Tutor Forum Exercise

I haven't posted onto this blog for ages. What's worse is that I haven't done any exercises from the BRB since the poetry phase. I have been working on an idea for TMA04 and have an embryonic idea for the dreaded EMA, but no exercises. So, the tutor has woken me from my exercise slumber and given us a couple of exercises to do.

The first exercise involves - tell you what I'll copy the damn thing here:

The aim of this exercise is to tap into memory and recount an experience using vivid sensory recall.

Make a list of six intense physical experiences you have had. Here’s an example of the things you may include (I’ll leave it to you to work out what you can’t include –see note on ‘powerful’ material in the Assessment Booklet, p7!):

• Repetitive work on a factory line;
• Travel sickness;
• Giving Birth;
• Falling in love with someone’s voice;
• Being part of a festive crowd;
• A dramatic haircut or restyle;
• Learning to swim;
• Singing in a choir.

Select one experience and write an account of it, including as much sensory detail as you can about sights, sounds or smells, as well as what you thought and felt.

Post your piece in reply to this thread.

I selected learning to swim as I thought it offered plenty of opportunities for sensory detail. Now I'm wondering whether to reproduce it here as I'm conscious of TMAs to come. Notably, 05 for which I have no material whatsoever. It's a shame this business of not being able to stick work on your blog in case there are loftier intentions for it later. As a compromise I'll reproduce the second activity which was, I think, far less impressive.

The aim of this second exercise is to get you to experiment with pacing, a particularly important skill in life writing because you will constantly have to choose what to dwell on, and what to summarise quickly or omit.

Summarise ten years of your life (or your subject’s life, if you’re choosing to write biography) in a paragraph or two. Then pick one event from of those ten years and write a paragraph or two only about that.

Post your 2 – 4 paragraphs to this sub-forum.

This second exercise was about through-lines, though the term as you can see, is not used in the above text. My first effort missed that point so it wasn't particularly well received - typical shit sandwich deal, plenty to like here, but... you know the drill. So I refashioned it to reflect what I hope was more of what was looked for:

Because I hated school for reasons I now cannot fathom since I've loved learning ever since, I left as early as I could with very few academic qualifications. This meant that I became a job drifter (this was the early 1970s and it was possible). During this period I worked on building sites, garage workshops, timber yards, farms, shops, offices and factories. It really was quite simple, when I got fed up, I left. If I didn't like someone there, I left, if I thought I could earn more somewhere else, doing something else, I left. Finally I shook myself up and realised that I was on verge of becoming a loser, so I joined the RAF and asked them to get a grip of my life. But I was not easy to lick or kick me into shape.

Before I knew it I was fully kitted out in ill fitting dungarees, a backpack with a sleeping bag badly buckled to the top that threatened to topple over at any moment, and a pair of stiff new boots that we were told to urinate in before wearing, if we wanted to avoid blisters the size of golf balls half way round the perimeter track we were going to be force marched around. I could feel the dampness around my feet as the march started. I could smell the acid mixing with the sweat and the mustiness of these old uniforms. This was the start of the weeding out process. Those who couldn't hack it would be on the next train home. I walked faster than I'd ever walked - felt my shins stiffen immediately. Pretty soon it felt like I was wearing splints. My helmet was spilling over my eyes one minute, biting into my skull the next. A little man a full six inches shorter than me wearing stripes and whose sole aim seemed to be to break our spirits, pushed his face into mine as I walked and gasped and sucked in air trying to stay within touching distance of the leading group. He called me a useless fucking twat for falling slightly behind. Even under this physical trauma I noticed the tobacco stains on his teeth, the flecks of spittle at the corner of his mouth and the mock hatred in his eyes. He was acting, but this was no game.

Travel? Might be an idea for 04.

The reading activity which shows Dervla Murphy and her travels on a bicycle in the Workbook seems to encapsulate the writing I would most like to do for this section of the course and perhaps going forward. It's the notion of 'experiences along the way' and recorded with a writer's eye for detail that impresses me most about this genre, and I feel that is where my strengths might lie. (Poetry? hmm, I'll take another look soon).

I have some evidence to support this with small travel pieces tucked away here and there that I have already recorded, such as my experiences in places that should have been holidays but in the end more closely resembled mini-adventures in for example, southern Spain, Prague, Slovenia, Hamburg, Helsinki, Tunis, Turkey, Cyprus, New York, Peru, Thailand, Budapest, Tallinn, California, Lithuania, most of France and closer to home trips to Ireland and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, even the good old Yorkshire Dales. Each of those trips, in small ways were to me quite fascinating - and I have already written about them with my own brand of enthusiasm: the people I have met and things I have seen and done.

