Some People

Aside from the day job of writing this blog, I mean books, every week I teach a creative writing class to a group of teenage girls in a South London school. It's a joy, and a humbling one, as they are consistently brilliant, talented and surprising. Today we did an exercise that was so rewarding that I thought you might want to have a go. It's easy. Just read this poem and rewrite it thinking about what it is in your life that other people might not know. We were all in tears by the end of class. (I'd love to post the girls' amazing work here but for now I'm keeping everything they write confidential.) Thanks to Kate Clanchy for suggesting this poem, and to Rita Ann Higgins for being such an amazing poet (and apologies to her for changing the word 'cunt' to 'cow' for my class of 13-14 year olds):

SOME PEOPLE
By Rita Ann Higgins

Some people know what it is like
to be called a cunt in front of their children
to be short for the rent
to be short for the light
to be short for the school books
to wait in Community Welfare waiting rooms full of smoke
to wait two years to have a tooth looked at
to wait another two years to have a tooth out (same tooth)
to be half strangled by your varicose veins, but you’re 198th on the list
to talk into a banana on a jobsearch scheme
to talk into a banana on a jobsearch dream
to be out of work
to be out of money
to be out of fashion
to be out of friend
to be in for the Vincent de Paul man
(sorry, mammy isn’t in today she’s gone to Mars for the weekend)
to be in Puerto Rico for the blanket man
to be dead for the coal man
(sorry, mammy passed away in her sleep, overdose of coal in the teapot)
to be in hospital unconscious for the rent man (St Jude’s ward 4th floor)
to be second hand
to be second class
to be no class
to be looked down on
to be pissed on
to be shat on
and other people don’t.

The Other Woman

I don't like poetry. That's the official line. The vast majority of the time, I find it self-indulgent and boring to read. So why was I reduced to floods of tears by a poem in Kate Clanchy's recent collection 'Newborn'? Poetry, it turns out, is not pointless when it speaks directly to you.

Here is the poem in question.

The Other Woman

I am running to meet her,
now, the girl who lives on her own,
who has in her hand the key to her own
hallway, her own bare polished stair, who
is clacking down it now, in kitten heals, swearing,
who is marching over envelopes marked with a single name,
who is late, can be late, sleep late, forgets things,
who tonight has forgotten hat, gloves and
umbrella, who is running not caring
through luminous rain.
What shall we say?

Shall I slip off
my coat and order cold wine
and watch myself sip it through
the long row of optics, arching my back
on the velvet banquette? And pick up the wit,
the moue of the mouth as we pass jokes like olives?
And say the right thing and stand up for my round,
tapping the bar with a rolled-up twenty,
tipsy, self-conscious, a girl,
a vessel of secrets, so
carefully held in?

Or down just one glass
and see stars and the whole
room go smeary, have nothing to say
and say all the same - You don't understand.
What happens is someone slips from your side, someone
full-sized. Will she yawn, get her bag, start tucking
her fags in when I get out his photo,
say Look, look how he's grown,
all by himself, he has grown
to the size of my life?


Oh god, I just started crying again just copying that out.

This poem is so unbearably cruel. It is written from the point of view of the mother, but I am not a mother, and so that is not how I read it. I am 'The Other Woman' of the title. Running late to meet my married friend, my friend the mother, whose rich internal life is so beautifully chronicled in the rest of Clanchy's book. I don't have a rich internal life. I just have kitten heels and my own front door. I may look luminous but I am an object of pity. In another poem, Clanchy talks of a friend who is single: "I thought / of her last eggs / the womb staying empty, folded / like an evening purse". What is wit and wine against an empty, folded womb? And then the cruelest blow of all: I don't understand. When my friend shows me her baby photos, she is afraid I might yawn. She has moved on to another place, a place of total fulfillment - "he has grown / to the size of my life." My pleasures are as transient and meaningless as olives. In order to maintain our friendship, she must lie to me, "say the right thing", be " a girl, / a vessel of secrets, so / carefully held in." She is afraid that if she shows her true self, her friend will get her bag and leave, but she does not allow for her friend's empathy. You don't understand. Her friend is The Other Woman. Sexy. Selfish. A threat.

