I Struggle With Words

My life is in words, not all of them beautiful, not all of them needed. But some of them thread me together like this poem by Sharon Olds:

    I cannot say I did not ask 

    to be born.

Yesterday, I proofread the manuscript for my forthcoming chapbook - GREAT MASTER / small boy (Fair Acre Press). I find this a nerve-wracking process, even though all is yet possible, nothing has been committed to print. I wrote the sequence in 2018-19 after travels to Germany and Austria with my son Jonty in search of Beethoven. "The trouble is," I said to Gabriel, his older brother, on our walk in the rain yesterday after dark, "I want it to be perfect." The book is, in its essence, a gift for Jonty (its publication date is his 21st birthday) - it's an account of that geographical journey, but of so much more too. As Andrew McMillan has written in his back cover endorsement, "...love of music is always a journey ... towards love."

     Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my

    children, to exist ...

This past year I have not been able to write much, or rather, I haven't been able to write much new poetry. I've written here from time to time. (Thank goodness for this blog, and the book that's come from it - so much pleasure there, and the kind reading and sharing of it). And I've written thousands of emails, texts, even posted the odd tweet ...I've written for my job as a university lecturer: thousands and thousands and thousands of words about, well, about how and why we can and must care for and empower each other, about how we try to learn when we cannot be together. That work has been utterly exhausting, though I regret none of it. 

As for the music of poetry? The place from which that comes feels numbed, weary, tuneless. 

    I asked, with everything I did not

    have, to be born. And nowhere in any

    of it was there meaning ...

I woke this morning and after a bit of Sunday morning laying around, talked with myself about first things - about how I came to write poetry in the beginning, how I scribbled lines, hid them and tore them up, then eventually had the courage to join a writing group in my 40s. It was through reading poetry, not writing, that I found what I needed to know. After the reading, the writing - the impetus to express my own longings. I knew, I reminded myself decades later, that it was reading The Wasteland in my 1980s London bedroom that convinced me that I was not alone.

Sharon Olds, in her poem I Cannot Say I Did Not addresses the question of unbidden existence more clearly than anything I've heard or read in any other context: church, family, school, social work text books, The School of Life website ...  This existential conundrum haunted my youth -  none of us asked to be born. Olds takes it head on in this poem, even daring to end on a preposition. It's brilliant, and reading it again this morning (from the Bloodaxe Staying Human anthology) it confirmed to me that if I turn back to reading the poetry that moves me most, poetry which is about this existence of ours - the one that we've been hanging onto for dear life - if I turn back to the well-worn pages of Olds, Rich, Hopkins, Eliot, Collins, McMillan, Clarke, Sprackland, Duffy, Oliver ...  in time, and with gentleness, and quietly, I will find my voice again.

    ... I want to say that love

    is the meaning, but I think that love may be

    the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds - I Cannot Say I Did Not