Inbetween Days - poetry and writing exercises

I love this description of the days between Christmas and New Year. And yes, I’m Clare, and like Anthony Powell, I am working on the next book – in between writing blogs and running workshops. Last night, Kim and I ran our “Inbetween Times” workshop – our “thankyou” to paying subscribers and anyone who wanted a bit of company (plus at least one person who needed to escape from the family). I thought you might like to read a little of what we did.

I’m appreciating the foggy stillness of these days. But I know it’s a strange and aimless time for lots of people …. the “Post Christmas Hangover”. So I brought along this poem

Hangover as lasting as empire

by Maya Krishnan

I woke at an angle to myself,
mind swung out like a window
left off the latch. No matter –
let the dream-cat pad out,
having been lofted all night
in an imaginary tree, howling
for steady ground. ‘What are you?’
Caught – hoisted on the tusks
of a dinner party where history
pauses for a pinch of snuff; caught out
drinking port my ancestors partly bought;
hung up on something both mine and not.
Are you maximizing your investments
in cultural capital? Call now
to an empty room for water; get out
from the maze of sheets; out with it.
Out with the bedroom/bathroom border
and the hot-tap/cold-tap distinction;
out with the kitsch of my kin,
gods who peer from 50-rupee frames,
Durga muttering to Kali,
‘Who does she think she is?’
Nobody responds in their language,
so out with the tat of tradition;
out with incensed altars and sari fabrications.
The fight against identity theft begins at home.
‘Where’s home for you?’ The bottom of a bowl,
cold and smooth as the white of an eye
looking back as I kneel,
expecting to recover the rich
red of empire’s aftermath,
but instead I come back clear
as a wet diamond.

As a chronic migraineur, alcohol triggers horrible hangovers in me, so I absolutely empathised with the disconcerting and unexpected imagery and how it captures the bewildered wrongness of a hangover – the

“mind swung out like a window
left off the latch”

I loved how “the dream cat howling for steady ground” captures the restless, anxious nature of drunken sleep. And how the formless poem – no stanza breaks, no regular line length – means that we’re carried away on a tide of fragmented memories and painful existential questions, as well as the evocative practical – the tangled maze of sheets, the relief of the toilet bowl and good purging, a radio or television on in the background .

Although I don’t know Maya Krishnan and her work, I wan’t too surprised to find out she grew up in America – the poem has the fragmented, flowing looseness of lots of contemporary American poetry – it feels no obligation to cohere or to make sense – bur at the same, there is an organising principle and the poem, as a description of a hangover, hangs together, like a Christmas tree filled with madly varied decorations …

But as I approach the end of the poem, I remember that it’s also about empire, and that Maya Krishnan is a award-winning philosopher with particular interest in Kant, and identity, so I re-read the poem and now I see that empire runs through it … in the painful imagery – “hoisted on the tusks of a dinner party” … the borders, references to kin and ancestry and gods, the dizzying confusion of the poem and the mazes of identity and legacy – what are you? - the reference to blood and the violence of empire – and the sinister beauty of diamonds, which in India represent the conquest and dominance of the British Empire. And I wondered if the title is a bitter joke, is there any comfort in empire passing, or are we bewailing how the hangover lies to us and tells us it’s a long lasting as the effects of empire.

As well as appreciating the poem, we used it as a leaping off point for our own writing. Beginning with those repeated, declarative, performative statements of

Out with the bedroom/bathroom border
out with the kitsch of my kin,
so out with the tat of tradition;
out with incensed altars and sari fabrications,

we warmed up with our own “out with statements” – creating a group poem which ranged from “out with Trumpian politics” to “out with cheese”. Of course, it’s that range – the mixture of quotidian and profound, personal and universal, specific and abstract which makes a list poem like this.

1. I invite you to warm up with your own “Out with” list returning, at the start of each line, to the statement “Out with” and allowing the poem to cast its nets wide, over fridges, psychology, wardrobes and politics.

2. And for your next exercise …. This poem – like all poems, really - works by making one thing stand in for another: the hangover is like empire and vice versa. This simple device makes us think differently, think hard and deeper about both phenomena: it requires us to find a totally different way to think. I invite you, for ten minutes, to draw comparisons between two seemingly unrelated objects or phenomena, following, if you some need help, the following model and prompts.

A is as ___ as B .

for example -

A

Christmas/ Migraine/ Desire/ Sorrow/ Moss

is as

Lasting/ Fragile/ Precious/ Necessary/ Fierce

as B

Fire/ Family/ Food/ Christmas/ Speech

I’d love to see what you come up with, if you’d like to post it in comments. Don’t forget to credit Maya Krishnan with an “After Maya Krishnan” if you follow this model.

Throughout the month of January, we’ll be running workshops like this every morning from 10-11am at our January Writing Hours. We’ll share some of the Writing Hours poetry and exercises here, with extras for our paid subscribers – who, later today, will receive a bonus writing exercise based on the quotes from popular culture which Maya puts to such good effect. I’m looking forwards to seeing lots of you on January 1^st – wishing you all love, warmth and happy writing until then!