When the poem begins before the poem begins

In my last blog I talked about “straightforward” poem titles—titles that simply announce the subject of the poem (e.g. “Black Swan”, “Kookaburra”). But there are other poem titles where the title itself plays with words and ideas so as to integrate with the rest of the poem. These titles are not mere subject headings (as useful as such titles may be in other contexts). Rather, the poem actually begins in the heading; the playing with words and thoughts starts even before the first line.

This is the case with my poem of the month for February, which I recently posted on Blogspot and Facebook, and which I reproduce here (above). The poem, as you can see, is titled “Parachutist”. Yet it becomes very quickly apparent that this tiny poem is not talking about a real human parachutist. The illustration, for a start, shows it’s about a leaf; even if it didn’t (that is, if there were no illustration) the first two words would give it away. “Parachutist” is being used here instead as a metaphor. In fact, it is personifying the leaf for poetic effect. The image of the leaf being a parachutist is continued with the verb “launches” in the second line and with the final noun “sky-jump”.

Such economy of words is especially useful, I think, in a haiku poem (which is what this poem is). A haiku has just three lines. If it is composed according to the traditional conventions, the first line has exactly five syllables, the second line seven, and the third line five. This amounts to only a handful of words for the whole poem. It is thus extremely useful to have even one more word available—in this case the title. By choosing the word “parachutist”, I tried to make the title worth while, introducing the central image which would be deepened in the following three lines.

By the way, it might be worth noticing that the personification is not “complete” (personification never is). The leaf is still a leaf. Although it has been pictured as a parachutist in order (hopefully) to deepen the impact upon the human reader, yet the word “one” before the final word shows that a leaf is also very different from a human parachutist. The leaf can never fly up in the air again for a second or third or hundredth sky-jump; this one plunge is its one-and-only flight, which is, of course, what being a leaf is all about. Thus, by the end of this tiny poem, a tension has been observed between the leaf and its human counterpart. Yes, they can be compared in one sense, but in another sense they remain forever distinct. In the end, the title was not the whole story—but it did introduce the central image.

Dead boring poem titles?

I have quite often written poems with titles like “Kangaroo sonnet,” “Kookaburra” or “Black Swan”. Since I am a poet, it is quite legitimate to ask why on earth I would choose such bland titles for my poems. Why don’t I come up with headings that buzz with creativity and excitement? Why not bring all my poetic gifts to bear so that the title itself works a sort of word-magic on the reader? Actually, there’s a method to my madness. These “bland” poem titles are doing a job that no “creative” alternatives could really do. In fact, they are working a word-magic on the reader, though the enchantment is of a very ordinary everyday kind.

These titles orient a reader. They immediately inform a reader what subject—out of billions of possible subjects on planet earth—the poem is going to play with. Notice, for example, what happens if I call a poem simply “Black Swan”. Your brain immediately does something. It focuses in on what it already knows about a “black swan”. It begins to form an image of an Australian swan (they’re the black ones) perhaps floating on a lake, perhaps curving its neck in classic swan style.

Thus, even before the poem has properly started, the poet has got you. He or she has caused you to think of the one subject on earth that the poem is about. This not only saves a lot of words (for the poet doesn’t have to describe the subject at length) but it also means the poet can immediately get down to the task at hand, which is playing poetically with the subject in their idiosyncratic way. These dead boring poem titles thus help the reader and the poet meet half way. The reader brings all their prior knowledge of the subject to their reading, and the poet launches out from this starting point without having to rehash the obvious. Instead the poet creates (hopefully) a new angle on the subject—perhaps many new angles—that the reader has never encountered before.

By way of example, you might like to read the poem below which carries the title “Kangaroo sonnet”. If you’re like most readers who hear this title, your mind will already be starting to close in on the topic of “kangaroos”. You’ve probably seen kangaroos at the zoo, or even (if you live in or have visited Australia) in the wild. Now that you are thinking about kangaroos, in fact, these creatures are probably getting ready to hop through the air in your mind already … which is precisely what I intended! You’re already half there.

