The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Who needs a sunset when a spork will do?
If you are looking for poetic inspiration, start with the objects in your pantry, says Tristram Fane Saunders
If you’re searching for ways to improve your poetry, take a look in your cupboard. There’s a myth that a poem has to start with powerful emotions. It can, of course, but it can just as easily start with a tin of beans. Thoughts lead to other thoughts. Begin with that tin, and you might end somewhere unexpected.
Painters know that drawing still-lifes can sharpen their skills of observation. The same is true for poets. Show a reader a particular, familiar thing in a way they can’t forget, and that thing will forever be a reminder of your poem. It doesn’t have to be a capital-P Poetic thing. In fact, it helps if it isn’t. Write about a nightingale, and you have stiff competition. Choose a spork, and your field of rivals narrows.
For years, I haven’t been able to pick up a jar of honey without remembering the opening of Jacob Polley’s “A Jar of Honey”: “You hold it like a lit bulb,/ a pound of light,/ and swivel the stunned glow/ around the fat glass sides.” What made it stick? Not the imagery, but the rhythm, the way Polley thickens and slows the ends of his lines by putting one stressed monosyllable next to another: “lit bulb”, “stunned glow”, “fat glass sides”. A game: take something else you might find in a jar. Write two lines that make it seem weightless, then two that make it seem heavy. Try to do this through the sound of the words, not their meaning.
Sticking with sticky things in jars, Seamus Heaney pulled off a similar feat of transformation in “Sloe Gin”, in which the glass vessel holds “The clear weather of juniper/ darkened into winter.” In his book Station Island, “Sloe Gin” comes a few pages before “Shelf Life”, a sequence of small, nearperfect poetic still-lifes about, yes, the knick-knacks on Heaney’s shelves, described in terms as precise as they are unexpected. His old pewter plate is “sullied and temperate”, “doleful and placid”.
Another game to try: take an object that matters to you, ideally one which to anyone else would look like a bit of old junk. Write a list of 20 adjectives describing it. Now write five lines about it, with three adjectives that you feel are a true description of it in each – but without using any from your list. By the fifth line, you might find a word that sticks.
If you’ve exhausted your larder and your shelves, you could do worse than look out the window. But, please, not at the sunset (see: the problem with nightingales, above). Take something else. Your laundry, perhaps. “Millions love and die wearing them. A couple/ of blunt pairs twirl on the rotary airer right now.” That’s how Heather Phillipson begins her poem “Take Spanking White Pants”. She swerves brilliantly between the bathos of the subject and the pathos of the thoughts it inspires. Laundry is “a routine linking average/ but unknowable troubles”: these undies have been given “A day off/ from disappointments in touch”. The pants come to stand for their owners’ “world of interiors”. When Phillipson (or the underwear itself?) says: “Forgive me, love me, make me new”, I can’t decide if it’s heart-rending or silly or both. How on earth did she get there from pants?
Here’s one last game. Take either Larkin’s “What will survive of us is love” or Rilke’s “You must change your life”, and pretend it’s a new line that’s just occurred to you – not inspired by ancient statuary, but by the least capital-P Poetic object in your pantry, on your shelves, or hanging from your washing line. Make that famous quotation a credible conclusion to your poem about this object. How on earth will you get from A to B? Try it. You might surprise yourself.
Woodsong by Tristram Fane Saunders is published by Smith/ Doorstop at £5
Using Stanley Spencer’s wonderfully warm painting as inspiration, we are going to create a scene that is unified by colour. I chose an interior because the curve of the stairs could be exaggerated, and the light had a similar quality to the dreamlike mood in Spencer’s painting.
Draw an outline of your chosen scene on your canvas in pencil.
Loosely block in the whole
According to the notes on iPlayer, Last Tango In Halifax was first broadcast on November 20 2012. No wonder I’d never seen it! That was three days after I got married.
I have often wondered why this fantastic show which won Baftas, spawned copycats, changed the cultural landscape and roared back for its fifth series a few months ago, was completely off my radar. I never even noticed it arrive.
