When my Mum died last year, I wrote a poem to read at her funeral. It features among other personal memories a glimpse of the North Downs looming over my parents’ house, the childhood downs that had been on weekdays a playground, and on Sundays the backdrop to serious family walks. This was in Guildford, Surrey, was where I was brought up, and in writing the poem I found familiarity with the landscape a gateway to using local imagery as a kind of shortcut into what I had to say. This felt like a perfect mechanism, and gave me the idea a year on of returning to Surrey for a longer sequential poem.
I took down a couple of relevant books from my shelves, both written by Eric Parker. His name was another part of my childhood, when almost every day I would pass a plaque at the top of Guildford High Street, inscribed “Eric Parker described Guildford as a beautiful city. Let us keep it so”. The Eric Parker books, one titled Surrey, the other Surrey Naturalist, looked to be promising sources for cutout poetry.
The cutout is an A5 piece of card, with a central rectangle about the size of a matchbox removed. It is placed on the page and slid like a ouija glass over the text until words and combinations of words framed in the cutout begin to free themselves from their context and nudge the attention towards new associations, new suggestions of meaning or wordplay. It’s a technique used more often in the 1960s and ’70s when there was perhaps more emphasis in poetry on process, by poets taking new angles in concrete, visual and found poetry, including Dom Sylvester Houedard and Edwin Morgan; an eminent example was Excavations from the Case-histories of Havelock Ellis by Jonathan Williams, who described how “what I was looking for were the fire-points, the garnet crystals free of their matrix”.
I tried cutout poetry a few years ago, wthout much success. There has to be a frame of mind, an openness, and the source material has to suit. My chosen title was Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, a lively book with wide-ranging references and a rich vocabulary, seemingly the ideal source. For the most part, I floundered. Suggestive words failed to connect, or I failed to connect them, and I struggled to find a tangent away from the thoughts and meanings of the original. The only one of many attempts I bothered to save was this:
Wordsworth entertained condemning the stag as a “complete waste of birds”
which I feel answers the promise of poetry in revealing a truth previously inexpressed.
The groundrules I laid down for the new sequence was that I would use every page of both books, writing the words selected from each page in a single line, one line below another in order, using the original chapter headings as titles. I would need to take the pages for each chapter in order, to enable a narrative. On completion of a chapter I would go back, read through, and take a second shot at any results that missed the mark. The nineteen chapters of Surrey would yield nineteen poems with a total of 251 lines – the number of pages in the book – while for Surrey Naturalist there would be fourteen poems and 286 lines.
I made what felt like a good start with Surrey, the first page throwing up:
I remember that cherry tree. It is a tree, too, this book
A few pages in I was beginning to struggle, and decided to vary the parameters. As well as choosing words from the static frame, I tried sliding the cutout from top to bottom of the page in a sinuous movement, catching stand-out words with a squinty, sidelong look. I also tried using only words that fell on or adjacent to the margins. The rule that words would remain in their original order stayed. The results are I feel promising, and in cases pleasing: “The county existed before the possibilities of birds in the mind”, for example, and “Darned clean soft toys”, which for some reason puts me in mind of David Lynch. And Chapter III, Lakes and Ponds, is revealing an unexpected sub-plot:
A visitor on migration in the hotel shot, shot at Mitcham, shot near that place
A casual visitor was shot in the hotel, a single gentleman
An occasional visitor most pleasing to know, not yet quite exterminated
I can’t wait to find out what happened next. This is, after all, a work in progress, and there is a long way to go.
*
Eric Parker, Surrey, Robert Hale (The County Books Series), 1947
Eric Parker, Surrey Naturalist, Robert Hale, 1952
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1949