How Am I Doing?

The ups and downs of my poetry life.

     Today is day 10 of the April poetry writing challenge. So far, so good in as much as I have managed to write something every day, although I wouldn’t say what I have produced is polished or will go on to be publishable. However, it’s an excellent exercise in creative discipline and I have been in dire need of that lately.

     Why?

      In 2024 I found myself writing poems about my father and about how his war experiences and his postwar army career impacted on our family. I hadn’t ever intended to write these poems, they just sort of poured out of me and the experience knocked me off my feet. Once I had regained my balance I found that I had a small collection of poems that I really really wanted to share. It made a couple of long lists but the collection didn’t get over the finish line to publication. I felt I had reached an impasse because the way I felt about them and about not having them out there in the world seemed to be preventing me from writing anything else other than the odd Omi poem to go in my grandson’s book. I have written poems about waiting for Robyn to be born, watching my son and his partner grow into parenthood, and poems about those milestones you get with a very young child. I give them to his mum and she puts them in a book. I am Omi because my mother was called Mutti, so it seemed apt. Anyway, apart from those, there wasn’t much going on in my creative life.

     I wondered if I had come to the end of the road, and that what had begun with such energy and excitement back in 2017 with a new job and more time to create had run its course. But then…

     I was asked if I would co-facilitate a Poetry Society Stanza Group. I was amazed as I didn’t know the person who asked at all. We have had two meetings now and I love the whole business. Then, the museum asked me if I would be the writer for a school’s project to produce poetry about the sea linked to a Jane Austen exhibition. It was the school where I had first worked as a teacher so many years before. Even better, the lead teacher for the school was been someone I appointed as a new teacher. I love her and she’s so creative and so dedicated. We met yesterday to plan the sessions. She remarked that it felt like ‘the band was getting back together’ and you know, it really did!

     Then there was an extraordinary thing, which was that a poem, The Prophet Ezekiel Comes To Gaza, which is one of the poems in what I call my ‘Dad Collection’ had been nominated for a Forward Prize by Tim Fellows of Fig Tree. I was stunned and grateful because maybe this meant that the whole collection would make it someday. Actually a week later I was told that I was a joint winner of The Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and so the Dad poems will be published in the autumn. I am thrilled and can hardly believe my good luck.

    I guess what I want to share is this: it can be hard to maintain a belief in the quality of your work. I don’t write for the purpose of my mental health or wellbeing. I write because I have thoughts and observations that I want to share. I want to share because I want to connect with others who might have had similar thoughts and observations or, indeed, different perspectives to me. It’s all about communication. To go back to my father for a moment, this trait I have of feeling utterly deflated when I don’t  ‘succeed’ with my writing comes from him. Spelling test? 9/10? Why not 10? Essay A-? Why not A? Small part in a school play? Why not the lead? You get the picture? Every time I submit something to a journal or a publisher I am fearful, convinced that any rejection is a judgement on anything I have ever done, ever written. This is objectively nonsense but nevertheless the child in me knows it to be true.

     This post is really about me counting my poetry blessings. I have another- if you are near Cheltenham on 14th May come to the Playhouse. I will be reading there with three other poets who are all fabulous and of course, much better than me. It would be lovely to see you.

     I will leave you with this poem written in homage to Eliot’s Wasteland and to the awfulness of my mid-teens which saw me attend three schools in a single year, a sick father and feeling of utter hopelessness. Revisiting this place almost gave me PTSD and was, I suspect, the catalyst for the poems I then wrote about my father. Please give me a B+.

A Stopover In Wasteland Of My Youth

A cold coming. Do not call this home, it never was.

Our motel is new, built where the pork pie factory

used to be. I knew a boy who swept the sawdust

from the factory floor, son of a Polish refugee, intent

on making good. He went to Oxford in the end.

Don’t remember, don’t remember.

Oh, such a hard time we had of it.

Now we walk towards this old town centre,

drenched by the pathetic fallacy of rain.

The chip shop sign blinks: Here, this way,

come this way. Remember?

And I remember mid-week nights ensconced

in the snug of The Friar Tuck, me, sawdust

boy and the rest,  sat on low stools around

a low table, drinking illegal Guinness,

talking about The Wasteland or The Second

Coming, aghast at Beckett - that

razor blade of the Anglo-Irish tongue.

Now he was a man who had to get away, for

him home was a place from which you were

always in exile.

This is the land of lost content.

Goodnight, goodnight me duck. See you

tomorrow?

Mebbe. Mebbe not, you mardy bugger.

Now we walk  to the grammar school,

the place where I learned how Malone Died -

probably from a lack of oxygen. God knows,

I suffered from a lack of oxygen all those years.

And the signs here are all interdicts: keep out, go back,

not here, not there.

Not there now, only a high fence as if this place

is a holding pen for refugees we want to

keep out of the fleshpots of our streets, away from

the temptations offered by fish and chip shop signs.

I always was a hot potato, too hot for here.

We peel off, hot potatoes one and all.

Walk on. This is the place, this is the place,

this family home, but not where we were happy.

It is smaller now. The past does this. Dingier.

The roses in the garden are gone and the

front path crumbling, it lacks the definition

of a sergeant-major.

The door is unchanged . Quick, stand to attention!

Inside is the hall where my sergeant-major died,

where we lacked oxygen.  And though I thought we all

might die from lack of air, only my father actually did.

Off, off, these lendings. Let it rain.

And the missing roses lift up their hearts and

sing, Folly, all this is  folly.