What year is it? It’s 1998 and winter.
I lived in Streatham back then. In a place that not even the most skilled lettings agent might bluff as a studio flat. It was a bedsitter. You know the type: straight out of central casting. Grim curtains, some beige cabinets with their doors straining at the hinges, the tick-tick of the meter. The Larkin deluxe suite. When I’d moved in earlier that year, several opened packets of rice were left by the Mini-Belling, and I found one shoe in the wardrobe, with a bloodstained sole. It was all very mysterious. Next door to me lived a young Scottish woman who would periodically sob of a late night. I understood. The next flight up lived people I never saw, although I knew their movements intimately as they padded across the other side of my ceiling. In the attic room, right at the top of the house, lived a young man who, when we ran into each other in the hallway, always appeared to be either on his way to the swimming pool or just back from it. There was singing, sometimes, somewhere. I could never trace the lyrics. This was the film Polanski never made.
The winter was especially cold that year. Or maybe now I like to have it that way. Or perhaps it was just the fact that the building had learned over the years to keep its cold to itself. It was somehow always colder than outside. I had a little heater that ran, like all other appliances, from the meter that seemed to swallow up my coins with alarming proficiency. At work, I used a word processor to type up my poems neatly. At home, this home, I used an electric typewriter. In many ways, I think now, the best way to work. No easy delete. No shaky hand to decipher. No split-second self-censorship. It taught the discipline of holding a poem in the head before committing to paper. If I remembered lines an hour or two on, here was something. And, then, when I rushed onwards anyhow, it often turned out that the mistakes were the diamonds. I would sit in bed with my socks on and the duvet wrapped around me and think, and read, and type into the early hours. I would even write when I came in from a night. Sometimes that involved some lubrication. One morning I awoke to find one line set out against the white: ‘You are you you know are you are.’ But in poetry, like drink, there are no accidents. I recall pondering this portentous missive to the crapulent self for the whole day. Many nights I would type out chunks of Frost or Wilbur to get me going. Typing or writing out by hand the work of the greats has an uncanny way of allowing their artistry to inhabit you, for their rhythm to discipline your own heartbeat, for their line to walk you fully there.
That winter, my little bible was Eavan Boland’s modern masterpiece, Object Lessons. I read sections over and over. Through the years, I’ve come to affectionately nickname it Abject Lessons. Nothing to do with the content, which, even when one comes to disagree with quite a bit of it (which I did, I did, dear reader), is a rich and quite brilliant piece of work. But, rather, reference to the humble beginnings Boland sketches as she takes us through her early years of grappling with a voice and a space with which and in which to be a poet and a woman and Irish. Woman. Poet. We had that in common at least. But we also shared that notion of space. Literal and metaphorical. Boland in her small flat, me in my bedsitter.
What I personally got most from the book was not Boland’s take on feminist or, of course, Irish poetics. It was, instead, compelling to hear a contemporary poet tell their life through – and of – a journey into poetry. To play out the arguments of what it may or may not mean for an individual to become a poet of their time, against an indifferent world played out before them. From the year zero of how that begins and what it takes, and what it will ultimately cost – a constant self-examination, abiding dissatisfaction, a marginalisation. And what gifts and, ultimately, strange liberations such things could actually be. This spoke to me directly and immediately. It affirmed me.
Boland and I, green girl that I was, shared a sense of that space. What we did not share, of course, was how we regarded it. Years ahead of herself, Boland was able to place herself within that space and bring to both a sense of symbiosis and, well, enchantment. It is, of course, a fiction. Of the true variety. In the present, that winter, I saw my space as accident and sentence, something to escape, as I flew furiously through the canon and began to find my beginnings. I know better now. We never fully own our moments. When we are in them we are too busy with the business of living them and, therefore, paradoxically, we are never quite present. And when they are beyond us only then are we truly there. Either way, something is lost. Which is just as it should be.
