Episode 6

Do you want to write poetry? Learn how to make and break some poems with Think/Write/Fly

Katie: Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of Spoken Truth to Power - a Culture Studio podcast showcasing original poetry and performance by south Asian poets across borders. Culture Studio and Aik Saath - a charity working with people from all communities, faiths, and backgrounds to promote and encourage community cohesion - commissioned a poetry workshop run by Adrian, who creates poems under the name of Think/Write/Fly. Adrian is a triple threat; a writer, a poet, and media maker, interested in innovative ways to tell stories and shape language in new poetic forms. His workshop with young people in Slough was so amazing that we wanted to make it available to you, our listeners. We hope that you pick up some handy tips on how to write and remix your own poetry. 

Adrian: So, the idea of this workshop is playing with the concept of the remix, right? So outside of just being a poet, I'm also a producer, I produce podcasts, and pretty much anything that you can use to tell a story, at some point I’ve done something with. Which is cool, but also weird, because I’m in this strange position where I have a kind of perspective on lots of different formats and how they kind of collaborate together. So, this new wave of workshops that I've been doing, I've been looking at the language of audio production and using it to apply for generating work in prose and poetry.

Now, the reason I've kind of done this is, effectively what you're doing in audio production is using the outside world; the sounds, the rhythms, and the emotive tones of the outside world to produce something new. You're crystallizing those things, and that is exactly what contemporary poetry does.

So, yeah, we're going to be poking through some mildly tortured metaphors and doing this load of scribbling in bite-size chunks. So, the first thing that I would love for you guys to do is look at the backbone of a poem, which is the action. The actions are super, super simple. They are someone, an actor, doing something, with an object or in a space. Right? So, you're talking, a dog howls at the moon, a poet goes for a swim, Layla dances in Paris. You can get as specific or as vague as you like, but what I want you to do for five minutes is grab your pad, paper, whatever you want to scribble with, and just mash down as many of those as you can conceivably think of. Just one and done, just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, knock them out. We're going to take five minutes to do that, and then we're going to come back and we're going to start to play with those things that we've come up with. All right? So, I shall see you all in five minutes. 

Cool. Three, two, one… so how do we find that? It is difficult, isn't it? It is really squeezing that part of your brain that considers this activity considered narrative, right? So instead of running through a whole gamut of, this is what I want the progression of something to be, or an arc of something, you just focused on that inciting action, that containing action. Nearly every poem, however obscure, can be pulled down to that. ‘After Apple-Picking’ by Robert Frost, one of the most famous contemporary modernist poems, is about a dude picking apples. It's obviously not about that, but that is the action in the poem, right? He focuses all this drama, psychology, sociology, and a philosophical outlook onto the action of picking apples. He utilises it as a metaphor and metaphors work because they're structured around actions that we can understand.

I love using this initial action in a poem regardless, we have very, very many more steps by the way, but I love using that initial action as the title of the poem. You could title a poem ‘Jane reads a book’ and what that comes out with, what kind of beautiful esoteric, lyrical madness that comes out of the other end of it will still be based on the idea that Jane reads a book.

That's what we're going to do for this next section. This is slightly longer section. So, there's three of these actions, any three, three that you mentioned or just any three, and then we're going to spend four loose lines describing each of those actions, so you're almost going to pull that initial fragment into four lines of detail. However long or short the lines, that’ll be entirely up to you. A line as a usual unit of measurement is effectively as long as a piece of string, where you feel is the most useful to make that line break happen is where it should happen, not before and not afterwards. But it will only be four lines! What I would love you to do is structure those four lines, if you can, if you've got space on the same bit of space, so the same page or in the same documents, so you can look at those three actions and the four lines that describe each action altogether. Effectively what you're going to end up with is twelve lines in total. They're not necessarily going to be related, but they're going to have the same mode about them. They're going to have been created in the same way, and that will be the only connection between those twelve lines. So, I'm going to give you three minutes to poke with that. So, let's see what we've got… three minutes, and go!

I'm not expecting completion from this. These are just sketches; you're stretching that part of your brain that has to really work to extract the poetry from something. Running these exercises in your own time on repeat is the best poetic warmup, you will be able to write about anything. 

So, you should have some half-formed thing and the reason I'm stopping you there, when I'm like 99% sure that you have not fully completed it because I didn't give you enough time, is because I want to play with this idea of interruption. If I get you to change tack, you have to reconsider the thing that you just previously did in a new light, moving forward. You're expanding that action and giving it more depth, more meat. You're creating images that add texture and density to the initial action. 

Make sure, by the way, when we run these exercises people, keep everything, throw nothing away, delete nothing. Just the idea of the delete button if you're working digitally, I almost want to come around and pry that off your keyboard! No backspaces, no deletes. If you put it down, even the mistakes can be beautiful.

