David Bleiman — 'Not Seeing the Woods for the Words'

"NOT SEEING THE WOODS FOR THE WORDS" — David Bleiman

Recently, I realised that, walking down my local river to the sea, my appreciation of the natural environment was heavily polluted…by words.  My wife, alongside, could just sniff the air, but every sensation was, for me, experienced through remembered or gestational poetry.  This thought, in turn, sparked a poem, Not Seeing the Wood for the Words, in my new pamphlet, Gathering Light: A Cramond Causeway.

To write poetry does require a pathological interest in language or languages, for sounds as much as meanings.  It was the joyful discovery that Scots and Yiddish share a common soundscape, with that hard ch sound (as in loch or tochus)‒ the voiceless velar fricative‒ which led me to reimagine the lost dialect of Scots-Yiddish in The Trebbler’s Tale.  On the way, I let the sounds lead me to playful phrases, such as the (as yet unpublished) dooked ma tochus i the loch (dipped my arse in the lake) in which the sense (or nonsense) comes for a ride on the back of the sound.

There is much else in the mix. Found language is important as is the curation of memory, grief and nostalgia.  We live across the road from Fair-a-Far Cottages, a row of workmen’s cottages named after the Gaelic for ridge of the cultivated ground.  But my father used to call them Faraway Cottages, which led to a poem oozing sentimental remembrance of my dad, whilst deploying his own wordplay.

Short poetry courses and one-off workshops have been useful.  I was sceptical about writing a poem off a random prompt but find that it can work wonders.  Polly Atkin invited us to grab any object in the room in which we were sitting and write a few lines.  I picked my Lacquer Wood Fiddler, a klezmer fiddler, acquired in Moscow twenty years ago, which has become my mascot.  I read the poem at my first 1,000 Monkeys open mic, with the fiddler at my shoulder.  Janice was impressed until I explained that he was sitting on an ironing board (I hadn’t ironed a shirt since March 2020 and the ironing board was repurposed for Zoom events).

​I could say more‒ about dreams and getting the words down before the person from Porlock comes a knocking, about merciless submission, about grasping rejection as an opportunity for revision‒ but, to paraphrase Billy Collins, the essay doesn’t end when the author stops writing, it ends when the reader stops reading.
 
David Bleiman is the author of This Kilt of Many Colours (2021) and Gathering Light (2022)