A small harvest

During lockdown, we had a go at growing various fruit and veg. Strawberry plants came from our local budget supermarket. Peas, carrots, lettuce, rocket, spinach and courgette seeds were posted to the children from their grandparents in Devon. Some potatoes that had grown eyes at the bottom of the bag got planted out. Apple and lemon pips were planted and there is now a miniature orchard in the garden and a porch filled with lemon 'trees'.

In due time, we reaped our harvest: a handful of peas, nine tiny carrots, fifteen mini potatoes, and one knobbly strawberry salvaged from the family of woodlice that got the rest of the crop. The courgette plant got infested with flea beetles (although it did yield a solitary marrow, after we'd abandoned it to its fate). The lettuce, rocket and spinach grew well, but were situated under a tree branch that served as a long-drop toilet for our local pigeon colony.

It was the first harvest for our children, and although it was small, it was a real joy in an otherwise fairly bleak season.

Which makes it a convenient analogy for my writing....

Over the summer, I was very grateful to have been selected for the MumWrite development course (see my post about it here). As a result, I got some new writing done and started submitting work again. This month, I have a crop of publications to share with the world. Like the children's harvest, it is small, but it is an encouragement for me to keep going, and hopefully it will also bring a bit of joy to anyone who comes across the poems. Here are some links:

My poem 'dream' is in issue #3 of -algia.

Two poems, 'Selfharm/Selfcare' and 'Twitter-light' on the Selcouth Station website.

My poem 'Headspace [no vacancies]' is in issue #69 of streetcake magazine.

I also have another poem 'The truth about sea glass' posted on the Places of Poetry map (a sea-quel, if you will, to the poem about Seaham, 'Sea Glass', that I posted there last year).

While all these small fruits have been emerging, we have been cocooned back in isolation as cases of covid have cropped up at school, so there hasn't been much writing going on (by me, at least - the 5 year old has written a lot of painstakingly slow sentences about seasons). Hopefully there will be more time for writing and submitting again soon!

 

The award goes to...

Recently, I attended an online workshop on Resilience for writers. Part of the process of submitting writing for publication is rejection. So far this year, I have received 23 rejections and 5 acceptances. Learning to deal with rejection, and retaining a sense of confidence in your abilities, is one of the most important skills that a writer can learn. 

One of the activities we did for the Resilience workshop was to write an acceptance speech, imagining that we were receiving an award for things we have achieved so far in life. This was hard for most of us, with the ever-present spectre of Imposter Syndrome lurking amongst the gallery of our pixelated faces. Some of us wrote with a mixture of self-deprecation and sarcastic humour. Most of us weren't brave enough to read out what we'd written (myself included). I wonder if this would have been the same in a mixed group - ours was all women, all mums.

In the confidence-building spirit of the workshop, I'm sharing the acceptance speech that I wrote here (and I would strongly recommend this exercise to anyone else!):

Thank you so much for this prize, but what is it for? What have I done that is so great? What are my achievements, what could fill the rapidly expanding white space on my CV?

Ok, well, I have given birth. Twice. I know nobody usually gets a prize for that, but really, everyone should. It's not called labour for nothing. It's unbelievable, really, that we don't talk about it all the time. The truly heroic, superhuman act that our bodies performed. The emotions. The hormones. The pain. Why do we ever shut up about it? How often do we thank our own mothers for going through all that for us? But no, don't worry, I won't go all Sharon Olds on you, I won't embarrass my pre-motherhood squeamish self with details of tearing body parts, projectile bodily fluids...

What else? I have potty-trained two children. (Sorry, it got back to bodily fluids pretty quickly there...) That achievement marks the membership of a select club. 'Potty-training' sounds fairly innocuous - easy even - to the uninitiated. Those who've been there know the truth. The same applies to many newly discovered parenting terms: 'cluster-feed', 'baby blues', 'threenager'.

What else in my life counts as an achievement? A PhD, I suppose. Although it still feels like an indulgence at best (a failure at worst). But I completed it. I earned the title, and I may yet come to be known by it again.

