TRUSTING QUIET

I’ve been thinking about this phrase. It seems potent to me. A relief. Especially for someone who has hungered for resonance.

I think about how it says – on the back cover of The Girl Who Cried – ‘Gann’s poems, which tackle risky subjects, do so quietly.’ (John Challis, Poetry School.) And of how small some of those poems are, crouched there on the page.

I think of growing up the youngest of a big family, and how my two earliest cherished memories are of being alone in the quiet: once, in our sitting room, watching a spider plant cascade into the dusty sunshine; another time, when I was very young, out on the pavement watching snow fall by streetlight.

I think of the relief I felt finally living alone in a flat in my twenties in London – after that full house of childhood, and multiple shared flats and houses.

Of how much I’ve sometimes talked as a way of coping with awkwardness and empathy. How instinctively I mistrust ‘social media’, at a visceral level. 

How much of my life I’ve spent invisible, and silent about the things that have really hurt and shaped me.

How difficult it is for me, at times, to trust silence – and not reach out across it.

But how the Quiet trusts me – with its pillows and cat and light falling through a window. And how I trust it back: the gentlest, safest thing I know. Where work gets done.

One Point of Interest

One role I have in life is as co-editor of the Sphinx site where we publish OPOI – or ‘One Point of Interest’ – reviews of poetry pamphlets. I’m really pleased that one of our new reviewers, Jane Thomas, has taken the same approach, and written an ‘OPOI review’ of The Girl Who Cried. I can’t post this on the Sphinx site, of course – that’s only for pamphlet reviews. But I love this as an approach to reviewing anyway: it means just focusing on one aspect that you’re particularly struck by, and that only briefly.

Jane said she was happy for me to share her review – so here is what she wrote:

The child inside

The crux of this glorious collection for me is:

How can I wake at fifty
with the same pain I woke with aged five? (p45)

The realisation that we always carry the child we were within us, with its most basic fears and traumas. That the adult version is just a build of years and experiences, like the stream of poems we find here.

Each page has a small square instead of a title. I think they may be small empty frames relating to the frame references – ‘unframed photographs’ (p60), ‘Your frame is f***ed’ (p53), and ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, I’ve been lugging this thing’ (p41) – but for me they also look like tick boxes: every year survived and ticked off. All the time the poet is just trying to survive: ‘Can I float?’ (p35).

It also feels like a study of the alienation that we all feel (maybe even more so in recent times). And the oft held belief that it is ours to deal with alone:

Nobody wants to know about me, or this.
Nobody. You want ‘an easy life’. (p9)

But when you read this collection you do want to know about the poet and her experience.

I grabbed your sleeve. I slipped pebbles
in your pockets: weighed you down. (p11)

Each poem slips a pebble to the reader, some shiny, some rough but they make you feel lighter – the assurance of common human experience. Some poems make use of psychoanalytic language hinting that the poet is speaking to someone and by the end of the sequence there is hope. It feels like now that the little girl has had a chance to cry, grieve and speak she is less likely to ‘drown silently’. In the final poem the poet is both loving herself and another and is being heard in the wider world. I suggest you join the audience and the journey in this inspiring book for alienating times.

Jane Thomas

• For many OPOI reviews on all sorts of poetry pamphlets, do check out the website here.
• And The Girl Who Cried can be ordered here.

 

How to frame a Conversation?

One of the things I love most about poems is how they’re like little frames on the page. A poem can be like a picture on a wall: here is a scene, often with a twist. A collection can be like a gallery of one person’s work (an anthology, or magazine, is a gallery of a range of artists’). Of course the pictures have been hung in a certain order, in certain spaces, and in conversation with each other, as well as hopefully with their reader (viewer, as she wanders through). 

By writing The Girl Who Cried I’ve taken a gamble: I’ve hung an exhibition that’s tried to frame something fundamental from my own experience, and see if anyone responds with recognition. There’s the gamble: on it not being just me who carries this intruding burden, which is a particular kind of severe, anxious loneliness.

‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.’

This is one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite poems. I know Mary Oliver herself is said to have grown tired of everyone loving ‘Wild Geese’, but I can’t stop. It’s the unexpectedness of the lines that make that impossible. 

The first: ‘You do not have to be good.’ The first time I read that (a long time ago now) I couldn’t believe it. The relief. Then, before we get comfortable: ‘You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.’ The combination of depth of feeling, with ease of expression utterly compels me. I was thrilled at how extreme the situation was that she’s describing: that degree of shame and toil. The desert like the decades we live (walk on our knees) through. She’s saying we don’t have to, but with maximum compassion: there’s no doubt she knows we have, and we do, and that she has too.

Each line in the poem is a full, clear, simple sentence. There are so few adjectives – so the first that does appear leaps out: ‘You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.’ That ‘soft’.

(I like noticing the adjectives in this poem: ‘soft’, ‘clear’ [‘pebbles of the rain’], ‘deep’ [trees – which is just lovely], ‘wild’ [geese, of course], which then allows the positive outburst of: ‘the clean blue air’ through which those geese fly high.)

And then there’s the line I started with:

‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.’