KANGAROO SONNET

They are—at first—unseen, just like statues

and as grey-brown as the eucalypt trunks.

But then they spring into action, these ’roos

rousing the forest with their thumps and thunks.

Most of their movement is flight; they barely

touch ground—instead they are bouncing, bounding

between trees, through blank intervals of air:

leaves fly—dust dances—amidst the pounding.

And then the action telescopes away

into the distance. The great disturbance

recedes like a train on a lazy day

and the bush unbends from its perturbance.

There is nothing left but some broken sticks

and some leaves, swinging, from those giant kicks.

Poem © Peter Friend. First published by the NSW Dept. of Educ. in
The School Magazine (Touchdown, Sept. 2011). All rights reserved.

The poem that became a shortlisted book

It is one of the quiet ironies of my life that I wrote my first picture book without ever intending it to be a book. I wrote it simply as a poem (it had eight stanzas of four lines each) and it was originally published as a double-page spread in a children’s magazine (The School Magazine, November 2009). It carried a single (and wonderful) comical illustration by Gus Gordan that stretched across the two pages.

Although I had had a bunch of children’s poems published by that stage, I have to admit I was still a frustrated poet. I really hoped a book publisher would want to publish a book-length collection of my children’s verse. (It would be a diverse collection, because I wrote on a variety of subjects, and in quite a variety of poetic forms—perhaps that was the problem!) But no book publisher had yet seen the light enough to want to offer me that sort of deal.

As part of my little “campaign” to get a poetry collection published, I printed off ten copies of a 36-page manuscript of “Sample Children’s Verse,” and sent it off to ten Australian children’s book publishers. The campaign didn’t work in the way I had envisaged, but, all things considered, I suppose it was quite successful. Six of the ten publishers wrote back to me, even though my submission had been, as they say in the industry “unsolicited”. Of those six, four gave me positive feedback, though stopping short of accepting any of my work yet; and one—

Little Hare Books—offered me a publishing deal for a picture book based on my “Aunty May” poem!

To say that I was surprised would be an understatement. I had never thought of the Aunty May poem as a book in its own right. But writers, I suppose, have certain gifts, and publishers have others. The team at Little Hare could “see” this poem as a picture book. The poem needed to be enlarged by three more stanzas, they told me. They asked if I could write three such stanzas—which I duly did—and, as it happened, they loved the result. Little Hare commissioned Andrew Joyner to illustrate the book in his wonderful comic style, and in 2012 the book appeared under the title What’s the Matter, Aunty May?

In 2013, the book was named a notable book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and was later shortlisted as one of just four children’s books in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It also received some great reviews from children’s literature reviewers, and in 2014 was translated into Simplified Chinese. It’s been quite a ride so far.

Part of the irony of all this is that I have written a bunch of actual picture book manuscripts over the years, none of which have (yet!) been picked up by publishers. Yet this poem, which I hadn’t envisaged as a picture book, became one. It was about a kid who, blissfully unaware of what he was doing, tried to help his Aunty May clean the house, and created chaos. A simple concept, really, but it worked, thought of course I had to work hard to get the rhyming verse tight, as well as comical.

Genres are rarely interchangeable in literature. In fact, children’s poetry and children’s picture books are about the only exception to this rule that I can think of. They overlap, because picture book texts are almost always short and punchy (like poems are), and sometimes picture book texts rhyme (just like rhyming poems). And if both carry a story, they can overlap.

By the way, if you’re interested in the Aunty May book, it is available from general bookstores or from the publisher. Otherwise, to buy What's the Matter Aunty May on Amazon click here.

And of course the book remains a prime example—to me and others—of how even a simple poem can eventually transform into a book. 