My current life is one of small victories. I got the fence painted. I mowed the lawn. I dried two loads on the washing line despite the plummeting temperatures outside. I tried a new food with the allergy child, and he was ok. I was ok. I got the school uniforms ready for the start of term. I read this week that my work as a mother and home organiser is to carry the mental load for the family. I know where everyone's socks and warm jumpers are kept, and how much chocolate spread is left in the jar. I know the different settings on the washing machine, when to order the repeat prescriptions, who had the blue cup, what time the post arrives. I can carry this load and cope with its demands. And coping is not just surviving, it's winning.

And I write. And other people read it and are touched by what I write. I can produce something unique, necessary. I can connect with someone across the ocean. I can communicate. I must be a writer - I've had more rejections than acceptances. That's the ticket to joining the writing community, isn't it? But I have had those few precious pieces accepted. I am quietly proud of them, but still feel weird sharing them. Especially outside my little community of writers. It will be even stranger when those pieces about people I know get published, and read by the people they're about. How will my kids feel seeing themselves in print? What about my parents?

One grounding factor is that my five year old's writing career is accelerating faster than my own. Every time I tweet something he's said about writing, I get more likes and follows than for any of my own witticisms. He also has more notebooks on the go than me, more stories written and shared with the family. I seem to have birthed a writer, a little well of creativity and ideas. And that's also a pretty great achievement.

ToddlerChef, the remix

Nearly a year ago, I posted a poem called Toddlerchef on this blog. I had sent it off to a food-themed competition and got nowhere with it. I posted it assuming that it was not going to be publishable anywhere else.

But...

It has been accepted, with a few revisions, by Lighten Up Online, and you can read it here.

This also gives me a chance to recommend Lighten Up Online as a great place to find entertaining light verse, which is much harder to do well than you might imagine.

Community

For a long time, probably ever since I finished my MA 12 years ago, I have been longing to be part of a creative writing community. It is pretty hard to write in isolation. It's also pretty hard for someone with increasing social anxiety, long emerged from the student-bubble, now firmly ensconced in a stay-at-home-mum-bubble, to pluck up to courage to venture out to meet groups of strangers, especially ones who might ask you to read out the poem you've just made up.

A few years ago, I joined Twitter. The impulse was not, admittedly, a literary one - I wanted to get a refund from a rather large company. Twitter worked in that instance. In the time since, it has presented me with quite a few good writing tips and contacts. Helpful as this has been, I have still not felt 'part' of a writing community.

Now in lockdown, much of life seems to have moved online. There have been online literary festivals, online writing retreats, online book launches... Still, I did not feel able to access much of this. As many of us have now discovered, attending an event on Zoom can create anxiety for even the most extrovert person. So, I was stuck: desperately desiring community, yet not sure how I'd ever find it, especially while locked down.

Two things have happened, for which I am extremely grateful. And for which I should also credit Twitter, without which I wouldn't have heard of them.

The first. Michael Loveday, a writer and writing mentor, picked up on the fact that many writers seemed to be finding it hard to get any writing done amidst the global pandemic. He set up a free online course “Unlocked in Lockdown: Slouch to 5k (for writers)”. For the first couple of hundred people to respond, there was a chance to join a Facebook group. Suddenly, I found myself on a writing course, and in a virtual community, where I am taken seriously as a writer (alongside other people I recognise from Twitter as 'proper' writers). I'm halfway through the course, and I've begun my first piece of creative nonfiction writing, which is about my Great-Gran's experience of raising young children during the German Occupation of Guernsey during WW2. I'll blog about this soon.

The second. I saw a tweet about a free online course called MumWrite, and thought I'd register my interest. I was asked to complete an application, and I realised that this was quite a serious undertaking. The last few things I've applied for, or submitted to, have not lead anywhere, so I was trying to prepare myself for a polite 'no'... but thankfully I was selected. It's a development course funded by Arts Council England, for mums who 'write experimental short fiction or poetry, or would like to write more experimentally'. I'm firmly in the second group currently, but in a couple of months will have moved into the first. And, there will be publication opportunities...

So, unlikely as it sounds, one of the things lockdown has brought me is community.

