Nil Desperandum

I can’t imagine there are any happy artists today; the result of the US election seems like a vote against knowledge, discovery and compassion and I’m not sure art can exist without those qualities. It may seem like it’s not worth writing, or worth trying anything creative in the face of such bleak realities, but the truth is, art has never been more important.

I know it feels like the world is getting worse and there’s nothing you can do, but there is. If you need a reminder on the value of art and of maintaining your self-belief, I can’t think of a better way to hear this message than to listen to Maya Angelou:

Keep on rising. You are not powerless. Of course, we don’t all have political influence and we can’t change the world alone but we can work together and support organisations that can. The morning after the last UK election I increased my monthly donation to the charity Arts Emergency because they promote education for all and the transformative opportunities art can offer young people. Today, the first thing I did on hearing the news was donate to Citizen Radio and The Freedom of the Press Foundation because I feel that the lack of an independent, unbiased media is somewhere close to the root of the problem and right now they need support. The same is true of organisations fighting for equality on so many fronts; it genuinely scares me how we seem to be moving backwards in the fight for equal rights and we need to halt that sooner rather than later. The same goes for environmental concerns, which just got a lot more concerning. Choose whatever speaks most to you, but put your money where your mouth is and if you have no money, give your time, spread the word. Do something.

People with no voice right now will need yours – and they will need you to listen. This is very important and ultimately, it’s why artists aren’t powerless – to create anything, you must have an open heart, you need to listen to others and have empathy. In short, you must engage with the world. Carry on writing your poem or your novel, carry on singing your song or painting your canvas. Carry on facing the world with a kindness and generosity. It’s not blind optimism, it’s not wishy washy liberalism and it’s not an artist in an ivory tower. It takes a backbone of steel to look at the world today and return nothing but love and creativity. If you listened to Maya Angelou and it helped you, you know exactly why you must keep trying. I recommend Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark which makes the case for optimism in a realistic and inspiring way.

I chose Horace’s words as the title of this blog on purpose because I’m a Latin nerd – it’s well known that the phrase means “don’t despair” but the reason it’s particularly appropriate right now is because of the way it’s constructed, not as an order but as something that in grammatical terms is called “the gerundive of obligation” which implies a compulsion and a moral force to the required action. It is your duty as an artist to never, ever despair. Stand for what you believe in, support the organisations that share your values, speak up for justice… and then get yourself back to work.

Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?

I’m taking on a NaNoWriMo challenge with a writer friend of mine; I won’t be writing a novel but I have made a commitment to write every day for a month. After agreeing to do so, I noticed that 2nd November is also National Stress Awareness Day and the coincidence gave rise to some very hollow laughter. I imagine all the writers just starting out on a month-long sprint to complete a 50,000 word novel in a month are all too aware of their stress levels. It made me think about writing and stress; having completed a Masters Degree whilst running my own business and facing some significant personal challenges, the two appear to have been hand in hand for a very long time.

On reflection, writing is perhaps the only thing that saves me from feeling drowned by the stress of everyday living and the lurking dark shadow of depression that waits in the corner. When I write, I feel completely free. I can plunge into another time, world or dimension. Of course, reading also offers that same comfort but where reading is a haven from the world, writing allows me to face it head on; I can take something jumbled and ugly and turn it into something beautiful.

So if I love writing so much, why is NaNoWriMo even a challenge? Why not just buckle down and write like that every month? Writing can be hard; it comes with a lot of frustration and rejection. Sometimes you get your hand burned one too many times and you’re afraid.

For one month, all I have to do is keep writing. The work produced doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to fit a given theme or echo an established voice, it doesn’t have to go anywhere. There are so many things that I have to do or want to do or ought to do that the idea of something that I just do inspires me.

I know it’s not going to be all plain sailing –the fastest way to empty your mind sometimes is to sit down with a free hour to write. I know, too, that I might see people on twitter boasting of daily word counts in the thousands and look at my own shaky couple of lines and feel worthless. I might send the work I’ve written to my friend when we have a weekly exchange and discover every word she’s written is magical and every word I’ve written needs changing.

