Mslexia

From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

New Writing Exercises for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition – Workshop #4

Devised by JANE HOLLAND

Find the Core

If a draft becomes lost, ask yourself: ‘Where is the heart, the true core, of this poem?’

Why the Core is Important

Every poem has a secret core on which its power depends. But you don’t need to know where it is unless your poem starts floundering. When a poem is obviously broken or dislocated in some way, it is often because the core has been lost or underdeveloped. Since you don’t know why the poem doesn’t work, you can’t fix this kind of breakage via the usual methods. So you give up and file the poem away as unsuccessful. But the poem won’t leave you alone, nagging at you to be rewritten. In such cases, it is almost certainly the neglected core tugging at your sleeve, not the peripheral mess cluttering it up.

How The Core Becomes Lost

The core of a poem often marks the site of a battle between authenticity and fraudulence. During the initial redrafting process, an experienced poet will spot fraudulent lines and remove or alter them. Examples might be where you have sampled or imitated another poet without first understanding and integrating their poetic lessons, or written in a certain way because it’s fashionable, or to chime with a particular editor’s taste. When you fail to prune these out, the original impetus gets buried under a detritus of confused motives and wrong turns.

Poet and fiction writer, Nuala Ni Chonchuir: ‘I am a notorious cutter rather than adder. I like to snip and snip at words and phrases until there is no flab left’

Locating and Recycling The Core

When redrafting a broken poem that won’t leave you alone, you must first locate the core. This is the line around which the poem revolves in an emotional or spiritual sense, without which it would either fall apart or lose its special appeal for you, the poet. The core may be the first or last line, but is more often buried in the centre, where it acts as the poem’s unacknowledged lynchpin.

Remove this line – or indeed lines, since the core may be an entire stanza – and rebuild your poem around it. Discard all other material. When writing this new poem, bear in mind that the core can now play a different role – launchpad, beating heart, emergency exit. If you continue to struggle with authenticity, refer back to the core. Stay on message and don’t be seduced by other possibilities.

Writer’s Block

Finding the core is a particularly useful exercise for those suffering from writer’s block. A fallow period can be a time of subconscious transition from one writing style to another. To facilitate this process, try ‘finding the core’ of a number of your most successful, preferably published poems. In this exercise though, the motive is not to ‘fix’ your poem but to find alternative ways of writing the same poem.

For this, reject everything but the core and allow the new poem to expand as freely as possible. Consciously encourage yourself to find unaccustomed strategies and solutions, and allow whatever voice wishes to emerge to do so unfettered by pressures and expectations from the earlier poem. This exercise is also excellent when wrestling with recalcitrant poem sequences.

Remember that you can always return to your original draft if the compass starts spinning too wildly.

>> TRY WORKSHOP #1
>> TRY WORKSHOP #2
>> TRY WORKSHOP #3
>> TRY WORKSHOP #5

JANE HOLLAND is an English poet, novelist and editor, born in Essex, 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. She lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children, where she was Warwick Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published one novel with Sceptre, five collections of poetry, and is currently working on a rather lengthy Tudor historical. Her latest poetry collection is Camper Van Blues (Salt). She is the editor-in-chief of Horizon Review.

These workshops have been devised especially for the 2010 Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition, judged by Vicki Feaver. This competition is now closed, though you can enter our Women's Short Story Competition, judged by Jackie Kay.

For the latest on the writing world, publishing and creativity subscribe to Mslexia now. To sample more Mslexia features or to find out about the latest issue click here.