Aware that I’ve written very little on Substack for the past months I thought it might be time to say hello again.
It’s possible I’ve been hiding – from myself or from others, who can say - but I went through a strange period of not writing, which is what this post is about…
I hadn’t realised how much I was enjoying being an unknown writer, free to experiment and play, without the awareness of being watched. And then in June I won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from the Poetry Society for the best single poem by a poet yet to publish a full collection. The poem is ‘Lifecycle of the Cochineal Beetle, c.1788’ from my forthcoming book Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).
Geoffrey Dearmer
Geoffrey Dearmer wrote about nature and finding humanity amidst the brutalities of World War I where he served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Here’s an extract from ‘Turkish Trench Dog’:
He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,
That muscle-sliding rhythm, knit and bound
In spare-limbed symmetry, those perfect jaws
And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws.
Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept—
That moment had my swift revolver leapt—
But terror seized me, terror born of shame
Brought flooding revelation. For he came
As one who offers comradeship deserved,
An open ally of the human race,
And sniffing at my prostrate form unnerved
He licked my face!
The Poetry Society established the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 1997 with a bequest in memory of Dearmer who, when he died at 103, was the Society’s oldest member. The list of past Prize winners reads like an index of some of the biggest names in contemporary poetry: Raymond Antrobus, Kim Moore, Paul Farley, Mary Jean Chan, Zaffar Kunial, Denise Saul, Kayo Chigonyi… and now me.
I didn’t apply for this prize. In truth, I didn’t even know it existed until the email dropped into my inbox one Friday morning and catapulted me out of my chair in surprise. I was – I am – thrilled at having been read and understood and for my work to have been recognised as something worth noticing. Judge Niall Campbell said he wanted to acknowledge a poet for ‘the brilliance of the poem itself’ and for ‘a sense of a poet getting into their stride,’ and I wondered if it was me he was really talking about when he said my poem was ‘a rich wonder,’ ‘a piece exceptional both in its poise and in its vivid metaphoric hold.’ But the strange thing is – and I realise it might be professional suicide to mention this – the exposure of winning made me dart back into the darkness because winning meant that people might notice what I write and therefore judge me without mercy. Of course, this is ridiculous, given that most of us write because we want to communicate, to have a conversation with others. Part imposter syndrome, part breaking the dream-spell of realising that someone might be watching me as I danced/wrote suddenly made me self-conscious and uncertain of my next move. I also wondered if I now had to write a poem that was better than the one I had already written – an impossible, infinite competition with oneself. The result was a kind of freezing, a playing dead after the intense productivity of three residencies and writing a full collection of poems.
In truth, I think I needed a rest.
Read my interview with Poetry News here (Summer 2023).
In amongst our collective grief at the death of the celebrated American poet Louise Glück last weekend, we shared our favourite poems and advice that she had given to students and fellow writers began to surface. In a message to the writer Gennarose Nethercott, she wrote that there was ‘nothing better’ than being in the flow of writing which is a ‘miraculous’ experience. She also said that ‘writing is painful as a life. I feel that even after decades. Doesn’t get easier which surprised me.’ In another message to Clare Meuschke on writer’s block, Glück said to endure through the blankness and something better will be waiting
You can do this. During my period of fallow, doubting time after the Dearmer Prize I found solace in editing. I’d had my collection, Red Handed, accepted for publication in late spring and could have handed it to my editor for typesetting as it stood, but I knew it could be tighter in places. The collection deals with some challenging material around whiteness and the grotesque underbelly of the English pastoral and I wanted the tone to be exactly right, the arc of the narrative to be curved the way the story required, to make sure the slant telling of my playfulness was not mistaken for flippancy.
I have learned that editing a series of poems can make it greater than the sum of its parts and that sharing my work with a small community of trusted writer friends gives me space to air out my concerns, take on the critique that needs to be heard, allow the work to breathe, and that a book – like a child – takes a village to raise. After all this sharing and reading and rereading and rewriting, the collection is now at the punctuation stage of editing and I hope to be sending it on its way in the coming weeks.