Having a month to reset my writing habits and expectations has to be a good thing in the end – I’ll come out of the month bursting with new ideas or eager to get back to the things I was working on before but either way, I will have learned something new about myself and about my writing.

I know a lot of people sneer at NaNoWriMo just as they remain cynical about the value of awareness days. To those people, I say go ahead and mock but ultimately, it does help people to talk about things that they’re struggling with, whether that’s stress or writing.

In truth, I don’t care what other people say. I’ll be away at my desk along with nearly half a million other writers across the world, trying to create something new. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of the challenge – to complete it, you have to ignore the cynics and the critics (especially the savage inner critic - mine appears to have had lessons from the JK Simmons’ character in the film Whiplash), say a big fuck you to everything in the world that might stop you creating and just write.

By the pricking of my thumbs…

Strange and frightening things are happening in our society that makes it appear less tolerant and accepting, more violent and divisive. It feels to me as if horror writers have become canaries in the coalmine; all the scary stories I have read recently – The Fireman by Joe Hill, Nod by Adrian Barnes and Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt – have demonstrated that there is a darkness dwelling at the heart of people. The situations are supernatural – a strange and deadly virus, inexplicable mass insomnia, a witch – but the response to those phenomena all show that humans are the real monsters. This is something I examined in my own poem, Pictish Beast and I think it’s the reason that why Hallowe’en continues to have a place in the cultural calendar.

Poetry embraces the darkness – from the eerie Hallowe’en tales such as Poe’s The Raven or The Listeners by Walter de la Mare to the psychological terror and incipient madness of Hughes Mearns’ influential poem Antigonish. There is something about the way poems are constructed, something about how they are set apart from normal life that makes them the ideal vehicle to chill the reader.

I’m currently working on a sequence of poems about witches; something about them feels perfect for poetry. Anne Sexton’s poem Her Kind finds kinship in those figures who are “not a woman, quite” and there is such vivid freedom in the lines even as the witch is tortured – “A woman like that is not afraid to die.” From a cultural perspective, the figure of a woman who refuses to be cowed belongs in a dark world of black magic, must be reduced to a hideous crone or a seductive temptress to somehow lessen her power, break her on the wheel of the mob. Similarly, Plath’s Lady Lazarus revels in being an unnatural monstrosity. The lady in the poem describes herself as “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade,” and is at once magical and terrible to behold. I love the way these poems revel in what is considered unnatural and refuse to apologise, and applaud the threatening end to Plath’s poem – “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Next time I go to a Hallowe’en party, I must remember to dress as Lady Lazarus.

Horror, in fiction and in poetry, is a way to make sense of the world and place an order on the chaos. It is perhaps for this reason that one poem that always sends a shiver down my spine is The Unreturning by Wilfred Owen. In this poem, the dead do not – cannot – return and while we might enjoy the vicarious thrill of a ghost story and tales of things that go bump in the night, the most frightening thing of all is that these are all just stories we tell ourselves. This poem is haunted by a lack of ghosts, it generates a silence that we are compelled to fill with signs and mythology in order to illuminate our own darkness. 

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman

I’m tired. Tired of being a woman, tired of how equality between the sexes appears to be retreating and I’m tired of being considered a female writer, as if I work in any way differently to a man. What do I mean when I say that?

I’m thinking of the recent unmasking of Elena Ferrante, the attempts to pin the writer’s achievement on her husband, or to link back to her personal life as if that’s somehow going to lessen the value of the work. If the Neopolitan Novels did spring from personal experience, they are still valuable and they are still a phenomenal achievement.

