What The Beatles might teach me about poetry

Growing up, I always had the sense that it was either The Rolling Stones or The Beatles – you could never like both. My parents were big on the Stones and, especially as a teenager, I thought they were the rougher, grungier of the two and therefore more socially acceptable among my adolescent peers. In those angsty years, it certainly seemed more appropriate to “Let it Bleed” than “Let it Be”. Obviously, these thoughts were part of my social conditioning, a seed planted by my parents and watered by their friendship group and mine. After all, John Lennon died the year I was born – these bands and their members weren’t exactly prominent throughout my development, certainly not compared to earlier years.

As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the Beatles more and more. The notion of them being clean cut boppers singing “Love Me Do” and the like became less concrete. My eyes opened to their larrikin behaviour and experimental music. As I evolved, I saw too that so did their style. With my blinkers removed, I became aware of their talent. And what talent! I’ve bought albums now, streamed their music, been to see tribute bands. I even sat through the 8 hours of drivel that was Get Back. I mean, Peter Jackson isn’t exactly known for his brevity but so much of that documentary felt unnecessary. Amid the repetition and nonsense, however, were moments of inspiration. Notably, I was struck by how they wrote songs.

In the vision, Paul McCartney idly strums away until he falls upon a rhythm and melody he likes. He sings the spaces where the words will go, like a jazz musician singing scat, filling those moments with nonsense words and improvised phrases. Stumbling upon a lyric, he repeats that and uses it as a launching pad to find the rest of the words. A Google search of his writing process reveals several interviews where he intimates that this was, and still is, the method he used to write songs.

“If I was to sit down and write a song, now, I’d use my usual method: I’d either sit down with a guitar or at the piano and just look for melodies, chord shapes, musical phrases, some words, a thought just to get started with. And then I just sit with it to work it out, like I’m writing an essay or doing a crossword puzzle…” Paul McCartney[1]

Often, one of John or Paul would go through this process and then share it with the other who would fill in any gaps or improve it in some way or another. Sometimes that would take it to producer George Martin for assistance in finding the sound they were looking for. Ringo didn’t write much for the band (reportedly only 2 songs) but George Harrison did and Get Back shows how “I Me Mine” was written in a similar manner to above – George brought in the bones of the song and Ringo and Paul helped flesh it out.

Collaborative partnership

So, I want to try this. Poetry is so often insular. Here is me with my pen bleeding onto the page. Here is my angst, here are my insecurities, they fall like tears into my words. Here my verse stands as naked and vulnerable as I was at my birth. Here my confidence is as frail as I may one day become. So, first and foremost, I wanted to reach out and find the John Lennon to my Paul McCartney. I reached out on Instagram, asked people to rewrite an existing poem of mine or to take a poem I haven’t managed to get published and to help improve it to a standard that might be accepted in a literary journal.

It was really interesting seeing how people interacted with the post and the prompt. A number of people followed through and actually wrote something based on my words or rewrote some of my verse. Although the number of people who said they’d write something is greater than the number of people who actually followed through with it.

Three responses, in particular, really piqued my interest. @nicole444_fallenangel turned a short poem of mine, built on the bare bones of an idea to develop into a seven stanza epic. @beautifulmesspoetess turned a 100 word story I’d written into a blackout poem, condensing the ideas of the original into something less than 20% of its length.

The third person whose approach to the challenge took me by surprise was a writer who goes by the handle @ianwilliaml. He’s someone whose poetry is often beautifully presented but, beyond that, he’s someone whose poetry is beautiful. His way with words is phenomenal.

Ian took two short poems of mine that I’d collated in a post and captured their essence in a single piece. He said he was “drawn to the weight held in balance” of my words and “sought to maintain that sense of balance… using a mirroring structure to realign it horizontally.”

So what began as:

Why is it that

when you place all of

your words and actions

on a scale,

the negatives

outweigh the positives?

and

My words are both bricks

and wrecking balls

but I fear I will be remembered

more for what I have destroyed

than what I have built.

Became:

Hearts

we hold to

scale are blind

to bonds of lightness

nor the masonry of words

bind our shape that

we cannot

change.

He wrote of the “bindings we place on ourselves” and how we can be our own worst enemy. Those anxieties are clear in my own writing. And my thoughts attached to what I’ve written. The post that @ianwilliaml shared had my handle (@teacher2poet) added to it as a collaborator. Within days it became one of my most liked posts for the year. In fact, it pips an older poem of mine for my most liked post ever. But what are they liking? Are the people engaging with the post responding to both slides, to both sets of words? Or are they simply liking Ian’s take on my original upload? As he has 500 more followers than I do and a more active Instagram presence, my head tells me they’re not double-tapping their phone screens for me.

