Reweaving

[This post is not obviously or on any level about feminism, but that's because it was threatening to get unwieldy so I've broken it up into several pieces, the next piece will be posted next week]

Poetry is my first love, always has been and always will be. Poetry is the blood in my veins, and my breath on the wind, without poetry, without being able to read it and write it I get sick

Poetry gave my raging, angry silenced, adolescent self a language that was formed by edges, silences, half truths pauses and metaphors, which gave me a way of understanding my fractured unintelligible life.

Of course I came to poetry through middle class white men, twenty years ago, even more so than now, they were the voices that got heard, I still learnt from them, I still loved them, we take our survival wherever we can find it. And even today I still love them, partly because they were there when I started, they opened a door for me and partly because they still have things to say to me. Eliot, Hughes, Auden, Causley, Mcgough, Armitage, I do come back to them and they still move me. I know not enough people who are other than white, other than male get published but it was white men who made me realise that with poetry I could carve out a space to breathe with, a space to think with, that poetry could be my breath and my protection and, when you are drowning you cling to any life raft regardless of it origins,

Its not even that poetry written by others isn’t important to me, I have at least as much (probably more) poetry by women as i do by men, i have Eastern European, Russian, Irish, welsh, afro Caribbean, South American, Spanish, African poetry (all in translation obviously, but still) and women poets do matter to me, more often than not they do resonate with me, they do see the world more often the way i do, Jennings, Rich, Olds, Duffy, Fanthorpe, Boland but also i am not going to pretend that Ariel by Plath is more to me than Birthday Letters by Hughes because Birthday Letters shoots deep deep inside in a way that to me for me Ariel doesn’t. And these men, Mcgough, Elliot, Causley and the war poets will always have a place in my personal cannon, because they gave me this, they gave me poetry, they gave me a way to save my life.

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

I loved Elliot, and he still influences my poetry now, in ways of both form and content, he gave me a lifelong fascination with post apocalyptic landscapes, a way of describing what my life felt,

Ted Hughes and I have always had a complicated relationship, a lot of his work I hate, and I go back to Crow, over and over again, not because I like it but because it repulses me, its like a car crash, or toothache. but birthday letters I loved, and I think one of the reasons I loved it was because it could have been written about me

The Shot

Your worship needed a god.
Where it lacked one, it found one.
Ordinary jocks became gods -
Defied by your infatuation
That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
It was a god-seeker. A god-finder.
Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.

In that flash
You saw your whole life. You ricocheted
The length of your Alpha career
With the fury
Of a high-velocity bullet
That cannot shed one foot-pound
Of kinetic energy. The elect
More or less died on impact -
They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flightpath.
But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.

Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I’d been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me -
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.

I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

Until I sorted my shit out, there have been times in my life where people I loved, people who loved me could have written this for me

And Auden with his

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Afica meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.”

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.”

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.”

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

This poem had such a deep profound effect on me that it may very well have been Auden who planted in me my love of surreal poetry and my subsequent seeking out of eastern European and Russian poetry which appears to the western reader to have many qualities of surrealism.

Poetry gave me ways of saying things that were never supposed to have been said, looking back now at my early adolescent effort all my writing contains, exile, loss, wastelands. Even later while at university my lecturer said to me, you write like you grew up in a war zone and I just looked at him and thought but I pretty much did

Part of the reason I think I love poetry is because I wasn’t force fed it at school, I was deemed to stupid to understand such things as poetry and so was put in a really low English set, so I stumbled across it myself while browsing the school library, so I dint have anyone talking about, pentameters stanzas, sonnets, villanelles of some poem that had nothing whatsoever to do with my own life and was written in a language I didn’t really understand, the explanations came much later after i had decided poetry was awesome and I wanted to understand what made it so awesome and the history of its awesomeness.

But to begin with I just read it, soaked myself in it and came to my own conclusions on it. Not learning about it officially left me free to bring my whole self to the experience of it without thinking of it as “work” without thinking of it as something that needed dissecting, I didn’t feel the need to splay its dead legs on a table and poke around its inside, instead a poem was something whole and alive to me.

But eventually I needed other words from other people, eventually middle class white men run out of things to say that make sense to me, that I can connect with, because at the end of the day they are not writing for me.