I’m thinking of the fact that I’ve had several recommendations to watch Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brilliant comedy, Fleabag and they all came from men; something about that fact makes me queasy. The show is brilliant, treading the fine line between comedy and tragedy with such a delicate touch and showcasing nuanced writing and performances. The subject is frank as well as funny and that’s perhaps where my unease lies. I feel like men seize on it and say, “this is true” and “this is how woman experience the world” and I think, not this woman. Waller-Bridge’s writing is as courageous as it is funny but that does not mean the perspective of the show is mine, nor does it create any obligation to expose myself, literally and figuratively, in my writing.

I’m thinking about the fact that my (entirely lovely and not at all sexist) workshop group are interested in the poems I write about aspects of my personal history in an entirely different way and that makes me want to stop writing them.

I’m thinking about this expectation that female writers should expose themselves in their writing, as if this one woman’s experience speaks to all women. I admire writers such as Sharon Olds who are vivid and visceral in their presentation of the female experience and emotional turmoil but that doesn’t mean I want to follow down that road. To me, this need for female writers to share intimate details feels like another demand on women and come on fellas, I’ve already got my face and my weight and the clothes I wear to worry about, you also want me to take my sexual experience and make it somehow universal and mean something? It feels like a particularly clammy form of voyeurism to me.

I’m thinking everyone – not just female writers – uses their personal experience in their writing whether they choose to do so explicitly or not and that to dismiss women’s writing as somehow lesser on these grounds is sexist. If you ask three people to write a love poem in the abstract and give them the same opening line, you’ll get three very different poems. The same would happen if you asked them to write a poem about, I don’t know, trains. It isn’t just about emotional experience – if those three writers had all had the same experience of romance and yet had read entirely different authors, or lived in different places in the world, the poems would be different.

I’m thinking that it takes as much technical skill to lay your life bare as it does to create a fictional world. I don’t weep into my gin and tonic when I write poems about ex-boyfriends any more than I dress up in ancient armour when I write about Roman soldiers. In both cases, I write and refine and restructure and amend and re-write until the poem says something that comes from me but is not quite mine.

I’m thinking that, through reading, I’ve walked miles in so many pairs of shoes – male and female – and I have always found freedom in that. I have been an astronaut, a detective, a penniless troubadour and a powerful witch, an animal and a piece of the landscape, a distant star and a mythical figure. I’m not a female reader, I’m a reader. I’m not a female writer, either. It’s not that I’m trying to hide the fact that I’m a woman or that I feel any sense of shame about that. It’s just that I don’t think it should get in the way of the writing. When I write, I seek the same freedom of imagination that reading provides to be anyone and go anywhere I choose. You know, the same freedom male writers have.

Poets: Have you hugged a scientist today?

When I was growing up, you were one thing – pretty, sporty, arty, nerdy – and even within those groups there were differences between, for example, the maths and science nerds and the literature nerds. I was thinking about this when I read Dr Adam Rutherford’s book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived – The Stories In Our Genes. I cannot recommend this book enough; it’s beautifully written and is a clear and compelling description of our history and heritage from a biological perspective. One of the things that struck me about the book was that Rutherford often uses excerpts from poetry to underscore a point. I think back to school days, when science nerds often looked down on literature nerds - because, after all, everyone knows that science is hard and reading books is easy – and am so glad that these distinctions seem to be over.

Everything in our society and particularly the education system encourages us to pick a lane and to consider certain specialisms in different ways. Writers of fiction, drama and poetry seem to have claimed creativity for their own, and yet some of the most creative thinkers of recent times have been scientists and mathematicians. Logic and specificity have been claimed for science but as someone who pulls apart a draft of a poem like it’s a faulty engine or spends a long time getting the exact word needed in a line, I’d challenge that too.

One of the (many) things I love about A Brief History… is that it challenges so many ideas about what we consider to be our racial identity and our heritage. Anyone who argues against racism is automatically on the side of the angels but the fact that it is done on a factual, not an ideological basis, makes it so powerful. The only things that really divide people are social constructs and the more we can learn to break such things down, the better. I am not saying that factual accounts are the only ones that matter – recent poetry titles such as Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade examining her identity as a woman of mixed race combines emotive lines with intellectual curiosity. Considering a different area of science, Pluto by Glyn Maxwell balances creative and emotional chaos and control in the context of the decommissioned planet, which is both a presence and an absence throughout the book. To better understand the status of Pluto, you would of course be wise to consult an astronomer, but to understand what those details mean for us so many light years away, poetry has a role to play.