Now I'm no Dervla, that's for sure. I've had the small matter of having to keep working to pay the mortgage and feed the family, provide a home and so on. If I can retire soon I have much more to do. But, I'm sure I can dig around and find a few things from my travel diaries.

I once hired a convertible in San Francisco and drove down the Pacific Highway to LA then across the desert to Las Vegas a before breaking down on the outskirts of a dump called Barstow which was just after we'd broken down close to Death Valley, in 100 degree heat and short of water. Then into Yosemite and full circle back to San Francisco.

I've taken a night train from Bangkok to Chang Mai on a single track which was within bandit striking distance of the Burmese border in the most horrendous electric thunderstorm. And a freezing ferry from Estonia to Finland in a snow storm over the Baltic whilst huddled up with Latvians wearing knitted bobble hats and faux-mink coats, sharing paper cups of undrinkable tea and smoking Russian cigarettes.

I've walked to Switzerland from France up and along a mountain pass which looked like an escape route from WW2. And I've walked through Cusco in Peru on my way to Machu Pichu with a wife who was so sick with altitude sickness she had to choppered to hospital for life saving treatment. And that was after surviving a horror night in Lima where we were dumped by our taxi driver at a hotel in the middle of a slum area.

All these trips I have written about and could again for the purpose of life writing - even if I'll never quite be able to match Dervla Murphy's experiences. As they say it's about enlivening the mundane - something we all need to be able to do unless we're war correspondents, dodging bullets whilst disguised as women and surviving arrests and beatings. Then I guess we're recording the absoulte truth in as much graphic detail as possible. But wait. The Workbook does make mundane references to visits to supermarkes and doctor's surgeries. This is where the skill of the writer overlays the intensity of the experience. That's why writers always have something to write about. Otherwise they're not writers. Simple as... as they say.

TMA03 Commentary

The subject of this poem came from a notebook entry under ‘short story ideas’ which included an old memory about going on a terrifying ‘first date, at Taunton’s Market Square. I thought the ‘story idea’ would convert neatly into a poem believing it could be refined to focus on emotion, mood and reflection and would work well with the brevity of poetry. I’d read Hardy’s poem The Convergence of the Twain about the Titanic/iceberg and their (arguable) inevitable meeting and added the quote to my notebook after Workbook Activity 12.6. I wanted to develop this predestination theme to describe a ‘collision’ between a clock and me, (see epigraph), as this also had unfortunate consequences due to misreading the time with that ‘glance.’

Having read the Workbook activity about photographs and how they inspire ideas, I remembered some old table placemats depicting the Market House in various historical settings. I thought these images good sources to show back-story and ‘life’ to the clock and could link with the contemporary, slightly scruffy 70’s town, with its late buses and gruff bus conductors also providing opportunities for show over tell. I wanted the poem to begin with a breathless, incantatory, inner voice to convey the poet’s anxiety and the late bus not helping. Then a staccato, jittery rhythm in S2 to reflect the poet’s frazzled nerves. I drew inspiration from Auden’s Night Mail and Belloc’s Tarantella as both emulate the rhythm of events through language, punctuation and line. I used alliteration to help show mood and internal rhyme to bring in sounds, particularly some recurrent initial letters and language and line breaks in S4 to show the tense poet’s steps as they synched harmoniously with the clock’s imagined ticking.

The first draft was sketched out in free verse block as I thought too much metrical discipline would inhibit the richness of the ideas and language. Later I included a sprinkling of local dialect to add originality, (see glossary). I wanted to be free to introduce rhythmic changes to reflect some of the action: inner voice anxiety S1, nervous feeling of S2, the fidgety anxiety of S3, halting and striding, S4, and the slower reflective tones of S5 -S6. I structured it into broadly even stanzas to break the poem into story-like chapters and aimed at rhythmic flow whilst eschewing a rhyme-scheme which I thought might appear too jaunty.

After listening to Douglas Dunn’s critical comments about free verse on CD2 I tried to reverse the poem into iambic pentameter to demonstrate competence in the form, but thought too many of the lines looked ‘forced’ rather than natural. I wrote several lines in iambic pentameter based on Herbert’s ‘I think I’d rather like a cup of tea,’ which I’d pasted above the draft as reference; but this poem didn’t work well with iambic metrical feet given the language and the effect I wanted.

Finally having read the tutor recommended compilation volume ‘Saving Lives’ and noting the positive feedback between tutor and students during poetry tutorials, I felt more confident about free verse as both the book and the tutorials showed how versatile and effective freer verse can be. I tried to ensure however that despite the poem being in free verse the 10 syllable lines helped tighten its feel whilst not inhibiting its freedom. (550 words)

Posting Work

Well, that could have gone better. I posted my 'masterpiece poem' on my blog and attached a link on that most (usually) supportive and friendly of forums, Facebook. This A215 group on Facebook is where you go if you're unsure of your work. It a place where - in this case during the poetry phase - you could post a non rhyming limerick, that doesn't scan, isn't funny, and is for good measure, offensive - perhaps even to its Facebook audience, and you can be assured of at least twenty 'likes' and 15 comments. Probably a lot more if others are, as they are at the moment, touting for support for their own work.