I also look at the final product and see it as something that exists outside of me. To borrow from cinematic parlance, what he created was a reboot. Sure, I created the characters and wrote the script but that was for the old version. This is a new actor with new villains, a different take for a different audience. I’ve engaged in more traditional collaborations before and @ianwilliaml has offered to go down that path in future but I don’t feel like we reached Lennon/McCartney levels of craftmanship here. Perhaps this was because of the medium and the approach. In Get Back, when Paul introduces John and the other Beatles to a song he’s working on, his involvement doesn’t stop. Because of their intimate friendship and the fact they occupy the same space, their collaboration goes back and forth. Part of me couldn’t engage that way. Even though I’d asked people to write or rewrite based on my ideas, I didn’t feel like we had an established rapport where I could comment on whatever they wrote back. Perhaps this is where Ian and I will get to in the future. After all, the Beatles had years of working together. Whatever was created in the pre-Beatles days of The Quarrymen (John Lennon’s original band which Paul and George later joined) was probably done so without the level of collaboration shown in Get Back.

What this told me is that, for now at least, I had to take a different approach. Sir Paul McCartney is a lyrical genius and that goes well beyond his work with The Beatles. So maybe I didn’t need a collaborator, maybe I just needed a process…

Dah de dum de da

The question was, could I take a process that had the benefit of music to create a particular mood and apply it to a text type that relies solely on what is written or said? I also wanted to link thematically or stylistically to the content of The Beatles’ lyrics. However, with such an extensive repertoire it’d be impossible to do this wholesale, so I leaned on particular songs for inspiration. “Eleanor Rigby” was an obvious choice considering McCartney once said, “Allen Ginsberg told me it was a great poem”[2]. “Paperback Writer” was another where McCartney’s characters came alive. I hope I captured the “capacity to render a fully rounded character from what might otherwise be merely a thumbnail sketch” that Paul Muldoon said is prominent in McCartney’s lyrics[3].

A rhythm, a character. Beyond that, mixing the unexpected with the expected, making the ordinary seem extraordinary. Observation, and a reflection of what haunts us. Those are the ingredients I was working with.

So I started with “Eleanor Rigby” and “Paperback Writer”, added “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “Get Back”, “Come Together” and “Octopus’s Garden”. I mapped the shape of each song from the lyrics alone, counting syllables as they’re written as opposed to how they’re sung. Superficially, they are nothing alike. While two of the songs are nothing but quatrains, the others alternate between sestets, quintains, quatrains, couplets, and monostiches. Some were strict on the syllable count, some were looser (probably relying on the singer to extend a word here or there). Using basic maths to tally up the types of stanzas, I decided to use sestets, quatrains and monostiches but I didn’t set out with any predetermined order or length to them – I was hoping that would come out organically in the construction of the poem.

I looked at what was happening around me.

There’s a homeless man, Richard, who is often at the train station near my work. I talk to him all the time but a number of people deliberately avert their eyes or look in his general direction the way you might look at objects in someone else’s front yard. He became inspiration for the first stanza but I’ve taken a lot of liberties when it comes to the description given.

Speaking of my workplace, the two most senior members of our administration (both female) are currently suspended. We’re in the middle of an investigation and, for a while, we seemed to be in the newspaper quite a lot. This chaos forms the inspiration for the second stanza.

Nothing concrete informed the remainder of the poem. There’s a general observation about the 9-5 lifestyle most of us live and some common phrases. Otherwise, I just went with the words that felt right. The first stanza dictated the syllables for the other two sestets and the monostich and quatrains are repeated where desired.

It’s certainly a departure from my normal narrative flow. It’s a lot more stripped back and the different stanza lengths give it a rhythm not found in my other poems. It reads as follows:

Portrait of a Population

Invisible man

sits alone at the station,

a sign so there’s no need to speak.

Frail and weak,

starving for attention

but still they all walk on.

Rats in a race, scurrying toward the city.

Queen in her tower,

throne made of a paper mâché.

A leader with no head or heart,

it falls apart;

hopes someone will save her

but still they all walk on.

No need for exterminators,

the pests are all controlled.

Put away the bible, dear,

their souls have all been sold.

Suits and pencil skirts,

days dictated by the clock.

Making a living, so they say;

throw life away

for a home and contents

and still they all walk on.

Rats in a race, scurrying toward the city.

No need for exterminators,

the pests are all controlled.

Put away the bible, dear,

their souls have all been sold.

Rats in a race, scurrying toward the city.

Rats in a race, scurrying toward the city.

