Cat and mouse

Charlie is nothing if not prompt. She produces a cat poem and a mouse poem based on the photo I sent her, and I’m chuffed that she thinks the experiment worth trying. It’s great to see her playing with these different voices. After all, if Jo Bell always writes in the same voice, as the same narrator, it’s a bit bloody boring after a while (as you may well have found out). Sometimes you want a poem to tell a story which you couldn’t experience yourself – ergo, you need to shape-shift every now and then.

So these two poems are a valuable experiment – and so is the other experiment I suggested. Once, in a session with domestic abuse victims in Staffordshire I asked them to write curses, maledictions – poems that would unleash all their repressed feelings about the people who had done them harm. Obviously, they had some ‘cursees’ in mind and their poems were forceful and fierce – things to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. But they were bloody good stuff, and everyone felt a bit better afterwards.

I asked Charlie if she fancied writing a curse. She obliged immediately, producing one for our next session. I begin to feel like the wicked demon on her shoulder, taking a perfectly nice woman and turning her into a bitter twisted curse-hurling hag in my own image. But this was good stuff, with the true personal touches that make a poem come alive when read aloud. Now, it’s very unkind to take a first draft and critique it as if it were a finished piece – but of course I do it anyway. Charlie is fantastically trusting, allowing me to see her work at an earlier stage than she might normally – which I hope allows me to make constructive comments in time to help them develop.

In this case, the piece was just a little unwieldy. Charlie had taken a few lines to ‘write herself in’ to the subject, with the meat of it at the end – something we are all guilty of, especially in a first draft. So our conversation turned to the subject of editing and ‘killing your babies’ – taking out those lines which you think are brilliant but which actually hold back the poem, especially in performance. It’s all good stuff and useful to both of us, I hope!