For those of you who didn’t catch the 9/11 special on channel Five last night, Simon Armitage has written a poem to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center atrocity.

Written as the first-person account of a fictional trader near the top of the north tower on that day, it was dramatised by Rufus Sewell, and was accompanied by news footage from the day itself as well as interviews with three people who were in the Towers during the attack, and family members of two of the people who died.

I know of Simon Armitage’s work as he is one of the required poets for study on the AQA GCSE syllabus, and have always thought of his work as pretty straight forward, with some depth but not necessarily to my taste. But this work, Out of the Blue, I find to be remarkable in the way that it captures the surrealism of the day, along with the pathos of the ordinary men and women who were caught up in the attack.

I think any attempt of mine to explain the poem would fall short of the reality. You can download the whole text of the poem in .pdf format here:

Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage

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OK, so I’ve decided to move my writing – toast haiku and all – to a new blog. I’ll still appear here, but I think that my tiny poems do tend to get lost amongst the posts and occasional rants that Richard and I have about things… So, they now have a new home. I hope you’ll join me there!

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The cat, regal and
haughty, pushes my book and
possesses my lap

Taking into account the comments from a friend, here is a toast-free posting…

The toast haiku did get me thinking, however, and I unearthed a notebook that I used in university to copy down poems that struck me at the time. What’s incredible is that they all seem to be less than 10 lines (with the exception of a William Carlos Williams poem – which is 12). But what fascinates me, I think, is how much feeling and emotion you can get from just a few lines of poetry. Here’s one of my all-time faves:

In a Station at the Metro

The apparition of these faces in a crowd –
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound

Pound was an American poet, and this poem ‘struck me between the eyes’, as it were, when I first read it at uni. It felt true, as if I’d just discovered something important – that you don’t have to use a thousand words to explain an experience, but that just a small, but important, image will do. Pound explained it himself, comparing his work to Asian forms of poetry such as haiku.

And I continued to find short poems with a powerful image interesting. My favourite of the afore-mentioned William Carlos Williams is this:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

For me, it evokes the sweetness (and sometime frustration) of married life – you come home to discover that Your Beloved has eaten the chocolate bar you’ve been saving, etc (except he never has – he has this very annoying habit of not snacking between meals…) , but also the sharp sweetness of the plums against your teeth, and the coldness hitting the roof of your mouth on a hot day. I also love that the title is so integral to the meaning of the poem – it gives the rest of it context, and without it the resonances of the relationship would be non-existant, or at least changed.

But haiku also can evoke the same kind of reaction. One of my favourites is from a Croatian poet, Darko Plazanin. (I did a search earlier, and there seem to be a lot of Croatian poets who write haiku – similarities in the language, perhaps?? ) My understanding is that haiku is supposed to recall an image, but also embody an emotion or link to humanity’s condition. (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) This seemed to evoke a wonder, as well as a feeling of – futility perphaps? -

After the storm
a boy wipes the sky
from the tables.

- Darko Plazanin

Here’s another that I found today:

Waterfall roaring -
though the sparrow sings unheard –
still he keeps singing.

- James Kirkup

How many different ways has that sentiment been expressed? And yet, it still seems to give new insight.

So, since this whole post has been about expressing emotion in poetry, I suppose I should leave you with one of my own. Please don’t laugh – but also, feel free to comment if you wish.

Cold night lurks outside
freezing all in its piercing grip.
Heart still in my chest

- Beth Peat