Weekly Blog: Windy Pish
Windy Pish
One of the many things I love about living in Scotland is that the national language is not English. To the casual ear, it sounds like English with an accent; I can assure you, Scottish people, at least where I live in and around Glasgow, for the most part, speak Scots. This wonderful difference is part of what makes Scotland unique.
Windy pish, in short, means talking shite. Pish is a multi-purpose word, and there are far more qualified than I who can explain the subtleties and nuance of Scots and its linguistic intricacies. For me, windy pish is what happened when the poet sat down to write a “proper poem”.
Inspired by the call that a poem is not just a sentence with line breaks and spurred on by the encouragement that form is what gives poetry its relevance and emotional weight, I sat down with a pen and paper to go analogue, old school and write.
It did not go well!
While the first line or two were decent enough, it soon broke down, my brain tried to hang it on rhyming couplets halfway through and it ended with what is best compared to a sodden whimper. A bedraggled, slightly whiffy hound of a poem that quite rightfully evoked sympathy for its rather sorry state.
But that is the point, to practice, to make bad art, to let the force flow through us while we get stung by lasers. We cannot make a perfect anything every time. The pursuit of perfection is futile because if we were to achieve it, we would pivot immediately and say it wasn’t perfect anyway. The point of expressing creativity is to express creativity. This is the very thing that chasing metrics led me away from. I ended up in the wilderness because I chased the wild goose of results rather than staying on the path of steady progress.
My poem was bad, and it was humbling. I am blessed that I can echo the sentiment of a young Bob Dylan, that I am less composing, more writing down what I am hearing. Often my poetry is a rush to note down what my head is telling me quick enough, asking it to slow down so I can keep up. A poem can be “finished” quickly, but this flow can lead to complacency. Hubris is not far behind; thinking the gifts can be demanded, turned on like a tap. The muse doesn’t work like that. My writing is about capturing what my mind brings to the front.
I don’t think a lot, not in the ruminating can be written down sense. My mind is a bit of a research library. I put a request in at the desk and wait to see what comes back. Poetry writing is part flow state, part art, part years of practice working with words. I installed Grammarly in 2016 and its doesn’t check anything outside a browser window; it has checked nearly a million words. I have no idea what I’ve written them all for, but the practice might well be paying off.
While writing windy pish is disappointing, it is what we do. This year has been all about the transition to enjoying the process, enjoying practice. The things I have enjoyed most in my life are the ones where I have been happy practicing. They were not about the result; indeed, finishing could be disappointing because that meant the fun was over. It was always about the doing, achieving wasn’t the only thing.
Hopefully this encourages you to go out and be awful at something fun and enjoy it. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to be bad at enjoyable things and long may that continue. Until next week: Keep on Keeping on.
“Windy Pish” Excerpts
“Staring at a blank page,
Imagine I am an assassin, revolutionary with a pen”
Okay … but this bit I like …
“It’s nonsense throwing rocks at the sea,
To build a bridge between what has gone and me”
Yep, that’s a sentence with a line break …
“Hoping for the future,
Because that’s what I’m supposed to do”
Another sentence with a line break.
I have left out lots of lines because the rest are staying in the notebook. Some lines are good lines and might be pulled out to have another turn at bat, others will hopefully skulk off and never be seen again.
