Exploring Poetic Objective, with Paula Aamli.
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INTERVIEW
Helen: Hi, Paula, welcome to the show.
Paula: Thank you very much. It’s lovely to be here.
Helen: We’re going to be speaking largely about poetic objective today and how your new collection really leans into that. But before we get into that, I wondered if you could, first of all, tell people who are listening, how you found poetry or how it found you.
Paula: Sure, thank you. I found poetry as a teenager, and thankfully, none of those poems exist anymore. And then I came back to poetry much later. So, for me poetry originally was something that my dad was keen on. He, you know, he was from a generation where, if you pass the 11 plus you went to grammar school. And I sort of liked to imagine that the school he went to was a little bit like the one in Dead Poets Society, although I suspect it really wasn’t. But he used to have to learn poetry by heart. And for some reason, despite being put through that he really enjoyed it. And so when we were kids, every now and again, we’d get snatches of, you know, the boys stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled, or, you know, my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, that sort of thing.
And the thing I think, is quite sweet about my dad’s relationship with poetry is that he is to poetry, what all dads are to dad jokes. I mean, he’s, I suppose the polite way to put it would be to say that he’s a comic poet. When he writes poetry, like he lives in Cheshire, he uses the name doggerel Banksy. So that’ll give you a sort of sense of the kind of person. And he’s what you might call an occasional poet. So, he’s always got a poem on the go for any occasion. And most of the time, it’s very in that sort of did do, did do, did do, did do, did do did do. I thought that’s what poetry was as a teenager, and then sort of left it behind for about 30 years, and actually came back to poetry and a very different kind of poetry when I was studying organizational change.
So, I was working for a bank, I was interested in organizational change. And I was really interested in difficult change processes and how we respond to them. And the reason I started getting interested in poetry was because of the way that I discovered that I felt like poetry gives us a sort of a landscape to go into where we can, we can sort of process some of those very difficult very ambivalent, ambiguous emotions. So I started using poetry as a as a tool in a totally, totally different context. But that’s, that’s my second relationship with poetry.
Helen: That’s so interesting, because they’re so very different. Obviously, Pam Ayers has made a very good living out of the kind of occasional poetry that you’re talking about and that sort of doggerel. I have visions of you and your family sitting around the dinner table and just rolling your eyes in the way that people do at a dad joke, you know, he’s gonna tell that one again. That’s entertains me quite a lot. But isn’t it interesting, I think at different points in our life, poetry can look different to us, can mean different things. And it’s interesting that you took so much time away from it. I wonder if that was, in part, because you heard it so much in the home setting and you wanted a break?
Paula: Yeah, and I think because understandably, because of my dad’s influences. And I guess it was the way that poetry is taught in English as well. Many, many years ago when I was at school, poetry was presented as something that had a very fixed form. And that it was almost it was almost like a particular kind of crossword puzzle where you were trying to to make the rhymes work at the end. So, it seemed like quite an artificial thing. And, so I suppose when I left school poetry didn’t come with me. It didn’t seem to have a use beyond a sort of intellectual exercise.
And it was really when I was running out of road in my day job, in my ordinary life, you know, I had questions I had had a go at answering them using, you know, spreadsheets and business techniques and logic. And I was getting somewhere in terms of information, but I wasn’t getting very far in terms of psychological insight or emotional connection. So, it’s a very, very, very different kind of poetry. And to start with, I was talking to someone about this the other day, I’ve absolutely resisted the idea that I could be that I could be considered, or I could consider myself a poet. So I was using poetry to achieve something. But it was a couple more years before I started to think, coming towards, towards objective, this poem can be a thing for its own sake, it’s not just a tool to help me vent my confusion about why the world is the way it is, or my grief or my curiosity, whatever.
Helen: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I think almost all poets do have that resistance, at first, to claiming the space of being a poet. I certainly did. And I think most people have a defining experience or a period in their writing, where they suddenly can step into that. And it’s interesting what you say about the questioning of these difficult problems and kind of exploring them through poetry. I know, you’ve got a series of pamphlets coming out. And the first one is a locked down London life. And that’s the one that we’re largely discussing today, with regards to poetic objective, but I wondered what your poetic objective was, with the collection, and maybe the series, but particularly with this collection, what it was you wanted to say?
Paula: I sort of love the fact that I’m grateful that this is the one that’s come out first, in a sense, I had a sort of a pile of poetry from a period of time. And these poems, in some ways, were the ones I was writing at the, at the end of the process of coming back to poetry. And so maybe they were the first poems that I was confiden, could stand alone, if you like, and the others that are coming later needed a little bit more thinking about and a little bit more rework. And so they slotted in a little bit later into the process. But to answer the question about the objective. So clearly, the title of the collection refers to a very particular moment in time, and it’s a moment that feels like it’s disappearing very rapidly into the rearview mirror.
