Jen Hadfield: The Urge to Make

Yesterday’s walk over the raised beach, and through the bandit pass between two knolls, I picked up another of the long, clean, white little bird bones and it made me crave to make thumb-pots in porcelain again. I’ve just about got over the first lot, which have had their bisque firing, dipped and dabbed with experimental glazes. Now they’re awaiting the second firing, a domestic orogenics. Mud made stone. I’m happily indifferent to the results and that is delicious. Given a 3-D medium I love, but don’t have too many hopes invested in, I might even able to leave painting to people who are good at it. I am not terrified of porcelain, as I am of writing, at the moment. What a relief. If I was smarter I’d learn something from that, but I don’t seem to be able to drill it through my skull.

What I thought was – what if you could make a hole in the side of the pot and feed the thin bone half-through, build it up just a little so the bone could slide back and fore through the hole, but the thicker ends keep it from slipping out? I imagine a bulbous little pot, rounded and irregular, smooth and with a balanced violence or thrust, in the way of the rock I found later, thoroughly buttoned into a coat of lichen, flat waxy white warts, like the skin of an embryonic crocodile.

The problem is that organic matter burns away in the kiln. Of course it does. Would the ash be black or pale grey? A spoor of black or pale grey soot, like the shadow of the bone that pierced the pot…that excites me. I came back and looked at last week’s abandoned thumb-pots, swelling and sagging in a deep bowl of water. There’s no waste in clay. Wait, I tell myself. Wait and really mean it. At the moment, I can do one big, difficult thing (writing the novel-Story), and one quicker less weighted thing (make a pot, read, teach, research) on top of a bit of social and admin. Otherwise I get scattered and unhappy.

You start a thumb-pot by plunging your thumb (I like to trim the nail so it doesn’t bite) into a lump of clay small enough to hold in one palm. You thin it gradually in spirals by pressing your thumb on the inside of the pot against your index finger on the outside. If it’s not going to collapse, you have to let the clay stiffen a little between each thinning.

I’m at my most hopeful when I can see what I want to make, but haven’t yet started to make it. Every urge to make has its waxing and its waning.

Jen Hadfield’s most recent collection, Nigh-No-Place, published by Bloodaxe, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007 and won the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008. She lives in Shetland.

(Experiments in Poetry)

Normal service will resume soon. In the meantime, here’s the first in an occasional series of posts that point you elsewhere in the search for interesting poetry-related material that might not get linked to as often as the latest book reviews.

There are a number of people doing empirical research on poetry, particularly on how readers process and respond to poems. Whether or not you can access this kind of scholarly research freely (i.e. without a trip to the British Library or a university card) depends on whether the researchers have published or archived it online. The first series of links, then, are all from Prof. David Hanauer (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) who has made several of his articles available through open access archiving of post-prints.

Hanauer applies scientific inquiry techniques to issues around text processing, comprehension and classification. He believes that the empirical method can be used in literary studies “as a research tool for deepening our understanding of issues arising within a literary system”, and he is (or was) particularly interested in poetry – though he seems to have done more in the area of ESOL and multicultural literacy in the last few years.

Whether or not you agree with his methods or his conclusions, it’s pretty fascinating to see someone design and execute literary experiments, and to see empirical reference points for ongoing arguments about how readers approach poems and what makes a poem poetic.

Hanauer, D. (1996). ‘Integration of phonetic and graphic features in poetic text categorization judgements’. Poetics 23, 363-380. Experiment to test the extent to which the sound of a text (levels of rhyme, assonance, etc.) and the way it looks on the page (lines, stanzas, etc.) make readers judge it to be more or less poetic, and how their level of literary education/experience affects those judgements. A James Joyce poem was manipulated to enhance or suppress those qualities.

Hanauer, D. (1998). ‘The genre-specific hypothesis of reading: Reading poetry and encyclopaedic items’. Poetics 26, 63-80. Experiment to test whether there are significant differences in the ways that people read texts from different genres: in this case, a comparison between a poem and an entry from an encyclopaedia. Hanauer looks specifically at reading time (i.e. do people read poems more slowly than informative texts), comprehension judgements (do people feel less confident that they have understood a poem) and surface information recall (do people remember more about a poem’s language, form and structure).

Hanauer, D. (1998). ‘Reading Poetry: An Empirical Investigation of Formalist, Stylistic, and Conventionalist Claims’. Poetics Today, 19 (4), 565-580. Experiment to test the extent to which people’s approaches and responses to poems are determined more by the reading conventions associated with the genre than by the inherent linguistic or structural qualities of the poems themselves. This is perhaps the most complex and ambitious methodology of the lot, combining manipulation of a poetic text (James Joyce again) with a framing element (i.e. describing the text as either ‘text’ or ‘poem’) in the context of modelling and comparing two extremely detailed theoretical positions.

Hanauer, D. (1999). ‘Attention and Literary Education: A Model of Literary Knowledge Development’. Language Awareness, 8 (1), 15-29. Not an empirical study, but interesting for its focus on the development of a reader’s ‘awareness and attention’ in literary education. Although Hanauer is talking about people learning how to read poems, much of it could stand for people learning how to write poems as well.

Hanauer, D. (2003). ‘Multicultural Moments in Poetry: The Importance of the Unique’. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 60 (1), 69-87. Conceptual paper arguing that poetry’s emphasis on uniqueness, both in terms of language and perspective, make it a welcome advocate for the individual voice in a climate of collectivisation and generalisation, and that this has implications in the field of applied linguistics, particularly in relation to multicultural, multi-generic research.

Finally, a nod to other studies in this area, which unfortunately don’t seem to be available on the web without subscription, but are worth a look if you can find them, and find this kind of thing interesting.

Peskin, J. (1998). ‘Constructing Meaning When Reading Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study’. Cognition and Instruction, 16 (3), 235-263.

Warren, J. E. (2006). ‘Literary scholars processing poetry and constructing arguments’. Written Communication, 23 (2), 202-226.