Whether it is because I posted on a Saturday - perhaps people have a lot more important things to do on this, the best of day of the week for most. Or whether I mistimed the posting - too close to lunch time perhaps, too soon after breakfast, too close to hangover time, or, perhaps my poem is so astonishingly bad people just didn't feel like lying to me, I don't know. But I reckon I must have broken something of a record for apathetic responding on this group for a posted work. One 'like' three 'comments.' I kid not. I have seen better responses from comments like 'poetry is crap' and 'anyone who likes poetry is sad and deluded.' Mainly these are put up by wind up merchants who are spoiling for a fight and who've been beaten with the misanthropic stick during their imprinting phase. And before you start to think that, 'well, anything that makes people angry will provoke a response’ some of the multitude of comments generated nearly always include 'I feel your pain,' 'you're right', and 'everyone's entitled to their opinion' And even 'Yes, I have been waiting for someone to say that, please marry me!' OK, I made that last one up, but only just!

The quantity of tumbleweed that swirled past my posting, given the nature of this group, was quite frankly astonishing. But I think I have some answers.

I think probably there is some truth to the timing, but I'm not egotistical to think that was the only cause. My poem is unusual in that it wasn’t particularly emotional. It wasn't funny, nor was it particularly profound. It didn't hint at some psychological truth, or something tragic in my background, and it wasn't a pitch for chocolate box expression of the year, nor will the greeting card companies be beaten a feverish path to my door with fistfuls of fivers. It was a narrative story with verbal effects. That's it. That's all it was. And the silence was deafening. Perhaps the good folk at Facebook are so nice, so supportive they thought: this man is a tragedy and is in partial meltdown if he believes this is a poem the best we can do is leave him to his delusion, and hope that he recovers in private and in silence. And sits down and tries to understand, that is not the sort of poem anyone had in mind.

Now as John Travolta memorably said in the film Pulp Fiction after being fed through the emotional mangle and emerging as a hollowed out shell with the face of dead man: 'If you don't mind I think I'll go now and have a heart attack! '

Ah well life writing here we come. Question is will I post any for peer opinion. Somehow I doubt it.

TMA03

Thought I'd put my TMA03 effort up. Went down well with the tutor and scored 77% though she was scratching her head at the final stanza so I had to rejig it. It might look strange, but that would be because I spent about three weeks on most of it, chopping, changing, titivating, burnishing, all the usual stuff - and then refashioned the whole of the last stanza in about 5 minutes. I think it shows. But it does, to be fair, make more sense I think, whereas the original ending left too much unsaid.

The next posting will be the commentary - so much better than trying to explain the narrative force behind this poem.

A Face in Time

'Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident.'

Thomas Hardy

The Market Square bus is late, today!

My head boils up at its cavernous void.

I cat-cradle my eyes, blunt out truthful light,

and draw in the threads of silent despair,

pull them together - force dreams to fill in, and

salve my wrecked nerves, settle that breath.

Surely now it's late, for that walking out date.

I'm already now a quiver of shivers,

a niggling of nerves, a salting of

sweat - starkly-stained on the shirt

that is witness to stress, with a cumulus cloud,

that's sufficiently there, for simple betrayal.

The fare finally falls with the flattest of rings,

as he dial-winds the clicked-out bisque flavoured ticket,

hung rude as a tongue and snapped

out from the jaws of the robot- like

gadget of stertorous breath and sparkled eye,

casually slung, like a silver box-brownie.

A whiplash-hiss-halt, a back flinching jolt,

landing amid the granular pavements,

still richly infested with 'on the town' nights;

striking of wide, metronomic, strides, and,

a single-panic-filled glance, at the big town clock,

that sits high up on Market House.

The old town clock whose hand-crossed face

has seen payment of corn weighed up with trade;

dealers dealing through the feculent stench,

whilst farmers furrowed the square with stocked carts,

churning the grainy ground into a

ghastly stirred breakfast of crubbinly slurry.

The old town clock that faced Jubilee Day,

the bells, pealing; the streamers, flying;

the confetti swarming, showing the time,

ticking the time, through history's changes.

But from centuries now we're in seconds,

through the continual slow-fly to collide;

the glance at the clock shows, I'm too late for my date;

for I am the ship, the clock is the ice,

and destiny has struck its most minor of keys,

and shown death, this time, to the smallest of dreams.