I’m not suggesting that COVID has gone away, sadly, I wish that was the case. But just the intensity of that first six months of experiencing living with it. And, you know, before we had medical solutions, you know, all that sort of thing, a very intense moment. So, even at the time, I had a sense that my memory was going to fade very fast in what it was like to live through that, but I was going to lose touch with it. And so I was writing, you know, obviously, I had a fair amount of time on my hands, because we were all trapped at home. So, I was writing quite a lot in that period, trying to pay attention. And specifically, starting to come to appreciate my very local part of London in a way that I hadn’t before.
There’s something about being in a place and really starting to pay attention to it. That makes me start to fall in love with it as well. I went from being quite indifferent to where I lived to and not interested and really treating it as a sort of place to depart from, all the interesting stuff happening in other places, to really appreciating the streets and the parks and the urban foxes and the sort of tangle of weeds that were growing in various places. And I gradually have grown into the challenge to, to the simple idea that pretty countryside is where we find nature, and that towns are nature free zones. I mean, sure, it’s, it’s clearly true that in a city, there’s a narrower range of plants and animals that you might encounter. But, an incredible number of species of things, creep into towns and make their lives there, and you can start to notice them. But also, for me, it attacks or addresses this idea that as humans, we have a bit of a tendency to think of ourselves as over here, and nature is over there. But the reality is that, that we’re also, at least in my view, of the world. Humans emerged from nature we are nature’s creatures, who also have this crazy wonderful thing called consciousness, and urban environments are created by us.
So, in some ways, they are a kind of nature life as well. Yeah. So that was I what I was trying to do in the collection was a little bit of a love poem to my neighbourhood, but also to ask questions about who am I in relation to this, to the nature that lives in towns? Who am I, as an urban dweller, but also a nature creature?
Helen: I think that makes so much sense. And especially having read the poems themselves? I think that comes across really strongly. And you do definitely raise all these questions. And I spent the first lockdown in London, myself a different part of London to you just, you know, a little bit further north in London, I think, but what a lot of people commented on is that there were barely any cars around and like barely any buses, or barely any, you know, kind of public transport of any kind. It felt like the birds, you could hear them again. It felt like they were in greater numbers. And there was a lot of things you saw in the headlines about very rural places were kind of, you know, goats overtaking a Welsh village, etc. But in London, there was still some of that. Nature really did see it as its own playground, again. And so it’s interesting, the way you explore that theme, that thread through your poems, and these poems do have very strong poetic objectives, each and every one of them or so it feels as you read them. I wondered if that was something you had from the outset, what was the process with that?
Paula: Yeah, thank you. It actually depends, across all of these pamphlets, I suppose, I would describe them as as cousin poems. And what I mean by that is, they were all written over the course of about two years, but in the London lockdown in particular based on material out of that particular six months. So there was a kind of a chronological connection to them. But I think more importantly than that, and I can see that now because, you know, I’m continuing to move on and what I’m writing is continuing to shift as well, I suppose. I feel like the poems in this collection come out of a period where I had particular curiosities or particular things that I was interested in or sort of obsessing about, I guess. So, they do feel like there they are facets in of me trying to answer the same question. I like to think that they explore it in a range of ways. I don’t think they are just one note in that way, but they’re certainly from a particular period when that was my big concern. So the things I was talking about, how do I relate to nature? On a kind of meta level, I’d spent the previous couple of years sort of processing the news about these emerging issues that we were having with climate, and sort of trying to process the effects of the industrialized, urban lives we’re having on the planet. So all of those same questions. Were kind of brewing in the background.
Helen: Yeah. And I think that really comes across and it’s interesting. And I do think that often with poets, our poetic objectives often come from our fascinations. I mean, you mentioned the word obsession. I do think that that plays a part, I think a polite term for it is fascination, you know, is the sort of never-ending fascination with a particular topic or aspect of life, aspects of history, whatever it may be. Aspects of politics, it just depends on what kind of poetry you’re writing. But I think that it is very difficult to write a pamphlet or a collection without really leaning into that fascination. And that is often where the poetic objective sort of springs from, or is kind of underlying by I think. That seems to echo your experience.
