When I realised I could be a poet

Poetry. For many it’s a word that brings a roll of the eyes skyward or an immediate sense of terror. It can feel like an alien being, another language, a horrible hour spent in a classroom being forced to read words on a page that make no sense, by an over-enthusiastic (or sometimes equally bored) teacher. For many years, I felt the same, excluded somehow from the pleasure others seemed to get. Like opera or golf or poker, it was a thing other people liked, but which totally evaded me.

At school, I never got it. I remember, at fourteen, studying some miserable anthology of poems which seemed to be mostly about death and impending doom. There was one about Chernobyl which petrified me — something about the ‘dark pools of watery sheep’s eyes’ and another which I now know was Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. The world in a grain of sand meant nothing to me then — too much, too abstract.

At seventeen, still pursuing English Literature for want of something better to do, I studied Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Now, most likely because of my amazing teacher and my increasing years, something clicked. The ‘squelch and slap of soggy peat’ felt visceral. The textures of Heaney’s words and the feeling of them in my ears, on the page, awoke me. Death of a Naturalist felt sensual, sexual…a new pleasure for an over-sexed teen. Hughes, I didn’t appreciate then. I remember studying Eagle. I can even picture exactly where I sat. I recall we had been shunted off to a science lab and the incongruity of the gas taps against Hughes’ “lightening-faced warrior” was too disconcerting.

I couldn’t get to grips with Hughes then; I do now.

It wasn’t until I became an English teacher myself, that I began to appreciate poetry. I did not relish the thought of trawling through poems with unappreciative teenagers. And at first, it was painful. I was the equally bored teacher.

But then we embarked upon Heaney for the first time and I discovered that when I became genuinely enthused, they became enthused. We fed off each other. I told them, there’s no wrong answers, no wrong interpretations: poetry is whatever you want it to be. For some this was mind-boggling — they were the kids who liked Maths where everything has an answer. For others, it was liberating. Suddenly, for me and for them, it was like solving a riddle or unpicking a crime scene, and we were in it together.

For all my career, I loved teaching poetry above all else. Even the most reluctant student grew to appreciate some part of that art in my classroom.

One day, I stumbled upon the poet Simon Armitage in an poetry book, whilst looking for something to fill a blank hour. “Mother any distance…anchor, kite”. I cried when I read that poem to my class. Cried for my lost childhood, for my lost mother, for the passing of time and the space I felt in myself. It was a grieving I wouldn’t understand for another decade. I cried for those teenagers in my class, not so far from leaving home and letting their childhoods pass away.

One day, at thirty-six, when my life was not my own and my heart was breaking, I found myself in my office at school with a pen and a piece of paper. This was a time of great emotional pain. One of those troughs, valleys, canyons in my life. Those times of great discomfort but huge change. I was embodying a pain greater than myself and suddenly, in that moment, the only thing I could do to release some of that intensity was to write. I wrote a poem on the corner of my note pad.

I had never written a poem before.

In the following weeks, more came. They seemed stored inside me. I could see how they replicated the poets I loved — Heaney, Armitage, Walcott, Dharker, Shelley. I could see they had form and life of their own. I didn’t dwell on rhyme or imagery — these poems were for me. For my relief. It was an impulse to put pen to paper; to write it out.

Over the next two years, as my life repeatedly fell to pieces and reformed again, poetry became my outlet and salvation. I left my job, not in pursuit of this craft, but more because I knew I needed time. I needed time to write. The paradox being I guess, as the pain eased, so did the desire to write poetry. So I turned to prose and found this lighted a different, deeper, less immediate urge. Prose is the like the long term medication and poetry is the quick jab in the arm.

Now I write poetry to explore new feelings — joy, wonder, belonging, nostalgia, feelings I never had time for back then when work was all-consuming. I find myself writing poetic portraits of others and musing on the way an oyster might be like a lover. Only this week, I found that a poem can have the lilt of a river and the staccato of shoes on cobbles. This is new and wonderful.

I remember hearing Armitage say that he didn’t appreciate poetry at all, until one day his teacher read ‘Bayonet Charge’ by Ted Hughes at school. It had a profound effect on him, on a working-class boy from the North West of England. It didn’t feel distant and unattainable anymore.

And I can say Armitage more than any other poet has allowed me to see poetry isn’t an alien or a thing to be feared. It isn’t pretentious or inaccessible; it is an outlet, a pleasure, a way to connect and to know you aren’t the only one who knows that life is fleeting or that “The river is a beautiful idle woman.” (Ted Hughes, Low Water.)

Writing has saved me. Long live the poet.