"You don't understand" says Clanchy, but I do understand. On the contrary, it is you who does not understand me. I am not bored of your baby. What breaks my heart is to see my friend sitting opposite me thinking that we have nothing in common - "what shall we say?" She thinks she knows me because she used to be me, but it is her own ambivalence about her lost self she sees reflected back at her. She has moved on, but the one thing she can never know is how it feels to be left behind. The mother in the poem, finding her friend wanting, has one drink and goes home to her baby. But the Other Woman, as with all Other Women, is glamorous but lonely. The mother has moved on to something, has grown a person to be her life. But the Other Woman has no life. Or no life that her friend can see.

The Other Woman a brilliant poem describing the divide which appears between single women and their friends with babies. What I would like to know is whether Clanchy believes that the divide is real or illusory. Fortunately I will have the chance to find out, because alongside historian Helen Rappaport, Kate Clanchy will be my guest at the Firestation Bookswap in Windsor this Thursday. Do join us.

Three Cheers For Carol Ann

I have never really seen the point of having a Poet Laureate, mainly because I don't like most poetry, which, like bad Gewurztraminer, tends to be over-floral and leaves me with a headache. The poetry Andrew Motion wrote while Laureate was awful, and I can't believe that it's the best of his work; in fact, I am sure it must be the worst, and it is only because I am put off by reading the poetry Andrew Motion wrote as Laureate that I can't bring myself to go and read more Andrew Motion to check.

A Poet Laureate, anyway, is a national poet who is supposed to write poems about national things. A sort of poet-in-residence for the whole of Britain. The very idea of it makes me cringe. Every time a member of the Royal Family has a baby, this person will be wheeled out to compose the official haiku which encapsulates what how we all feel about it. Something like:

Don't care don't care don't
care don't care don't care don't care
don't care just don't care.

A few months back, Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate, which I found an intriguing choice. I met her a few years ago and saw her perform; I remember her being lovely and down-to-earth, and I was so struck by her poem Valentine as to have never forgotten about it -

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Even so I wasn't convinced she would be able to withstand the horrors of having to compose the Official Someone Royal Has Reproduced poem every however often.

Today her first poem as Laureate was published. Of course, it was the Queen's official birthday this weekend, so no doubt she had taken the chance to pen a sickly ditty devoted to Her Maj. Right?

Perhaps not. Perhaps, like the rest of us, she has other things on her mind. Perhaps, for once, we actually have a Laureate worthy of the position, who is actually capable of speaking for the nation - or at least for me - in verse. Hurrah for Ms Duffy for making me believe in poetry again.

'Politics'

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

If...

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

So far so good.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Kipling obviously never had to take the Silverlink on a Sunday.

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

OK, I'll give him that. Hating and lies to be avoided.

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

What exactly is the correct level of good looks and wise talk? I tell you, I never look in the mirror in the morning and think hmm, better rough myself up a bit, I am just too foxy today. And even more rarely do I catch myself in the moment of speech and think oops, must remember to be more stupid in future.

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

That's just depressing

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

And that's insane. Can you imagine meeting the kind of person who treats triumph and disaster just the same? Can you imagine sitting next to them at dinner? Do we think this is Kipling taking his own advice and not talking too wise?

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

I see the point he's making but I am starting to think that Kipling doesn't have a particularly optimistic view of life.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

I wouldn't advise anyone trying this.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

I am increasingly thinking that Kipling needs a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

And not hang out on Comment is Free slagging off Max Gogarty

' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

Well that's the way to make friends, don't like anybody too much, don't care about what they say.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

and no sleeping

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

It is just as well I have never aspired to being a Man.