Rats in a race, scurrying.

Rats in the city.

          

I think the inspirations are obvious. If you know the songs I used as a jumping off point then you’ll see some resemblance in the cadence and rhythm of this piece. Probably. I know I tend to read the opening lines of the verses to the tune of “Eleanor Rigby” even though that wasn’t intentional when writing it. I’d taken a mathematical approach and still ended up with something that feels inspired by the music and lyrics.        

        So what I have so far are two failed approaches. Not failed in the sense that the final products are bad, I don’t think that’s the case. Failed in that the intent or the imagined direction seem vastly different to what I feel I have down on paper.

One more round

                I thought I’d try my hand at one more Beatles inspired method of writing before wrapping this up. I went to the library and borrowed Steve Turner’s The Complete Beatles Songs: The stories behind every track written by the Fab Four. It’s a fascinating book filled with great insight collected from a variety of sources. In the introduction it divides their song-writing into four clear eras. The first is pre-1964 where the pop songs about love helped form that mindset I mentioned at the start of this essay. From 1964 they became more serious. They were inspired by art and literature and began experimenting with different sounds and recording techniques. It was then, too, that their lyrics told of more developed characters and emotional experiences. This took them into their third era where their experimentation went into the realms of meditation and drug use. During this time, John found his confidence battered and became less prominent in the song-writing process. The final era started in 1968 and signalled the end of The Beatles. Life outside of the band was pulling them in different directions and their music returned to a simplicity reminiscent of the style produced when they were first starting out.

                Now, I’m not in the position to be experimenting with drugs nor do I have any interest in sacrificing family and friends for the sake of my art. No, what I thought I’d do is read through the book and see where inspiration hits. Part of what’s written within its pages tells of how various Beatles songs were written in response to newspaper headlines, photographs or other media that they’d stumbled across. I was hoping to stumble into a spark.

                I didn’t read as you normally would. I didn’t turn from page to page reading word after word. I treated it as more of a Choose Your Own Adventure story but without the instructions at the bottom of the page. I read, flipped a random number of pages forward, read, flipped back a few pages, read, flipped forward and so on.

                I landed on a page that had a picture that reminded me of an event from my childhood. That, I decided, would be my muse. The photograph shows Paul, Ringo and George with a cardboard cut-out of John ala Yellow Submarine (a similar photo is posted below[4]). John also happens to be the name of my stepdad and, one time, my family in Adelaide threw a party and had cardboard copies of John, Mum and I (also below).

And so, this ekphrastic poem was born.

                Poor John (Rah rah rah)

It’s a going away party

but he’s already gone,

a cardboard effigy takes his place.

His clothes are coloured in

and they’ve drawn a smile on his face

(to show he’s having a good time).

They’re keeping track of all their chats,

they’ve got a tape recorder on

Everyone’s got a lot to say

except for John.

He’s probably got a mouthful

of his cardboard cut-out drink

that they pose him with in photos

(so that people think

he’s having a good time).

He’s got a cigarette

but it’s a fake one too,

they all know the damage

a real cigarette could do.

At the end of the night

when they’re all heading out the door

they leave poor John

flat out on the floor

(he had such a good time).

Final thoughts

                And here’s the pinch. I look back on anything created in this endeavour and I do so with trepidation and awkwardness. I’ve read recently that people tend to look at their own work with an overly critical eye because it is the product of their own imagination and workmanship. That, regardless of how good it is, we will always tend to view it as inadequate because we don’t see our own worth. This is especially true for amateurs who discredit their work because it wasn’t made by a ‘real’ artist (regardless of what artform we work in).

                In McCartney 3, 2, 1, Paul says that he can now be a fan of The Beatles[5]. At the time when he was writing music with John, George and Ringo, he was too invested. Time has allowed him now to return to that music, almost as an outsider looking in. It has allowed him to appreciate his own work.

                Perhaps, one day, I will be in the same space. In the distant future I might look back at my body of work and be proud of what I’ve accomplished, not in a material sense but a metaphysical one. As a part-time writer, I am already proud of the quantity of poems I have had published. I hope to one day be equally proud of their quality.

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[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2016/06/10/481256944/all-songs-1-a-conversation-with-paul-mccartney

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/paul-mccartney-writing-eleanor-rigby-beatles

[3] https://theconversation.com/paul-mccartneys-the-lyrics-an-extraordinary-life-in-song-171603

[4] https://www.beatlesbible.com/wp/media/paul-george-ringo-800x370_01.jpg

[5] https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/as-the-music-plays-paul-mccartney-becomes-a-beatles-fan-20210910-p58qou.html