Their gift survives it all

the poetry of lost friends, with prompts and exercises

Happy New Year! It’s been a busy week, and we’re already on Day 5 of our January Writing Hours – the daily writing sessions which Kim and I deliver throughout January. It’s not too late to join us – or you could simply follow the exercises we’ll be posting here throughout January. Today, I’m reproducing the session I led this morning, and tomorrow, I’ll post the session I delivered on 3^rd, along with some extra material for our paying subscribers.

I think Kim and I are both quite taken aback by the number of participants attending our Writing Hours this year – and also by how close you can feel to 300 people when you write together in our workshops. Special thanks to all of the participants who paid the full price of £75 for the month. Your payment subsidised a lot of other people who could not otherwise afford to attend - we’ve given away over 100 free places this year to people who have no or low incomes.

Kim and I are also very grateful to our paying subscribers here, as we wouldn’t be able to do this without you. I’ll share some extra material and exercises just for you, as a special thanks.

from

In Memory of WB Yeats

by WH Auden

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

On January 3rd, I said that if you were only allowed to write about one thing for the rest of my life, then fruit wouldn’t be a bad choice. Similarly, I think that if you could only read one poet for the rest of my life, then you could do far worse than WH Auden.

This is a small section from his Eulogy for the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. For all of the poem’s skill and grandeur, “You were silly like us” is perhaps my favourite line. “Silly” is such a small and unexpected word – simultaneously dismissive and fond, it describes his attitude towards Yeats’ spiritualism, perhaps his politics, but it also feels intimate, and only gently critical. It’s not rose-tinted about Yeats the man, but it recognises the genius of his work. And for all the “poetry makes nothing happen” - this is a poem about poetry's ability to transcend, to exist on its own terms.

Exercise:

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” – how much political, cultural and psychological depth and insight is packed into that one tiny line! I’d like to to consider how the place you were born into or grew up either turned you towards, or away from, poetry – or the art form you most want to consider. Begin with the verb, and let it be the engine of your poem - did your town hurt you into poetry, or throw, or pull you away from, or hold your hand and walk with you into … and if so, how?

It’s thick snow here today, “the dead of winter”. The end of the year is a time for reflection, and a time for remembering all those people you've lost. This year, we lost Kathryn Bevis, who was a very dear friend of mine, so it's a proper pleasure to share this poem from her Seren collection, “The Butterfly House”.

Night-Time at the Aquarium

by Kathryn Bevis

and the keepers gone to their beds.

The tanks hum. I sleep on a glass

bridge. Sharks cruise beneath me

in a single, sinuous loop.

As they waltz, their gills grin, crescent

moons in the fluid dark. Tonight,

it’s the fire cardinals that drift

across my dream’s page, fins soft

as poppy petals, mouths kissing

the water, eager for shrimp.

Inside, bubbles rise in reverse

to the motes of dust that fell

in a shaft of sunlight that day

we first touched — lips, fingers,

skin — in the attic’s hush. Up here,

I hover and watch their bodies

blush as ours did. They are candles

lit from within. Swirling

their silk ballgowns,

they queue decorously

to watch me back. Their flanks

are fluted glass. Jewel anemones

pulse the spun sugar

of themselves, endlessly.

I’m never entirely sure of what this poem is about. Is it a dream, or an imagining? A memory? I guess that it’s something that drifts fluidly between all of these states, via an exquisite description of a first love, and a luminous evocation of how nighttime alters all contexts entirely.

The poem appears in the first half of Butterfly House, amongst poems like “Portrait of My Cancer As a Ring Tailed Lemur” and “My Body Files for Divorce”, published just two months before Kathryn’s death. I think this gives another reading to this poem, and to the that final image of the endlessly self-creating anemones ... which in reality, can live for up to 150 years. Kathryn was 49 when she died.

Exercise:

Imagine a real-life context you normally only encounter during the light – the Arndale, for example, or a school – and describe that place in the dead of night. You can visit it alone, or in company.

Kathryn died in May; in June I lost another close friend, Jackie Hagan. Jackie won the Jerwood Prize for poetry in 2018, which gave rise to brilliantly titled poem “Awards Ceremonies Are Full of People Who Think They Are Something”, which she sent me along with other poems like “Eleanor Rigby wears jogging bottoms, a salmon blouse and gets the No. 42” and “CTGF gene polymorphism, late stages” – the condition which she was diagnosed with just after her thirtieth birthday, and which ended her life at 43. Jackie was joyful and hilarious, chaotic and irreverent, loving and fierce, and an absolute genius who wrote for stage and for performance as well as for the page.

(apologies for the formatting of this poem - I’ve battled with it for ages and now I’m resigned to it. I think perhaps it’s Jackie, fooling around and telling me off for caring so much about stanza breaks).

as honest as tea

After a week of snow

a threadbare lady on my street

struggled with her bags in the dark

and I bounded like a puppy to help her

of course we bonded

she told me her stories;

intricate like snowflakes
warm as a kitchen that’s lived in.

Except we didn’t.

I offered to help and she drew herself in.

We stayed in the dark,
kept on trudging inch by inch

and both shrank a little.