The next thing that I'd like you to do, keeping in mind what you've created, and you can continue to create in that vein, by the way, that idea of forming that block of twelve. If you want to come back to it at any point, in fact, I would suggest that you do come back to it over the next tasks, almost like a simultaneous thing, because we are going to be looking at and considering them in a little bit more detail, do so. 

But like, a weird question to ask but something I want you to think about is what senses have you focused on in those lines? ‘Cause your five senses inform everything we think about and do, right? So, what have you focused on, particularly in the description of your actions? Are you focusing on something that's particularly visual? Are you focusing on sounds? Touch? Is taste the core component of the lines that you're putting down? We're going to start to poke them a little bit and focus on what senses we’ve focused on, because when we are in this free state of flow, what we tend to do is go for the most available information, right? If you're a very visual person, you tend to focus on the visual and describing in detail what you see. I'm quite audio focused so I tend to focus on the soundscape of a particular thing, the volume, or the density of the sound that's going on. You could focus on taste, or some of my friends are kinaesthetic so they tend to have very strange poetry where they’re talking about the sun being lemony rather than yellow because of the connotations to taste and how those senses can blur, almost equalizing, right?

So, if you're paying attention to what senses you focused on in those lines that you've pulled out, and you note them down, what your predominant senses are. So, if you focus a lot on sound, a lot on taste, a lot on touch, a lot on sight, some of you might have written lines that focus really intensely on smell. I could imagine doing that - I don’t think I have done that for a while, but I guess it’d be really cool. Now you get to modulate those, so I want you to rewrite those lines, or write those lines again, I should say, because like I said, no deletions, we keep everything, and I want you to pick a new sense to focus on. 

So, if you focused quite heavily on sight, what does that poem sound like? Same scene, same actions. You’re just going to change which sense you’re dialling up and down, and that's the way I genuinely imagine it, it's almost like faders, right? You want to pull the bass down; you want to push the treble up. You want to change the focus of that same rhythm that you've been playing with in the creation of those works. Because that information is still there, by and large if something has one sensory input, it has all the rest of them. Our memories are never just what we see or hear or smell. 

I'll give you a little bit longer on this one, because it's a little bit more contextually sticky. So, we're going to go with five minutes and if you manage to do all twelve, that's amazing. If you manage to just do four, or a handful, that's cool too. But what I want you to do is re-evaluate what you've just written and change that sensory focus. Cool. I'm going to give you five whole minutes to play with that, and then we'll come back.

Okay. How was that? It's a challenge, isn't it? It's using parts of your brain that considers images and information in a way that it doesn't usually, it's very rare that you go back over a memory and go, ‘oh yeah, but what colours were the bowl of that soup in that restaurant? That was so amazing, it tasted so great’. Or ‘what did it sound like when I saw that green Ferrari?’. It's very rare that we revaluate our sense memory in that way. 

If you really wanted to, if you wanted to create a longer piece, you could cycle a loop over that same moment, just shifting the sense and give more and more avenues into a single moment. So, I want you to run that once again, okay? And I want you to now focus on a third sense, definitely not your first choice and definitely not your second. So, if you'd picked a particular visual input and then you shifted to sound, what touch senses are in that same scene? In that same action? Touch is an interesting sense because we often think of it as quite a tactile thing, but then we forget what tactile Ness is. Touch can be the sensation of your clothes on your skin, it can be the heat or the temperature of the room, it can be the dampness in the air, it can be the tongue touching a sharp bit of broken tooth, it can be so many things. Touch as a sensation is so huge, often it fades into the background and then we only tend to think about it when we're coming into tactile contact with another being. 

So, I'm going to give you five minutes again to play with that same scene that you've been playing with, and I want you to shift and modulate that sense information again and see what more you can pull out of it. This one's going to be even more difficult because you're going to have so much previous information that you've played with, and that's going to keep bumping into your thought process and derailing it, but let it happen because often the collisions between those thought processes are the things that bring new information to light.

So, it's almost like, in a weird way, it's kind of like a poetic meditation, right? Be derailed, and then come back to what you want to focus on. I will give you five minutes and I want you to play again with this new sense now.

About a minute and a half left! If you want to tighten screws, play with the tension of your lines. Remember we're doing this in this balance between quality and quantity, right? So, if the task calls for a certain number of lines, that's the maximum expected. You don't have to hit that maximum. Getting one or two, just flawless, lines that you're really happy with, that hit the button, is far more interesting than managing to churn out all of Beowulf in three minutes. I would be very impressed if you could churn out all of Beowulf or T. S. Elliott’s ‘The Wasteland’ in five minutes, I mean, that would be dope, but you don’t have to!

Okay, then the idea of the poetic refrain as a point of interruption, it's literally the next step in this. So, you've built all of this beautiful sensory information, now I want you to start chopping it up, breaking it down, mashing it together, and seeing how the sound pattern and sense pattern can connect to each other. The refrain is a really beautiful way of doing that; picking one line, picking a fragment, something that has the ability to hold meaning on its own and has an emotional impact on its own, and then interspersing it between lines. I tend to do it, say if I’m doing quatrains, the fourth line will be the refrain. There are certain poems that do every other line as the refrain, and it becomes this thing where it is, it becomes a rhythm. It becomes a unit of rhythm, right? A unit of rhythm, as well as a unit of meaning.