One of my favourite haiku from Jack Kerouac is this:

“Came down from my
ivory tower
And found no world”

As writers, we are steeped in literature but if, as RS Thomas asserts, poetry reaches the intellect by way of the heart, then we have much to learn from the many talented non-fiction writers who have so much to teach us about the mechanics of living. This, I feel, is the concern of the poet. Next time you’re in a bookshop, come down from the ivory tower of the fiction and poetry sections and find the science section, browse through the history titles or pick up a biography. Just as I am creatively fed by Rutherford’s knowledge and writing, I believe that if books from science writers, historians and more can make their way to the shelves of poets, the art will be the richer for it.

Enter the pod

I recently wrote a post about where my ideas come from and I'm pretty surprised I didn't mention podcasts once - I am a huge fan of the medium; it’s replaced TV as my primary form of entertainment and I ramble on about them to anyone who will listen. I think they’re a great resource for writers in the work they provide and the way it is provided.

There are a number of programmes focussed on writing and literature. The Penguin Podcast, The Poetry Society and TLS Voices are some of my favourites. If you don’t mind adding ever more titles to your “to read” pile (which I don't), I also recommend Robin and Josie’s Book Shambles, in which comedians Robin Ince and Josie Long interview a public figure about their favourite books in a way that is both erudite and wittily accessible.

I listen to a number of factual programmes – Radio 4’s The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry is a favourite, as is Dan Snow’s History Hit. Another great podcast for history is Lore, which looks at folklore, mysteries and the more gruesome side of the past. I admit, I’m a lifelong nerd and I love to learn new things, and I glean new ideas for writing from the information I gather. 

Podcasts are the perfect medium for long form interviews, which provide insight into people's lives and allow you to hear the patterns underlying conversation. I love the Nerdist Podcast and Scroobius Pip's Distraction Pieces is always entertaining and informative. The warmth and humour of both Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast and The Adam Buxton Podcast often lead to some brilliant insights. A lot of comedians have podcasts and I’ve always felt that comedians have a lot in common with poets, both are looking for the surprise hidden in words. For rambling conversation in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore vein, it’s hard to beat Frankie Boyle and Glenn Wool’s Freestyle but topical and issue-based shows such as The Bugle, The Guilty Feminist and Citizen Radio combine humour and current events in a way that will make you think differently (and laugh). Citizen Radio is also worth a mention for the moving and honest way the two hosts address difficult issues such as mental health and the challenges of living a creative life - the fact that they achieve this whilst also being funny is a testament to their skills as creative people.

There are also some great fictional podcasts – the No Sleep podcast brings excellent production values to short stories. Both The Black Tapes Podcast and Welcome to Night Vale present serial drama in a way that is deliciously addictive with creative plots and engaging characters. In fact, these podcasts are responsible for my latest entirely unreasonable crushes on fictional characters (I'm looking at you, Dr Strand and Carlos with the perfect hair) which I think is testament to the quality of the writing. These productions engage my imagination and remind me of the power of words; both of these are vital for a writer.

One of my recent favourites is The Parapod. Comedians Ray Peacock and Barry Dodds consider cases of the paranormal; one is a cynic and the other a believer. The result is not only funny enough to have me crying with laughter, but also the way Peacock structures his arguments against the fantastic concepts serves as a very good reminder to writers that with every flight of fancy, you must keep at least one foot on the ground to convince your reader. It is probably worth having Ray Peacock’s voice of reason in your head when you’re looking to fix plot holes or tie some concepts together.

