Thursday, August 31, 2006

If i jumped from the top of the parachutes


There's been people occupying the writing space for a week. It started with someone I know coming back from her hols in America with lots of stories to tell, then came my birthday, then my friend from way back coming to stay with me for a few days. Birthdays are funny, they make me think too much, when I seem to have a check list of all these things I thought someone my age would have done then compare it to reality. Aren't I supposed to have a real job by now? Aren't I supposed to be married and feel ecstatic at the sight of new lawn mowers and stuff? Where do these things come from? I have no idea. I blame Peter and Jane, cooking with mummy, digging with daddy, who don't look any older than I am now, and of course TV. You can put it down to anything you like, my annual mid-life crisis (we're entitled to more than one, since none of us know how long we will live), the fact that I had thought my writing did more than scratch the surface until it hit bone, the fact that I was just tired. Tired of routine maybe, sick to the back teeth when I heard someone I know talk about hols when I hadn't been anyplace again (she talked the states as if it was her back yard "Oh, you must pop over and see next time we go"), tired of feeling guilty about my new poems and proctrastinating about whether i should use them, and mostly just tired of myself. I still haven't decided if I will use the new poems that are about me, but I am thinking I will write some more and select some ... possibly, maybe, I hope. But I have been looking into practical things about my work and thinking about it, order, gaps, edits, length, and am thinking about the spaces that need filling, and spaces that should be there. Also prose is perculating and I am wondering if I will have the chance to let some out, but enough of that. What I really thought about was how I had said I have realised my own boringness, and self limitation, that is born of fear I suppose, or habbit, or what other people expect of me, or all of the above. I realised I forgot how to have fun, and couldn't remember when I last really laughed. I wanted to laugh like those girls on a bus you see, in stitches about nothing that is visible, the girls that make you feel like you must be the joke, with their laughter in code. The girls who are just being girls. I forgot how to be a girl along time ago. The good thing about this is my clothes are alot more comfy, I eat more that I just fancy, I get more done, but if you stop doing something enough you forget how to do it. I've had to change this abit in the last week.

My friend came to stay and I decided to forget about the work and its baggage and go with it, experiment , see what things where like. I made a list of lots of things I want to try, and either never have tried or haven't done in 20 years. I wanted to just do something, see if I could release me of practicality for a little while,see if I could forget, find out if I was only the woman who tiles walls and writes odd little poems, and see if this was fun.

Birthday To do List

1) Go Iceskating
2) Go on some fairground rides
(the last time I did this was 20 years ago.)
3) Try archery
4) Try a rockclimbing wall
5) Lose some weight
6) Wear a dress
7) Learn to cut glass and lead it
8) Learn to say No
9) Turn off the narrator and try to Dance-
(maybe go to a salsa dancing class or something to get more confidence in moving)

(The thing with the dancing is once I was no longer young or thin I stopped, when I tried again I found I was sort of a puppet with the real me trying to put clamps on my body pulling strings, saying "Oh no, you can't get away with that, what are you doing?" My arms and legs began to work with my brain saying left leg moving now, hand to right, and it just lost the feeling of dancing. I remember it used to be fun, remember when I lived alone dancing in the kitchen to The Smiths with a tea-towel and feeling good at looking like a dick, and want to lose the self awareness enough now and again to do it again.)
10)Put my feet in the sea
11) Go on a boat
12) Try dressed crab
13) Try lobster

14) Visit some country or place I've never been
15) Go on some go-karts/quad bike
16) Try and ride a horse


