Will you be my Valentine?

Love, like poetry, is a slippery creature and both love and poetry remain an enigma to me most of the time. In preparing this blog, I’ve researched love poems, thought about the structure of love stories and watched a couple of films and I’m at a loss. I recognise that Valentine’s Day is just a commercial enterprise and the aim is to make people feel they are lacking something which can be remedied by buying a certain product, or buying into a certain worldview. It still sucks to be single on Valentine’s Day, though. I miss having someone to sneer at it without appearing bitter. I miss being able to talk about romance at all without appearing bitter, tragic or, if I choose to think more positively, hopelessly naïve.

Love poems can be incredibly moving and address many aspects of romance, from consuming passion to unrequited love and the end of an affair. I haven’t written many love poems in my career because I’ve never found a way to break out of those categories. I have written some reflections on past relationships, but they’re rarely about love and more about self-discovery. I did write a poem for the wedding of two of my best friends and that was a tough commission because I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. I found the certainty of their marriage, the “rightness” of them being together very hard to express without resorting to cliché. The language around love is something that fascinates me because, I think, what it demonstrates in most cases is the inadequacy of language. So much remains unsaid and perhaps that’s why poets, novelists and musicians continue to try.

As a single woman in my forties, I may find much unsaid about my experience but that doesn’t mean it isn’t written between the lines – screaming at me between the verse and the chorus – and those are messages no one wants to write down. Love poems talk in elevated language about how superficial aspects such as age or looks don’t matter (and my friends do the same) but the truth is that in the real world, they do. In the rousing poem Wild Geese, Mary Oliver counsels that, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” That may be excellent advice for life, but if that soft animal contains too many contradictions, if it loves delicate poetry and the most bombastic action movies, gourmet cocktails and a pint of Guinness, or loves being an Aunt but would rather have a puppy than a child, it makes for a truly terrible dating profile. Trust me.

Just as there is a gap between the words found in love poems and our experience of love, there is a dissonance between how we would like life to be and how it really is. While no one finds the words to express that, Valentine’s Day can stake a claim in the gap, pulling us towards the dream and away from the reality. On bad days, I think there must be something wrong with me to have failed so utterly in the world of romance. I remind myself of the many loves in my life, comprised of my family and the most incredible friends, just to be reassured that I’m not irrevocably broken. I always write to find out what I think, so maybe I need to start with that experience and write love poetry which reflects my reality. Wild Geese may be relevant after all, concluding as it does:

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. ”

Next time I feel like a romantic failure, I’m also going to remind myself of something I discovered while researching this blog – Amazon lists the recent film version of Macbeth under the category of Romance. I may suck at dating and remain mystified by romance but at least I know that Lord and Lady Macbeth aren’t the romantic model to strive towards.

I’ve told you a million times to stop using hyperbole

I’ve noticed that the word traitor seems to be popping up in rhetoric a lot recently. It seems I’m not the only one to notice, with a German panel labelling it the ‘ugliest word of 2016’ due to Nazi overtones. A traitor is defined as ‘a person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause or principle.’ This means a person who is protesting against the actions of a government they see as deplorable is not a traitor, they are in fact staying entirely true to their own principles.

Protests which are designed to condemn the behaviour of a corporation – such as #DeleteUber – or deny a platform to alt-right speakers, as happened at the University of Berkeley are not betraying principles of freedom of commerce or speech. A company can and will do what it wants, but so can each customer. That alt-right speaker does have the right to speak, but equally everyone else has a similar right to ignore him, or speak up about why they don’t want him there. I, for example, have the right to tell you I’m going to turn up at your house once a week and read you poetry, and then send you a bill. You have the right to tell me you don’t want to pay for that, and you don’t want a stranger in your house. You’re missing out on some cracking poetry, of course, but you’re not a traitor to free speech to tell me so.