There are many things I love about podcasts and many reasons why I find them inspiring. I think some exciting and creative work is being created in this form and it is also, in most cases, entirely listener supported through subscriptions, donations and pledges via Patreon or Kickstarter. Audiences do connect with the power of words and are willing to support high quality and creative work - that is a hopeful thought. If, like me, you’re a podcast fan, I hope you’re supporting this vibrant new source of brilliant writing because I want this medium to survive and thrive. The creators of these podcasts deserve to be paid for their work in order to keep going. If nothing else, how else will I trick myself into doing housework?

Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is a celebration of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and should be applauded as such. However, Ada is also an inspirational figure for women in the arts - and poets in particular.

She is credited as the world’s first computer programmer for her theories on “poetical science” and was described in this article as “the first person to marry the mathematical capabilities of computational machines with the poetic possibilities of symbolic logic applied with imagination.” If you are interested to know more, Sydney Padua’s graphic novel about Lovelace and Charles Babbage is as entertaining as it is informative.

It is not just her significant intellectual achievements that make her an admirable figure for poets. The daughter of the unhappily married Lord and Lady Byron, Ada embraced both her parents’ interests, while they themselves used them against each other. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, was gifted in mathematics and after the relationship soured due to Byron’s repeated and rather dubious infidelities, he railed against her. He called her a “Mathematical Medea” and referenced her in Don Juan with the contemptuous lines “Her favourite science was the mathematical… She was a walking calculation.”

In fact, Ada herself was the walking calculation. In marrying mathematics and poetry, she managed to both appease and defy her parents. It is the sort of infuriating rebellion that is so cleverly constructed that it is beyond reproach. The contrarian in me loves her for that alone. Poets should embrace contradiction and look for ways to create tension in their writing because poetry is a living, breathing art and reflects human interests and frailties. If a novelist presents characters as either “all good” or “all bad”, they become two-dimensional and often readers lose interest. In the same way, showing something of Ada’s spirit of rebellion in poetry can only enrich it, raise questions and place the answers just beyond reach and address the many contradictions of human behavior.

Lovelace believed that machines would become partners of the human imagination. My advice is to take a creative journey with Lovelace herself -  as partners in imagination go, she is a most inspiring travelling companion.

Winchester Poetry Festival

After such an amazing weekend in Winchester, waking up this morning without a schedule of poetry to look forward to feels like such a disappointment. I’m sitting in the kitchen with my coffee as I try to acclimatise back to the real world and I really don’t want to.

Last Friday was the Chalk Poets event; the fear of reading my work to an audience was tempered first by seeing the beautiful Chalk Poets anthology and then by seeing family and friends in the audience. It was still utterly terrifying – I am told I appeared confident and that I read well, but my brain seems to have wiped the whole experience. I remember the wonderful work of my fellow contributors, walking up to the lectern and the relief of sitting down again. I have at least learned that public readings are nothing to fear, and I hope I can do it again. I am so very grateful to Stephanie Norgate for providing me with such a wonderful opportunity.

My Saturday began with a talk by Simon Armitage and Pip Hall on the Stanza Stones project; it was fascinating to hear about the process and heart-warming to know how valued the stones are in the local communities. Next on my schedule was a reading by Frances Leviston, Shazea Qurashi and Deryn Rees-Jones. What struck me in these readings was the incredible clarity and conviction with which each writer presented their work; there was a lot to admire and aspire to in this session. This was also true of the following session from Dr Choman Hardi, Sinead Morrisey and Bernard O'Donoghue. In both this and the previous session, the personal and the political, or public, spheres collided in new and inventive ways. In the evening, the Watcher of the Skies event with Simon Armitage, Mimi Khalvati and Helen Mort was sublime; three perfectly pitched readings which sent me back to my hotel in a reverie of words. I couldn’t sleep for quite a while after that, I think I was afraid to close my eyes and end the magic spell that had been cast.