First Fruits

My last post was back in January. That afternoon, as well as blogging about not giving up, I also submitted some poems to a couple of online publications. The very next day, I was astonished to see that one of the editors I'd emailed had already replied, and had offered to publish two of the five poems I'd sent. This was hugely encouraging, and statistically unlikely (I've only had one other thing accepted - with suggestions for improvement - since then).

I didn't share the news right away as there was going to be a bit of a wait before the poems appeared online, one in March and one in April. I planned to write accompanying blog posts for each poem when it was published, and was excited to be able to include links to my 'real' poems for the first time.

By the time we were into March, however, the coronavirus pandemic, and the accompanying anxiety surrounding it, made it a bit hard to concentrate on writing. I kept putting off writing the post about the first poem 'The thin silence', and within a fortnight our family went into self-isolation, three days before the whole country entered lockdown. A month later, when 'Cope' made an appearance, I had not only lost the motivation to write, but also the time and opportunity, having now become a homeschooler, as well as losing the writing desk and laptop to the working-from-home husband.

Anyway. Better late than never. You can read the two poems here:

The thin silence

Cope

'The thin silence' is based on a 2019 sermon by David Campbell of the same title, which was about depression, and the experience of the dejected prophet Elijah hearing the still, small voice of God (1 Kings 19:12). This sermon resonated with my mental and emotional state at the time, and my response was the poem.

'Cope' was written about a year earlier, and is also to do with mental health (as the title might suggest). It came out of my strong dislike for the word 'cope'. I've always felt like it was a silly, weak word, especially when used to talk about people who are struggling. 'She's not coping very well', or worse, 'I can't cope', sound like a completely underwhelming way to describe an overwhelmed state of mind. One day I decided to look up the etymology of 'cope', and I was surprised at the depth of meaning that can actually be found in the word. At the end of writing this poem, I had managed to encourage myself that a) I can cope, and b) this is more of an achievement than I had previously thought.

As I write, we are still in lockdown, writing is still a challenge, but I am trying to make it a priority again.

On not giving up

 A friend asked recently how writing is going. The answer is, not well. Although I am gaining more space and freedom in which to write, I rarely get started, and when I do, I hate what I've written. I don't like to read the raw emotion that spills onto the page, yet it feels hypocritical to write with humour, optimism or hope that I don't currently feel.

A few things have prompted me not to give up, however. Last week I saw in my garden a small plant growing in a pot; it was a pot I'd left outside to be re-used, thinking that the seed I'd planted there had died. Yet it grew, without my help, and is beginning to bud. This reminded me of an attempt I'd made at writing a poem about planting this seed. The poem is a re-write of some verses from Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which I have always been drawn to for its bleak, understated sense of optimism. The same day last week, I heard someone read out the same passage from the Bible in a completely unrelated context. And in the last few days, kindness from my family has encouraged me not to give up. So, this post is on not giving up with writing, and it is my attempt at continuing.

(Proof that there is still a bit of hope in me about my writing is that I have a few things that I think might be eventually publishable, which means I can't share them here... however, this is not one of them: due to its lack of actual poetic merit, here's the Habakkuk 'poem'.)

Habakkuk

Though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet…

yet I planted a seed, left it quiet

on a high shelf near the front door,

I try to remember to water it,

check it during my comings and goings,

before I’m called away again.

It has surely been too long now

to expect anything to come of it,

it must have rotted away,

become one with the soil it sat in.

My heart is a well of grief

for the fruit that never came,

and yet…

yet my feet go on trudging,

stumbling on this mountain side.

Remembrance Day

This morning my four year old told me what they'd learned at school about Remembrance Day. I tried to write down word-for-word what he said. My own feelings about Remembrance are hard to express, so I'll offer his words without further comment.

Remembrance Day

Mummy,
there was a rabbit
chasing a butterfly
on the screen at school.
But then there was a
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
And all the loveliness
cracked into pieces,
and that was the day
that I made my toy robot
at wet playtime and now
he's worried at night time
that there will be a war.
But then the screen cracked
into tiny little pieces
and there was a big red poppy
and it was really strong
and it means that there won't be
another naughty war in the world,
Mummy.