The word was used this week in relation to MPs who voted against Brexit, as if they were traitors to the country and the will of the people. Apart from the fact that the referendum didn’t deliver a resounding 100% vote, if you believe in the UK as a sovereign power, and you believe therefore in the sovereignty of parliament and the notion of parliamentary democracy, then you believe in the right of MPs to vote against something they believe is not in the national interest, or the interest of their constituents. They are, in fact, the living, breathing embodiment of faith in the system that they are accused of betraying.

It seems like ‘traitor’ has become shorthand for ‘someone I don’t agree with’ and that’s dangerous because the word has so many emotive associations. It is used as an argument-ending word to shut down discussion and will, in turn, become meaningless. The truth will always be more powerful than any amount of hyperbole or rhetorical tricks, and writers have a duty to preserve and defend language so that the truth can be shared with people. A good example of this is in the Pablo Neruda poem I’m Explaining a Few Things and the haunting lines:

“and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like the blood of children.”

Neruda is the master of simile and metaphor but in this poem, denouncing the Nationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War, he understands that nothing is more powerful or emphatic than the bare, unvarnished truth. In these times, writers must look past the rhetoric and maintain a clear eye and a steady pen. This is how to write beautifully but more importantly, it is how to live without betraying your freedom. 

Sympathy for the devil

At a poetry workshop last year, we were set an assignment to write an ode to someone or something we thought about negatively. On that occasion, I wrote about my school bullies and I never finished the poem because although I saw the value of the exercise, my heart wasn’t in it. This weekend I set about resurrecting this assignment in relation to the current political situation and once again, I couldn’t bring the thoughts into any kind of resounding whole. I’ve spoken before about literature being a vehicle for empathy and, it seems, mine has a limit.

When I wrote about my experiences in school, I could understand that those girls were afraid of anyone different, afraid of anything that toppled their tenuous grip on popularity. They were just as trapped in the complex, vicious social hierarchy of an all girls’ school, however cushioned they were by prettiness and popularity. The poem I drafted that day, though, rang hollow. Usually when I write, something rises up from within the poem that is more than just words and in this case, there was just an empty shell.

This weekend, I tried to understand how anyone could support the racist, inhumane treatment of refugees. I checked some of my privilege - I imagined if, perhaps, I hadn’t had the good fortune to be brought up in a family where kindness and support were not only valued but enacted every day. I also considered whether if I’d had more – more money, more power – I’d feel like I had more to lose from an inclusive society.  In both cases, I could understand the rationale but - like that poem about my school bullies - there was no heart to the argument. This IS no heart to an argument like that.

I saw a lot of parallels between the school bullies and the racist arguments. The first, most obvious one is the name calling; it seems Social Justice Warrior (SJW) has been replaced by snowflake. For the record, if someone calls me a Social Justice Warrior, I feel like a combination of Captain America and General Leia so please do go ahead with that. Snowflakes are pretty, so again, be my guest. What the prevalence of such empty insults reveals is that these bullies are terrified of being called names because they haven’t got the backbone to withstand them. I’ve had a lifetime of ginger jokes – when I started primary school I was a chubby kid with ginger hair, national health glasses and a patch over one eye, so feel free to come at me with name-calling if you must, but I learned to cope with that when I was five or six and I just don’t care. If anyone thinks that might hurt me, all they’re doing is revealing their greatest fear.

Years ago, when I was learning to cope with bullies, my Gran, who had a bellyful of bad treatment in her life, told me to just ignore them – and if that didn’t work, then kick them in the shins. I used to talk to her about how I hated being singled out and she would say, “Oh Zoe, wouldn’t life be boring if we were all the same.” I think about that a lot as banning refugees is reframed as protecting us from terrorists, and racism, classism and sexism all rise to the fore. My Gran was right and I don’t want a boring life, I want to meet people from all walks of life and from all over the world. I don’t see the hypocrisy in wanting an inclusive world and being intolerant of bullies because, as I discovered over the weekend, there’s no heart there, nothing to connect with.