On Sunday, I watched the results announced for the Winchester Poetry Prize in awe of the huge talent and variety displayed in the short-listed and prize-winning poems; judge Mimi Khalvati also threw in an invaluable lesson or two on the composition of poetry for everyone in the audience. Magma Editor Jon Sayers’ interview with Jo Shapcott offered a fascinating insight into her writing and was so well pitched, revealing without being invasive and clearly presenting the idea that inspiration is everywhere if we know how to recognise it. (It also totally legitimises my habit of poking around second hand bookshops for new gems… I do need all those books, like I’ve always said. Thanks for that, Jo.) Nicolas Roe’s lecture on Keats in Winchester provided a vivid and fresh perspective on one of Keats’ best-loved poems and provided an insight into the life and work of an exceptional writer. I was also rather thrilled to learn he stayed in the building that is now the hotel I was staying in for the weekend; I can only hope some Keats magic seeped into the walls and wafted over me while I slept. The Complete Works session had readings from Inua Ellams (displaying poise I can only dream of as he took requests from audience members on what topics to address in his reading), Sarah Howe, whose reading demonstrated all the qualities that made Loop of Jade so deserving of the TS Eliot Prize and Kei Miller, who had the audience rapt; I’m sure I’m not the only person who shed a tear when he read a quiet poem about his father. The whole session underscored something that I really loved about the festival; there was a huge amount of diversity in the poets attending the event. The performance theatre was packed out regardless of the gender, age, class or race of the readers. I hope the Winchester Poetry Festival shares the pictures of those attentive audiences far and wide, reminding the literary establishment that the only thing that matters in poetry is the beauty of the words and more must be done, as in Winchester, to remove barriers to writers from minorities because our language and culture are richer for their contribution.

The festival was closed by Tim Dee and Roger McGough, talking about the beloved Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and with McGough reading some of his work. This was an emotional one for me because as I’ve said before on this blog, Roger McGough is the reason I first fell in love with poetry. For me, he’s inextricably linked to my Dad, who used to read his poems to me and we’d laugh together and share a real love of the magic of words. My Dad died two years ago and although McGough was warm and witty on stage, I had tears in my eyes a few times during that session because I couldn’t stop thinking how much Dad would have loved to have been there, how we would have stared at each other in amazement that there he was, the man who had brought us both so much joy. I did get the chance to thank Roger for that, and he signed my most beloved McGough story, a strange picture book called Mr Noselighter that my Dad could recite from memory right up until the day he died because it was so often requested. I cried all the way home; since my Dad died I don’t think he’s felt closer than he did in that theatre, or so very far away.

My Dad filled my head with words and nonsense and he helped to make me the poet I am today; Winchester Poetry Festival demonstrated that he was right to do so. Poetry matters, and matters an awful lot, to a lot of people. I’m sorry that my Dad missed that last session, he would have loved it so much. I reconcile his loss much the same way that I will acclimatise back to the real world after such a wonderful weekend in Winchester. The scope and scale of the reconciliation is vastly different of course, but in both cases I’m left with all those beautiful words, words, words and the magic spell they will continue to weave over my life.

Happy National Poetry Day

Today is not only National Poetry Day, it is also my nephew’s 9th birthday. This may seem less significant to you than it is to me, but in truth the latter can tell us something about the value of the former.

National Poetry Day (NPD) is an initiative of the Forward Arts Foundation; the stated aim of the day is to promote the enjoyment, discovery and sharing of poetry. In short, it’s a day when we make it clear that we value the fact that poetry exists in the world and what is a birthday if not a day to celebrate a person who we are glad to share the planet with?

I think for poets, today is something of a vindication. It’s a chance to show off all that we care about and prove that we’re not (entirely) mad to have chosen to spend our days in the pursuit of the perfect line, the most fitting word or the most dramatic line break. On your birthday, presents are chosen for you, and they represent your own tastes and interests. In both cases, it’s a chance to celebrate the unique, to honour the weird little star of something that matters to us.