Paula: Yeah, I just wanted to say on that as well, because it occurs, to me. As I’ve come back to this collection, I’ve had a look at it again, just now. I find myself wondering whether I would write it again, like this now. And I mean, of course, on one level, that’s sort of a ridiculous question. Because now that these poems exist, they don’t need to be written again. So clearly, I would write something different. But also, the, the threads that I’m following have moved on as well. So I’m quite interested coming back to this, this this pamphlet, to see to see what shows up in it, and what’s missing from it, as well. And I think sometimes it’s okay, and maybe this is relevant to having a clear poetic objective, that we are not trying to talk about everything all the time. I don’t think my relationship turns up in this or my family. If it turns up at all, it’s very much at the very edges of what’s going on. But in the last six months, I’ve been writing a lot more into the experience of being a woman at my stage of life. So I’m in my late 40s. And, the kind of the lens has, turned from the sort of the world out there to the world inside me. That’s a much more introspective kind of poetry. And I sort of love this idea that we that we follow one thread. And then there’s a moment that we think, yeah, I think that’s good for now. And then we follow the next one. And it may be that we, that we cycle back, but it doesn’t surprise me when poets shift quite significantly, if anything, I think maybe this comes back to my dear dad and his doggerel that if you’re going to do the same thing over and over again, for a lifetime of poetry, it’s going to be a pretty predictable. Yeah, it’s in the best way dad in the best way. Predictable can be good.
Helen: I think you’re right. My first pamphlet was about water. And there was a point where I thought I was never going to write another poem about anything else except water. I was like, how am I ever gonna get off this subject? I just I didn’t know what was up with me. And there were so many strands I didn’t even touch on because it was only a pamphlet. But I still felt like I wrote so many poems about that and when you’re in it, you sometimes wonder, am I ever gonna write about anything ever else ever again? And then, of course, six months later, as you say, you’re writing about something completely different. And that’s great, because it gives you a completely new focus, it opens up new forms and new structures and new vocabulary and all kinds of things for you to toy with.
And when I think about poetic objective, I think about how it informs the whole poem. So not just what said in the poem, but the title and the form of it, and the rhyme scheme, and if there is one, etc. And I just wondered if, as you were writing this, the poetic objective that you had informed any of the forms, in particular, because people ask so much about form, it is one of those questions, it just never goes away in poetry about how to grapple with form, how to manipulate it, how to explore it. So you have this very particular thing that you want to say and explore? Did that inform any of the forms that you selected?
Paula: Yeah, it did. And I guess first of all, to say, specifically, for this pamphlet, I find myself wanting to say that these poems were quite conversational. That feels very consistent with the idea that I was trying to explore: avery mundane, everyday life, and in a period of time where really nothing much was going on, except for going for these walks and seeing London. So, I mean, if you sort of contrast it, I didn’t really have the material to be writing some sort of epic, I know that sort of long epic poems are not really in fashion at the moment. But I’d find it very strange to be fashioning some sort of Gilead type, noble, heroic, out of this material.
The other thing is that the poems are a little bit episodic. So towards the end, there are there are fragments, which are not quite Haiku, but they’re that short. There’s a poem in the middle, which is modelled on a poem by Billy Collins. The form there is that it follows the same number of lines and the same shape as his original poem. And that feels sort of appropriate for a collection, which is fundamentally shaped around wandering around in a city, if you think about the way a city, I mean, I know some cities are very planned. But even in the planning, there’s, an element of chaos, and you might find yourself in a square with a very grand building, and then you might find yourself in a shopping center. And then you might find yourself in a very rundown bit, you know, hopefully not at night or in any danger. But there are lots of different environments in an urban context that could be right up against each othe. So a little bit of inconsistency felt, felt sort of right. And I think the final thing I’d like to say, sorry, now, I’m banging on
Helen: No, it’s great, great material.