Writing the truth

Recently, there was a National Poetry Day competition with the theme of 'Truth'. Annoyingly, I've just written a poem about truth, too late to send in. But truth remains a weird thing to write poems about. What's the difference between truth/authenticity/sincerity/universality...? Can something in a poem ever be absolutely true?

A few months ago I wrote a poem that I did actually manage to submit somewhere. It was for the Places of Poetry project, where anyone could pin a poem about a place on a digital map of England and Wales. Check it out here https://www.placesofpoetry.org.uk/

My poem, pinned to Seaham on the coast of County Durham, was called Sea Glass. Here it is:

Sea Glass

We ate our sandwiches on the grass

up by the Seaham coastal path

backs to the carpark, wave watching

over the cliffs as the tide splashed in.

Then, down the concrete steps,

nettles reaching for our fingertips,

across the line of sea-turned stones

to the surging water’s edge beyond.

We picked up sea glass from the sand,

frosted white, green, honey-amber,

one small speck of electric blue,

one with rusted wire running through.

We stepped, scanning the length of shore,

and carried home a treasure hoard.

This poem has bothered me a bit with questions about truth. Although the description is literally 'true' - there are concrete steps edged by stinging nettles going down to the beach at Seaham - for me, this poem doesn't communicate the reality of the experience. It is devoid of emotive language, which was perhaps my way of dealing with what had been a difficult day struggling with depression and anxiety. The trip to the beach, at my husband's suggestion, was a welcome break from the darkness I had been inflicting on the family, and turned a bleak day into a happy memory. My poem doesn't really communicate any of this. So today I tried again, drafting a poem called 'The Truth about Sea Glass'. I'm not sure if it's finished yet, and if I do get it to a refined state, I may want to submit it somewhere else, which means I can't post it here (a sad truth about submitting poems for publication). The new one doesn't really rhyme or have a set metrical form (which may make it technically worse?) But, I already like it more, though, perhaps because it seems more 'true'.

The problem of pre-emptive grief

Back when I was still working towards an academic career, my research was beginning to look at particular sub-categories of grief. My postgraduate studies of the elegy, the genre of poetry which mourns a death, were getting refined to include new definitions of grief. This included, in the language of psychiatry, disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is an umbrella term which covers things like the loss of a pet, the loss of a secret lover, the loss caused by divorce, and many other instances in which the grief suffered might in some ways be seen as ‘taboo’. Or at least, less of an obvious loss than losing a loved person to death. Actually, the example that Freud uses in his work ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, upon which most of the literary theory about elegy has traditionally been based, is that of a jilted bride, which is clearly not a grief caused by death.

An area of disenfranchised grief that I had started to write about was that of anticipatory, or pre-emptive, grief. The grieving that occurs before a tangible, final loss has taken place. The example that I had been working on was the grief connected with dementia. This became more personal to me as I watched both sets of my grandparents, together with my parents, live through this pre-emptive grief; my Grandpa suffering from Alzheimer’s for the final years of his life, and my Grandad succumbing to vascular dementia.

I have been wanting to write poems about my own parents. However, I am finding it hard to begin. One big reason, currently, is that my Dad was recently diagnosed with cancer. It has since been treated with surgery and we await results from that. It turns out that pre-emptive grief is a real phenomenon. It is further nuanced for me because my Dad’s type of cancer is likely to be fully treatable. So there is much hope for recovery. But, there’s still a kind of grief.

From a writing point of view, this is quite hard to process. Any poem written now would feel like an elegy, which I feel reluctant to write. Yet, perhaps all poems about the people we love are elegies in some way – they memorialise that person whether they are still with us or not. Perhaps there is something slightly superstitious in not wanting to mourn for someone while they are still alive and (relatively) well. But then, we often regret that the nicest things said about people are usually at their funerals. Can I re-imagine this problem of writing pre-emptive grief, and consider it as a celebration of life and hope? Might the attempt to do this actually help to generate hope, in myself and others? I hope so.

Morning Meditation

The more serious blog material is still lodged away somewhere in my brain like mental constipation.

So, here is a silly thing from a time when the two minutes that I spent brushing my teeth felt like the only time I ever got to be in a room by myself (on a good day). It's also partly a 'found' poem, as half the lines are taken from a bottle of mouthwash. Found poems are sometimes in danger of being a bit pretentious...

