Ten years ago, I wrote a poem called ‘Joyrider’. Of all the poems I’ve ever written, it probably means the most to me, approaching a talisman of sorts. This was the first poem I finished that felt completely realised. Most established poets could probably tell you of their moment and their poem. When it happens, at last, after all the reading, after all the misfires, it is as if the doors of the world have been flung wide open.
I had started it in my lunch break and completed it mid-afternoon. It was another life, then. I worked for HM the Queen. Deep in the bowels of the Civil Service, where the sun never shines and there is only ever more paper. Later, I would work my way up to the tussle and excitement of Whitehall. But for this now, here was a job depressing in its structure and regimes, an infinite filing cabinet of protocol and towing of lines. An antithesis to freedom and creativity, and joy. This made it absolutely ideal for writing poems in your lunch time or the empty hours between 3 and 6. Seemingly, I was not the only one. I am particularly fond of one apocryphal tale that recounts how, in one similar department, the server collapsed under the weight of so many civil servants working on their novels and poetry collections. It is not literally true. But, in another sense, it is the only truth about the Civil Service you need to know.
Anyhow, that first poem. I walked home that evening after work feeling heady. It was like first love all over again. But an altogether grander interpretation. Love is common enough. Art is the sublime. Oh yes, it’s hubris alright. I had tapped into something. I was elevated. For the first time in my life, I felt…What was it? As if I had been given a second life. And this one was definitely going to be special. (The tragi-comedy of this in hindsight is not lost on me, in case you’re wondering.) And, after that, the poems seemed to come relentlessly, easily. As if they clustered around this one true thing. I liked for many years to believe that all the poems that came were good. But, recently, before taking an Arvon course, I fished out a dusty first draft of The Never-Never. I was astonished about how much I had weeded out, changed, added. How very bad some of it was. I gave out copies to the students to look over. It became an exercise in recasting, shaping a book, recasting. Aiming for that elusive beauty: integritas. But it also served as a timely exercise in mortification, an assault on pride. Don’t believe the hype you dream up to peddle to yourself.
Still, what it did show was how that first poem had definitely set in motion the thing most vital to all writers: a sense of release. A letting-go. A sense of brashness, of dancing like no one’s looking. 'Joyrider' had given me the confidence to believe that I could write. Better, that I could trust my instincts. And it introduced me to my voice. Or what I prefer to think of as a ‘personality’ to the text. I felt buoyed and purposeful. The Never-Never was published in 2004. It did quite well. And for that I am forever indebted to the fickle fortune that ignores or garlands poets at whim. I was lucky. Some are not. So it goes.
And then something unexpected happened. I ran into a wall. Yes, a wall. You know, they call it a block. But it’s not. You can walk around a block. It’s a wall. A high, high, wide, wide wall. It has no ends. There is no point trying to walk it with a rope and scramble over. On the other side of that wall, there is the wild blue yonder of possibility you once knew. Being on the wrong side is rather like hearing next-door neighbours making love with abandon while you lie in bed alone. To say to a non-writer that it is an agony sounds like so much idiocy, probably not without justification. But it is agony. And cold-sweat fear. And uselessness. And crying without tears.
What was to follow would prove curious. On the one hand, I had just given birth to a daughter. For several years my life to come would be a coaxing of first steps and words, of play and epiphany. It was a time of wonder. On the other hand, the creativity and ambition of my new daughter served as a brutal reminder of my own stasis, my own wordlessness. At the time, it felt I had lost myself. Turns out I had.
A period of, shall we say, readjustment followed. I attempted to string a stanza together. Old ground. Old texture. Old escape routes. Me. But not me. The old me. And it rang completely hollow. Delete. Delete. Delete.
Part of the problem had been, of course, the prevailing conditions that make a first book. The fine poet Maura Dooley once memorably noted that the genesis and completion of a first collection is as if the whole of one’s life to date has been poured into the shape of it. I’ve always loved that. The idea of fluidity. That a book is not a thing of and for itself, but rather a vessel for something that has been years not only in the writing, but the living. And it chimes well with what I know some other poets I have spoken to have experienced following the publication of a first book. It is at once a spectacular fulfilment and yet a devastating depletion. It is as if life is a great water tank building up, until at some point, miraculously, it is full and cannot be contained. And then it is empty again.
Where was I? Oh yes. Never writing a poem again. I made pains to stay wedded to the writing business. Not poems, no. But readings, editing, teaching, journalism, creative non-fiction, reviews. The thing we poets do when we’re actually being non-poets. Through it. I discovered something surprising. That I loved writing beyond myself, my words on the paper. I began to come to terms. And then one day I was at terms. I had had my moment. I was done. But the muse is a bitch. Just when you’ve got over her, burned her letters, stopped reading her horoscopes, in she walks, lovelier even than the memory. Here you go again. I began to write once more.
My second collection is coming along. It’s so utterly different from that first book, it might be written by someone else entirely. And, of course, it is. I am surprised by the new direction. And excited about it. I’ve ironed out the creases and the swagger has given way to a kind of, well… modesty and uncertainty. What will it all amount to? The making of a good poet always begins with their unspoken admission ‘I don’t know.’ And, you know, I really don’t. So maybe I am on my way, at last.
0 comments:
Post a Comment