In a writing class this week we were looking at improvised poems, and how they can serve as a useful catalyst in allowing your imagination a certain freedom from the restraints of habitual writing styles (line length, form, rhyme, rhythm etc).

We looked at several poems, including Deryn Rees-Jones's 'My Father's Hair', Selima Hill's 'What Do I Really Believe?' and Christopher Reid's 'What the Uneducated Old Woman Told Me'.

Others like Armitage's 'Not the Furniture Game' and Nick Laird's 'Disclaimer' spring to mind.

Anybody know of any good 'uns they'd like to share? Bad ones will do too. I'm just interested to see the various ways in which poets have used improv in their poetry. There's a section of Riordan's 'The Boy Turned into a Stag' which makes use of it to pretty dazzling effect.

I take it these are all poems that you know were improvised because the poet said so? And meaning, presumably, that they wrote it with few if any changes, and in a very short time? I think Yeats said (in the introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse) that Pound wrote 'The Return' that way.

I don't really understand the concept of the 'improvised' poem, unless its in relation to performance.

Sorry to be annoying

:blink:

I wrote six or seven poems in the voice of a bizarre character called 'Darwin Duke' in one evening when I was putting together my first collection. Three of them made the final cut, with barely a change, even at comma level. Simon Armitage saw them and suggested a minor change to one line in one of the poems, which I dutifully implemented for the book but still find myself ignoring whenever I perform that poem.

Doesn't happen like that anymore though. Either I've lost that first innocent flush of enthusiasm or I'm now always so dissatisfied with my own work that I find it impossible to compose in white-heat-mode.

According to Hughes' letters, wasn't half of his otter poem written by a spirit called Pan he had first contacted in a seance? That half appeared printed in thin air just at the edge of his vision, fully-formed, apparently

Does that count as improvised? Heh.

Otterly unbelievable, of course. :rolleyes:

I love that kind of stuff.

f*** workshops. I'm going to a seance.

Of course we could argue about what exactly constitutes 'improvisation', but I was just thinking along the lines of what Matthew said: a poem that is composed quickly and with few changes at any stage, in the sorta white-heat-mode that Jane mentioned.

So, does anyone have any poems to suggest? Not that Hughes's contact with spirits and the like isn't fascinating.

I'll fish out the 'Darwin Duke' poems you mentioned, Jane.

Why not combine the two? You could facilitate workshop seances, a Restless Dead Poets Society. Might be a winner.

Here's one idea:

Take a newspaper article at random form the paper. Take phrases from the paper that appeal to you and make a poem using only those words, rearrange no more than once. No cheating by putting ands and buts in.

Do the same with lines from your old rejected poems. Or an article in a technical journal. Or Darwin's Origin of Species.

A lot of my poems are at least half-improvised; I used to rewrite at least 10 times, now I'm wondering if I'm doing too much it I rewrite 5 times.

Speed of composition is an interesting issue. I generally write extremely slowly, with lots of staring into space and lines endlessly reworked. But occasionally a poem comes very fast - I once wrote two in a single train journey for example, and there are a couple I produced during exercises which I joined in with my students. There doesn't seem to be a correlation between time taken and quality. I also find that when I'm working on a long poem, or using the same form for several poems in succession, I get used to the task and can write quicker and quicker. That's one reason I enjoy writing long poems and poems in form.

Back in April '07 I joined a group of ex-FYPs in attempting to write and post a poem every day. (We eventually relaxed the rules to '30 poems in the month' so that people who'd missed a day could catch up.) The effect was interesting: looking back over the poems, not only do they show a whole lot of thematic links that I never intended as I was writing them (sex and the city, mostly - not the TV show!) but they also get steadily better and better. The early ones are dreadful and forced: the last of them, written in barely half an hour just before midnight on April 30th, was published in the last issue of Mimesis without a single change. So if you want to improvise I suppose there's something to be said for practice (although it was creatively exhausting - I spent two weeks without writing a single word after that month). We're going to try it again this year.

Personally I always find my speed-written work to be better than the stuff I agonise over for hours: reading over the slow-and-careful poems I've written feels like wading through sludge. There's a lot to be said for 'white-heat-mode'.

When people asked Norman MacCaig how long it took him to write a poem, he used to say, "Sometimes I write one-fag poems, and sometimes they're two-fag poems."

This is also true for me at the moment, working on various lengthy translations/versions. The first thirty or forty lines seem to come very slow, as I work my way into the new voice, then suddenly ... whoosh!

Gulp. :unsure:

Flipping Young People? French Yodelling Police? Fresh Yam Picklers? Or possibly the international Fellowship of Yoghurt Peddlars, now no longer in business?

Folio Young Poets cult.

A lot of people at the Everypoet forum do the poem a day thing in April each year (aka napowrimo). I think it's something of an Internet workshop phenomenon. It's fun, in a masochistic way.

I love his work, and it doesn't seem improvised at all.

Yep, that's us. We're a hivemind. :rolleyes:

(Foyle Young Poets, and sorry - I usually abbreviate, forgot which forum I was on! I sort of wish it was a defunct fellowship of yoghurt peddlers, though - that sounds much more exciting...)

Yes, and the reams of drafts which were apparently found after his death suggest the old rogue was a bit of a fibber with his 'finished by two fags or it's in the dustbin' yarn!

Figures. But fair fu*ks to him.

Norman taught at my primary school in Edinburgh when I was there (1948-1955). I can't believe that one of my teachers would fib.

Anyway, it sounds too good not to be true. And I've written the odd 'splat' poem myself.
Colin

You never see pomegranate-flavoured yoghurts, do you? Odd, that. (I nearly wrote poemgranate then ...)

Actually, I noticed recently that Pomegranate makes for a handy (if grammatically incorrect) anagram: An Great Poem.

Intentional, Emily?

Did you know (he asks, putting on his ex-scientist hat) that pomegranate seeds are stuffed with oestrogens? They were used medicinally from ancient Egypt onward.
Colin

@Colin: I did not know that! I feel I've been educated now. :D

@Ben: completely unintentional, but delightful to discover. We just snatched at possible names out of the air (it was nearly called 'Dream Up Snow' until we realised my limited artistic skills probably couldn't come up with a logo for that one.)

@Jane: that's a lot better than our usual typo, 'porngranate'. (I don't know how it keeps happening... :unsure: )

I don't think of poems written quickly, or written without much need for revision, 'improvised'. For me, improvised poems are those written/spoken on the spot in response to a subject or trigger just as some performance poets improvise poems in response to words called out by the audience.

I thought that was Tourette's?

In practice, many performance poets have learned to wangle a given word or idea into a piece they have already written and learned. This has been to competition slam as the mobile phone has been to pub quizzes...