Paula: But there’s also a question that I can answer in the negative in the sense. so I’ve mentioned already that, you know, I’ve been writing my way into understanding I was becoming a poet because I was writing poetry. But because I was very slow to see myself as a poet, I wasn’t really doing anything with the poems so I wasn’t trying to submit them, they weren’t going out into the world anywhere. So I had this quite large reservoir of material. And, for quite a lot of that period of time, I had been writing in very formal structures, although not really rhyming poetry, I write a little bit of rhyming poetry, but I do find it hard. Again, no offense, dad to write something that rhymes, but the rhymes, you know that you give up some of the truth of the poem in order to meet the rhyme scheme. But I was using a lot of structures. And I made a decision quite early in dividing up my material that I would devote what I thought was going to be one pamphlet, it turned out to be two pamphlets, to the quotes, you know, structured poems. So there’s a pamphlet, which is mostly written using pantoums, which is a repeating plaited structure where the lines kind of weave in and out of each other. And then there’s another pamphlet, which is sonnets. And so I sort of pulled those formal structures out of play. And then when I looked at the rest, actually, that sort of verging on the edge of prose poetry, with one or two excursions into something slightly more recognizable, as a poetic form that felt appropriate to this to this context,
Helen: I think that’s something that we do have to be prepared for that sometimes we may go for those really formal structures, where you’ve got like a pantoum, for example, and it does require you to think carefully about where you’re placing your lines and placing your rhymes and your words, etc, etc. And, and in other places, we may be a little bit more freeform, and that is going to be part of the process. For us, it’s going to be part of the exploration of the topic, and the exploration of what we, you know, want to do in terms of rhyme just to pick up on that, you know, because it does fall in and out of vogue. And it depends on what kind of a writer you are, whether or not you’re a performance poet, you’re more likely to write in rhyme, so you can remember what you’ve got to say next. But the trick with it is always making sure that you’re in control of the rhyme and not the other way around. I think when the rhyme starts to control you in the poem, that is the moment where it can feel really forced. And as though that word was just put there because it rhymes. And as you say, you feel like you lose some of the truth. And that is because it feels far too forced,
Paula: I I enjoy attempting to write rhyming poetry. I think I would have to say I’m disappointed by my rhyming poems more often than by my freeform poems. But, but one thing that I’ve really, really enjoyed, I think you and I have talked about this before, in another context is bringing half rhyme. It’s such a fun, releasing thing to do. And again, I know tastes differ. And I suppose the danger that you always run with a half rhyme is that the reader reads it and thinks, Oh, dear, you didn’t get that quite right, that doesn’t actually rhyme.
Helen: I don’t know. Like, I know, there’s only a couple of things in the English language that nothing rhymes with that all. I mean, I think give it a go. I, you know, sometimes that can be a nice surprise for the reader if they get something that kind of almost, but doesn’t quite properly half rhyme. And again, it’s serving a purpose within your poem or, you know, certainly that’s the aim. I find, unfortunately, that half rhyme is more useful because often we’re writing about difficult social situations, difficult relationships, difficult political situations. I mean, poetry is a place where you can really explore those grey areas. And doing that in perfect rhyme doesn’t really sit well most of the time. So it’s not to say you can’t do it, of course you can. And people can do whatever feels right to them in their poetry. But half rhyme tends to be a very useful tool to poets, just because we’re usually exploring those really ambiguous questions or difficult issues. And to write a poem in perfect rhyme under those circumstances can feel not only forced, but sometimes completely inappropriate.
Paula: That makes so much sense. Because thinking aloud a little bit here the perfect rhyme has this inherent promise that everything’s okay. Really resolved. So of course, if we’re trying to write things where we don’t know that we believe that or we actively don’t believe that things are going to resolve, it’s very boring. It’s glib to suggest that it’s all going to be alright.
Helen: Yeah, and another thing I enjoy with half rhyme is that it can surprise you, you know, if you’re, there are certain words, that you can sort of feel coming from a long way off. There are certain words, and the half rhyme can just turn and take you in a different direction, you have the benefit of the benefit of surprise,
I suppose the most successful poets do that with doggerel The ones who do rhymes that flip between what you are sort of hoping the rhyme will be amusing, or something completely surprising that you weren’t expecting, even though it’s perfect rhyme. That is a real challenge to poets, I think, to write a poem in perfect rhyme where you do not expect any of the rhymes. Because with half rhyme, a little bit of the work is already done for you. But with perfect rhyme, you have to work hard to think well, what word may they not expect? If the last end of the last line was a particular sound? So it’s a very interesting one.
I ask all guests to share a prompt for the listeners. And I’m thinking because of our theme, like if you can think of something particularly that might work in terms of them exploring poetic objective, or getting in touch with their poetic objective, some kind of writing activity or poetry activity, do you have anything that you could recommend?