Morning Meditation

Apply toothpaste. Switch on.

Upper left quadrant, thirty seconds.

Macrogoglycerol Hydroxysterate, Sorbitol, Peppermint oil and Water.

Upper right, thirty seconds.

Macrogoglycerol Hydroxystearate may cause skin reactions.

Lower right, thirty seconds.

KEEP OUT OF THE REACH AND SIGHT OF CHILDREN.

Lower left, thirty seconds.

If no improvement after two weeks, please see your doctor.

Toothbrush shudders to a stop.

Somewhere a child is crying.

Toddlerchef

Here's something that got rejected from a food-themed competition last year. 

Toddlerchef

Here’s a cooking show I’d watch on TV:

the judges are aged between two and three –

grown-up food critics are far too easy.

They will eat things like bone-marrow, offal,

steak tartare, frog’s legs, snails, or steamed mussels,

mushroom ketchup, sea-weed, skin, and truffle…

The toddlers are a formidable bunch:

inscrutable, as you bring them their lunch;

fastidious about what they will munch.

Contestant one. Your meal is rejected.

We’re sorry, but we see you’ve neglected

the memo re: greens – the plate’s infected!

Contestant two. You’ve fallen down on sauce.

This meal needs deconstructing, a divorce

between the pasta and red stuff, of course.

Contestant three. Now, this is hard to say.

While we like everything you’ve made today,

you didn’t slice the same way as yesterday.

Those gallant souls who make toddler dinners

that meet with approval are true winners.

All other chefs are simply beginners.

My First ABC of Parenting

I returned to something I wrote nearly two years ago. Some things remain true. Some, thankfully, are less pertinent. Some have been replaced by exciting new worries...

My First ABC of Parenting

A is for anxiety, allergies, and anxiety about allergies.

B is for bath-and-bedtime, breastfeeding, babysitters and bribery (see also “s” for snacks).

C is for cake (allergen-free), CBeebies, Calpol and carseats.

D is for “Don’t lick the radiator/window/fence!”, “Don’t ride the baby!” Also, doctors’ waiting rooms and Disney (see also “f” for films).

E is for eating the children’s selection boxes/Easter eggs. How long can this go on for?

F is for films. And failure.

G is for Grandparents.

H is for how long does it take a two year old to put on gloves/shoes/come down the stairs when you’re late for nursery?

I is for immunisations.

J is for JOY.

K is for kisses that involve more teeth and saliva than you had ever previously experienced.

L is for love that is wilder, more overwhelming, exhausting and terrifying than you had ever imagined. Also, laughter. Also, labour.

M is for missing them when they are asleep.

N is for naptime. And nappies. Nappies. Nappies.

O is for other parents. And opinions. Other parents’ opinions. Opinions about other parents. Also, the discovery that small people also have opinions, in abundance, from a very early age.

P is for pasta. Also potty training, and parent-and-child parking spaces.

Q is for questions. One of the best things about two year olds. One of the worst things about health visitors.

R is for risk assessments. You have just become your own health and safety officer.

S is for snacks (your new magic word). Also, sitting in the car on the driveway/in a KFC carpark/during church because they fell asleep 30 seconds before you switched the engine off.

T is for TV boxsets, binge-watching of; trying not to stand on the squeaky floorboards; trying to fit two toddlers into a supermarket trolley. And terror.

U is for university fees. Do we start saving now?

V is for vomit.

W is for WHAT are you doing? WHERE do you think you’re putting that? WHY? Also, Wotsits.

X is for x-rays, because A & E is the most fun place to be with a toddler on a Friday night.

Z is for zebra, because it’s important that pre-schoolers living in the North of England can correctly identify their African wild animals.

Deferrals

[A foreword... Ironically, ha ha, I have deferred posting this for a week. The process of writing it, which was made possible mostly because of the support of some good friends, was therapeutic. So much so, that the next day my feelings were so far away from those described here that it felt a bit embarrassing and over-dramatic to publish this. However, I am determined to keep writing and posting, and trying to be honest. So here it is...]

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12.