I abandoned my poem and instead wrote a defiant piece and worked on another poem where I’m attempting to make the title do a lot of heavy lifting. In one way or another, they both came from the work examining bullies and the power of words, so I’m still getting great value from that assignment. Maybe one day I’ll go back and try again but until then, actor David Harbour said everything I might have to say at the SAG Awards last night. I stand with Stranger Things’ Chief Hopper on the matter of bullies. If my Gran were still around today, she would stand to her full height of five-foot-nothing and do exactly the same.

And don’t think I don’t know that it was a privilege to have such a principled, bad-ass Gran. 

Oh hey, fixed those lists of dystopian fiction for you

In the last week, both The Guardian and the Irish Times published lists of dystopian fiction that might help their readers make sense of the current political climate. Neither list contained a female writer.  Not Octavia Butler, who foresaw insidious intent behind the phrase “Make America Great Again.” Not Margaret Atwood, who took the current treatment of women to its logical conclusion in The Handmaid’s Tale. Not Naomi Alderman’s recent book The Power, which examines gender inequality in a fresh and sometimes terrifying way. Not… OK, I’m not just going to list writers here, but I think the point is made.

Excluding women from lists like this may seem like a small thing to get upset about in the circumstances, but it’s upsetting nonetheless. The idea continues that men write great books of social importance, women write domestic stories about feelings. Even if this were true (and to be clear, it’s not), domestic novels such as Middlemarch or South Riding and the entire catalogue of Jane Austen demonstrate that such stories can and do also contain valid political and social commentary.

I understand that ultimately, what we read is down to personal taste and if you want to read exclusively male writers, that’s your choice - even if what you’re choosing is to miss out on a lot of what literature has to offer. It is worth examining, however, why lists like these in the media, and school reading lists continue to promote the canon of male writers – and predominantly straight, white men at that. I’m not advocating wiping men off the list, but reading something like Orwell or Vonnegut means more if you read it alongside Atwood or Butler.

It strikes me that the disregard of women writers has a parallel in the continuing snobbery around genre fiction as somehow consider “less than” literary fiction. First of all, if you think you’re in any way a better person because you read the Booker shortlist instead of a fantasy series, you’re not. Secondly, you’ll find in genre fiction such as crime, science fiction or fantasy that the author base is more diverse – still not perfect, but certainly it is a more progressive arena. Finally, genre fiction can and does comment on personal and social issues, sometimes in a more moving and gripping way. I wonder if this is because in genre fiction, the story is so much more important than the writer. On this more level playing field, people of both genders and from all walks of life can and do succeed.

It only takes one book speaking directly to you to make you a lifelong reader. I would never judge someone based on what they choose to read – or not to read – but when compiling lists of recommendations, wouldn’t it be worth casting the net more widely, not least because you have a greater chance of hitting the mark? Reading is one of those self-perpetuating habits; the more you read, the more you want to read and I can’t understand why anyone would want to put limits on that.

I am aware I missed so many other examples of dystopian fiction written by women and that I could have listed so many more examples of female writers of social, political and literary importance. I recommend following #ReadWomen on twitter for more recommendations. 

Lights Go Out, Walls Come Tumbling Down

I’ve been thinking about walls. As part of my dissertation examining the relevance of Ancient Britain, I walked along Hadrian’s Wall and wrote a poem considering the perspective of that wall. I’ve yet to place it, and I can’t work out whether I’m pleased that it now has more relevance and might find a place somewhere or not. I always felt the poem was a warning not to repeat the mistakes of the past; I never wanted it to reflect the present. It’s still one of my favourite things I’ve ever written, but I feel a little sad for it now, poor wee poem standing on the foundations of the terrifying political landscape we’re currently facing.

