Tom Beckett: What do you want from writing? What do you hope for (expect?) from a poem?
Rebecca Loudon: A map is the most basic thing I want and need from my writing. A map from yesterday to today. A map from 1968 to next week. I want a north arrow, a legend, degree tick marks, time zones, a legend, latitude and longitude lines, mountains with ridges I can trace with my fingers, blue rivers, street names, oceans and springs, lakes, Arctic definitions and national parks, highways marked in red, historical monuments and wildlife preserves, capes and points and peninsulas, fjords and inlets, archipelagos and live volcanoes, and an impossibility of folding the map back to its original configuration. And that is what I want from each poem, each story, each letter, each blog post that I write. I want a map so I can find my way back.*
Rebecca Loudon: A map is the most basic thing I want and need from my writing. A map from yesterday to today. A map from 1968 to next week. I want a north arrow, a legend, degree tick marks, time zones, a legend, latitude and longitude lines, mountains with ridges I can trace with my fingers, blue rivers, street names, oceans and springs, lakes, Arctic definitions and national parks, highways marked in red, historical monuments and wildlife preserves, capes and points and peninsulas, fjords and inlets, archipelagos and live volcanoes, and an impossibility of folding the map back to its original configuration. And that is what I want from each poem, each story, each letter, each blog post that I write. I want a map so I can find my way back.*
Last week, doing my morning round on Facebook, I happened upon an irresistible invitation from Madame Rebecca Loudon (see above) and promptly sent off an email with a list of words in the subject line. Realising I'd more-or-less prescribed a poem to the poet (yikes!), I quickly sent off another e- replacing my ramble with one word. Lighthouse.
Madame guarantees a one-day turnaround and - never mind the fact there are oceans and continents between us - a week later her poetry postcard arrived in my mailbox. Handwritten mail is a rare thing these days and there's something unfailingly thrilling about receiving a handmade posted object (a lighthouse!) and, too, in seeing a web-friend's handwriting for the first time. Rebecca's Lighthouse, complete with poem, musical penmanship (she's a professional violinist and poet) and four US poet stamps is a thing of rare loveliness. To top it all, it was delivered to me on my birthday - how brilliantly synchronised was that?!
You, too, can be on the receiving end of one of these! Visit Rebecca's blog www.callingdrbombay.blogspot.com and look for the donate button on the right hand side of the page. She will write on any topic for any amount. (Either private message Rebecca through Facebook or leave a comment on her blog where you and she can exchange email addresses.). Put in a request for a poetry postcard for yourself or ask for one as a gift for a friend - they make a brilliant, surprising and totally original present.
To learn a little more about Rebecca, her writing process and her poems, click on the links below.
Rebecca Loudon
I especially love this excerpt from a 2009 interview with Tom Beckett -
". . . Poems begin for me from practice. When I am practicing my violin, when I am practicing drawing, when I am practicing writing. I used to write every day in notebooks. Not just poems, but anything I thought of. Then I switched to my blog to continue my daily writing practice. I believe that the mastery of any art comes from mastery of practice. It’s kind of weird. I don’t think many poets think in terms of daily practice. Maybe it’s from spending a lifetime as a musician. But we have these muscles, not even muscles—tissue, tissue memory. Practice strengthens that tissue memory. When I practice Bach every day then it’s my tissue memory that can perform Bach, not my fingers, not my brain. My brain just gets in the way of things, slows me down. It’s the same with writing. I’ve learned to have a notebook by my side pretty much all the time to jot down ideas. This is practice. This and reading.
When I rehearse, I write during rehearsal breaks. Pages and pages of fast unreadable penmanship inside my cheap notebooks. Poetry begins for me while I am reading. I am an unstoppable reader. I find poetry everywhere. In novels in cookbooks in roadmaps in billboard advertisements in history books on the back of cereal boxes. I jot ideas and words and whole lines and possible titles in my notebook. I let these simmer and later on I use these to form poems or discover that I have been slowly writing poems all along. . . " Rebecca Loudon
When I rehearse, I write during rehearsal breaks. Pages and pages of fast unreadable penmanship inside my cheap notebooks. Poetry begins for me while I am reading. I am an unstoppable reader. I find poetry everywhere. In novels in cookbooks in roadmaps in billboard advertisements in history books on the back of cereal boxes. I jot ideas and words and whole lines and possible titles in my notebook. I let these simmer and later on I use these to form poems or discover that I have been slowly writing poems all along. . . " Rebecca Loudon
*
The interview I've quoted from here is without doubt one of two most eloquent, daring, transparent and brilliant interviews I've read in ages. The other is an interview with Melissa Green conducted by SusanT. Landry on her memoir site Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie. I guarantee you'll want to read each of these interviews several times over and, too, that you will want to go on to read Melissa's luminous memoir The Linen Way, published by Rosa Mira Books.
*
This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Kathleen Jones
(Kathleen, Orchid and I met in Dunedin a couple of months ago!) with Marco Polo
by Ali Alizadeh
Please click on the quill!
