Nearing Forty...*

I turn 40 soon.

I know.

I think I was more fussed by move from my teens into my twenties so I'm not stressing about it. Instead I'm distracting myself by thinking of 40 things I can do when I'm 40.

The first thing I thought of was to learn at least 40 poems by heart - partly inspired by the Poetry By Heart programme in schools and partly by being reminded of Invictus by William Ernest Henley following the death of Nelson Mandela. I reckon it can't be a bad thing to have an arsenal of poems to draw on for any situation life throws at you. The poem I have by heart (and yes, I know it's only four lines long) is Epilogue by Grace Nichols.

Anyway, I asked some of my friends on Facebook to tell me their favourite poems. The ones they've held in their hearts since the moment they heard them and they came up with some crackers. Some poems I already love and will enjoy learning by heart and some I'd not come across before. A couple are probably a bit too long to make it to the shortlist of 40 but it's been great to read. I'll be flicking through my poetry collections and anthologies over the Christmas holidays to add to the list but here are the poems that have been suggested so far...

After Long Busyness by Robert Bly

Everything is Going to be Alright by Derek Mahon

I Go Back To May 1937 by Sharon Olds

If We Must Die by Claude McKay

Indelible, Miraculous by Julia Darling

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Machines by Michael Donaghy

Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden

On the Grashopper and Cricket by John Keats

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

Prosepoem towards a definition of itself by Brian Patten

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The Identification by Roger McGough

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

The Moment by Margaret Atwood

The Mower by Philip Larkin

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Sun is Rising by John Donne

This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

I'm probably going to blog about my approach to learning each poem (that will be another thing to try when I'm 40 - keeping a regular blog!). And I'm interested to see if I'll still have all forty poems in my head this time next year. We'll see.

*About six years ago I came across the poem Nearing Forty by Derek Walcott and now here I am...

Knights encountered today = 1

Saying that I met Andrew Motion tonight might be over egging things a bit. But I did. On account of buying a copy of The Cinder Path and asking him to sign it.

I’ve been quietly excited about this event for a while so when Daniel found out that he had a parent’s evening that wouldn’t be finished until after the reading I prepared myself for the possibility of missing it... luckily Marian came over from Lanchester to look after the girls. (I think secretly she was looking for an excuse to see the hamsters she’d helped the girls to pick out last week. They’ve doubled in size since she saw them which is easy to believe as they are massive – relatively.) Anyway, I’m really pleased that she came to the rescue because it was an interesting event and inspiring too.

At the start of the reading Motion talked about the fact that we forget we’re a country at war but that we shouldn’t. It made me think about the fact that I’d like to write poetry that deals in some way with the world that we’re living in at the moment. And that made me think about the fact that poems written because the poet wants to highlight a cause or reflect an injustice are often shit. If you’re not careful.

There were personal poems as well as those about war – love poems for his wife and elegies for his father and Philip Larkin. All of which showed that in order for us to create poems that have meaning for other people we should take care of the particulars, the specifics. Focus in on the details and avoid generalisations, grand ideas… it’s the small things that will lead us into a poem and make sense of it in relation to ourselves. Of course he put it more eloquently than that.  

This was definitely a reading. Not a performance. At the end Motion thanked us for ‘listening’ to him. And that was it; we’d gone to listen not to watch. So that left me wondering about my own approach to readings/performances. Can I split myself and my poems in two so that for readings my body language is understated (with less gesticulation) and for performances it becomes more about how I use physicality to emphasise the imagery and how I embody my poems? I don’t know. I’ll just have to suck it and see. I have a few readings coming up during March – all in very different settings so by the end of the month I should have an idea about what I want from myself… maybe.

One more thing. Michael Chaplin asked a question about process that led Motion to describe part of his routine of writing. Getting up early, really early and beginning to write in that space between being asleep and being fully awake. Being a ‘bastard’ about protecting that time and refusing to allow anyone or anything to eat into or take over. Now I know I’m never going to get up early to find that time – I live in a very small cottage and if I get up at 5.30am, the girls are probably going to hear me pottering about and at 7 and 4 years of age I don’t think they’ll quite buy into the idea of mummy being a ‘bastard’ to protect her writing time. No. I’m going to have to programme myself to switch off all electronic gubbins, forget the guff on TV and the latest newsfeed on Facebook (which I’m giving up for Lent btw) and head to my room at 9pm and write for an hour or two… or even just read… a writer is a reader too, yeah?

Poems

Absent
A handful of photographs,

all I have to link to my past.

No photographic army of relatives

no reminders of a

or connection to the generations

that came before my parents.

No thick, brown, spiral bound family albums

losing their stickiness,

photos slipping out from

behind their protective film.

