Writelife

I bought a book the other day – The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. It’s a book about writing poetry. No, really.

Now, I think I know enough about language and particularly English that I don’t need a book about how to write a poem. So why pick this up? The answer is simple and it comes in two parts.

The first part is that Mr. Fry is quite English in the way he writes and he’s a particular kind of Englishman in the way he writes. He’s very humourous and very dry, which always appeals to me, and he has very wide range of words he draws upon. In other words, he writes well and he’s funny (not to mention informative).

The second reason is because I like writing poetry though I’ve not done it for a very long time. However, one year I wrote over 500 poems! Granted, the vast majority were crap. In fact, I recall only two that I actually liked (and one was bad but I liked what it aspired to be).

So, one reason for getting the book was to see if, while being amused by Mr. Fry’s way of writing, I might not also be inspired to start writing poems again.

There is one very great risk, however. I discovered back in my poetry writing days that, after a certain point, my free verse style fell away and I got hooked on rhyme. I nearly drove myself mad with rhyming things – it was not something I wanted to do but was something I was compelled to do. I would find myself drying dishes, putting cutlery away, and saying things like, “And now I put away this knife – or shall I, rather, take a life?”

It took years of therapy to get over that. It was the second time it had happened. Years ago, at college, a friend and I went through a hudibrastic couplet phase – that’s couplets that rhyme but don’t really (like many popular songs do). (“I fell in love in springtime/on the Mason-Dixon line.”)

Anyway … I do hope this doesn’t lead to bad things. To be honest, I haven’t started reading the book yet. I may never get around to it. I may be too frightened to start. But should you start seeing posts that resemble what follows, at least you’ll know why:

I think that I may never see
A blog rhyme quite like poetry
But that’s okay, most o’ the time
Poetry (when good) does not rhyme.

Yet, why not rhyme a word or three
And pass it off as poetry?
(Oh my, I rhymed that once before,
in verse the first, lines three and four.)

Tags: Poetry, Stephen Fry

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