Katherine Stansfield post 2

You're going to be glad you stuck with us! Here we have the next installment in the "Living Spaces" series. It will not disappoint!

Panda poem installment two

So after I finished writing my notes on notes that might become a (panda) poem for the Contempo blog I actually carried on working and produced some drafts, bravely stepping out onto A4 paper: the next stage of writing commitment. I find that having a restricted amount of time to work on a poem is a good thing. A whole afternoon stretching away to work on a single poem is unappealing, frightening almost. What if I have to face the fact, hour upon hour, that it’s not working? And if I give up early, say before 5pm when I actually planned on getting up from the desk, then that’s giving up, isn’t it? That’s not to say that I wouldn’t spend a whole afternoon working on a number of poems all in draft form. That’s OK, and I find moving from one to another like some sort of poetry-writing bee actually works well, and I don’t end up with several poems all converging on the same theme or technique. But for one poem a good time is 40 or so minutes before I have to go to a meeting, which is often. That limited, clearly defined time period is when I’m most creative for poems (but not fiction, oddly enough). It forces frenzied bursts, similar to those I demand of myself when writing notes in the notebook. I’m doing the same thing for this blog post. I have to be at a poetry reading in 22 minutes so that’s only 22 minutes of serious self-reflection. I can do that.

I didn’t make the Magma poetry competition deadline, alas, but that’s good news for Contempo because it means you can have the finished poem, along with its nascent stages.

I’ve kept my drafts and numbered them for the purpose of the blog but usually I discard as I go because I don’t look back. I didn’t date them, unfortunately, but I think I wrote drafts 1 and 2 straight after one another, and then 3 and 4 the following day, having given the words time to ‘brew’, all on paper. Here’s draft 1:

I cut my teeth on Newsround: 

‘And finally’ (John Craven said) 

meant pandas at least 

once a week: pandas on planes, 

panda [something illegible I’ve crossed out] love at Edinburgh Zoo, 

pandas pandas pandas The Queen 

unveils a new panda. There was 

something about them even then. Too big: 

[illegible] lumpen. Their eyes (lost in [illegible] black fur circles) tricks of a hypnotist. Big pads that 

could be hands. Shoes inside the feet. No one believed me but 

when I saw the [illegible] baby on youtube sneeze 

and the mother jump in shock, I knew – 

pandas are people in suits 

the world over. [illegible] (look at them) 

They’re all having you on.

I had meant to use my biro with less force for crossings out so that I could see what the words were (again, only for the purpose of the blog as I usually want all trace of the word removed so as not to distract me as the poem begins to come clear through the haze of less good ideas or lines). However, I clearly got carried away. The round brackets I add once reading back and usually mean that what’s inside them won’t get carried over to the next draft; this is another way of ‘thinning the trees’ so to speak. In the draft I put // at the points I feel, even early on in writing, that there should be a line break; for instance, there’s one after ‘suits’. That felt like a strong word to end a line on, and I think I must have been anticipating ending the poem close to the word ‘you’ and was making a mental note to have some rhyme there with ‘suit’. What usually happens when drafting is that my sense of line breaks dissolves mid-way through the poem and I write long sentences, which you can see above. The other line breaks given above I didn’t indicate with any ‘notes to self’ – I obviously trusted I’d feel them sufficiently in draft two not to need a reminder. As well as line break indicators I also put little lines under certain letters of words to emphasise to myself that there’s a rhyming sound there. For example, there’s a little line under the ‘I’ of ‘tricks’ and ‘hypnotist’. I’ve been using this kind of code for years and never really thought about why I feel the need to remind myself of these things but I think it must be because I don’t tend to read a poem aloud until it’s on the computer: phase three. I’m still not totally committed at this stage. It could sound dreadful read aloud. It could put me off continuing. But I have the sound in my head, and that usually translates pretty well to reading aloud.

Here’s draft 2:

I cut my teeth on Newsround: 

and finally meant pandas at least 

once a week: pandas on planes, 

panda love at London Zoo, 

the Queen unveils a new panda. 

There was something about them even then. Those eyes 

tricks of a hypnotist eyes. Too big, lumpen The big pads that could be hands 

and shoes inside the feet. 

No one believed me when I saw // 

the sneezing baby on youtube 

and the mother lurch in shock, I knew 

pandas are people in suits [note to self: caps] 

the world over. 

They’re all having you on. 

the youtube clip where the sneezing baby 

makes the mother lurch with shock, I knew 

that pandas are people in suits 

the world over. They’re all having you on.

The poem is becoming more economical. I’m getting more of a sense of how shorter lines will fit together to make longer ones by this stage, but I still feel that there will be a break after ‘least’ as that’s made it into draft 2. I changed ‘Edinburgh Zoo’ to ‘London Zoo’ to give some alliteration with ‘love’. In my memories of pandas on Newsround they’re always at Edinburgh Zoo but, for the sake of the poem (in particular its sound) which, of course, is moving beyond its original starting point, I’m more than happy to change it. This is a sign the poem is beginning to have a life of its own. The last section, about the youtube video, is proving tricky, and that’s something that’s still continuing. The phrasing is awkward here; I’m finding it hard to convey that the baby is sneezing in a video in which the mother then physically reacts in shock. That’s the crux of the poem for me, the moment the idea that pandas were people in suits came. It has to be in there to give the poem focus; this is what I’m building up to.  I’m committed to the verb ‘lurch’ as it’s more unusual than ‘jump’, though by this stage ‘lumpen’ is out, despite the nice rhyme that would give with ‘jump’. It’s a lumpy word in terms of sound and it’s not really necessary either. Overly descriptive. I can’t quite remember why I’ve written ‘caps’ after ‘suits’ in the crossed out lines. I’ve never used block capitals for a whole word in a poem. I was obviously feeling experimental. It would certainly suggest force of idea, but in an overly forceful way, I think, as if the speaker is ranting, when I wanted the odd idea of the poem to be convincing, logical. It’s what a friend and colleague calls ‘controlled hysteria’ in my poems and it’s a common trait, I now realise, often when animals and birds are concerned.