When I was researching Ancient Britain, I learned more about the Antonine Wall in Edinburgh. Like Hadrian’s Wall, it was also built by the Romans as a means of marking the boundaries of the empire and attempting to keep out the raging Caledonii who didn’t take kindly to invasion. The wall is notable because the lines cut brutally across the landscape in a very vivid demonstration of how little politics is related to the natural world. The wall had forts dotted two miles apart along the 39 mile long, 10-foot high structure and was surrounded by deep ditches. Despite these fortifications and over 7,000 men stationed at the wall, it didn’t last very long. The Caledonii tribes were too effective at guerrilla attacks because they understood and worked with their environment and the Romans were frustrated at every attempt to effectively hold or advance the line.

Writers face metaphorical walls as well as real ones, internally and externally – perhaps you sympathise with the Romans and every time you seek to build up your career, a rampaging heathen comes along and topples your structure. Perhaps you feel like those native tribes who sought to frustrate imperial rule at every step, faced with a wall of established rules and requirements for an industry that both shuts you in and keeps you out of the wider world.

From the top of a wall, you can see both sides. Sometimes I’m the Roman and everything I build gets torn down. Other times I want to lace up my DM boots and put my foot through the latest barrier to achieving what I want to do in my work. Either way, I understand that walls themselves aren’t inherently bad – they’re pretty good at holding up the roof over my head, after all – but what they represent can be very negative. Perhaps both politicians and writers can take a different example from the Romans and consider the straight pathways they created to improve trade. The walls, after all, are now crumbling monuments to the folly of the past. Their roads, on the other hand, continue to connect people.

As an aside, with all this talk of crumbling monuments - has anyone thought of air-dropping thousands of postcards bearing the lines of Shelley’s Ozymandias in Washington DC?

Singing about the dark times

The use of literature- and poetry in particular - within the protest rhetoric of yesterday’s Women’s Marches was incredibly powerful. From references to Margaret Atwood’s (increasingly chilling) novel The Handmaid’s Tale to lines from Maya Angelou’s I Rise appearing on many placards, it is clear that literature has a role to play in the fight for equality and fairness.

Some of this is due to the fact that literature, at its best, breeds empathy. Once we have walked a mile in another’s shoes, even in our imagination, it is harder to dismiss, stereotype or persecute people. Stories take us beyond difference and unearth the same humanity we all share.

Many placards seen at the marches showed pictures of talented writer and actor Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from the Star Wars franchise declaring that “A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance.” There is a straight line between the Star Wars stories and those in ancient myth; George Lucas was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s book on comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces which directly links our stories to our psychology. The message on those placards is simple and clear – when you act against women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, those with disability or any other marginalised group, you are not some edgy hero grasping at freedom, you are not The Resistance everyone roots for in those films, you are The Empire.

Ancient myths and classical epics tell the same stories over and over of oppression by the elite and uprising from the disenfranchised and what they have in common is that it is those resisting hate and oppression who triumph. It is, therefore, literally wired into our brains to stand against this tide of hatred because whatever your religious and cultural upbringing, the stories we tell and those we hear remain the same. The details in those tales bring us closer both to empathy for each individual and an understanding of the universal human condition.

I also came across a quote from poet and activist Audre Lorde yesterday:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Reading that made me want to know more, and I looked up the context of those lines. Here is her statement in more detail:

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Literature, then, not only allows us to tell our stories, it gives us the language we need to articulate them. In this context, the personal is incredibly political. A recent example of this is found in Stephanie Northgate’s poem Miracle published recently on the And Other Poems website. The poem paints a clear picture of the vulnerability of refugee children by connecting them, and their parents, in the quiet and tender moment when a small child finally falls asleep. This is something all parents can recognise, and this personal experience of motherhood makes a strong and moving point about how we all have more to connect us than to divide us. Refugee parents want the same for their children as we do; those children exposed to danger and cold could be ours.

Writers must keep working. Representation matters in the arts and more must be done to make it happen. Lorde is right, finding the words to express and then address the challenges we face is not – and never will be – a luxury. To all the writers and readers, have faith in the fact that in your heart, you already know the story you need to tell and it is a vital necessity.

Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water

I am delighted and honoured to be one of a number of people taking part in a reading of Keats’ poetry to coincide with the completion of a statue of the poet due to be placed in Eastgate Square in Chichester. The event takes place on St Agnes’ Eve, a poem Keats composed in that very city. I remember the first time I discovered Keats’ connection to Chichester and I was thrilled to discover that one of my heroes had visited my hometown.

I have written before about the sense of urgency in Keats’ work and the beauty of that alone is enough to elevate him as one of my favourite poets. However, it is his life that lifts him to heroic status in my eyes. It is not just that he achieved so much in his short life, but that he lived very much on his own terms. Keats did not belong in the luxurious high society of the other Romantic Poets and often felt uncomfortable in their presence. He did not have the same education, connections or leisure as other writers of his time. Despite the beauty and delicacy of his work, Keats knew about the realities of life and the pain it can bring. He studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital and worked as a dresser – dressing wounds, setting bones and assisting in surgery – prior to deciding that he must become a writer. He did not receive positive reviews when his first book was published and, outside of a small liberal circle of writers, was heavily criticised by the literary establishment. John Wilson Croker said his work consisted of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language,” and John Gibson Lockhart called him a “vulgar Cockney poetaster”. I almost want to raise them both from the dead for an evening just so they can hear his work still being read and see the statue in his honour.

Keats is my hero because he defied all the snobbery and prejudice and stayed true to his own convictions and artistic vision. He wasn’t rich and didn’t belong in Society; the literary establishment didn’t want him and tried to tear him down as soon as he began writing. In short, there was nothing in Keats’ life to suggest he should become a poet and he did it anyway. His clear-eyed passion for writing allowed him to put aside the frustration of being considered an upstart and create work that is timeless and continues to move and inspire people.

It used to make me feel very sad that Keats died believing he was a failure and that his epitaph: Here lies One / whose Name was writ in Water betrayed a certain amount of bitterness. On reflection, though, I think of the lines in Catullus LXX – sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scriber oportet aqua, which means, “but what a woman says to a passionate lover should be written in the wind and the running water,” – and I think that perhaps, once again, Keats showed immense vision in seeing his work, and his name, as something both ephemeral and eternal, like love. 

I hope to see many rebellious-minded writers and artists there - I think Keats would like that. 

Hakuna Matata

When you start writing, plenty of people will advise you that it’s a difficult life; it’s rife with frustration, rejection and any number of challenges both practical and creative. What is much less discussed is that while you’re facing these issues – picking yourself up after a polite “no, thank you,” from a magazine, trying to find the right word or unearth an emerging structure - the rest of your life goes on too, with all the attendant ups and downs that living entails.

This week I got unwelcome news which is causing me some stress – nothing too serious, I should add – but my first thought was how it would impact my writing and the recent plans I had made on that score. I felt bereft of the hope I had built up recently and I just wanted this problem from my life to just go away. I realise how easily I had fallen into a familiar trap; wishing for a perfect life, telling myself I will concentrate on writing after I have everything else in place, once I have just got over whatever bump in the road I’ve encountered…

It may feel like you have a good reason to put your writing on hold, but really that kind of thinking is a trap. With a few exceptions, nothing should stop your writing plans because waiting for the ideal time will lead you to wait forever - life is never perfect. I know it is a trap because I completed one assignment on my Creative Writing MA after having lost Dad at the beginning of the term. I barely felt like getting out of bed, let alone writing poetry, and yet once I started to work, I found that the creative process gave me freedom.

What is most interesting to me is that at the time, writing gave me a way to escape, however briefly, from my personal difficulties and yet when I read it back now, I see it is shot through with my grief. I was writing a long narrative poem and reaching for a fantasy world but regardless of my intent, the real world crept in and I think the poem is the richer for it. The jaws of this trap are sharpened by the fact that not only can you not wait for life to be perfect, but you shouldn’t want it to be.

