Poetry by Alan Franks

Alan Franks
Writer and musician

Alan has been writing poetry for many years and has won several competitions. His good friend, author and BBC producer Nigel Williams, wrote an article about Alan's work that was published in The Times and in an issue of the poetry magazine Markings dedicated to his work. Photo by Sylvan.

Alan writes:
I suppose I started on poems because the songs seemed too much like hard work. I mean the sheer joining up of words to music. Fine when it's working, but terrible when it's not. There was one song I was trying to write and it took forever - a span of years - for me to finish off a little four-line bridging passage between the verses - what they call a middle eight. It wasn't particularly good or different when I'd finished it, and certainly not wildly original. Also, at a prosaic level, it was a pitiful return for that input of effort.

Anyway, I put music to one side for a while and just started leaning on words. Some big things had been going on in my life, or in the lives of people close to me; birth and death basically. It wasn't that I wanted to say anything specific about that, only that I felt like saying something. When I got into it, I was reminded of the extent to which words can contain musicality, the more so when they are allowed to get on with it themselves. In addition, a much wider vocabulary was offering itself for use. I started to show them to people, my wife Ruth particularly, and when she liked them it gave me the confidence to take it a bit further.

I joined the local writers' group and went along to the meetings with something like dread. I'm very glad I did, because there were other people struggling with the same sort of problems. We all sat in a circle, listening to everyone else in turn. Sometimes there were 25 people there, which is an audience of Wembley proportions in the world of poetry readings. Some of the comments I got back were sharp, horribly on the nail. Not discouraging, just straight, and there were times when these responses would make me go away and re-think what I'd been writing. Then I started sending poems into competitions as I believe you're meant to as a way of testing them anonymously in a sort of critical market. It was when I won a couple of these that I thought I would carry on. I think "gave myself permission" is the phrase.

W.H. Auden, whom I've always admired, said a poem is never finished, only abandoned. I haven't a clue how they start up, or how they get finished, except that, like so much else, if you really put all your concentration and resources into it, then it starts to declare its nature to you and to offer you resolutions you would never have imagined, as you go along.