The acknowledgment in this line. I like the fact we’re now together in this. There’s no room for doubt: you have your despair; I have mine. This poem (poet) meets us here: joins me on this vital similarity. That, in itself, is quietly marvellous: it leaves this (at times, despairing) reader so much less alone. It’s GENEROUS…

The Girl Who Cried

So what brought me back to this line now? Sitting here, thinking how will I introduce my own, new, strange book, which just arrived for preorder in the HappenStance shop? And of course, in the midst of this awful, global situation – which none of us could have anticipated.

(Bloodaxe, by the way, chose ‘Wild Geese’ as the epigraph poem for its famous anthology Staying Alive with good reason.)

My book. Why have I written it? Well, to start with, I couldn’t stop myself. I mean, if I was to go on writing poetry at all, these were the next poems that insisted on being written.

It is a(nother) quite brave book for me, detailing as it does the most basic, long-lasting and embarrassing inner struggle. This was the book that sat for me behind the first I wrote – Noir. I had to write that to get behind it to this – although once I did, I saw I had also, over some years, been writing them in parallel.

I carried on, writing poetry as simply and as clearly as I could. At one stage, I thought of these as ‘woodcut poems’. But there was something too thin or harsh about the book – as opposed to ‘harsh and exciting’ – and so I started introducing my drawings. I realised they were needed – to accompany these poems out into the world. 

They brought a bit of air, and together the poems and pictures lifted a little off the page. (Helena Nelson, publisher at HappenStance, also suggested removing each poem’s title – which helped lighten the pages further.) Something happened… The pictures, along with certain phrases in the poems (e.g. ‘I know / I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds’ – phrases I think of as ‘human bridges’), HELPED.

‘Meanwhile the world goes on’, wrote Mary Oliver. And later:

‘Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.’

I could never have foreseen, of course, publishing in the midst of a global pandemic: the awful loss and pain and anxiety so many have suffered and are suffering and will suffer, and all of us gripped in this thing…

I guess some things remain human. I’m not certain why it is we go to such lengths not to tell the truth about ourselves: why the shame is so pronounced. This is my attempt to do something different – ‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine’ – and by doing so, too, perhaps to further discover my ‘place / in the family of things.’ 

Here is Mary Oliver reading ‘Wild Geese’.
Here is a link to The Girl Who Cried.

Occasionally a poem HELPS

Around any corner an amazing encounter may await. That’s what happened for me with Jennifer Copley’s poem ‘The Two Friends’. It just stunned – stuns – me. At every reading. A short piece – 13 lines. Set in three uneven stanzas. It’s irreverent, and concerned only with acceptance.

Visibility versus invisibility

‘… This book – which grew from the seed of the pamphlet – asks: what are we to do with the darkness? The things, and people, often left silent and invisible.‘

By some strange twist, I found myself at the British Library a week ago, taking part in an event organised to celebrate poetry pamphlets on the eve of the tenth Michael Marks Awards. Five of us had been invited to share reflections, and poems; I was very glad to have been included…

“My poetry pamphlet (The Long Woman, Pighog Press) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award six years ago – in 2012. This was a huge help. The pamphlet was a stepping stone to a full collection, and the book very much a continuation of work started there: it was encouraging to get that cheer along the way.

‘I was much further out than you thought’

The poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Stevie Smith is only twelve lines long. Yet, the first time I read it, it created in my mind, for evermore, a whole world – and life story. Not the poet’s – or certainly not directly; no, ‘the dead one’’s:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

‘Oh no, love, you’re not alone…’

Nearly everyone my generation has their own Bowie ‘story’, or history – his work touched or touches so many of us. (Including two of my own very favourite allies – one brother, one son…) As for me, when I was a teenager, I appreciated Bowie’s androgyny. Never a girlie girl by any stretch, it helped me see people could be however they wished and felt comfortable. My friend says Bowie encouraged everyone, by his example, to ‘be themselves’. I think that’s right – though I probably didn’t think about it like that at the time.

Question: What is big and red and eats rocks?*

I think it was on my first day at primary school that someone told me this joke – which, looking now, I see must come from Bennett Cerf’s 1960 Book of Riddles. I immediately identified with the image – as I still do today. In my mind, aged four, I thought uh oh – could it be me?

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote. Photo by Wolf Gang.

As an adult, I’ve pored over  the work of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. The subtle mess he brought to his roles I find extraordinarily moving. It’s like seeing ourselves writ large. The way he played humans. Characters who were always flawed but also understandable, even lovable. In whatever mess or difficulty. (And, yes, I felt a physical kinship too – if not me, my father or brother could so easily be played by this actor…)

Love & lack in the Larson universe

Me, in my new ‘Mixed Idioms’ t-shirt.

How can I write about Gary Larson cartoons when he doesn’t want them shared anywhere on the web? As he explains here, in an online letter:

These cartoons are my “children,” of sorts, and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone’s web site is like getting the call at 2:00 a.m. that goes, “Uh, Dad, you’re not going to like this much, but guess where I am.”

Meanwhile, I struggle to imagine the series of posts I’m planning without any reference to the fact these cartoons are, for me, touchstones. So I’ve settled on a short piece geared to anyone, like me, already familiar with the Farside cartoons to which it refers. Of whom I know there are plenty. And there’s only one place to start…