Frontline words and what’s missing?

I just got home from seeing ‘Bruno’ at the cinema….. (which features a cameo by Snoop Dog at the end, along with Bono/Sting/Elton John in the spoof music video’finale’… ) and then I turned on the tv to see news of 8 soldiers dying in 24 hrs in Afghanistan. Some contrast eh? For some reason it made me wonder why we haven’t heard any poetry from the frontline in recent years? At school we did the War poets like Wilfred Owen as my first introduction to poetry…. and now with 18 yr old lads being sent out without proper equipment it seems, for a war that many of us and probably they themselves don’t believe in and they’re watching their mates die. Pretty extreme, and how would any of us get to understand how to cope with the extreme feelings in such a situation? The ex Guantanamo Bay prisoners have talked of how in solitary confinement many of them had written poems, with no previous experience of it before – and how it’s a natural human response to an extreme environment.

The BBC has made some outstanding programmes for the Poetry season, but most of the featured poets seemed to be dead or the more traditional academics – wouldn’t it have been refreshing to hear poets from a different world altogether? Would their ideas have echoed Wilfred Owen and co, and the futility of war, or has the experience of war changed in essence? Wouldn’t it also be enlightening to hear the words of the Afghan soldiers too?  Khaled Hosseini with ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ has written with a poet’s eye for detail and introduced many of us to a sense of the beauty and order of a place now synonymous with such destruction and chaos. Suddenly tonight I want to hear a modern update of Frontline Words, so if you know of where I can read/hear some – let me know please?

Changing the subject, how do you know when a poem is finished? Do you ever know, or is it continually evolving with each performance? Do you find yourself editing the lines you keep forgetting, thinking subliminally there’s a deeper reason you’re forgetting certain lines – ie. they don’t belong there…. they’re poetic orphans in search of a good home, so you’ve allowed them temporary shelter but now you need to evict them for a future work…… I’m guilty of that one sometimes! (Mentor Jo Bell and I have a running joke about this, as she has Xray vision and will always pick out a line that I’ve lamely tried to sneak into a piece that doesn’t work or belong there, and she spots it like a CCTV swivelling camera. ) I just ask, as I’ve spent ages picking at a Self portrait piece to go with a ‘Poetraits’ project and finally I thought I’d finished it, recorded it and had that sense of satisfaction where it just feels complete and you feel at ease with it. But….

Then I sent it to a mate who’s involved in the same project, Dreadlock Alien (without whose encouragement a few years ago, I wouldn’t be doing this today, so maximum gratitude to one of the hardest working poets I know) and we did ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ swap. So I listened to his poem this morning and knew something was missing from mine. It’s an alchemical process, but somehow hearing his rhymes has triggered something that makes me now see a gap previously invisible in my own poem. So I’ve been keeping my pen with me everywhere today scribbling possible new lines in the gym, at a school event, at a food show where I hosting a live chef cook off… that was close, my words nearly burnt in the flames under his fritatta…… but no, I didn’t scribble any words during Bruno – didn’t want to spill the popcorn:)

Anyway, better go finish that off now, and hopefully by Monday I’ll be able to share a WBA piece in progress about a ‘cagoul’…. more to come. For now – enjoy your weekend:)

x