The bird that earned me $87

I suppose you could say that nature helps me earn my living, for which, as a struggling writer, I’ve often been grateful. There was once even a particular bird that directly earned me eighty-seven dollars and seven cents. The moment is still vivid enough in my mind that, as a sort of “paradigm” for writers, I think it is worth recording.

I had taken my work to some coastal parkland for the day. (Getting outdoors to write is something I heartily recommend.) I could feel the air around my ears. I could see large stretches of grass, trees, sky and sea. Suddenly, this bird arrived. I can’t remember what I was actually working on that day, but the bird immediately captured my attention. It was a smallish black-and-white bird, utterly vivacious and curious. If you’re from Australia, you’ll almost certainly recognise the Willy Wagtail. If you’re from elsewhere, I’ve provided a photo to give you an idea what it looks like. It gets its name from its constantly waggling tail, but it’s not just its tail that moves. It does everything in a flurry of movement, back and forth, darting up and down; its arrival is full of drama. So, with my pen already in my hand, I stopped what I was writing and scrawled down ideas for a poem. The final poem began like this:
                       
                        He arrived in a fluster,
                        his tail swivelling like a weather-vane,
                        inky black over a snow-white undercarriage,
                        and for a small, flickering moment,
                        all was pandemonium upon the lawn.

That was the first stanza, and there were two others, both of five lines, where the predominant image was of a helicopter coming to land (“blades churning, sleek lines trembling”) and then taking off again.

I chose to write in free verse for this poem. It seemed to fit the randomness of the arrival and of the bird’s movement. And I wrote in short phrases, each one overtaking the next; this wasn’t (as far as I remember) a conscious choice, but of course it fit. It was probably intuitive. The words came together, and I finished the poem soon afterwards and sent it to The School Magazine, who paid me $87.07 for a one-time usage. They commissioned an illustrator called Matt Ottley to illustrate it, and he painted a wonderful Willy Wagtail juxtaposed with a helicopter in the background.

I still sometimes visit that spot on the coast. And I always remember the bird that arrived and earned me eighty-seven dollars. The meeting, which only lasted a few minutes, has remained a great encouragement. It taught me that poems can arrive when you are not at all expecting them, if you only have your pen in hand and are willing to write them down. It can even pay!

Poem of the month - February 2015

An absolutely ordinary pelican

My last two blogs have been about one-off encounters (with a pineapple tin and an echidna) that inspired stories. They inspired writing because they were—at the time—unusual and memorable. Really, however, all of life is unusual. It’s just that we get so used to some of it that we don’t think about it much. We think it’s ordinary.

My poem titled “The Pelican”, which I posted on Facebook, and here on Blogspot earlier this month (as my poem of the month) was an example of a piece of writing based on something ordinary. Ordinary for me, I mean. That’s because, in the coastal area where I live, pelicans are common. On most days, I see them sailing across the sky, large yet graceful—masters of the wind. They glide with imperceptible adjustments of their flight feathers; they’re the largest birds in the sky, larger even than the sea eagles.

But when you see them close up on land, it’s another story. Their largeness is accentuated. The Australian Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus) is the largest of the world’s seven species of pelican. Its plumage is undeniable handsome, a smart mix of black and white, giving it the appearance of a bird dressed in the top half of a tuxedo; yet it also looks ungainly and comical, and that—on land—is its downfall. With its fat stomach and enormous pouched bill, it is extremely difficult to take a pelican seriously. On the beach, people routinely laugh at them. Pelicans don’t strut majestically (like herons do, for example); they waddle. Their stomachs and bill seem to constantly get in the way. On land, pelicans are more like clowns or buffoons.

Thus you have the two extremes of pelicans: the sheer enchantment of their flight compared with what seems likes gross tomfoolery when they land. For the poet, it’s inspiration served up fresh on a plate. It’s all there, just waiting to be written down.

But, of course, the poet has to notice it.

