Lifesaving Poems: Sharon Olds's 'Looking at Them Asleep'

I found this poem in a collection of poems called The Matter of This World in a second hand bookshop next to Berwick on Tweed station. It was pretty much falling apart at the seams then, and has completley disintegrated now. I still have it. It may be one of my favourite books of all time.

The first British publication of poems by Sharon Olds, it reminds me of a very particular time in my life, that of looking after and administering to the needs of my two young children. Parallel to this era, but not separated from it, was another kind of enterprise altogether, that of reading and writing as much poetry as possible.

I am not really sure if you can ever replicate the sheer hunger, obsession, desire and compulsion of your first serial encounters with poetry, at the point when you know you need it to breathe and make sense of who you are as much as you do food and a roof over your head.

The closest thing I can compare it to is the love -animal, pre-verbal- that consumes you if and when you first have children. You tiptoe into their rooms at night, just to check that they are still breathing. Sometimes you wake them up, just in case. It is just like tinkering with a poem, getting up early or staying up late to delete just one more adjective, or comma, in case you get hit by a bus on your way to work the following morning only for the world to laugh at your incomplete and amateur work.

Nothing prepares you for it and nothing comes close to taking over your life in the same way again, not even illness or death. It is not a choice, finally, like falling in love. It is beyond that, existing somewhere in and outside of ourselves 'deep in unconsciousness' and 'anxious and crystally in all this darkness'.

 

Looking at Them Asleep

 

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss the children,

I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,

her face deep in unconsciousness – so

deeply centred she is in her dark self,

her mouth slightly puffed like one sated

but slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,

her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the

iris around to face the back of her head,

they eyeball marble-naked under that

thick satisfied desiring lid,

she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion

and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,

one knee up as if he is climbing

sharp stairs up into the night,

and under his thin quivering eyelids you

know his eyes are wide open and

staring and glazed, the blue in them so

anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his

mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb

and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled

and pale, his long fingers curved,

his hand open, and in the center of each hand

the dry dirty boyish palm

resting like a cookie. I look at him in his

quest, the thin muscles of his arms

passionate and tense, I look at her with her

face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,

content, content – and I know if I wake her she’ll

smile and turn her face toward me though

half asleep and open her eyes and I

know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit

up and stare about him in the blue

unrecognition, oh my Lord how I

know these two. When love comes to me and says

What do you know, I say, This girl, this boy.

 

 

Sharon Olds from The Matter of This World

Lifesaving Poems

 

Lifesaving Poems: Julia Darling's 'Chemotherapy' vs 'Psalm 102'

I was astonished to find in an old diary today that by 8 March 2006, less than one month after I was diagnosed with cancer, I had already been given two infusions of chemotherapy. The speed of the cycles of my particular treatment was due to my successful volunteering to take part in a randomised control trial testing the efficacy of a cycle of 14 days against 21 days, or, in the jargon, 'CHOP-R 14 vs 21'.

It is odd what you remember. The twenty tiny cherry-red pills I had to swallow with milk during for five days after each infusion. (These were steroids. They were deeply un-fun, let me tell you). The Piriton chaser injection just ahead of the main infusion, 'to send you away with the fairies, my lover', as one nurse put it. She wasn't wrong. 

Most of all I remember the swathes of bright blue clothing every nurse had to wrap themselves in each time they began the course of injections. When I asked why this was necessary I was told it was because the chemicals were so poisonous they would burn through ordinary clothing if spilt. 'And to clean it up we would have to shut the whole ward down. For a day.'

Mostly I looked forward to being away with the fairies.

I had come across Julia Darling's marvellous poem 'Chemotherapy' nearly a year before I fully understood what she was talking about. There is not much I need to add to it, except to say I think 'the smallest things are gifts' sums up for me the entire universe of pain, gratitude, suffering, relief, anxiety and humour which the word 'cancer' registers in me.

Chemotherapy

 

I did not imagine being bald

at forty four. I didn’t have a plan.

Perhaps a scar or two from growing old,

hot flushes. I’d sit fluttering a fan.

 

But I am bald, and hardly ever walk

by day, I’m the invalid of these rooms.

stirring soups, awake in the half dark,

not answering the phone when it rings.

