Is February the new January?

By Kim Moore

A few years ago I came up with the idea of January Writing Hours as a way of dispelling the gloom of what is officially (in Kim’s world) the Worst Month of The Year. It’s grey, it’s gloomy, the excitement of Christmas is over, it’s dark afternoons and darker mornings. It’s the pressure of new year’s resolutions and the performativity of happiness because an arbitrary period of time has started, or finished. Clare was daft enough to agree it was an excellent idea - I can always count on Clare to think that projects that involve ridiculous amounts of stamina and energy are a Good Idea.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that now February is the new January, and perhaps it has to be the way that there is always a month that is tiresome and tiring, that drags on with its darkness and its frost and its cold.

I don’t know what it is about me that likes doing projects that have this air of a marathon about them. January Writing Hours. 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence (you can read more about this project from last year on previous substack posts). That they are feats of endurance is part of the attraction, almost as if nothing is worth doing unless it wears you out, or drains you completely, so that you can fill yourself up with something completely new afterwards.

For those of you who somehow managed to escape the madness of January Writing Hours, every morning Clare Shaw and I run a Writing Hour from 10am to 11am. And now January has completely transformed for me now from a month that I dreaded to a month I actually look forward to. Meeting with between 250 and 300 people every morning at 10am throughout January has been a joy. Now January is the time I go back to my bookshelves, when I start to read as a writer again, finding poems that illuminate some part of this mysterious journey of being a writer, or finding poems that change me somehow and offering them to the community of people that gathers online.

I found friendship difficult when I was younger. I was badly bullied at school - sometimes I tell the story of the teacher who gave me and my sister a lift back home for a few weeks because the school couldn’t guarantee we would get home safely, or the story of my friend who got beat up by a gang of girls, and how her boyfriend put his arm round her to protect her and he got beat up by a gang of boys, of how I stood there, kind of frozen, not daring to move, not knowing what to do, how I remember the complete and utter shame of that, that I didn’t jump in because I knew I’d be beaten up in turn, how I took two steps forward and then two steps back, over and over again, until the beating itself was over.

Afterwards I promised myself I wouldn’t be the type of person who stood by again whilst somebody else was hit. I was very hard on myself. Now I look back on my thirteen year old self with sadness and empathy and tell her she was doing the best she could, in the place I lived in which and a school system I survived in which was threaded and washed through with violence.

It has taken me a lifetime to learn friendship, to learn how to be a good one, or at least to stand in the foothills of friendship, and give energy and time and commitment to it, to even recognise it as a landscape I can move purposefully in, instead of hoping that it happens to me. January is important to me for that too, because it is now the month where I see Clare every day, one of my favourite people in the world. January is the month where I’m guaranteed to laugh every day, to sometimes feel as if I will fold in half laughing. January is the month where Clare walks into my house and makes themselves a cup of tea without asking, or raid the cupboard where the crisps are, help themselves to an orange etc etc etc.

And it’s the month where I see the January Writing Hours community, a family of strangers who chat away as if they’ve known each other all their lives, who make me laugh out loud most days. Their faces pop up on the screen and there are moments during this fourth year of Writing Hours when it is still like the first during Covid, when we couldn’t meet and that first blossoming of faces on the screen looked like flowers.

Clare has been asking me since last Friday to do a substack, and I spent the weekend falsely promising that I would. I may have been a little bit distracted and over-excited, and a bit giddy on Monday for our weekly writing day, and this was Clare’s response to my fidgeting…

Clare has swanned off to the Lake District now and I’m under strict instructions to write another Substack post before they get back. When I say Clare has swanned off, what I really mean is that they have very sensibly booked themselves a few days away in the Lakes to reset after the mammoth month we have just had. I’ve been talking about doing this for *checks notes* about two months now and not actually doing it. It’s not that I don’t want to have a lovely holiday, it’s just that the act of organising it feels too much. And it’s also not that I don’t want to write to you all. It’s just that I’m very tired, and if I had to draw myself, I would draw a massive pile of paper, which is my marking and just my head sticking out, and perhaps one arm.