“The process of doing a PhD and becoming an early career academic operates through a model of delayed gratification. It demands that you work extremely hard (research, teach, network, publish) and implies acceptance into the academic fold, esteem, and a lecturer’s salary as your reward. Leaving the sector meant coming to terms with the reality of a broken social contract which meant none of those things would be forthcoming for me.” Catherine Oakley, “How I left academia: An honest look at the challenges and benefits of leaving UK academia with a Humanities PhD, one year on.”  see article here

After a year of blogger’s block, I am stirring myself to return to writing.  This blog, and writing in general, has been deferred for many reasons in the past year. Some practical ones, like it’s been busy selling and buying houses, overseeing building work, decorating rooms… sometimes writing time has had to make way for the general duties of life: laundry, cleaning, child-related tasks… But, other people have these things in their lives, and still write. The major reason for my silence has been what the writer of Proverbs might have called heart sickness. Others might call it depression.

The root of this is probably my life-long tendency towards deferred gratification. I have always operated on the basis of ‘if I can just get through this, then it will be better’. This, as Catherine Oakley has recently pointed out, is actually the premise that most of our education system is based on, particularly at postgraduate level, and even more specifically, within the academic career trajectory. And when the promised academic career doesn’t happen, you find that you have done all of the deferring, but got none of the gratification. Instead, you get a gaping void where your aspirations had been, and a full-blown identity crisis.

This is not the only area of my life in which I have been deferring joy. It comes naturally to me. As a child, I was the one who would save up sweets in a box under my bed, while my brother devoured his the moment he got them. The knowledge that I had something to enjoy later was almost more gratifying than actually eating them. I deferred my entry to university, not because I had any gap-year plans, but just because deferring seemed like the thing to do. And in a sense, I was proved right. I had such a miserable year before university, which included a broken engagement and working 9-5 for the council, that the first year of my degree was a blissful time. So, this tendency to defer became a defining characteristic of my adult life.

My experience of parenthood is also in danger of going down this route. When you have a new-born baby, it’s easy to think, ‘This will be great… when we finally get some sleep/when we get feeding sorted/when we establish a routine/when we get our evenings back…’ This can become a habit. Over the last four and a half years I have continually found myself waiting for the next stage (particularly when it comes to finding space and time for myself, and for writing). I begin to believe that life will be easier when the kids can walk/talk/don’t need naps/go to nursery; that if I give all of myself at this point to being a mother, wife, household manager, I will eventually earn the right to be anything other than that (a writer, a poet, a voice that reaches beyond the four walls of my home). Now that the eldest child is preparing to start school, I need to face up to the reality that there will always be reasons to defer the things that I want to do for myself. Not all of these are good reasons. And endlessly deferring my own life makes me heart-sick, taking the joy out of everything, including my family. I want this to end. I want to bring joy to my children and husband, and to relish and treasure the joy that they are to me. I need to stop deferring my dreams.

Although this might not sound as inspirational as that last sentence, I need other people to help me do this. If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes community to nurture creativity. If anyone reads this, please talk to me about what I'm writing, ask me for a poem, share your writing with me, tell me what you're reading, let me know where you find joy, or when you're in need of some encouragement.

The pain of requited love?

I am daily aware of, and hugely grateful for, the immense amount of privilege that I enjoy.

One of these huge joys is that I am loved by the people that I love most.  I endeavour not to take this for granted or to treat this gift too lightly.

Many of my early attempts at writing poetry, as a younger person, were based on experiences of unrequited love, or heartbreak, or mortifying misunderstandings. I have no doubt that the writing produced was not very accomplished. I have very little desire to trawl through old word documents to attempt to find any examples. Yet, at that time, I felt extremely motivated to express my feelings in poems.

In my current phase of life, I am searching for ways to write meaningfully about the relationships that I have with the people I love. One slightly paralysing consideration is that these people will probably read what I write – not usually a problem when writing about an ex, or about someone who doesn’t even know you exist. This was one factor that delayed my writing about my Grandad’s death. My Grandma might read it, my parents, my aunt: people who knew and loved him longer and better than me. I am still holding back on either writing or sharing elegies about other relatives and friends for the same reason. This is also why I struggle to write poems about, or for, my husband. This is why I worry about writing in too much detail about giving birth to my sons, or the subsequent experience of parenting them.