All of these sound really simple, they are. But I just have never done these things, or have done them once when i was 7 or something, and no one will stop me being boring but me. Alot of things that are very simple and alot of people take for granted I just don't do. I worry about them, I decide they are impractical, I talk myself out of it, and let myself be lazy. On my birthday i tried lobster; the day after I tried dressed crab, and was hugely disappointed that it didn't come in an actual dickie bow or something the way I had envisioned it as a child and a slightly autistic adult. So when Luan was here we kept busy, made ourselves do some of the things that were outside our comfort zone. The first thing wasn't too bad, we went to the Baltic, because last time she visited there was a function on and we weren't allowed in (though I did go in the time tunnel, which I might have avoided before due to the humiliation of the fat girl on a slide.I laughed all the way down, I don't know why. The Baltic man at the bottom looked so serious I thought I must be doing it wrong, but it was good anyway. I liked the little house in Baltic square, it seemed quite moving to me, that little house talking, saying a house is supposed to protect (is it?) , saying it was fat. I also enjoyed watching David Beckham sleep though I don't know why, I kept expecting him to wake up screaming 'Victoria man, get off us', or something, but asleep he just looked like a real pretty man being normal, sleeping, and I didn't have to worry about whether he was a bastard or thick as the Bo selecta sketch, or shallow. He was just a person, ok a real pretty one, asleep.) The next day we went ice-skating (skating is too strong a word , we went to the ice-rink and sort of shuffled along with one hand on the rail- I did let go of the side though and tried to do it, not very well, but ...) The day after that we went on the ferry (can't believe I have never been on this the whole time I have lived in Newcastle) and went on fairground rides. These are such easy things, shallow maybe, with no self impovement involved, but when I was up in the parachutes I no longer felt guilty about anything. I span round on the twister and laughed, for no apparent reaosn, laughed till my mouth was dry as the sand and the people were just sandcastles falling away in slow sifts. I felt my arms juggle air on the way down as I grabbed the rail and laughed so much I forgot who I thought I was. Maybe I never really knew. I felt more alive than I have felt in a long time, doing something just because I could. Some things I want to do aren't on the list, I need to lose the weight first or learn to swim better or things that are quite hard and slow, but it feels good to have ticked some things off the list. I did wear a dress, and looked , I dunno- fat? Yeah, but more than that, more vulnerable maybe, as if I was trying to be a girl, and the safety of jeans that no matter how bad I look no one can say I am trying to be or do anything, there's a comfort in that, a sheild of invisibility somehow as something without a gender. But I do know more about myself for all this, the most trivial things; no I can't iceskate, but do enjoy it, lobster isn't a patch on prawn and my favourite fairground ride is The Twister.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Why do people write?

I am really interested in why people write. It worries me also. I recently read in 101 ways to make poems sell that poets need to ask themselves this, but also why should anyone pay money to read my work? Why do I think they will? I need to spend some time thinking about this, as I don't think it is something poets initially think about. What they are thinking about is how to make their poems good, make them work, then comes the question about how commercial they are, and where they fit in when they think about getting a publisher. For a long time I believed writing poems that sell meant compromising what I wanted to write about, and how. I thought about the poets that do well commercially, and the biggest name I could think of was John Hegley. So this made me think to write poems that people will want to read they have to be

a) funny
b) rhyme.
c) Come in a package with a good/cool/or somehow otherwise appealing look
d) That this package must contain some form of likeable personality

I think there is an element of truth in this, in the sense that some poets will receive more readers because they seem non threatening, media friendly, and mostly write poems that are accessible and create the illusion to readers that they themselves could write something like that. But this is an over-simplification. (John Hegley is in many ways a bad example of what I want to say, as I actually really like his work, but am constantly surprised when I see people laugh at it. Ok, I admit I do have a problem laughing out loud in public, but when I have seen Mr Hegley read there are times I will be thinking that a poem is painful sounding, sad or something in it is plain unfair and the audience will be laughing along quite merrily. - This brings up somethingelse about comedy, and its essence- do people not see, do they choose not to? Is everyone cruel? Or is JH tapping into the truth that one of the functions of comedy is to provide relief where it is needed. Something has to be done, and it's better to laugh than cry - except I am out of the loop with that one.) I think about the people I know who buy poetry and they are not only buying John Hegley. They buy a range of comtemporary poetry, in different styles, with diffferent subject matter and voices. As my work is now approaching being a collection I need to think about what it might have to offer a publisher, who might read it, how, and why, which is new to me in many ways.

A colleague recently told me they had written a list of what they want to acheive in their writing and how they intend to go about it. This scared the hell out me , because I am not sure how I can create a similar list, and how to go about anything that I would like for my work. But I do need to think about it. I'm horrifed, but am going to try and compile a similar list sometime this week, to see what it does.

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. ; )

About Me

Poetry is like having an imaginary friend, who still forgets your birthday.