I suppose the day also goes some way to addressing whether poetry matters. For me, of course it does, but I think that it does for everyone. Even people with only a passing interest in literature may seek out a poem when facing extremes of emotion – at a wedding, for example, or a funeral. When the heart breaking photos of refugees reaching Europe were published by news outlets, poems such as Home, by Somali poet Warsan Shire were shared widely on social media because somehow, the words “no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark” could articulate something that we found it hard to wrap our minds around. I was struck, also, that the Chilcot Report on the enquiry into the Iraq war quoted Virgil’s Aeneid, as if there were things that needed to be said that only a poet could say.

People may turn to poetry in times of extreme emotion but the truth is, the magic of words can be used at any time to make us feel happy or sad, take us to new worlds and find new words to articulate our experience. In the same way, I may take the opportunity to show my nephew just how much I love him on his birthday, but I love him every day of the year. NPD goes some way to demonstrating that you don’t have to wait until you are at a loss for other words to reach for poetry, just as you should never, ever wait to tell someone how much you love them.

I wondered, when I started this post, whether I could actually tie National Poetry Day with my nephew Jack’s birthday. In writing about them together, I feel I understand both a little better. Just like a birthday, National Poetry Day is a chance to celebrate something special that we value. Just like poetry, Jack shows immense kindness and a real curiosity about the world. Celebrating both together fits a lot better than I imagined. I am looking forward to discovering new writers amongst the poems shared today and equally I can’t wait to see my nephew and present him with the bag of gifts I’ve chosen for him. There are some books in there that I know we’re going to love reading together.

It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…

I’m reading some of my work at the Winchester Poetry Festival later this week and I am terrified. My work in marketing means I have plenty of practice in public speaking and it never really phases me. However, the idea of standing in front of a discerning poetry audience - on stage with what I consider to be the real grown-ups - I am scared I’ll get laughed at, found out or perhaps struck with a case of situational Tourettes Syndrome. Intellectually, I know they are unfounded fears but in my heart, there remains a nagging terror that I can’t quite excise.

The circumstance reminds me of the time I read a poem at the wedding of one of my best friends. Although the work wasn’t mine, I felt such pressure to get it right. I was confident in the poem I’d chosen but still, to stand in front of the congregation immediately after the fateful pronouncement of “husband and wife” seemed like a monumental task. I practised until I could recite the work without the words in front of me (I practised so much, in fact, that ten years later I still can) and until I knew how the poem worked. Reading my own work, then, I should be at an advantage – I already know all the workings, how it moves and breathes across the page.

In the end, the reading at the wedding went very well and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. That is mostly down to the situation – I can’t imagine there has ever been a heckler during a reading at a wedding – but it is also because words have their own power and magic when spoken out loud. As a child, I was lucky enough to be read to by parents who also loved language and reading. No one could deliver a zany Roger McGough poem quite like my Dad, and no one ever will. He trusted in the writing, leaning into the humour of the situation and expressing the music in the language. My Dad died two years ago and it forms a little crack in my heart when I think of how he can’t be in Winchester to support me. In some way, he is the person I’m reading for at this festival; I want to honour all those bedtime stories delivered so impeccably. I want it to be perfectly clear that I did listen and it made all the difference in the world to me.

What does this mean for the reading at Winchester Poetry Festival? I can put a big tick next to column labelled practice, and although the situation is not as personal as a wedding or a child’s bedtime story, I’ll be reading in a creative, positive atmosphere so that’s another tick. Have I reasoned myself out of my fear?

Not quite - there is a third element and I think that might be the one where my fear resides. What the wedding reading and my Dad’s bedtime stories have in common are that they were carried out in love. At the wedding, I put my heart into what I was saying and when he read to me at night, Dad would make up the voices and accentuate the rhythms of the writing that would seem daft to the outside world but showed how much he, too, cared about the bedtime story. I know that at every good reading, the speaker lets the love pour out of them and that’s a vulnerable position to be in. Do I dare to stand on a stage and let all the love pour out of my mouth? Do I dare risk looking like a fool to share what’s truly in my heart and in my mind?

I am my father’s daughter – I have to.