If I write too specifically about loved ones, especially in a ‘warts ‘n’ all’ fashion, am I betraying their trust? If I use my children’s names, is that a data protection issue? How do I avoid the ‘miserable mum’ genre without glossing over the fact that motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve experienced?

There are many people who have managed to do this very well. Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poems about motherhood, for example. Ciaran Carson writing about his wife’s serious illness in his recent work. Writing about more mature relationships is the next step in my poetic development.

Heritage

Back in May, I attended the funeral of my grandad. The service was a thanksgiving for, and celebration of, the life of a well-loved man. He, like the majority of my family, had a strong Christian faith and there was a powerful sense of shared hope for a heavenly consolation as a packed church congregation sang together throughout the service.

Certain lines from the hymns stood out to me, and I hope to be able to write poems that echo them:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease…

Mine is the sunlight

Mine is the morning

I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun;

And in that Light of Life I’ll walk

Till trav’lling days are done.

This post was begun soon after the event, but I didn’t manage to finish it at the time. For many reasons – some of which I will blog about another time. But one reason was because of a poem I wrote for my Grandma about my Grandad. I gave it to her at the funeral. I believe she got it printed in that Sunday’s edition of Pew News, the notice bulletin handed out at her church. But it felt a bit too soon to go more ‘public’ with it (that is, pretending the readership of this blog extends further than my immediate family…).

Except…

The week after the funeral, I entered the poem in a poetry competition. In fact, it had been written to conform specifically to the exacting demands of the competition – an 821 poem, which has an initial stanza of 8 lines, followed by a couplet and ending with a single line, which should also contain a volta or ‘twist’ of some kind. The organisers also stated (as most competitions/publishers do) that the work must not have been published anywhere before, including on a personal blog. Luckily, my offering was met with a polite ‘no’ from the competition, which means that I can put it on here.

So, although it feels a bit morally ambiguous that I wrote a poem that was simultaneously for my Grandma as she mourns her husband, and also an entry for a competition, it is also my tribute to my Grandad.

Heritage

My grandad, with his northern vowels,

‘Let’s ‘av a luke’, ‘bring me that buke’.

Child-me thrilled at the way he spoke.

My grandad, on his daily strolls

‘cross Cookham Moor to the churchyard.

My grandad, the musical lad:

church organist, and taught my dad.

Now my sons caress the keyboard.

My grandad, who made pilgrimage,

and brought back stones from Galilee,

has come into his heritage.

Elegy for Nicholas Heiney: more questions than answers?

My PhD was about the elegy, a type of poem that laments a death. Although that sounds pretty straightforward, the idea of a work of art being inspired by grief can become quite complex.

Writing about a famous person or a well-known tragedy instantly becomes political (that is without the assumption that all poetry is political, but that’s a discussion for another time). Writing about your own loss involves processing your grief in a very public fashion (assuming that your poem will be read by others); and the loss of a person rarely only affects a single mourner, so the elegist’s personal grief response must also engage with or at least acknowledge the grief of the community of people mourning that loss. (More on this soon…)

Perhaps more complex is the idea of writing an elegy for a complete stranger. Is it ethical to create a work of art that expresses a grief that is not your own? Would the grief be ‘artificial’? (Is artifice a bad thing?) Can a poet be a ‘professional mourner’ on behalf of someone else? Do you need to get their permission, if so? Is it exploitative to make art, and perhaps a name for oneself as a writer, from someone else’s grief? (Did Milton capitalise on Edward King’s death when he wrote Lycidas; did Shelley, when he wrote Adonais for Keats? Did Andrew Motion jump on the People’s Princess bandwagon when he elegised Princess Diana?)

