There is poetry for everyone

In this column I want to write about the poems I love, what they mean to me, and what makes them relevant on a personal level, which is a real joy because I spent several years with my head under an imaginary pillow so that poetry would not see me cowering.

I did not want to face it because it was what my parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, did, and I wanted to be different. As for my parents’ poetry, after I’d read my father’s book of comical poetry about an imaginary family called Meet my Folks when I was a small child, I refused to read any more of his or my mother’s work until I was 35, when I believed that I was impervious to their influence having already written the poems that would become my first collection, Wooroloo, named after the small place where I lived in Western Australia in the Nineties, and where I became something of a hermit when I developed ME in 1994.

Yet, as a teenager, I would sneak off to write my own poetry, furtively, with a packet of equally guilty cigarettes, just to quell the verbal cacophony that filled my head. The words sang and danced and aligned themselves in what they thought were attractive arrangements, demanding to be rendered, pen on paper. Writing poetry was a compulsion, like scratching a terrible itch, and, like all good compulsions, it made me terribly self-conscious, as if I had a complaint that people might point at, but oh, it felt so good to scratch that itch.

Between the ages of 24 and 34 I managed to stop writing poetry almost completely — a decision I made to avoid comparisons with my parents — except for those tortured nights when I’d wake with my head full of words and have to scribble them down before I could go back to sleep. I stuffed all those offerings in a box and never looked at them again.

But when I developed ME I had to work within the limitations of my few conscious hours — or not at all — and I could not afford to waste precious time on avoidance of writing poetry, simply for fear of the comparisons that might be made between my work and that of my parents. What an idiot! What cowardice! What if I reached the age of 96 and realised that I could have been writing poetry all those intervening years, and didn’t, because I was afraid of what complete strangers might think of me? I would have subdued something of myself that makes me who I am and it would have been entirely my own fault.

Whether rhyme or free verse, the thing that defines a poem for me is an integral rhythm, a sort of in-the-head drumbeat that might change or fluctuate but is ever-present. After ten years without consciously forming a single complete poem, this internal drumbeat was now all I could hear and I just wanted to write about everything and anything all at once — when I could manage to stay awake long enough . . .

In the first weeks of this outpouring I couldn’t read back and correct what I wrote, because ME wouldn’t allow it. I was scribbling blind, because the words appeared to be no more than black tangles on the page when I looked at them afterwards. It was as if my dyslexia had been magnified from a small pothole in the road to a major excavation into which all my literary efforts tumbled.

But as the weeks became months, my mind cleared for longer periods — sometimes a whole hour! I was able to make more sense of what I was writing if I was quick about it. Poetry suited this constraint because it was usually short, as were my attention span and ability to concentrate, and forcing myself to focus the mind when the mind was awake enough to be exercised could only be good for it.

The pile of paper on the kitchen table grew as I explored all kinds of subject matter — the subject of myself included.

Except that I wasn’t accustomed to being direct about the more personal aspects of my life, the way other poets seemed to be of their own. To overcome this, I found myself often codifying my intention, disguising it in allegory or burying it beneath layers of extrapolated imagery so that the poem reads one way but, if the code is known, tells another story altogether.

So, in my last book, Waxworks, several of the poems have two lives; the life of the name in the title of each poem and the “other” life, often illustrating an aspect or relationship in my own life, for instance, Sisyphus, Prometheus and Lazarus, among others, are all my father, and I am both Cinderella — although this did not become obvious to me until I was halfway through reading it in front of an audience — and Madame Tussaud.

Lucrezia Borgia is an extremely rude poem about any woman who sleeps with a famous man then tells all the newspapers, Nebuchadnezzar is a poem about Tony Blair and the building of the disastrous Dome, and my contemporary take on Romulus and Remus is based on Blair and Mandelson, though I doubt that anyone would guess that, and it doesn’t matter at all since the words tell a story nonetheless:

They won the throne back

For their fallen king,

(Labour hadn’t governed the country for some time)

And for themselves

They built a city.

Romulus called out

For strays to fill it with,

The lost and the fugitive,

The seekers of asylum,

(we’ve had enough illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers to populate quite a sizeable city)

But mostly men.

(Illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers seem to be predominantly male.)

Remus knew

They needed women,

Even though he didn’t want one.

The various Waxworks characters might also bring to mind an uncle or aunt or cousin — a brother, sister or mother-in-law — we’re all there in one guise or another. Once, after a poetry event where I’d read the title poem of a previous collection, Stonepicker, about a punitive character who collects grievances, an excited woman grabbed my arm as I left and said: “I had no idea you knew my sister-in-law.”

It seems to me that poetry is often held at arm’s length and viewed with a mixture of suspicion and the attitude that somehow it is not for ordinary people, only for elevated literary types who talk of iambic pentameter and hexameters. But the more one reads the more familiar and accessible poetry becomes.

I believe that poetry explains us to ourselves, through the mirror of the poet’s eye. In the writing of it, it comes from a place deep down inside us that is more honest and real than the superficial face we present to the world, and when a reader finds the right poem, that is the part of them that responds, especially if the poem should describe a familiar experience or a reflection of someone they know — or themselves.

And for those who feel that no poetry will ever make sense to them, perhaps they would appreciate the simple directness in Wendy Cope’s poetry book Serious Concerns (Faber). One poem, Some More Light Verse, reads:

You have to try. You see a shrink.

You learn a lot. You read. You think.

You struggle to improve your looks.

You meet some men. You write some books . . .

This is instantly accessible:

You blow your nose. You see the shrink.

You walk. You give up food and drink.

You fall in love. You make a plan.

You struggle to improve your man.

And nothing works . . .

How many women have not tried, at one time or another, to improve their man? Or perhaps they would just like him to leave the toilet seat down and not blow his nose between his forefinger and thumb when taking a shower.

And for the man who would not be improved, whose wife or girlfriend would see him settle down and, perhaps, produce a child to solder the union, his sentiments might be expressed in the poem Seed by Don Paterson from his book Nil Nil (Faber & Faber), the last four lines of which read:

Leaking cock or bodged withdrawal,

ruptured condom; month-long vigil —

it is I who just escape with my life.

My child is hunting me down like a thief.

How many men have experienced that feeling of being stalked by the spectre of the child to come, that they are not ready for? And what if that child should manifest? Then William Blake could provide a choice of verse for the afflicted father, depending on whether he adapts to his new role or feels otherwise.

From Infant Joy:

‘I have no name:

I am but two days old.’

What shall I call thee?

‘I happy am,

Joy is my name.’

Sweet joy befall thee! . . .



From Infant Sorrow:

‘My mother groaned, my father wept,

Into the dangerous world I leapt;

Helpless, naked, piping loud,

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.’

My recommendation for anyone who has not found a poem to their liking is to read more of them until they do. Every poetry collection is a new country, and they should keep travelling; otherwise they might miss a comic gem like this one by John Kinsella, from his Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe Books):

The police busted me with a chilli in my pocket

It’d been through the wash —it was in fact half-a-chilli

looking fibrous and not a little washed out.

But there was no doubting it was a chilli,

I accepted that — no need for laboratory tests,

the eye and honesty adequate analysis.

So, why do you do it they asked. I dunno, just habit I guess.

The sun dropped below the horizon like a billiard ball.

The chilli glowed in a hand.

One of them rubbed his eyes and they began to sting.

We’ll have you for assault they said.