Idea

 

‘Listen! I have an idea’ is the subject of this year’s poetry prize. How do I teach this to sixty primary school students? By reading poems aloud, but first what is an idea? And do children have ideas? I raise these questions at a dinner party on the weekend. Friends at dinner agree, it’s a great subject, but even though we all have ideas, we don’t think of them in the abstract. I said I was helped by William Carlos Williams’ saying in his poetry “No ideas but in things.” In other words, things prompt words that reveal ideas. Young poets find poetry by using images in their own language. Our host wrestled with how thoughts expressed well are kind of the start of ideas. I introduced the oft-said concern that children simply parrot the ideas of adults, in particular their parents. Wine and conviviality got us no closer to a theory about how we write poetry about ideas. Or may did, but the wine was taking effect. Next day I asked my daughter on the phone, what is an idea? She said, after some thought, walking along the street, that an idea is when two thoughts meet, at any age. Trick being, how to present this definition of Idea to a group of under-12s? I cannot, of course, because it’s too cerebral, like thoughts and ideas in general. Some older students may respond with a poem like a philosophical argument, but most wish to say something, or else even write a poem called ‘I Have No Ideas Today’. But admittedly, thoughts meeting is often the genesis of poems, so how to make that happen. By chance, whatever chance is, over the weekend a relative gave me a spare copy of Saul Bellow’s essays. I discovered that Bellow is an intellectual who hates the word intellectual. His biographical interview ‘A Half Life’ (1990) opens “I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has.” Asked for examples, he replies: “Sitting on a curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here?” I started to think that the first word in the theme was as important as the last. Listening was as much the theme as ideas. I needed to find poems for reading that showed things and that drew in the listener, whether child or adult. The theme equated poetry with the need to say something to others. If children already have ideas, whether as defined by my host on Saturday night, my daughter on her phone, or the American Nobel laureate in his interview, then those ideas will form by hearing poetry and imitating its sounds, feel, word games, subjects and so forth from their own experience. My job became one of finding poems that assisted that process, reading them out carefully, and seeing what happened next. Poems would follow, and ideas, even poems about what is an idea.

Idea

 

I heard such iridescent rainfall turn to runoff and sunny yelling mingled everywhere with voice and whistle and the operatic noises loud then soft again, dog and breeze and wave, from earliest outsides out, having no idea that such nature amounting in unloosed meanings to be its very own music could sometime recede into silence. I opened the book that took me into my friends’ tales and fortunes, merry as is though some had their personalities, each day a more unexpected turn of events, mature perspectives as it was put with no idea whatsoever that I would one day close the book, and all the others like it, their palpability and parade, their affective news something to go by, thence then to go into the place of no books. I walked down past the houses to the friendly shop with easy to access hot food and jam doughnuts and impressively toned oranges, the emporium of et cetera, with no idea that such suburban walks under bird-rowdy trees along tram-clanging streets would ever come to a finale in a sverdrup of end things, or a quiet room of once belonging. I lived with the body in all its litheness and torsion, its limberness and tension, soft shape aching with desire or tired from the day, with no idea that the knuckle and the knee, ribcage and clunky cranium could slip up, or would let me down, let me down so this then was all of me. I spoke with the incessance that youthful insistence streams across the airwaves, of others all with names abundantly, of the thrall that travel beyond fell into in a world like this, a world of horizons, of days that triumphed magnificent shapes and colours in changing shade, with no idea even as I took a breath, that such talk was once and for all in present company sufficient, trained to say the most in a little for reasons that silence will meet when silence intervenes upon the unstoppable flow, echoing as such silence may prove. I wrote words aided solely by my adolescent mind, aided by vocabulary oft defiant of yon dictionary, their enquiring sprightliness and shimmying adjectives, with no idea such years of words and ascension of ideas would in time speak backwards to a past rather than forward to a present, let alone a future that is for others, such a future combining to forget or remember or remake those words in its own youngest thrill of discoveries. I learnt to take from the wardrobe and return to the wardrobe on hangers from earliest memory my shirts, and most effective coats, shoving and shoring them regularly along the rail to make space for other shirts and coats, with no idea that an actual moment would come that was the last time I opened a wardrobe to return a shirt, or coat, having no further call for clothing.