One day I noticed it enough to write the poem that became “The Pelican”. Thus a bird which was an everyday sight, became something special to me in words. I chose to write three stanzas about the pelican on land (the butt of jokes, the misunderstood buffoon). But then I turned the poem and wrote a fourth stanza about the pelican’s utter transformation in the sky. I had grown to love the pelican over the years; that’s why I wanted to make the majesty of its flight the climax of the poem. Its behaviour on land was no more than a tongue-in-cheek joke in view of what the pelican routinely becomes when it takes to the air. 

The constant challenge for a poet is to notice things, and not just new things, but old, everyday things as well. I’m not any better at this than most people, I have to prod myself. I have to remind myself to purposefully see the things I look at every day. Even then, a poem has barely begun. I still have to allow the words to play in my head and become music (for that is what poetry is). But, in seeing, I have at least begun.


                        THE PELICAN

                        The pelican struts, and he gawks at the air

                        with a bill that’s too large for his head,
                        and he gobbles and gulps, turning here and then there,
                        just as if he had never been fed.

                        Then he turns on a show for the people that come
                        (just to watch how he swallows his food)
                        and he waddles around till the people become
                        quite amused at his merry old mood.

                        How they laugh at this slow and preposterous bird
                        and they smile at his stomach so large,
                        then they say to themselves, “For a bird, he’s absurd,
                        with a belly as big as a barge!”

                        But then in a moment, the bird is all changed,
                        his wings are outstretched by his sides,
                        and up in the air he seems all rearranged
                        as he swiftly and gracefully glides.

                       Poem © Peter Friend. First published by the NSW Dept of Educ. The School Magazine Aug 2011

The echidna that wouldn't budge

The short story that became the cover story of the magazine pictured (above) almost wrote itself. Not really, of course, but that’s how it felt, and that’s why I’m telling you about it. It was a fictional story based on a real-life encounter with one of Australia’s oddest mammals, the echidna—and it taught me both about echidnas and about writing stories.

At the time, we were visiting my parents’ farm in rough, hilly bushland a few hours west of Sydney. We knew echidnas were around because we had often seen the gashes they left in the large ants’ nests and termite mounds. But we had rarely ever spotted one in real life because they preferred night-time and they kept to themselves. It was often years between sightings, and even then it was usually just a momentary glimpse on a far-off hillside.

And then one day, an echidna just wandered onto the dirt track we were driving slowly along in broad daylight. We shouted out in delight. The echidna spotted us as we spotted it, and it immediately did something which echidnas naturally do when startled at close quarters. Seeing nowhere to flee, it sank. With a flurry of movement and a churning of its heavy spade-like limbs, it dug itself straight down into the ground several centimetres. Its limbs and head disappeared. All that remained was its large arching back, bristling with spines.

And there it remained. It wouldn’t budge. By now, we had stopped the car, and were crowding around it. We had never been this close to an echidna before, not even at a zoo. With hushed voices, we took photos at close range. We softly ran our fingers along its thick spines. The echidna just stayed there, probably wondering who on earth we were.

But the key point—and the one that would later become the climax of my short story—was that I saw, for the first time ever, that an echidna was a real-life breathing mammal. From a distance, all you see are the spikes. But when you are right there, literally on top of it (as we were), you see that the spines are interspersed with soft, brown fur, and through the spines you see the echidna’s body gently moving as it breathes in and out.

It wasn’t too hard to turn this encounter into a fictional story. I made up a couple of human characters: a boy from the city visiting his cousin on an Australian farm; they ended up running after an echidna which came to a stop and half buried itself, just as our one had done. They too were amazed at the reality of the furry, breathing mammal under the spines. It was a moment of discovery for them, just as it was for us. Later, once I had written and submitted the story, the editors of The School Magazine very kindly made it the cover story of their Blast Off magazine, with some great illustrations by Peter Sheehan. To me, it was a prime example of just getting out into nature, encountering something wild, and then reimagining it as a story. That’s why I still try to get out into the wild when I can.