The world’s a scary place

and I’m scared too.

When someone gives me a box -
I can’t shut my eyes and open my hands

anymore. The fairies went home

long ago.

And when you write me
on clear-as-day couldn’t be more simple A4 “I love you”
it’s hard to believe as happiness
and I think I’m being mugged.

I want to give you the trust I give tattooists

and bus drivers
but you know me better than they do.

When you praise me

I think you’re a spy sent here to check
I still feel guilty.
Love makes me look over my shoulder
I feel catholic again.

But I don’t want see the world

with fish-eyed suspicion.
I don’t want to leave boxes unopened
I want you to carry my bags

to tell me your stories,
intricate like snowflakes
warm as a kitchen that’s lived in.
Two people, simple as smiling,
as simple as people aren’t.

With Jackie’s trademark warmth and humour, this poem faces hardship head-one. It's beguilingly informal, but it features some ferocious powerful, concise imagery and emotional insight. It feels as though someone is chatting to you, but a heightened chat full of beauty, pain and intelligence.

Exercise

Think of a neighbour you’ve only ever observed in passing – and now imagine an encounter with them. Write into that encounter, its setting, its story, its lessons. You might like to experiment with Jackie’s style – writing in a conversational style, but with striking, possibly surreal imagery.

To make art out of something painful, uncertain or damaging is an act of real empowerment” wrote Kathryn Bevis, and that’s exactly what all these writers did. And David Gee, who died on 21^st December. He was an activist and writer and a very recent friend, whose special interest was hope in the face of crisis. You can find him on Hopes Work, where he provides a beautifully acceptable exploration of hope, and a robust but poetic framework for developing your own. As David faced his own death, he reflected:

“Then, that single cell does what all life tends towards: it divides, divides again, and proliferates. The prodigious talents of nature it carries within itself go rogue. Neither wilful nor mischievous, and certainly not malicious, the cell is still simply being itself, doing just what it was born to do, but now it enjoys dangerously free rein. The body has given birth to itself in a new way. It knows something is up but can’t find it. It now has a child in its midst and they’re hungry.

Such is the physiology of cancer, as well as I understand it. And such also is how cancer feels to me in my body. I have a child, a wild one, within me. Like all children, this one is a beautiful, ingenious, I’ll dare even to say divine expression of its parent, and at the same time it’s ineluctably also now its own person, surviving in its own way, becoming itself. Certainly, and this feels important, nothing unnatural is happening in me, which is why this disease is so hard to treat: how to tell apart the body and its child when their natures are almost identical? But its freewheeling ways bring havoc, and in the coming months my cancer child will bring an early end to its parent’s life”.

David’s work was in hope, and he offers us a robust scaffold for our own hope’s work. He suggests that you consider these “queries” – perhaps by taking them for a walk and mulling them over.

1. What are you living for?

2. What are you thankful for?

3. What is hard to face?

4. What do you need?

5. What now? What one thing do you do now that you can keep doing? What one thing do you need to do differently?

That’s hope’s work!

Exercise:

So, the final exercise is writing into one of these queries, just as David instructs us. What are you living for? Consider - what do you love? Whom do you love? If you can, keep going — get to thirty things you love. Now ask, what do they have in common?

Finally, I want to finish with a letter from David, who told me in one of the very few chats I was lucky enough to have with him, that his experience of oncology was an experience of being held in care and love. I hear such echoes of Kathryn there, and Jackie’s voracious appetite for life and love. And I think of Auden talking about the gift which survives everything - the way of happening which won’t ever leave us - and how, when it happens in a room with 300 people writing in silence, it can’t help but feel like hope, like love.

Dear [redacted]

I’m writing to thank your team for their care during my week or so on the John Radcliffe cardiology ward. I was in a rather bad way and I felt held, as I needed to be.

I’m told I can nominate a nurse for a Daisy Award. Imogen, who’s only just started nursing, looked after me the most and has all the makings of an accomplished nurse – mostly good attention, which I felt as care. And yet I can’t single a person out. I remember the nursing assistants Jan and Marcos helping me in the shower, too, allowing me my slowness and telling me their stories (hope all goes well on your coming wedding, Jan!). Felipo, who tied my hospital gown behind my back for me to my preference before bed with the devotion of a Jermyn St tailor. Heidi in the night as a bustling picture of by-the-book efficiency who brought the jug of water but also took the time to pour me a glass before she swept out again. The cleaning man whose brushes whispered in the door very early to clean my toilet in complete silence so as not to wake me. And the morning tea lady with just a few words of English whose answer to no-matter-what question is always ‘OK-OK’, who would wave across the little yard to me from behind the closed windows.

I could go on. I remember details of every one of you. You’ve taught me how it takes many different personalities, or daisies if you like, to care well in common. It takes the whole sunny field of you.

All that week, the news showed our ailing, beautiful world on a stormy turn. The desire to care about – and for – the life around us, get pushed further away. So, your caring work matters to more than me personally, I feel sure. More and more, it matters for the world. Please know that you fill me with hope for its future. And please keep going.

My abiding gratitude,

David Gee