No anecdotal stories

of my parents’ childhoods.

No tales of what their parents did.

No pictures of the places they lived

or the holidays they took.

As if they appeared

Parents - Ready Made.

With no life, no existence

before we arrived.

No boxes of family photographs

linking me to my past.

No one who looks just like me,

staring blankly out from

creased, faded photographs.

No one reaching out

to show me how I got here.

Only half remembered photos

in the front rooms of relatives

I’ve long since stopped visiting -

whose names I can’t remember.

Where are they?

The photographs, the people.

If I knew they would just be

So many nameless faces

for the many faceless names.

Craving

Wintersun through the kitchen window,

it feels like spring.

The heat presses against her,

holds her close as she listens to

the tinitus whine of the fridge;

the grumble of the bypass;

the birds she can’t name who live to shit on her sheets.

The sun highlights remnants from last night’s snowfall.

Alone in the morning darkness of the backstreet,

she harvests the snow from her husband’s car.

Leaving pock marks over the once perfect surface,

her hand like a starfish,

fingertips barely touching the brittle crust.

Then grasping, eating mouthfuls of clean, pure snow.

It melts as it hits the warmth of her mouth.

Enough to satisfy – at least for now.

Julia

These words

don't want to come out yet.

Hiding behind quiet tears

that don't want to be seen.

My head fizzes gently as

they float around

Looking for a safe way out.

I won't imprison them too long;

They'll make sense soon enough.

But I'll keep these words

Hold on.

Until they can be changed.

Understood.

My Father

With a voice softer than

the stirring of a sleeping child

and words gentle rain at dusk.

With the hope of a grandfather’s

stories of love and desire, wanting

to share more than just the hard times.

Fear and anxiety hide beneath his smile.

his forgotten childhood half-remembered

in softly spoken conversations.

His voice has a smile when the pain lets up.

The voice I strain to hear

at the end of a distant phone line.

Relax

There is something different in this hot yellow school summer. The heat and sweatiness of friends distorts in the intense August light that still fills the living room. An album cover balances delicately between my skinny brown fingers. Against the white background two figures. A man. A woman. Each half naked, his torso/her belly, rump and thighs. Outside, their shoulders, legs and arms bare, friends play in the dust of the estate.

Wearing a Groove

How often I walk this route,

wearing a groove into the hard concrete

of Newcastle’s pavements.

I see the same views

the same people

as I walk from home

to nursery to work and back.

Exercise the same muscle groups

over and again until

I just want to stop.

But then I think -

how trim my bum is becoming.

This Love

Her alarm call of “mamma” sounds through the night.

Tiredness clings to my body as I work

out how to convince her it’s too early for play.

I avoid the gaze of the clock; ignore how soon til morning,

In the half darkness I wonder how long to leave

before going in with a gentle “shhh, my love”.

There’s no time to shower before breakfast. I’d love

to take five minute’s - instead I clear last night’s

left overs and somehow plan the time left

in the day to tackle the mountain of housework,

when all I want is to sleepwalk through the morning;

and all she wants is to play.

As she sleeps I slip the earphones into place and press play.

I sink down and down and listen to the songs you love

and suddenly the soundtrack to my morning

brings you home to me. The smell of last night’s

sex fills the air. Clings to my body. A sleepy tryst worked

into a schedule when there is often no time left.

On Wednesdays she cries when I leave

her . She’s in good hands, she’s in good hands - guilt plays

on my mind as I close the door behind me. I go to work

dismiss the stay at home alternative where love

alone can’t carry me through until the night

and the same old begins again the next morning.

But there is no sense mourning

the independence and freedom I willingly left

behind, when each night

chemical euphoria would play

with perception and loved up masquerading as loved...

was never going to work.

It’s my breathing space, work,

not my reason to get up every morning

It isn’t the job I love

but the slight return to my old self. By the time I leave

it almost feels like play

I arrive home refreshed, ready for the night’s

work to begin. Thoughts of tomorrow left

until morning. Time to enjoy now and play.

This love keeps us safe at the end of each night.

Not getting awards and young poets in the Times

So, I'm not going to get an Northern Promise Award, so I'm at least five years older than the young poets in the Times, so this is my third attempt to start this blog (I deleted the first attempt - inane wittering about Jesmond mums and their attitude towards road safety that led my 3 and half year old to say "fugging heck" as we narrowly avoided being mown down by a ridiculous tank - hence the title of the blog; the second is on wordpress but I just can't handle their dashboard)... so what.

I'm actually procrastinating, I should be getting some pages down for script frenzy but I just want to get some of my poems out there so that I have at least a minor online presence. These poems have all appeared elsewhere (mainly thanks to ID on Tyne) so I don't have to worry about saving them for any poetry comps out there...