 

I never thought that life could get this small,

that I would care so much about a cup,

the taste of tea, the texture of a shawl,

and whether or not I should get up.

 

I’m not unhappy. I have learnt to drift

and sip. The smallest things are gifts.

 

from Sudden Collapses in Public Places  (Arc, 2003)

 

 

I did not come across Psalm 102 ('A prayer of an afflicted man. When he is faint and pours out his lament before the Lord') until some after my treatment had ended. Again, I do not think it needs much explication. My first reaction to it was -how did the psalmist know how to describe the bodily reaction to chemotherapy thousands of years before it was invented? 

 

Psalm 102

 

Hear my prayer, O Lord;

            let my cry for help come to you.

Do not hide your face from me

            when I am in distress.

Turn your ear to me;

            when I call, answer me quickly.

 

For my days vanish like smoke;

            my bones burn like glowing embers.

My heart is blighted and withered like grass;

            I forget to eat my food.

Because of my loud groaning

            I am reduced to skin and bones.

I am like a desert owl,

like an owl among the ruins.

I lie awake; I have become

            like a bird alone on a housetop.

 

(1-7)

 

Lifesaving Poems

Thomas Lux's 'The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently'

To celebrate World Book Day last week I read the poem below, by Thomas Lux, to my students. I was put in mind of it by a recent and ongoing discussion thread on this blog, under a post I wrote in November 2010 called The Politics of Reading.

It reminds me of the complexity and layeredness of reading as a skill and as a composite of attitudes and learned behaviours and history.

As Seamus Heaney says in his essay The Government of the Tongue '[the poem] does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, 'Now a solution will take place', it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves' (The Governement of the Tongue, p.108).

 

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently

 

is not silent, it is a speaking-

out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,

a voice is saying it

as you read. It's the writer's words, 

of course, in a literary sense

his or her voice, but the sound

of that voice is the sound of your voice.

Not the sound your friends know

or the sound of a tape played back

but your voice

caught in the dark cathedral

of your skull, your voice heard 

by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts

and what you know by feeling,

having felt. It is your voice

saying, for example, the word barn

that the writer wrote

but the barn you say

is a barn you know or knew. The voice

in your head, speaking as you read,

never says anything neutrally - some people 

hated the barn they knew,

some people love the barn they know

so you hear the word loaded

and a sensory constellation

is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,

hayloft, black heat tape wrapping

a water pipe, a slippery

spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,

the bony, filthy haunches of cows...

And barn is only a noun -no verb 

or subject has entered the sentence yet!

The voice you hear when you read to yourself 

is the clearest voice: you speak it

speaking to you.

 

Thomas Lux from New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (Mariner Books)

 

 

What are the four types of creativity? - By Eric BarjBarking up the wrong tree

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Creativity, Confidence and Challenge: The Write Team Research Report

 

‘I’ve learnt to be more confident with my ideas, because sometimes you have an idea that you just sort of hide away, because you think no one will like it, but this has taught me that even if no one likes it, you won’t know till you’ve asked.’ 

Write Team pupil

Write Team Project Manager Emma Metcalfe Writes:

 

The Write Team was a creative writing project designed to develop pupil confidence and engagement in their learning. The project, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation brought together an arts organisation, local authority and schools to share experience and skills, in the support of those pupils who ‘play truant in the mind’.

(Collins. J (1998) Playing Truant in the Mind: the social exclusion of quiet pupils. BERA).The project aimed to engage pupils ‘who keep a low profile; invisible pupils who are quiet and undemanding’ (‘Keeping Up’, DfES, 2007). The project provided a weekly programme of creative writing workshops led by the Project Coordinator and developed by writers to engage pupils, develop their confidence, and readiness to write. The Write Team lead teachers attended these weekly workshops, and used reflective diaries to record both their own creative writing and thoughts on writing and impact of the teaching of writing. 

Eleven schools took part, eager to use the project to address the ‘guilt that the majority of teachers have about those pupils whose name they still do not know in the fourth week of term’ (Write Team lead teacher) and five of these schools took part in the project for more than one year.  In a local authority with high achieving schools, this project focused on a key area for the Local Authority School Improvement Team, namely how to support pupils who were not achieving their potential.