The other place I found unexpected comfort from the malaise of not-writing-poetry was working in long form, outlining a book I had started and stopped over the past year depending on paid workload and the many other demands of my life. The book is about land rights, river access, rave culture and belonging. Sometime in midsummer I saw that the Nan Shepherd Prize was looking for submissions for the end of August of synopses and chapter-by-chapter outlines of proposed nonfiction manuscripts on nature.
I thought to myself, well I can do that - outlining is not writing! The Nan Shepherd is such a generous prize – the submission package they request is exactly what you would need to submit to an agent or publisher when pitching your book so getting that sorted seemed like a win-win situation to me. Regardless of the prize outcome, I’d have something I could send out.
I didn’t think I was the type of person to get up at dawn and write but that’s exactly what I found myself doing through the summer so I could get this outline done.
And do it, I did.
Off it went and I learned that telling myself I can’t do something is an excellent way of convincing myself to do it. Go figure.
And then I spat my tea all over my mirror one morning in September when I only went and got longlisted. I am not sure at all what to say about that, apart from a huge thanks to the judges for selecting me and for giving me a massive confidence boost when I was at a very low ebb.
If I only get this far, it is enough – more than enough - to give me the courage to endure. Thank you, thank you.
An exhausted campaigning friend said on a WhatsApp group a few days ago that they ‘can’t look at Twitter rn, a feed that is nothing but environmental horror, the horror of Gaza/Israel and a bit of Ukraine horror for good measure.’ They went on to say that their feed, interspersed with people saying ‘hey I’ve got a poem out,’ was just too much to bear…. And while I share that feeling of hopelessness and despair at the horror of our world, the disbelief at what is happening to our planet and our people, something inside of me rose up to defy the idea that poetry, any creative writing, is a petty indulgence inappropriate to the times we’re living in.
For many years until very recently, I took a long detour from a plan to work in literature to instead spend my days working on social justice, education programming and advocacy campaigns with communities in conflict and fragile settings around the world. My experience of living in the Niger Delta, Rwanda, working in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere has left me feeling very f*cking jaded about politics, I admit, but it also taught me most of the things I know that might actually be worth knowing and one of the enduring lessons the experience taught me is about culture.
When people are pushed to the limits of their humanity by conflict, hatred, greed, starvation, environmental catastrophe, one of the things they lose first is their culture and an impoverished spirit moves into the emptiness that tragedy leaves behind. Words matter, song, prayer, poetry, music, dance, stories matter because they bring us joy. And joy, happiness, delight, pleasure, thought, reflection, grief, sadness, our sense of well-being and satisfaction are essentially human ways of communicating, understanding and giving expression to our unique experience.
Joy is a form of resistance against hatred and greed. Audre Lorde said that survival is ‘not mere existence … implicit in survival is joy, mobility and effectiveness and effectiveness is always relative … if we do what we need to be doing then we will leave something that continues beyond ourselves and that is survival (hear her sampled on this superb new track, ‘Quiet Strength’ from Super Duty Tough Work).
Part of the political game of oppression is to make us feel pointless and irrelevant, to make us feel powerless. Speaking up, turning up – whether at the page or in person – bearing witness to the world and our experience (whatever that may be) and looking after ourselves in the process, is an act of deep humanity and care.
And that, my friends, without meaning to sound trite or hasty (this post gotta end somewhere babes) is the train of thought that has brought me back to the ‘stack and spurred this tentative move back to the page…
Thanks for reading and bearing with me while I found my joy again. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences about writing / not writing in the comments below – let’s have a conversation … xxx
A Litany for Survival
BY AUDRE LORDE
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
"A Litany for Survival." Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by the Audre Lorde Estate. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Fallow is so unrelentingly necessary, it's good to read your words. This cycle of fallow and fruting, quietly, here under the rock where I currently reside, is proving itself to me once again. The pixel face has been a place of distinctly harmful trauma in these last few years, so despite my having shared and communed through its interface for many years, withdrawing to the wifi free rock of residence is yielding fruit. F*ck that sounds cryptic, but maybe also comprehensible, I hope so. Anyway, all really to say that your celebrations have lifted me too this year, and the keeping on is the form my endurance also takes. I'm not sure I'm at risk of needing it, but thanks for the headsup re sudden shining of light on your wee corner of word weaving! Forward.. ;)