On writing a Trident poem

To make up for the usual rubbish Scottish summer we had a gloriously long, warm, dry autumn which meant spending many hours sitting by the Clyde Firth writing streams of images.

I've used all this material to write a poem in three voices about Trident nuclear submarines - a common sighting on the Clyde. 

It many ways it was a real challenge to write. Technically, writing a poem in three voices was for me a new experience. I started by separating the material into three distinct personas which I initially based on archetypal projections of  mother / daughter / wife.  

These projections were disbanded when the writing became staid and I pretty much got stuck on the poem. The initial idea was to write dramatic monologues in the voices of women anti-nuclear protesters. So I did a lot of fascinating reading up on and watching youtube clips of women peace protesters and some of the approaches they took. And although I used some of the material the voices in my poem tended much more towards lyric than dramatic writing which I felt would have required a more narrative approach that was non-existent in my poem.

I also did a lot of reading up on and watching documentaries on the atom bomb / nuclear testing / Hiroshima etc. I've always been anti-Trident and also always been fascinated by nuclear power. Reading up on it all has just enforced the horrific reality of nuclear weapons and how the only right and rational response is disarmament.

Anyway the poem approaches this in a very understated way, I think of my voices as Cassandra's - prophets of disaster - rather than being an overtly political poem. 

I found the drafting process more difficult than usual and still feel the need to hear it read aloud by three voices to see if it's actually working.

Whether it does work or not it's certainly been a 'stretching' process in writing it!

Pictures, for a change!

For once, I grapped the camera while heading out for a walk yesterday. Rubbish day for taking pictures - dull mid-afternoon with a bitterly cold breeze!

But I wanted to show you my beloved Firth of Clyde which features in so many of my poems and which I love looking at regardless of the weather. These two pictures are looking down the Clyde; the islands of Cumbrae and Bute are faint lines on the horizon.

This is our Victorian pier, the photo is looking up the Firth where the water slips to the left to become the Holy Loch and slips around to the right, curving past Greenock and making its way all the way up to Glasgow.
 
 

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This picture looks directly across the Firth to Inverkip, and these are the Gantocks, the infamous rocks that have been the cause of many a shipwreck and which you can hear the seals howl from at night. I wrote a poem about the Gantocks which can be read here.

and here are my travelling companions, Ruby all wrapped up in her pram and Sorley begging for a shot of the camera, but I didn't fancy fishing it out of the water!