I understand now. On November 20 2012, we had other things to do. We were in Scotland by then, somewhere near Fort William. I didn’t need television, it was thrilling enough to stare at my wedding ring, the breathtaking Highland scenery and the words “Mrs Mitchell” on a chequebook. (I had written them there in biro. Have you any idea how difficult it is to change the details on your bank account officially? The world of ID checks and “data protection” does not sit well with the Old School romance of taking your husband’s name. The bank still prints my credit cards wrongly to this day. They’ve sent so many different variations, I’m thinking of becoming a fraudster just to save time.)
Anyway, our honeymoon was exciting enough not to need TV. For dramatic twists, I accidentally ran over a partridge in the Forest of Bowland and left my glasses on top of a petrol pump in Carlisle. (Keen geographers will know it must have happened in that order, so the partridge can be squarely blamed for its own demise.)
We didn’t take the internet away with us. We had no communication with the outside world at all, apart from one phone call to my optician who kindly agreed to send me a new pair of specs by emergency courier, based on my 2008 prescription, as long as I promised to pop in for an eye test as soon as we got back. I really must get round to doing that.
Do you remember how it used to be, even just going on normal holiday, when you were in a bubble outside the news? Nothing reached you unless it was covered by Dick Francis or Jilly Cooper. If someone famous died during your fortnight’s break, you might not realise for years. (I’ve just googled nervously and it turns out Larry Hagman died while we were on our honeymoon. Damn! I really liked him).
I’ve started watching Last Tango In Halifax because I was disappointed by the endings of Normal People (BBC One) and
Unorthodox (Netflix), so if you have yet to watch those series and want to keep their conclusions a surprise – or if you don’t want to read my sugary views about marriage – look away now! Spoilers lie ahead, even if only of breakfast for those who are revolted by sentiment.
In last week’s column, I said the ending of Normal People was a bit like a limoncello at the end of an Italian meal, undermining the delights that went before. That’s because the couple at the centre of it didn’t end up together, and I thought they should. The nicely written script, phenomenal performances and pleasing narrative arc were all telling us that these characters had found their soulmates. We joined them for 12 episodes of ups and downs (and, indeed, ins and outs) which revealed that, after all their trials, they could not live apart nor bond with anyone else. They made each other feel safe, whole and happy.
But then he was offered a prestigious academic placement in America and she didn’t go with him. Why ever not?
Unorthodox is the four-part story of a young Hasidic woman who runs away from an arranged marriage. The husband, a gentle and sympathetic character, follows her to Berlin and does the full “journey” required of drama: everything about him changes. He learns to understand his wife and give her freedom, he supports her ambition to study at music college, he realises he has been obtuse about physical pleasure. He rethinks his approach to absolutely everything except the sanctity of marital union. At the end, in a powerfully moving gesture, he tearfully cuts off his payot (the sidelocks that symbolise his Jewish orthodoxy) to show that he would make any sacrifice in favour of their partnership.
And she goes: nah, don’t fancy it. Unorthodox is a true story and I suppose it couldn’t misrepresent the couple’s fate, but the tone really confused me. The husband’s commitment to marriage is depicted touchingly and beautifully, yet the wife’s rejection of it is clearly signalled as a happy ending – a triumphant escape, a euphoric victory.
The heroine of Normal People discards her sweetheart in favour of hanging out in the bars and libraries of Dublin with her mates. The heroine of Unorthodox chooses the cafés of Berlin with a rather faceless bunch of German music students. When I was 20, I would have found both endings as sophisticated and uplifting as I think they’re intended to be. How childish to end a romantic tale with a wedding, I would have thought! How grown-up to end it with solitude!
Now, it just feels sad. For me, after years of determined singledom, marriage has proved an intensely happy experience, so I like stories where they choose love.
Hence, when I noticed Last Tango In Halifax on iPlayer and saw that it begins with Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid) deciding to get married after a single date, I thought: that’s the show for me.
Those characters are 75 years old. So they don’t have to be grown-up at all.
On our honeymoon, I ran over a partridge and left my glasses on top of a petrol pump