Writing in January

In January I spent time reading as research for things, and working on poems I had started at Arvon in December. I had to type them up first and see how they looked, and do some re-writing. Only a couple seem finished, and there are some I will need to go back to. The best of them is a poem called Tap I think. I spent some time thinking about poems I never got far with at Arvon, and finally got round to doing something about the snapshot exercise, which proved to be the most productive exercise of the week. So why was I reluctant to do much of it at Arvon? Seems the exercise was private and didn’t suit that public space. The idea was to write about a photo. I started and wrote two very short poems about photos of me as a child. In the end in January once I had the other things out the way and in the PC I spent some time writing a sequence of these photo poems. All of them are very short. I rarely write about my own early childhood, in fact never. I thought it would be a good way to write about it, quite simply, without bringing much that isn’t in the photo into it, so that there are gaps, things missing, to be figured out, which sort of relate to the child’s viewpoint of lack of judgment and few words. It shaped up not bad, but the title still isn’t there. The title was originally Snapshots before the Ugly Stick, which I quite like as a title, but when I showed them to Jo Colley and Kate Fox they felt that a judgment and awareness is in the title that isn’t in the poem, and I think they have a point. So I still need a title. I spent some time the following week writing a sequence that expands beyond the original, and is a sequence of poems about things you make as a child. It seemed to convey the relationships and things to aspire to as a child, without getting into a god-like voice about it all. They are very simple poems in a way, pared down with a lot cut out. One of them is the first poem that mentions my Dad, I seem to write about my mother and grandmother a lot, but he is conspicuous only by his absence. Maybe this is why I distrust them; some work is like that. The question over is it too simple has no answer. Titles though, they are tricky. Seems that there are poems you know the titles of instantly, and others never seem right.