Tabloid inspiration

Last week I went to a workshop at the Poetry School with Carrie Etter, about beginnings and endings. This was all about poetry but everything we did, from playing with tabloid headlines to analysing what titles did for their poems, got me thinking about sideways ways into stories. Poetry is never direct: you very rarely say straight out what you mean. (In my case at the moment, I never say what I mean at all, unless there is something very deep underlying the chorus of washing machines in my writing.)

The First World War produced reams of poetry: there was so much to express. After even the little research I've done so far I feel surrounded by powerful characters, all with something to say. There are also hundreds of little connections to my world.

I feel the need for a sideways way to express it all. I wonder what the tabloids said during the First World War. Did they even have tabloids back then?

Sunday 11/11, 2010

Watched the ceremony at the Cenotaph today: sorrow and remembering, and camaraderie. Tried to imagine what the ceremony was like the first time. Didn't need to, there's footage in this clip:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11734920

Letters from a lost generation

To correct my last post - it's not true that there is nothing amiss in these letters and diaries. There is detail, often shocking, of wounds and incidents, like Mairi Chisholm's description of looking in a man's coat pocket for his identity tag and finding someone else's brains. There are expressions of surprise that the writers have coped.

I have come back to Vera Brittain, in the letters between her, her brother and three of his friends, one her fiance (Letters from a Lost Generation, ed. Bishop and Bostridge 1998). Her letters are full of a pain so personal that, if I were feeling it, I could not write it, if I could write it I could not express it clearly, and if I could express it I would not be comfortable sharing it with the world.

She lets you very close, in a way that not everyone can, or wants to.