It’s not just the sound of those words used in that way, it's almost like the best explanation I have for it is the ‘call and response’ either in jazz or my wife has introduced me to this crazy, crazy band which mixes metal guitar with tabla, and how the repeated patterns on the tabla are then repeated by the drummer, and then repeated by the guitarist, and then passed back to the tabla, and it goes around, and around, and around. It’s that idea of once you've got that pattern in motion, that pattern informs the next pattern, which informs the following pattern. It just comes back on itself, and you create that improvised jamming, the poem’s jamming with itself. Now that's very esoteric and weirdly philosophical, and a little bit like ‘it's all in the vibes, man’, but that is what you end up building, it’s what you end up building incredibly quickly.

We should try this now. I want you to find, in the lines that you've created, in any of the lines that you’ve created, from the first thing you scribbled down to anything that you've come up with in the development process so far, in each stage of development, I want you to find a refrain. Find something that just hits right, something that will just land, and has the versatility to kind of be teased and poked in slightly different directions.

I want you to try that. I'm going to give you another five minutes. Find that refrain, find that line, and then I want you to play with that scene again, those lines again, and find a way to insert that refrain and play with it. See how the lines before and the lines following alter its context and alter its meaning.

So, there’s this thing in narrative poetics - again, this is another workshop entirely so I’m not going to wax lyrical on this - there's a thing in narrative poetics where you're structuring, you use this as a tool to structure your narrative, right? So, you use the refrain as a tool to structure your narrative. Very, very, very famous narrative poems do this incredibly well, including Ramaywana, Beowulf does it incredibly through its middle section, as does Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If you have any chance to read any of these long-ass epic poems, I would go for it. They’re weird because it’s almost like OG classical music, it’s okay if you don’t like them, but you’re kind of like, ‘I appreciate that, I see what you did there, 500 people playing the same tune in different ways, okay, I’ll allow that’. It’s very much, it’s a very, very, very difficult thing to do, because you have to understand where you're going with your metaphor before you set it up, right? Because you can't suddenly find halfway, fifty lines down your poem, that ‘oh, I want to reiterate and go back to that stanza in order to give it any context, but actually this isn’t the direction I’m going to’. So, it shows a level of foresight in your work.

There's this thing that you do when you're crafting a line where you have tension in it, right? That’s saying just enough to structure the line on the page where it sounds right, it feels right, it imparts meaning, but not so much that you blow the line out, and make it dilute its sense. 

So, one last thing, I want you to recall a moment of introspection, any moment of deep feeling that you had. I want you to recall where you were, the shapes, you know, the shapes that you saw, the shape of the space, the size of it, the sounds, the smells, all of that sensory information that we've been playing with. And in your own time, I want you to capture it. So not what you felt, but where and how you felt it. Then I want you to imagine the sensory chaos of the poems that you've been sketching colliding with that moment, so almost like a point of interruption. I want you to try and play with that, I want you to try and play with a moment that's familiar to you, a memory, an image that is familiar to you, being interrupted by some of the random actions and poems that you've been playing with.

And if you want, you can literally insert the poems you've written into the middle of this new work that you're playing with. That's something that I want you to try doing because often the best way into a work, and you notice that throughout this I've been quite hesitant to ever focus on too much of the personal, because I believe poetry exists outside of the person as much as it does within the personal, but the best way into a moment, a best way into putting something down on the page, is through a process of interruption. So deliberately pulling yourself and the reader out and away from it, as a point, as a way of giving context to that moment. 

Yeah, let's give ourselves a round of applause for today. I'm going to give you all a round of applause because I think today was amazing. 

Katie: Thank you so much for listening to this bonus episode of the Spoken Truth To Power podcast and a huge thank you to Adrian, Think/Write/Fly, for running the workshop.

We would love to hear from you about how you got on so please email us on spokentruthpowerpodcast@gmail.com or you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @SpokenTruthPod, or we’re @spokentruthpowerpodcast on Facebook. You can support Spoken Truth To Power by visiting our website www.spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and clicking ‘Support Us’.

Daljeet: Spoken Truth to Power is created by Daljeet at Culture Studio. Music, sound design and post-production is by Elliot Bulley. This episode was produced by Katie Bevan. Artwork is by Amrit Singh, podcast consultancy by Chhavi Sachdev and marketing support by Katie Bevan. Promotional support was provided by Bobby Friction and Kommune.

You can check out updates on www.spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and join the conversation on #SpokenTruthPod. If you like what you hear, please rate, and review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on your favorite podcast app. This season was funded by Arts Council England, and the workshop you’ve just listened to was funded by both Arts Council England and Aik Saath in Slough.