Why it's okay to keep writing the same poem again and again
A minor iteration
A lot of the poems that I have written in recent years have been about one particular thing: the view from the rear window of our flat. I blame the pandemic. Being shut in without access to a garden for most of the day made me much more attentive to that view, though I've always loved it. And while I've once again had the freedom to wander as I relatively wish for these past few years, I keep on gazing out at that skyline and getting the urge to write.
This should be absolutely fine but my self critical voice kicks in and I start to feel a moment of shame about it. I can't just keep writing the same bloody poem all the time. Haven't I scoured the shortlists and the big shots recently? None of them are publishing odes to their back window. They're at the front line of this and that, taking the temperature of big world events filtred through the finely calculated filters of their day-to-day subjectivity!
I think back to my early twenties, my infatuation with Charles Bukowski and how I kept buying those thick volumes that Black Sparrow Press churned out year-on-year until I realised how familiar it all became – how the racetrack poems or the bar poems or societal lament poems each seemed to be the same poem repeating itself.
We've heard those criticisms elsewhere too. How bands from Status Quo to Oasis were often accused of releasing the same song again and again. How movie franchises become formulaic even though the audiences seem happy to lap up the same thing and can even become anxious when well-worn standards are strayed from. But while repetition and iteration might be the things that keep a fandom happy, they rarely result in positive critical notices.
One contrasting example comes from the art world. Part of this can be for financial reasons: why sell one work for an exhorbitant amount when you can sell a few? But I also think about Monet’s late works, how he would set up a easel and paint the same scene, be it a bridge in his own garden arched over a pond; the shadow of the houses of Parliament looming through London fog; or a pair of hefty haystacks.
Of course, these repeated paintings were not the same. The forms and structures might have appeared the same but everything else was transformed by the light conditions of the time of day that it was painted in. This in itself drummed home the Heraclitan ethos that underpinned Impressionism – that it was never the same haystack or water lily from one moment to the next.
So the poem written about the view from my window might indeed be another bloody window poem but the very nature of a window is its function of framing a changing world for the vantage point of an ever changing perspective. If an impressionist uses the same subject to bring attention to ever-shifting qualities of light, then a poet can do the same to bring attention to the ever-shifting qualities of mood.
It’s not like my own repetition of the same motif is something brave and new in poetry. The haiku poets, in particular, not only kept returning to the same images and motifs, they also formulated strict rules about the usage of such images – especially when applied to the formal, collective composition of a renga.
I don’t think I’ll be bothering any publishers or magazine editors with my burgeoning corpus of window poems. They wouldn't touch them with a barge pole anyway and I could imagine (because we are already in the world of wild fantasy when considering their acceptance) a minor scandal erupting if I simultaneously published a window poem in every esteemed literary organ at the same time.
Which leads me onto why I'm building a digital garden. If I write fifty poems about the view from my window, I can just publish them all side by side on my own online space and leave it to the reader to see how many they would like to read through. They could read a window poem a week and spread it out over the year with a two-week window poem break if they wanted to. In writing these words I find myself tempted to bookend each Rusty Niall post with a “window poem of the week” but I think it's best that I don't.
I'll probably go into more detail about why I'm developing a digital garden strategy to publishing my content online next time. Keep an eye out for that one, but for now, and for one week only, here is my window poem of the week!
sheet lightning
Last night, the heavy clouds pulsed. Slight thundery rumbles and then silence, real silence. I’m not sure how it was possible, what with the standard stream of traffic outside and other Friday night shenanigans. Even the rain minded its manners.
At first it appeared at the edge of the horizon, which for me is the top of what might be Sydenham Hill, I still haven’t worked it out despite living here for twenty years. I thought there were fireworks just beyond the reach of sound but then the pulses grew wider and brighter and the silence became more pronounced.
The morning after is muggy and cloud-bright. The birds are kicking off about something. The thumpy festivals that shut off the park for the month have packed up and rolled off to become spreadsheets and stock reports.
I’ll remain open to that silence beneath all things, the silence that the sheet lightning spoke of. When I listen close enough, I always end up with something worth saying.
This is the latest in an ongoing series of weekly, shorter posts from Rusty Niall to complement my longer essays that have settled into a monthly delivery pattern. Every week I’ll aim to send something interesting, funny or poetic to your inbox. If you like it then please share it with someone that you think might like it too. You can also support my work through some of the options listed below.
Cheers.
Niall
Insightful as always but validating too. Before I become a fully paid up member of the 'whatever happened to the lyric lads? - mid-life crisis division, I thought I'd best put in some training. So each morning after cycling up virtual Innsbruck or wherever, I sit in the grounds of Mary Magdelin, on the same bench, whatever the weather and write a poem. Haiku in spirit, but not always in form and with no preconceived ideas, just sit, observe and write. It is very interesting to me how there is always something new to write about doing this on average 4 times a week. When the year is out I'll look back and put the book out. So, upon reading your article I certainly feel vindicated in my routine and confident in its concept, thank you Mr. O. (If uou change your mind about Window Poems in print, you are very welcome to nudge).
Keep up the great work,
Mark
Cheers Mark, looking forward to seeing how those poems turn out. Glad this was somewhat vindicating. Thanks for the nudge offer about the window poems on paper too. Hope all's good with you otherwise my friend.
N