If I could learn to measure my worth by the people I am friends with, by the people who love me or loved me, I think I would, in general, feel a lot better about myself. After a difficult, and at times traumatic week for reasons I can’t go into here, I wanted to share something that a friend did for me that felt like an act of love.
Above is some audio - me reading a poem from my second collection All The Men I Never Married, accompanied by Dave Boraston. I think all books have seeds, from which other poems and the collection as a whole springs out of, and this is that poem for me. It was one of the first poems I wrote for the collection. I wrote it not long after I’d finished my first collection, when I was in despair because I hadn’t been writing. I wrote it as a kind of joke, a list of all the terrible men I’d been out with, and some of the wonderful ones too.
I wrote it whilst I was in Amsterdam at a poetry festival. I was the only poet at the festival reading in English, but I ended up going to a lot of the readings, though I couldn’t understand a word of Dutch. There was something about listening to language as if it was music that made it easy to write. I scribbled this poem in my notebook as I sat at the back of the poetry reading.
And then the book grew out of it, and the idea of female desire and sexism became intertwined together.
I met Dave Boraston at Leeds College of Music. I was in my first year of a music degree. Dave was a postgraduate student. Although our relationship changed from those early days of being students, I know I’ll always love him. I think we’ll always be friends, we’ll always know each other.
Dave asked me to send him a recording of myself reading a poem so he could put some music to it, and this is what he sent back to me. Dave wrote the music, arranged it, and played all the parts. He now works in London as a professional trumpet player, playing trumpet with The Stone Foundation.
When I listened to it the first time, it made me cry. It still makes me cry now. Of course as a trumpet player, I’m going to say the trumpet is the closest instrument to a poem, but if a poem is a time travelling machine, the trumpet feels like an instrument that transcends time. We put our breath into it, and we can call back across the years.
All the Men I Never Married No 1