Malika's Blog

My writing process: the gathering and initial ideas

If you were following these blogs when I was first in residence, back in late 2010, early 2011, you will remember that I have been collecting oral stories from audience members, visitors and staff of the RSC to use as stimulus to write poems.

I am no longer in Stratford upon Avon. I am sitting at my desk in my office looking at all the flip chart paper stuck around my walls with people's personal memories of the RSC; a notebook full of post-it notes and personal letters with people's RSC desert island disks or listening to the recorded interviews, looking at video footage and photos of different areas of the building. All of this is quite cool.

Firstly I immerse myself in the RSC. Sometimes when this is too much I get a 59 bus to the Royal Festival Hall and go to the poetry Library or the members bar to listen and scribe. Soon I am over whelmed by all this information. I also begin to realise that no particular story jumps out at me. This is scary as I am a narrative poet and most of my work has been either narrative based or first person monologue.

Now I have done projects like this before where I have collected stories and used them as stimulus for poems. But something is different here. I am not getting stories about peoples personal lives sparked by their theatre experiences, I have collected people's relationships with productions, actors, aspects of the building, or their history of the RSC throughout their various visits as most of the people that I had interviewed between November and January had been coming to the theatre since the 1950's. I began to panic. Had I been asking the wrong questions? What was I going to do? I began to think of a different approach as it became apparent that story would not be my starting point.

I began to think about the mood and tone in the voices that I had been interviewing, to look for the commonalities. I began to notice a reverent tone, a tone of worship, a testifying to glorifying experiences in the theatre, a gratification, and slight addiction about the RSC. I was on the right track. I began to think about the RSC building standing so impressively near that little river at the edge of town, so tall, with such splendour, and so commanding.

Let me digress a little here. I grew up in a very religious family, we were catholic, and we went to church each week to worship the Lord. It was tradition. I began to see a slightly religious link between the RSC and its users. The way people's faces lit up when they spoke of their great experiences in the theatre. The way they could recount each visit, each production, the way my aunts could recall a particular sermon and I started to feel excited. I had something here. I could feel it.

I was still not sure where of all this was going? I just knew that the poems needed to have a reverence, be symbolic and somehow be transformative. They also needed to have a sense of ritual and tradition to them. I kept coming back to the word symbol. Now I was totally lost. I had never started any of my poems like this before. I began to read poetry collections and write my favourite poems into my notebook (something I always do when I am stuck).
Ana Akhmatova, 'At dawn they came and took you away...'
Beverly Bie Brahic, 'O Sea of tranquillity. Your light is always on…'

And then I began to panic (as I always do at this stage of writing), 'this is doomed' I said to myself.  What do these poems have to do with the RSC?

I would also doodle after each poem…

Little weird lists and short lines.

Then one day I began reading an interview. Tina Chang was interviewing one of my favourite American poets Li- Young Lee on Poets.org, an amazing poetry site.  You can find the interview here: http://tinyurl.com/3gmy2n2
They began to talk about absence and presence in relation to his father and his brother's deaths and his answer seemed to answer my current struggle to connect the pieces of my RSC jigsaw when the center or heart of the puzzle is missing. I had to write his answer into my notebook.  

"I keep noticing that human speech- if not all human speech is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about absence and presence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel vey present when we are breathing in, we can't speak, so presence and silence have something to do with each other. The minute we start breathing out we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that it poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.  When we make verbal meaning, we use dying breath…every time we speak we're enacting on a small scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives." 

This was it! I sat at my desk for days thinking about the RSC in relation to presence and absence. The plays, Shakespeare's texts, the actors, the memories that I had collected of other people's presence in that place, the elaborate explanations that people had to provide because I had been absent (I had never seen a play at the old theatre), the way everyone would try to explain the magic of a production that they loved, yet there was nothing tangible that they could use to illustrate their point. Always this continuous struggle to communicate.

I began to think about the presence of the theatre and it's different manifestations. How we could see the new and the old together in the current architecture? Yet another theatre had burned down in this very spot and its presence is still here too. I thought about Shakespeare who had been dead for so long yet his plays are being brought to life in this theatre each season and it's like he is so present in his absence.   I began to think about the marks that we leave on this earth, in memory, how things become shrines. I began to think of the two empty chairs at the top of the wall at the back of the new restaurant and how they illustrated how far back the old theatre had extended. Yet those chairs very presence made the absence of the other chairs so very present.

I began to get excited. I began to think about tradition. This is all about tradition and with the random thought process of an artist I began to think about the big tree that I had seen at the vicarage that had such a strong presence of age and long life that I had to take a picture. I remember telling the cab driver how it reminded me of the RSC, a building with such a strong sense of history and presence, and just like that I had a starting point, these thoughts would become the glue throughout the writing process and these themes would echo in some way in all the poems that I would eventually write.   I began to think about presence and the marks that we leave. How do we make those marks. This became one of the starting points for the first poem.

The next blog will talk about the development of first poem.

by Malika Booker  |  3 comments

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