Sunday

They keep saying August will be hotter than July, but it's raining. I noticed a clutch of red leaves on the tree the other day outside my window, feel summer has burnt itself out. This week has been an odd writing week, I've been at my desk wanting to write poems about the last biography I read, and was finding it really slow.
I asked a colleague who is quite familiar with my work what they felt might be missing if the poems were part of a collection, and their answer was 'you.' All of the poems are about other women. (At times I have been touching of course on things that relate to my own experience, but there is no way for a reader to know that.) This raises an interesting question, which relates to things I have been reading lately, being how much do readers actually want to know about the writer themselves? Is this something I need to know the answer to and consider? I don't know the answer, and I think not knowing it made writing slower than usual at the beginning of the week, because I was sitting down to write with the suspicion that this is the point where I need to write poems that include the writer a bit more, but felt reluctant to do that.

I am interested in how writers deal with writing about themselves, because it always means actually to some extent writing about other people (our parents, relatives, friends, lovers.) Then what do these parties make of the poems, and what we have said? All week I avoided writing anything personal because of this huge feeling of guilt hanging over me regarding this issue, as if writing would be snitching on people somehow, showing things the people themselves have forgotten. So I couldn't write the poem that was really there regarding my research which would have actually included some people I know, and wasn't sure how to get past this.

Actually this was also hanging because recently I received a phonecall off my mother which ended with her saying "put that in your book", and hanging up. My mother has never said anything about the content of my poems other than she understands that there was swearing because I wanted to be "realistic. But suddenly the thought was there, that she may disapprove, and at very least must have said this for a reason. I thought about my previous work, and the poems she was named in - and couldn't see what might have annoyed her about them. I wondered if what was annoying her was the thought of the things I could write about, that she doesn't want to hear, rather than what I have actually written, and that seemed more likely. But I don't know, like I said she hung up on me, so I left her to it. But that comment has stuck with me enough so that the poem that was actually the one to be written couldn't come out, I had to write about other things to do with what I had been reading rather than what wanted to be wrote. I had pretty much decided I just wouldn't write a poem about my mother, because of this conversation and the guilt that it brought, then something changed.

At the end of the week I received a note from my mother, with 3 poems attached to it.

The back story to this is that since about February she has been asking me over and over if I was entering this poetry competition that she saw advertised in the paper for poems of less than 12 lines. I had reasons not to enter, being my suspicions about it

1) It was free to enter- how many poetry competitions are free?
2) There was no judge named and mentioned (which should always appear on competitions)
3) It was advertised in The Evening Gazette (though it claimed to be a national competition.)

All of this put me off (plus of course the fact that I have no faith in competitions really). Nonetheless I did send a couple of poems in, just to stop her going on about it.

Last week what I received were poems she had wrote and sent to the competition. The note told me that one of these poems had been selected for the anthology. This was all strange to me. This is the first I have heard of her even writing poems. But most of all I couldn't understand why she hadn't mentioned this, and why she had asked me to enter the same competition she knew she would be entering (mine, of course weren't selected.) (Now I know what anyone reading this will think this is a case of jealousy that my poems weren't chosen, but actually I couldn't have cared less in this instance because it wasn't a competition or press I heard of , etc, etc.) But I did wonder what this all was about; was she competing with her daughter (in the one thing that matters to her) and trying to put me down somehow? In terms of my acheivements as a daughter (infact everywhere) poetry is all there is (there is no high status job she can tell people about, no holiday cottage tucked away somewhere, etc etc), about all she can say is that I have had some books published in the North East. I wondered if this was a way of putting me in my place, saying 'look I can do what you do, and am infact better at it.' (I'd like not to think this, I'd like to think my poetry inspired her to want to write- but if so, why didn't she tell me about it?)

More to the point, the content of the poems was interesting. She had not only written about my childhood but used my actual real name (I may have written about mother, but only as a mother, in poems which could potentially be a fictional first person account of any mother.) I couldn't get out of my head the implication that I shouldn't write about her, that she didn't like it, yet here I was, my name in black and white and my childhood in rhyming couplets. Although this incident was odd regarding my relationship with my mother, it was actually hugely liberating for my work. I could shrug off the guilt and concerns about ethics that had plagued me all week quite easily (what's good for the goose is good for the gander right?) I had hated seeing my name in the poem, and felt misunderstood. I decided that writing anything whatsoever that explains who I am now inevitably involves writing about my childhood sometimes. And writing about my childhood does involve at times mentioning parties who were present, but I had a realisation that is so simple but huge; it is my childhood to write about. She has written her take on it, I can have my own too. Suddenly the poems I had pushed into nothingness bubbled out, and I had no reason to feel guilty anymore, she had herself given me permission to write in the most unlikely way.

Some people might see this and think the motive behind writing those poems is revenge, at very best tit for tat, but it is infact something to do with reclaiming your own life, that people take from you by their own perspective, or locking it away. I actually feel pretty good now , somehow free, and the poems I wrote? Could be worse. ; )