our Commonplace Book.
Pullman recalls reading Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost, aloud in his 6th form class, and talks about how important it is to experience reading poetry aloud when you don’t understand it. He says…The sound is part of the meaning, and that only comes alive when you speak it – you’re already closer to the poem than someone who reads it in their head, looking up references and making assiduous notes… He suggests that if you ‘interrogate a poem’ the results will be worthless, ‘as the results of torture always are’. …Poetry is in fact, enchantment, that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell, and that when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were, in fact, being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchantment and enjoy it they would eventually understand much more about the poem. Pullman suggests that the best test for poetry is that your ‘heart beats faster the hair on your head stirs, your skin bristles’. How beautifully put; poetry is enchantment that can make your hair stand on end.
I can remember, when I was about 13, deciding I’d learn Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot off by heart. I’d just read Anne of Green Gables, and was moved and inspired to read the poem. I barely understood what it was about as I read in my head, and I skipped many of the verses. But once I’d decided to learn to speak it aloud, the entire thing opened out to me…I become enchanted.
The Lady of Shallot was my party piece for many years, but as time went on and I didn’t recite it so often, I began to forget it. Recently, I had to read a poem as part of a book club meeting, so I took it along and discovered I could remember quite a bit.
A year or so later, at a Christmas party, one of the book clubbers reminded me of this, and asked me to do it again; right there and then. I didn’t believe I’d recall a word, but once I’d got the first line of the first verse, I was off…

John William Waterhouse, 1888
The Lady of Shallot
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
(The rest is here, for you to enjoy)
An excellent tip, then for those of us who write poetry regularly or even as an occasional thing, is to remember to read our work out to ourselves, to find those cadences and bring it alive by speaking it, as Pullman recommends. An even better thing is to find a ‘slam’ where you can read your poems to an audience.
Pullman reaches the origins of the idea for this book in the essay entitled Imaginary Friends, which was inspired by an interview with Richard Dawkins, where Dawkins expressed concern over fairy tales giving children a false belief in magic…I started…Pullman says in this essay…to think about whether children believe in what they read in fairytales or not…I think reading is like playing or pretending. I used to pretend to be Davy Crockett but I always knew I wasn’t him. By playing out what I’d seen on the screen my mind experienced that heroism and what it was like to be brave. Those experiences are part of our moral education. Pullman clearly loves fairy tales, saying how they are ways of telling fundamental truths without labouring the point…They begin in delight, and end it truth. But if you start with what you think is truth you’ll seldom end up with delight, it doesn’t work that way round.
Although Pullman’s two new books are only available in hardback and therefore costly, you might enjoy listening to the abridgement of Daeman Voices, while it’s still available. La Belle Sauvage, volume one of The Book of Dust, is a Radio Four Book at Bedtime, also available until the end of November in iPlayer.


Posted by author: Nina

2 thoughts on “Torturing a poem

  • Great piece Nina, I’ve always loved (and believe I sometimes am… she hangs on my wall too) the Lady of Shallot and remember during a works leaving speech my boss began reciting the verse beginning: “there she weaves by night and day, a magic web with colours gay….” and was delighted that I’d remembered the ensuing words. Looking forward to reading the Philip Pullman. It’s always interesting to know how successful writers do it.

  • Wonderful piece, Nina. I remember when my mum had quite advanced dementia she could still remember great reams of The Lady of Shallot.

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