Oranges and parrots

Oh my, is that the time? I’ve had a hectic few weeks backpacking in America – well, my daughter was the backpack and we were in the city mainly, teaching in Belfast, and chasing buses in London. And then there’s beautiful Manchester where I am right now.

So, to start … Well, poems usually come to me, but sometimes, especially if writing is your career, you have to pluck one from somewhere. I’ve always thought of writing as an act of conjuring – conjuring memory, images – to explore ideas. One of the ways in which I like to trigger a new poem is to give myself little writing tasks; a recent one was, write something with taste, touch and a tree (notice the ‘T’s? yeah, I like to stretch myself). The result was: 'The air tasted of salt, a cold distillate of long gone rains. She placed her hands on the tree root behind her and sat on them.' It went on for longer, but I usually discard most of what I write, take the idea I like best and use it as the seed of something bigger. From that, I took the first line and it’s currently waiting to be expanded…

When writing for younger people, I try to keep the language nice, light and fun – regardless of the subject or idea explored in the poem – so I use rhyme much more often than I do otherwise and I pay close attention to rhythm. I think my leaning on rhyme and rhythm have a lot to do with my memories of how much I enjoyed the simple sounds of words when I was younger, the staccato of multi-syllabic words, the sibilance of ‘s’ and ‘c’, and the great fun we had trying to change the rhyming words in our free time. Oh, and repetition – nothing like repetition to get the young ‘uns going.

A good example of a poem I have using all those elements while dealing with quite a serious idea – that of identity, being an individual – is ‘About an Orange’. I was thinking about bullying a lot and started with the idea of a boy standing up to tell a group of bullies who he really was (a bit like Saul Williams’ Sha-Clack-Clack moment in the flim Slam) and, somehow, I thought of the Nick Hornby title About a Boy, even though I haven’t read any of his books. The thing is – you’re really going to think I’m making this up – I was eating an orange and I thought: what would the orange say? And that’s how it began.

Look an orange in the eye,
look an orange in the eye
and you’ll see a parrot fly –
red and yellow flappers with a twinkle in its eye.

One dose of repetition, a recurrent end rhyme, a smidgen of internal rhyme, and – if you have the faculty to pick it up – a distinctive rhythm. But, of course, the original idea still had a message and that was something that the poem had to convey and that comes in the middle of the poem, picking up, first on the rhyme, then on the colours in the first section:

First:
Drop an orange on the floor
and it won’t even be sore –

Then later:
An orange is the yellow of calm
and the red of anger,

In the final section, the message I summarised the message by repeating the first section, but with a different final couplet:

Look an orange in the eye,
look an orange in the eye
and you see it’s more than a fruit;
to really know an orange you must go to its roots.

So, I guess the trick is to start somewhere. Use whatever works for you and once you have an idea of what you want to say think of your audience. I’m not suggesting that you don’t share your opinions, ideas, or messages with the world and only say what people want you to say.

The point is that you don’t talk to a five-year-old the way you would to a sixty-year-old in the same way that a doctor won’t speak to you about your illness in the language she uses to discuss it with a colleague. Our job as writers is to communicate and the moment we forget that our work may become redundant.