These questions were considered, in a largely theoretical way, during my research. They became more real a few months ago, when I was given a book by a good friend. The Silence at the Song’s End is a collection of writing – journals, sea logs and poems – by Nicholas Heiney, edited by his mother, Libby Purves, and his university tutor, Duncan Wu. Nicholas took his own life in 2006, while in his early twenties, after ‘a long and well-concealed battle with severe mental disturbance’. I loved this book: Nicholas was an excellent writer. Reading the collection, lovingly curated by his mother, was an emotional experience for me, and my response was the desire to write an elegy for Nicholas. Yet, I am somewhat paralysed by the questions I’ve already voiced here, and many more besides.

I do, however, believe that poetry can help to explore grief and mourning, and even seems to be a natural response to loss. Poems are often read at funerals and are almost always found at roadside tributes and sites of tragedy. So I will continue wrestling with these questions, and try to write elegies for strangers like Nicholas, and also for the lost ones dear to me.

Poems and preschoolers

With two young children at home, it often feels like there is no time for writing. Yet, making hurried notes to myself on my phone has sometimes been a small sanity-saver, reminding me that there is beauty and worth in what I’m doing with my kids, and also that there is more to life, and to me, than being a bottom-wiper/tidier-upper/toddler-referee...

The point of the notes is that they might eventually prompt poems. Often they are cryptic and ungrammatical, jumbled together in juxtaposing clusters. Perhaps these would be interesting poems in themselves? Example: ‘Mary played the marimba. // Boy sparrows bellow from rooftops. // Pitch for a parents’ cookery comp. Sestina??’

I have made some forays into harvesting from these notes, with varying degrees of success. One of the less successful was a poem about seagulls. Coming back to it, weeks later, the note seems like a better piece of writing than the poem that came from it. 

Seagulls

Outside a flock of seagulls kerfuffle, congregating on the pavement outside our neighbour’s front wall. The boys watch. The little one is momentarily lifted from his teething grump to giggle and lift his hands to the fluttering whirl of wings passing the window. The bigger boy asks why we can’t hear these birds singing. I realise that we can’t hear them, only the electronic squawk of one of the educational Christmas presents; ‘square!’, ‘square!’, ‘square!’. Although, the toy’s got an accent and pronounces it ‘squeer!’, to the two-year-old’s endless amusement. I tire, quicker than the children, of the feeding frenzy in the street. Opening the front door lets in the seaside sound of squabbling birds, as incongruous in this suburb of Durham as it was in the school playground in Bristol. I find a discarded box of fish and chips by the neighbour’s driveway. It goes to join the pile of nappies in our bin. I return to the house, where the sounds of squabbling have now taken up residence.

A start

Quick, fill in some of this white space!

My hope for this blog is that it will make me do some writing. I toyed with the idea of setting up a home page where I describe myself as Naomi Marklew: writer. ('Poet' sounds far too pretentious, particularly when poems are yet to be written.)

I am not yet that bold. Hence, the 'potential' bit of this blog's title. Also, having had a bash at academia, and now in the throes of stay-at-home motherhood, I am not entirely sure how to describe myself these days. Dr Mummy? Perhaps, but only when wearing my three-year-old's plastic stethoscope.

I had more confidence in my writing 'career' as much younger person. At primary school I wrote a story about a bear called Harold, which I was then invited to read to the reception class. (The teacher took over after about one and a half excruciating sentences.) As a teenager I kept notebooks of my ideas for novels. I hope/dread that some of these will come to light next time I move house - more mortifying than an angst-ridden diary, I expect. My undergraduate English degree produced some essays in which some rather astonishing claims are made about canonical writers, with seemingly unshakable confidence. Taking a module on poetry writing for my MA got me writing and giving readings alongside some enthusiastic (and very talented) classmates at small student events in Durham. This was a highlight of my creative writing career. A PhD in poetry later, I can confirm that my confidence was extremely susceptible to shaking. Almost seven years on, I am still recovering from my PhD viva.

After the birth of my first child, and entering a whole new period of existential crisis, I thought about trying to write poetry again. Not much happened, and I soon got a bit busy having a second baby. But I recently came across a small attempt from that time of early motherhood, more a passing thought than a poem, which (rather feebly) documents my decision to explore my own poetic potential.

Find a book to write it down.

Find the smallest book, the most unnoticeable.

Write it quick, before you change your mind.

Already it’s passing, the moment of belief.

Cross out, falter, stop…

Find a place to hide it again.