Poetry as Therapy

Poetry as therapy is the sort of New Age, almost medieval treatment I'm not likely to believe in. Poetry might possibly cause more problems than it solves or maybe it's just the people that write it that make it seem so.

However, medieval is by no means always bad and I had thought I might sit down with some poems and see if it did me any good, with special reference to my loss of interest in the genre. I took the Firebox anthology with me to Chichester yesterday and in there, Sean points out Elizabeth Bishop's The Bight as a precursor to Craig Raine's 'Martianism'. 

The local library is closed on Wednesdays so I couldn't go and collect The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson that they've got in for me. So, early this evening, I took books by Bishop, Sean, Julia Copus and Roddy Lumsden from the shelves and read a few poems, mainly reliable old favourites by those reliable, old favourites.

They were good, actually. Even if one's lost faith with the art in general, it takes more than that to dim the admiration for the best things.

It is always seeing other people do things well that makes one want to try it for oneself, or it always has been for me and before long, well, an idea of sorts. Poems, for some of us, come as much from other poems as they do from 'life'.

11 syllables per line with 10 in the last of each stanza, not making any claims to sonnet form, in some ways autobiographical, in others meta-textual or whatever it's called, but mostly ironic, downbeat, making no claims for itself, declaring itself a work-in-progress and so far, so good, I'm not displeased with it.

One Day Perhaps I Will Think of a Title

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop. 

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be. 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays

In suburbs where the library is still closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so,

I ask her how she is but not to dance.