The Writer’s Ear: Hearing Prose, Poetry and Music

UK Author Jo Carroll very kindly responded to our question about how poetry and prose influenced each other in your writing.

I have a diffuse boundary between poetry and prose.

I know that one informs the other, but I’ve never tried to define that, nor explain it – even to myself – in a coherent or useful way.

I’m going to make life even more complicated and include music in the mix. My experience has been a joyful interaction between the three disciplines and I take delight in all of them.

I was fortunate to be brought up with music; my mother played the piano – badly, but she played and we stood beside her to sing our childish songs. When not playing, she had the radio on – 1950s pop, mostly, with thrilling rhythms and silly rhymes that had us dancing round the kitchen. (Did you notice what I did there – the mirrored ‘i’ sound in thrilling, and rhythm, and silly?)

Music merged with poetry, in the form of nursery rhymes and children’s verse. I saw ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ as a dance. ‘You are old, father William’ was chanted by my grandfather. There was a glorious muddle of music and verse that, even now, I can’t disentangle.

I was also, of course, taught poetry at school. The least said about that the better. There was too much unpicking of difficult meanings and not enough wallowing in the joy of words. But I’ve always had a poetry book by my bed, or in the glove compartment of the car. Not to study, but simply so I could dip into it and – briefly – swim in someone else’s imagination.

The result: I’ve absorbed an understanding of rhythm without thinking about it. I can hear if a sentence needs a word with three syllables or two, if it needs clipped, shocking words or ones that stretch languorously across the page. I can hear if work needs tripping sentences to race along, like Chopin’s ‘Minute Waltz’ or the weight of words that mirror the chords of Beethoven. Which is not to say that my prose is poetic or musical; rather that I utilise my experience of both disciplines in an unconscious way when searching for the right word.

I even, occasionally, write poems – generally to encapsulate an idea or fleeting experience that is too self-contained to find its way into prose. These are often jokes of some kind, whimsical pieces that raise a smile and are gone.

And, occasionally, poetry provides the container for a story that is too difficult to express in prose. For instance, when I was last in Cambodia I met a man who had survived the Khmer Rouge. I wrote his story in my notebook and promised to find a way to tell people at home; but when I came to write it I found it too harrowing to express in prose. I felt as if the full horror of his experiences were falling out of the confines of the story; I needed a way to hold it all in. Poetry provided the solution. His story can be told and I don’t disintegrate in the telling.

But I write much more prose – mainly because that is what I read. Novels and short stories and memoirs. Books and journals and columns in newspapers. And so that is what I write – novels and shorts stories and memoirs. The poetry lurks on my shoulder, taps me every now and then to remind me, if my prose is ploddy, that words should sing and dance.

That is my experience. And yours?

Are you aware of using an understanding of poetry when you write prose? Or do you stumble around, as I do, searching for the right word and knowing that there is a dialogue between prose, poetry and music taking place somewhere at the back of your head, where you can’t, quite, hear it.

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Women Writers, Women Books would like to thank Jo Carroll for responding to our request to write a post on how her writing is influenced by different disciplines.

UK Author Jo Carroll is an adventurer. Author of Over the Hill and Far Away: One Grown Up Gap Year, she’s got stories, and she’s telling them. (See her website for the book links to international (non-American sites). Follow her on Twitter @JomCarroll

 

 

 

Tags: how poetry influences prose

Category: British Women Writers, On Writing, Travel Writing by Women, Women Writing Memoirs, Women Writing Non-Fiction, Women Writing Poetry