We talked during the January Writing Hours about feeding the lake of poetry, which is something that Maya C.Popa writes about in her wonderful substack Poetry Today. It’s something that I talk to my students about all the time. The lake is of course ourselves and we are part of it and we have to feed ourselves by reading and writing. But the lake is also each other, and we can share each other’s work and talk about it and shine lights onto poetry and poets and it doesn’t cost us anything, apart from a little bit of time. This doesn’t have to be a long substack post of course - it could just be a message or an email, or just talking to a poet at a reading, telling them what you liked about their work.

So this is part of my feeding the lake, and partly escaping from marking as well by sharing a poem that I showed people during the January Writing Hours. It’s a poem called “Rowing” by Rosie Jackson from her collection Love Leans Over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). I was lucky enough to mentor Rosie a few years ago and she sent me a copy of the collection when it came out.

During the January Writing Hours I shared this poem towards the end of one of the sessions, but it was a bit rushed and I was sad that I didn’t have time to talk about it a little more. So with Rosie’s permission, I thought I’d share it with you all here, and talk a little bit about why I like it.

I think it’s one of my favourite poems in the book and I think it also encapsulates what Rosie is so good at, which is creating a poetic resting place where the physical, spiritual and emotional can all meet each other. If this poem was in a family of poems, it feels as if it belongs to the family of poems that another one of my favourite poems belongs to “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” by Wallace Stevens. There is that same strange rush of immediacy and peace to both of these poems for me, the same heady rush of restless searching and utter stillness.

I love the way into this poem as well - the ‘Here you are’. Who is the you? Is it us? Is it the poet? Is it the speaker of the poem? I know it’s not me because I’m not ‘near the edge of the world, rowing /across a vast lake’. Or am I? Perhaps this is why I feel so tired, so discombobulated, so unequal to the task of writing a Substack post, that is until I climb into the boat of this poem, and take myself back into language.

As I read this poem, I find the boundary between myself and the speaker in the poem suddenly becoming porous and I feel as if the poem is addressing me. When I read “You are tired of having / to re-invent yourself” I think of the wonderful Rilke poem and the shock of that poem in the last line, when the poem turns its face towards us and says “You must change your life”.

This is a poem filled with wisdom, and I love some of the line breaks here. In stanza 4, the second line we get “You rest the oars of your boat. You are weary of acting”. What a brilliant line break. You are weary of acting. Acting as pretending? Acting in the sense of constantly doing? We find out in the next line what the poem wants us to know but for the time of that line break all of those possibilities are present. It continues “You are weary of acting / out of fear. If the bird of night comes, let it come.”

I love how in stanza five the world is reversed with the line ‘the water beneath you the depth of several trees”. What is down is measured by what grows upwards. And then this is followed by that direct question - to the self, or to the reader, perhaps to both: “How long is it since you did this, sat in a boat / and studied the textures of darkness?” How long is it since I stopped and looked around, and caught my breath? Do I need to go to the edge of the world to do it? I hope not.

And then we reach that final, beautifully poised stanza with its last line. The sky closing like an eyelid, the poem closing like an eye that has seen me, seen the reader and now lets us go.

If you would like to order Rosie Jackson’s book and get a signed copy, you can email her at rosie@rosiejackson.org.uk and she will organise that for you.

Thankyou again to everyone who subscribes to this Substack. It’s lovely to know you are out there, and a special thankyou to those who pay for a subscription. It means we can justify setting time aside to write things like this, to keep ‘feeding the lake’, and to keep swimming in it, despite admin, despite marking, despite tiredness. I will leave you with Rosie’s poem, and I might see you there if you read it, near the edge of the world.

ROWING
ROSIE JACKSON

Here you are, near the edge of the world, rowing 
across a vast lake. You thought you knew the water, 
but now the sun sets earlier, the distance seems blacker

and your courage has shrunk. You are tired of having 
to re-invent yourself. Some things, you think, you should
be able to take for granted: that place you imagine 

most people start from, the block of love they push
against to start sprinting. It astonishes you so much 
of your life has worked – marriage, family, friends – 

as if they found something in you that you didn’t. 
You rest the oars of your boat. You are weary of acting 
out of fear. If the bird of night comes, let it come. 

The air is still. In woods at the edge of the lake, 
owls call. To your surprise, you like it here, 
the water beneath you the depth of several trees. 

How long is it since you did this, sat in a boat 
and studied the textures of darkness? 
You feel you have rowed into the centre of a tear.

You remember the Sufi saying that God sees
a black ant on a black stone in the darkest night. 
The sky closes over you like an eyelid.