Murder your darlings

There was a Beat Generation attitude to writing which was "first thoughts, best thoughts". In my thirtieth year of writing I more than ever liken poetry to sculpture - you chip away anything extra, anything lumpy until you are left with the finished form.
Since late 2009 I've been working towards realizing my fifth volume of poetry, entitled "Personal Weather". I say to myself that I don't want any passengers in the collection, any poems that let the team down. In the last three months I've printed out all the poems intended for the manuscript and then given them a hard look. This scrutiny has resulted in a dozen poems being deleted. I'm now faced with "replacing" those deleted poems. I've shift my self-imposed deadline back now several months. I'm pleased that I got rid of those dozen poems. After a break of not looking at them, then re-looking at them, I could see they were either skeletal, didn't have enough going for them, that I was to a degree repeating subject matter and character types.
I promote being ruthless with your own work. What I find holds people back is that they don't write often enough, don't face the blank page often enough. They say they are waiting for inspiration or only write when inspired - this results, at best, in five poems written in a year.
Raise the bar for yourself. Face the blank page each week. Make it a life priority. Trust that there's material in your heart, mind and bones that you don't know is there until it comes out of your fingertips on the keyboard or out of your pen. Face the blank page, calm but focused. Negative thoughts about your writing capabilities, "I have no ideas", "What can I possibly write about?", "Everything I've written in the last month is crummy" will freeze you up/block you.
Relax. Trial some words on a page. If you don't like them, no big deal. Try out some more.
Even if you spend eight hours at that keyboard/writing desk and you're not happy with anything you've written, you've cleared away debris and cobwebs. I believe no writing time is wasted time. You've got to dig away a lot of dirt to get to the gold.
Persist. Continue. You want to be a writer. Charles Bukowski said "A writer should be writing".
Writing is not easy. Some days it comes easier than others. Stay in training by writing regularly,
keep that mind supple and give it nourishment by reading and reading, going for walks thinking about the big questions too "Why are we here? What is our/my purpose? Is there an afterlife? What is a human being?
Write about your life. Pivotal, significant moments in your life. A poem about a parent. A poem about your childhood - how it REALLY was - not a soft focus fantasy version of it. Poems about what you observe. Poems about what you think about. Tell me what it's like to be you but don't complain or rant in a poem. You have your senses, your mind, your personal history, all taking things in, sifting and reconsidering. Go for it.

Personal Weather

                                                                         Photo By Walter Bakowski

This black and white photo of myself taken at Mary Street park in Richmond, Victoria on Sunday,
18 November 2012 is the proposed book cover for my forthcoming volume of new poems, Personal Weather, which I anticipate being published in the first half of 2013. 
The photograph is meant to complement the book title. Any feedback about the photograph is appreciated.
Here is a self-portrait poem from Personal Weather —

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Self-portrait, Melbourne, 19 September, 2012

I am many selves, some are intimidated by authority figures.
Disapproval, its possibility, makes them stay in the dark beneath my ribs.
Emergent selves must believe no predators are near, ready to break their spines.
Not too social some of my selves. In being alone they get their best thinking done.
Tentative, they observe rather than participate, prefer libraries to dance floors.
Insistent invitations make them grumpy. You can tell by their body language that
They’d rather be elsewhere, not politely asking, “And how do you earn a living?”
Yet they can be kind to the shy. “That was me once,” they’ll say to each other.

   

Portrait of Edith Murtone, fiction writer

Scarlet nail polish and lipstick.
Plastic surgery on her once-prominent nose.
Edith summers in Cornwall,
winters in Athens.

Her latest novel is selling well.
The cook and the gardener
will each receive a Christmas bonus,
compensation for enduring 
Edith’s moods and temper
when she finds living
harder than writing.

Characters like Clarissa and Harold
appear to her
as she drives, 
as she walks along the river.

Clarissa,
eldest of two daughters,
an amateur botanist and watercolourist, 
infatuated with her piano tutor.

Harold, 
a neighbour’s only son,
asthmatic, excused from sport.
Interested in astronomy
and the treasure underneath Clarissa’s skirt.

Desire,
the primary emotion that moves plot and pen,
stirs the serpents in the garden.

Images crafted into words,
words crafted into images.
Truth and fiction,
lying down in the same bed,
entwined, 
no longer strangers
to each other.