Paula: Yeah, I do. The the actual prompt itself is really simple. And there’s a little bit of, let’s call it pre work, as well. But what I’m going to describe is pretty close to the way that I was getting myself started with the pieces I wrote for this year, during this period, and for this pamphlet. And so the first part of the prompt is not about writing, the first part of the prompt is go outside, if you can go for go for a walk, let’s say let’s say go for a 10 minute walk. It doesn’t have to be some huge hike. Or if you’re not able to get outside, maybe do some breathing or some yoga do some sort of activity. For me it would be walking. And then the second part, which is also pre-work is having done that don’t spend any time thinking about it, just get on with your day. And the poetry prompt starts let’s say later that same day. So let’s imagine that you went for a walk in the morning, you’ve lived your day, and then it’s early evening and you’re ready to get writing poem. So come to your notebook or your your laptop. Open it up, sit down, and at this point let your mind wander. So you’ve sort of forgotten the the details of the activity that you were doing. But as you sit there waiting, little bits of pieces and fragments will come back to you. And write down, let’s say, write down five fragments, not full sentences, just phrases. And again, part of the prompt here is, it might be about the physical experience that you had. So you might be writing down, rained heavily, but it might also be was in bad mood. So whatever the things are, or that what, what most comes to mind is the fact that your mind had wandered onto the TV you were watching, or the argument you’ve had with your boss or your brother, or, you know, so. So although you’re sort of casting your mind back to the activity, it doesn’t have to be an account of the activity, but just five fragments. And then once you’ve got, well, if you want to give yourself some leeway, more than five, but once you’ve got your fragments, then use them as the starting point, to write a poem that references all five of those fragments in some way. And if you’re feeling like it was very difficult to reengage, then your poem might be called, My mind is blank today. And that might get somewhere quite interesting. So yeah, that’s my that’s my suggestion.
Helen: Yeah, that’s really great. And it sounds really as though it could be any activity just for anybody who is listening and has mobility considerations, it sounds to me like you could do it with almost any activity for you, it’d be walking, put just a change of activity from what we normally for ten minutes, and then sit down after other distractions, and try and create five phrases that kind of link to that experience. Yeah, I think that would work really, really well. And I guess out of that, you will probably then, you know, explore that activity, what it means to you, you know, what, what you felt about it? And from that, of course, sparks sparks your objective. So I think that’s such an interesting idea. I’m definitely going to do that. And what it’s so interesting, linking back to what you’re saying there about this task, which is a good one, because it gets you observing things. And talking about the observation you did, you said you’re you know, you’re trying to pay attention. I keep getting told in all the poetry classes that I do that being observant is like one of the most important things for a poet, and I am terrible at it. I am really bad. I’m always just thinking about other things and not what’s going on right in front of me. And I think that’s just a sign that I take too much on, but it’s just always entertaining in poetry classes, when it’s my turn to, you know, we do an observation activity. And they’ll be like, remember something that happened? And what did you observe? I think what I’ve learned is that I’m not very good at observation. But that’s okay, I’ll work on it. So it’s a really good skill to flex.
Paula: I also think it’s quite interesting too, because I did a version of what I’ve just described to you I did as a kind of a practice for, let’s say, some weeks at a time. So I was sort of doing an activity, getting on with my day, and then writing these fragments down later. And then try and use those, those fragments or those phrases to, to write a poem. But actually, some of the things I learned, were also about paying attention to the moments when my mind wandered. Because say for example when I first started walking, I picked a route so that I could walk through one of London’s Royal Parks, so parks with these very big, gorgeous trees in them. And to start with every day I was just really overw
helmed by these trees and how amazing they were. And then there was a day when I realized that oops I hadn’t noticed trees at all, they just became background. When you’re at the beginning of something, you can think it’s going to be the only way it’s ever going to be. So when I was at the beginning of noticing nature, I was like, I will never not notice nature again. But noticing not noticing can be quite interesting, right?
Helen: Yeah, exactly. And it’s so funny how so quickly things can become background to us. So the more we flex those observation skills, the better I am not a model poet in that respect, far from it. Far from it in many respects, but I do think that is a particular weakness of mine. It’s not how I work generally as a poet, but it’s a very good habit to get yourself into as a poet. And I did see somebody say something on Twitter a few weeks back now one of my old tutors, she wasn’t saying it to troll me, she was just saying, you know, something along the lines of no matter how boring you think, a task or activity is, if it’s well observed, then it’s interesting. That’s something I want to work on. But I do think that there’s a lot of truth to that, that if something is well observed and observed in an interesting way, then it’s gonna spark things. So I think it’s really important that that sort of comes across from, you know, the kind of observational nature of some of the poems in a lot of the poems in this pamphlet, and in the ones that you’re going to release. It’s just a good thing for listeners to remember.
And the last thing I’d like to ask is where we can find more information about you and these other pamphlets that will be coming out.
Oh, thank you. So I am active on Twitter. You can find me there. I also use link tree to keep all my links in one place, because I’m sort of scattered across social media. So maybe, if you don’t mind, we could put a link into your show notes.
We will put a link in the show notes. The link tree for sure. Thank you so much, Paula. It’s been absolutely fantastic speaking to you.
Paula: Oh, thanks for having me. What a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.