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.