Ongoing #71

First the poem.

I'll dissect it later.

Alice waking, Alice sleeping,

Alice laughing, Alice weeping,

Alice singing, Alice dancing,

Alice fleeing and advancing,

Alice trying, Alice failing,

Alice healthy, Alice ailing,

Alice wanting, Alice needing,

Alice broken, Alice bleeding,

Alice falling, Alice flying,

Alice living, Alice dying.

Alice through the looking glass.

Alice in the underpass.

I have no idea if anyone will like this poem or not but I would like to talk about what it means and how it came to be written. 

Part, perhaps the major part, of what a poet does is to make connections. Each poem is in itself an attempt to connect the poet's experience with the experience of the reader. More than that though, the actual construction of a poem is an exercise in connections an many different levels. On the purely structural level there are the connections of the words to form rhythms and rhymes. There is the connection of lines to form verses and verses to form complete poems. But that's all purely mechanical. The real connection is the connection of ideas. The humblest limerick usually starts with a couple of lines which are joined by lines three and four to a twisting or subversion of the idea in line five. The greatest of poems link ideas in subtle and interesting ways. One of my favourite poems is Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Whenever I read it I wish that I could write that well, hope that one day I shall write something so nearly perfect. The beauty of the poem to me is the reality of the way that it links the ideas of life and death.

I don't pretend that my poem above has any such merit, perhaps no merit at all, but it's creation was a linking in  ways that not many of the poems in this series have been. It started out with a couple of lines based on my favourite book- 

       Alice falling, Alice flying

       Alice laughing, Alice crying

which went nowhere and didn't quite make it, in that exact form, into the final piece. I had been intending to write a poem connected with Alice In Wonderland but nothing more came to me. What came next was the doodle from the book that I have been using to provide inspiration - a doodle of an old lady on a bench, looking half-mad and quite frail. It occurred to me that she might be a very different Alice, an Alice whose inner world was very different to that of the young heroine of the book. I drafted a couple of versions on that theme but I didn't like either of them.

Then I saw a teenage girl begging in a subway in Birmingham. She looked even frailer than the lady in the doodle. She may well have been trying to get money for drugs - she certainly looked ill enough. As I continued on my way home I speculated on how she had come to her current situation and the poem, as it finally appears above came to me almost complete. 

I juggled the order of the lines a little to create a sense of narrative and finally had it done. The poem connects Alice Through The Looking Glass, a random doodle in a book and the sad life of a teenage beggar. I don't know if it's successful or not - poets are not able to objectively appraise their own work - but I hope so.

And I hope it makes a connection with some of my readers.