A Poetry Survival Kit

By Kim Moore

Here I am, staggering towards you all with another blog/essay/rambling falling out of my pockets. I’m on the other side of what has been an incredibly busy term – my first year as a full time Senior Lecturer, my first time co-organising Manchester Writing School Summer Festival, and my first time doing all of these things whilst being a mother. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact – that this is why it feels hard, because it is hard!

If I’m being honest, I don’t find relaxing relaxing. I’ve been sat here feeling a bit down because this week is a ‘quiet’ one. But if I write down what I’m doing or have plans to do: another substack post, a reading in Manchester, hosting an online reading with Erica Hesketh, re-reading Erica’s book in advance, contacting the open mic poets for Erica’s reading and getting them to send them in advance, collating those into one document, four MA tutorials, chairing a viva, writing a feedback questionnaire for the summer festival, and going to the re-opening of Lumb Bank – I’m now realising that’s not really a quiet week by any ‘normal’ person’s standards.

A few weeks ago, I ran a course at Ty Newydd with Roger Robinson called “Building a Sustainable and Authentic Poetry Practice”. Sometimes when I was thinking about and planning for this course, I felt like the worst kind of fraud. How could I talk to other people about building a sustainable practice, when often my life feels anything but sustainable?

I make myself busy all the time, and then feel really down if I’m not busy. I’m not sure that is particularly sustainable! For example, this morning I could feel myself really down and I think it was because I thought I had a quiet week – only to write that list of jobs out and realise I’m actually not quite right if I think this is a quiet week!

I think one of the ways of making any type of writing practice sustainable is getting to know our own writing process – what we think we need, and what we actually need (which might be two different things!). I know that writing all day on a Monday is working really well for me at the moment, that working alongside friends works, that I don’t like to ‘catch’ myself writing or admit that I’m writing, that I often have to pretend I’m doing something else or just messing about. I know that I need feedback from other people to motivate me to keep going, otherwise I get distracted and give up halfway through.

One of the exercises I wanted to run during the week at Ty Newydd was drawing from some of the ideas in the work of Sara Ahmed, who talks about having a “Feminist Killjoy Survival Kit”. So I thought I’d share it here. In Living A Feminist Life Sara Ahmed lists ten items in her survival kit. These include:

1. Books – favourite feminist books close to hand

2. Things – creation of a ‘feminist horizon’

3. Tools – hers are a ‘pen and a keyboard, a table’

4. Time – time to have time out

5. Life – connection with nature, animals, people?

6. Permission notes – permission to step back, permission to be sick

7. Other killjoys – who hold us accountable

8. Humour

9. Feelings - our emotions can be a resource

10. Bodies - being in our bodies, dancing, moving, or not moving if it is required

I love the ideas in here - and I definitely have my own feminist survival kit. Perhaps the most important ideas from Sara’s list for me is books, other killjoys (who hold us accountable, but also hold us up), feelings as resource, and being in the body (in my case, running - as I can’t dance to save my life!)

I have started to think about what a poetry survival kit might look like and there is so much cross over in terms of what would be in my kit. We need all the above to survive the bruises of the poetry world sometimes as well.

Some of the things I have in my poetry survival kit are:

1. My Filofax ( I would be lost without it and wouldn’t know what I was supposed to be doing

2. Beautiful notebooks – a notebook for admin, a notebook for creative work

3. Friends – friends that I can send work to, friends that I can dream up crazy projects with, friends that I can gossip with, and complain about things with.

4. Laptop – to type poems up!

5. Books – A library of books at home

6. A room of my own – I have this as a tattoo on my arm to remind me that a room of your own is something we hold inside ourselves, a space that only I can enter, but now I’m lucky enough to have a physical space as well.

7. Running – I try and run at least three times a week so I stop thinking

8. A note on my desk reminding me of my rate of pay – so I limit the times when I go round the country for £10 and a bag of crisps.

9. Feminist books – I need these for poetry as well – I need the writing of Sara Ahmed to make sense of the world I sometimes have to move through

10. My daughter – she helps me put everything in perspective.

What would your poetry survival kit look like? What would you include? I’d love it if you could share some ideas in the chat.

Photo by Oriol Pascual on Unsplash