Poetry operates with tension at its core; a poem could be written about an intensely personal experience and convey something more universal. A poem like Ted Hughes’ The Thought Fox is both about an animal and the idea of an animal – or perhaps the animal of an idea. The articulation is beautiful precisely because of the friction between these concepts; they rub up against each other and overlap. The fox is too real to exist only in the imagination, the metaphor too clear to let it just be a fox. Whether you want to think about the problems of “real life” or not, they will creep in to anything you write, and this isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary I believe, like the pressure simmering within Hughes’ poem, it makes the work richer. It’s important to remember that and I write this as much as a reminder to myself as anything else. It is lovely to sometimes daydream about having no worries for the rest of my days, but deep down I know that day will never come. Even if it did, what would I write about then? I write to understand the world so if everything is in its place and understood, what would be left to discover?

As for my recent challenge, I am sure I’ll find a way out of it and it will soon be nothing but a footnote in my memory. Other challenges many of us are facing due to the current social and political climate may not be so easy to solve and although I don’t think these issues should be ignored, neither do I think they should stop you from working. I know some people believe that times of unrest can lead to a rich resurgence within art; I don’t really subscribe to that school of thought. Given the choice, I think I’d rather have a fairer, kinder world than one with beautiful art that arises from protest and I don’t think a writer has to be tortured in order to create great work. Writers do, however, have to connect with their readers and for that reason, any intrusion in the life of a writer, good or bad, has to be accepted as part of the writing life. 

It’s only words

I’m not going to provide links and examples because I don’t want to add fuel to the fire or clicks to the clickbait, but there have been many examples in the right wing press of promoting hatefulness under the banner of family values. I thought I’d write about my family values because every time I see an article promoting prejudice and indifference to injustice under such a banner, it infuriates me and I think, that’s not my family.

My family is small; my Mum and Dad are and were both only children and I am one of three daughters. Growing up, I didn’t really know that there was such a thing as not being allowed to do something because “girls don’t do that”; both my parents were nurses so I never really grasped the idea that nursing might be a job for a woman, or that similarly there might be such a thing as a career that was meant for men. I remember once in infant school, we had to write about what our parents did and I wrote something along the lines of “My Mum is a nurse and my Dad is a nurse.” The teacher corrected me and said, “No, Zoe. Your Mum is a nurse and your Dad is a doctor.” At the time, I was upset because as a nerd from a very young age, I hated to be told I had got something wrong but also I burned at the unfairness of it because I knew my Dad was a nurse, I knew I was right. At the time, of course, I didn’t register the sexism implicit in that correction but I did know deep in my bones that it was wrong. My Dad was a nurse, he worked on a psychiatric ward with patients that most people were afraid of, people who didn’t have a voice or often anyone to care for them, and he worked hard to make their lives better. Sexism and restricted gender roles? Not my family.

I don’t want to present our family as some kind of hippie utopia; we were as normal as the next family in many ways. My sisters and I bickered sometimes, got along other times. One thread that runs through my childhood is the notion that we had to share – attention, time, gifts. For example, in the days before on-demand Netflix, we had to take our turn in choosing a Saturday night movie to rent. I don’t think I suffered for that, on the contrary I saw a lot of films I would never have chosen by myself. When I was a teenager, it was hard to get to the cinema without a car and I had a deal with my Mum that she would take me to anything I wanted to see as long as I went with her to anything she wanted to see; we both shared our interests and often enjoyed the films we would never have chosen. The idea that the country is “full” and we have nothing to share? Not my family.

I’m the only redhead in my family; I know all the ginger jokes having heard every one on the playground (and they’ve never evolved from that level), but one thing I do recall is that my sisters never ever made those jokes. Again, I want to be clear, we weren’t sitting in a circle singing Kumbaya, we did all the usual “Mum, she took my…” “Mum, she won’t let me…” but never once did either of my sisters laugh at me or point out my (admittedly minor) difference, despite the fact that they had been on the same playgrounds, they would have heard the same insults and it would have been an easy shot. Attacking someone just because they look different to you? Not my family.

