WRITING LANDSCAPE POETRY
All of us inhabit two worlds: the inner landscape of thoughts teeming with dreams, aspirations and fears; and the outer landscape dominated by mountains, valleys, rivers, sea or urban conurbations. As poets it is easy to concentrate on the inner person and produce only ‘confessional’ style poems about how we feel. There are several ways to write about the landscape and hopefully, the following will inspire poetic attempts.
Landscape as A Picture: The chances are that as soon as we think of landscape we are knee deep in Wordsworth’s ‘golden daffodils.’ At a basic level the poet is a painter of words, using the pen or computer, to take a written snap shot of what is in front of him/her.
This is a good place to start. One writing group brought holiday photographs and every one wrote a poem, either about a place they, or someone else in the class, had visited.
While it’s a good place to start it is a place where we can become bogged down. If we get stuck in this approach the poems are often obvious and tedious. Wordsworth was once condemned for sounding like a ‘silly bleating sheep’. To avoid such reviews, we need to look at other approaches.
Landscape and The Seasons: John Clare’s collection of poems The Shepherd’s Calendar is a wonderful evocation of how one fixed landscape can change through the four seasons. It can be fun to write a series of poems about one particular landscape over a period of months. The sea, a mountain, a river or woodland all lend themselves to dated poems. Recently I have started my own jottings on an Edwardian Park which is in the middle of the town where I live.
Landscape Representing Something Else: Good writers will always combine the outside and the inside world. Rona Campbell’s collection The Hedge is at face value a series of poems on Breconshire hedgerows. On closer reading, the hedges become symbols of human love, death and betrayal. Similarly, Seamus Heaney uses the bogs of Ireland as a metaphor for the struggles in Ireland’s troubled history.
The Harsh Landscape: Many landscape poems are a million miles away from the chocolate box cosiness of Wordsworth. In addition to thrilling us with its beauty it can also trap us and hem us in. R. S. Thomas’ early poetry about the Welsh hill farmers features Iago Prydderch. Although there is something frightening about the vacancy of his mind, Thomas sees him as a fighter who is battling against the wind’s attrition and the uncompromising landscape. Interestingly, in many of R S Thomas’ poems, he mentions the ‘gap in the hedge’ – which no doubt symbolises the escape route from the claustrophobic countryside. Ted Hughes also captures this wild harshness in his poems about the hill farmers of Yorkshire (Elmet).
The Danger and Unpredictability of Landscape: It was William Blake who moved landscape poetry away from the gentle and pastoral setting into the world of the jagged tooth and claw of nature. His poems Songs of Innocence and Experience depict both the cosy and savage side of nature.
We have thought only of the natural landscape but there is also the urban landscape which has influenced the poetry of writers such as Larkin and Armitage. All of these examples suggest the poet has at least four choices……. try one!
• Write as an outsider looking in
• Write from inside – the landscape shaping you
• Fight the landscape
• Use it as a metaphor of life
Peter Read Aug 2015