The white heat of writing—
thoughts, visions
becoming words,
lifting the writer and the reader
beyond the page,
to where the self is seen,
an ant
struggling with crumbs,
one day to be crushed 
beneath a wind-blown twig.

On a good day, five thousand words.
On a bad day, the snapping in half of pencils—
the study mirror reflecting
Edith asleep on the sofa,
one shoe missing, 
an empty brandy bottle
in her lap.

Edith waking
with hangover—
legs of straw on which
to inch and tilt
towards the horizon
of the kitchen sink,
a much-needed glass of water.

Edith 
straightening cushions on the sofa,
lighting the day’s first cigarette,
asking the walls
what post-war England could be 
if Nigel’s plane hadn’t been 
shot down over Berlin.

The roulette wheels spins,
the white ball
comes to rest on zero.

Not every player 
will risk as much again.

Edith alone
with her characters.
Maybe in the next book,
Harold, through his telescope
will view the flare and fall of a comet,
an arc of light that once scarred the heavens,
now reduced to a photo, data in a journal.
Clarissa will disturb his ordered world
by becoming pregnant.  

The characters’ world changed by 
a birth,
a wavering allegiance,
an affair revealed.

All that threatens and excites,
asks us to consider again 
human nature
as it slithers away
from definition,
Edith will examine
in her next book.

Already she knows its title,
writes it out neatly
on a fresh sheet of paper.

Tomorrow will be a good writing day.

Pruning and sifting your poetry

When you've written poems for a few years, it's worth doing a count of certain words you've used. If get to the happy state of having a Selected Poems published you wouldn't want to see that you've used the word "banana" in nine of your poems. I've realised in my twenty-years of writing poetry I've now used the words "sparrow" and "sofa" enough. I'm going to consciously refrain from using those two words in poems. I've had my quota. If you keep using a word you're arguably resting on your laurels, kicking back in the same old comfort zone. Refresh your poetry with fresh for you words.

Silence

I've heard and read too many poems that include the word "silence". I find in reality that if you stop and listen at any moment you'll hear something - the wind, a lorry rumbling past, the sound of a car shifting gears, a neighbourhood dog barking, a birdcall. I can't recall the last time it was truly silent - that is, I could hear no sounds whatsoever. I encourage poets to question each time they're about to use the word "silence". I encourage poets to ask themselves why they are going to use the word "silence" in their poem, to ask themselves "Is my use of that word accurate, true? Does its use ADD to the poem, improve the poem?"

Syvia Plath writing in her journal, 23 Fitzroy Road, London, February 1963 - genesis of the poem and video link

Writing my Sylvia Plath homage poem involved reading several biographies of Sylvia, a biography of her poet husband, Ted Hughes, and a biography of the woman he left Sylvia for - Assia Wevill.
I also re-read Sylvia's poems, especially the ones written in the last weeks of her life.
A key fact that helped me in writing the poem was learning that the winter that Sylvia killed herself was the coldest London in 100 years.
Melbourne poet, David Lumsden, also encouraged me to write a Sylvia Plath poem that didn't mention gas - unlit gas fumes from the kitchen oven being the cause of Sylvia's death.
Over the course of two years I revised the poem a dozen times. Reading all the biographies concerning Sylvia, Ted and their circle, was invaluable to me in realizing the poem. I get lots of poems from reading - reading continues to seed poems for me. Click here to hear and see me read the Sylvia poem.

Portrait of Blood - background to the poem and link

Click on "Portrait of blood" (in purple) in the last sentence of this post to hear and see me reading "Portrait of blood" from my poetry collection, "Beneath Our Armour".
The poem is personal in that I was born premature with a hole in the heart and have undergone heart surgery twice, once at the age of six and once at the age of thirty-seven. Consequently, I've seen my own blood in tubes and syringes in doctor's surgeries and hospitals throughout my life.

The poem is universal in that we are all mortal/finite, all have red blood coursing through us no matter what colour our skin.
We are all vulnerable to bullies, conflict, known and new diseases, the fickleness of biology and luck.
"Portrait of blood" is the last poem in my poetry collection, "Beneath Our Armour", because I always like to have a philosophical poem ending a book and a poetry reading.