A week after my 18th birthday, my Dad had a heart attack and by Christmas Day he was still in hospital, having just been moved out of the intensive care ward. It was a tough Christmas; I remember the tension every time the phone rang in case it was a call none of us wanted. On Christmas Day, we went to visit Dad with our presents so that we could all open them together. We’d also brought with us some mince pies and a box of crackers and we went round that ward, offering other people who didn’t have visitors a cracker and some home-baked care and attention. We also bought a large box of chocolates for the doctors and nurses taking care of my Dad; no one knew better than my parents that they would rather be at home with their families on Christmas Day and yet there they were, doing their jobs. We were suffering ourselves, but did that mean we couldn’t extend some love and care to others who may also be suffering in different ways? Not my family.

The reason this is important for writers is because words are being corrupted; the right wing press are promoting hateful, cruel ideologies under the banner of family values and the meaning of those words has been hijacked; these are not the values of my family. Of course, there are bigger challenges ahead and this may seem minor, but the language we use helps us to understand the world we live in and that world is being corrupted by a poisonous, insidious creep in meaning. Every time we write, we consider the language we use and the effect it has, it’s how we allow readers to understand the worlds we create. So, to quote the Bee Gees, it’s only words, but words are all I have. 

Most People Never Listen

In my last blog, I considered the importance of artists continuing to speak up in troubling times. I also touched upon the importance of listening, and that was something I was reminded of as I finished reading Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, the brilliant book by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy, an account of the meeting of activists Roy, Cusack, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and Pentagon Papers insider Daniel Ellsberg. It is a fascinating, if somewhat frightening, read, a book so dense and brilliant that I immediately want to go back to the start and read it again.

I have long admired Roy for her literary brilliance and insightful political analyses, but in this book, I was equally struck by Cusack, not least because he listens to the people around him. I am aware that this should be the default, that we shouldn’t just give praise that one privileged white man has learned to sit back and listen to others but it is an increasingly rare and highly underrated trait and it’s important to us all both as political and artistic thinkers. We need to learn to listen more, and to broaden the scope of what we’re listening to.

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

— Ernest Hemingway

I think many of us are chilled by the out-and-out racism on display in America and at home in the UK at the moment, but what makes it worse is that people of colour have been telling us, repeatedly, that it was happening and we didn’t listen. LGBTQ people told us they were fearful of the prejudice they continued to face and we didn’t listen. Similarly, women are told there is no glass ceiling; it is slowly and patiently explained to us that there is no misogyny even as we present hard facts on the wage gap and a sexual predator wins the White House with plans to dismantle a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Shush, ladies, less of your hysteria, the grown ups in charge are talking now.

We must learn to listen better and to broaden the scope of the voices we listen to. This includes supporting artists of colour and other silenced and dismissed minorities such as the disabled or LGBTQ people, it means taking in culture from all over the world, it includes reading at least twice, three times as much as we write and stepping outside of our usual boundaries of tastes and favourites.

I don’t even really present this as a moral duty – the rewards are phenomenal, it adds a diverse symphony to your own education as an artist, it brings colour, magic and insight from across the world. In short, it will make your life richer and your art better. I’ll give just one example from hundreds I could have chosen. The poem Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith haunts me; it’s not just the message it conveys but the way the poem conveys it. The work reverberates with energy and yet the form and structure of this work is both delicate and astounding; it works as a masterclass on the power of repetition on a par with Lear’s “never, never, never, never, never” line in Shakespeare’s play; it made me see and feel something new both about another’s experience and about how I write.

Actually, given that I acknowledge part of Cusack’s brilliance and his significant contribution to the book Things That Can and Cannot be Said, I should shut up and let you listen to Danez Smith.