The programme of weekly workshops were developed into schemes of work by professional writers: poets, novelists, sports writers and dramatists. The aim of the scheme of work was to provide creative activities for the pupils to enjoy and activities that the teachers could incorporate into their teaching practice and share with colleagues. A writer also visited each school every term to work with the Write Team pupils and lead teachers who, by the time the writers arrived, were already accustomed to creative writing.

 

 

‘I have been more confident with my work. (Now) I say my ideas even if they might not be right’.

Write Team pupil

 

Key Findings

• In Year 1 - 86% of pupils made a link between a change in their perception

of themselves (e.g. ‘improving’, ‘getting better’, ‘more enjoyment’, ‘better at

learning’, using ‘before and after’ statements) and participation in Write

Team activities .

• In Year 2 - 70% of comments made by pupils made a link between a change

in their perception of themselves (e.g. ‘improving’, ‘getting better’, ‘more

enjoyment’, ‘better at learning’, using ‘before and after’ statements) and

participation in Write Team activities.

• In Year 2 - 87% of comments by teachers about their pupils made a

link between increase in confidence and engagement with learning to

participation in Write Team activities.

 

You can download the Write Team research report on the Write Team link at at the top of this page, or by visiting the Write Team website here.

What I have learned about cancer

 

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of my diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (NHL), an aggressive cancer of the lymphatic system. I was told I was in remission from this disease in October 2006.

Here is what I have learned about cancer since my diagnosis.

1. As a culture we still prefer to use war metaphor when we talk about cancer. Witness all the tributes to the plucky 'battles' of celebrities and 'fighting' the disease, nearly always in the past tense, as though we are World War II Sptifire pilots dashing off to our planes to give Jerry hell.

2. My attitude to cancer is still partly superstitious. When I was dignosed with NHL I assumed, irrationally, that I had used up all of the bad luck of my friends and family. I was wrong. Since I entered remission three good friends and one family member have been diagnosed with cancer, one of whom has died. If your life has not yet been touched by cancer the chances are it will be. There is no way you can prepare for this.

3. Eventually your friends, family and colleagues will stop using the word 'cancer' around you. Eventually you will follow them. I promised myself this would never happen but now surprise myself by referring to my cancer as 'when I was poorly' or 'when I was ill'. When you meet friends you have not seen in a long time they ask how you are with fierce concern in their eyes. But they do not use the word 'cancer'.

4. I am not angry that I had cancer, though I understandand that many people do not share this attitude. The closest to anger I get is when I reflect that my being ill forced my children to grow up more quickly than they would perhaps have done otherwise. There is no way of knowing if this statement is true. So much of what we say about cancer is not empirical, though we pretend it is.

5. You find out who you friends are when you are diagnosed with cancer. These are the people who show up, offer lifts and leave tins of brownies on your doorstep. The people who write, the people who make CDs. And those who, six years later, still say 'How are you?' or 'Tell me how you are.'

6. Once cancer touches your life you are never done with it. From the overheard plotlines of soap opera characters to the death and relapse of close friends, cancer is never far away.

5. Even if you have surivived cancer you do not think about it all of the time. You compartmentalise; and, as Buddhists say, you  practise acceptance.

7. When you are told you are in remission from cancer you do not feel like celebrating. Not one of my friends or aquaintances has held a party on being given this news. Personally speaking I am no nearer to cracking open the champagne even six years after my original diagnosis. My gratitude at still being alive is deeply felt, closely matched by my relief. Neither of these emotions approximates to a celebration.

 

On waiting to be diagnosed with cancer

Six years ago I began writing the journal which has become my forthcoming memoir of my experience of cancer. It is called Love for Now and will be published by Impress Books in September.

By this time in February, 2006 I had been in hospital three times, had had two ultrasound scans on different parts of my body, plus a CT scan. As I left the Radiography department after the latter I was informed that it would take two weeks to learn of the results. Twenty four hours later the phone rang. It was my GP, inviting me to see him that morning.

A day afterwards I underwent a biopsy under X-ray conditions. The pain I had woken up with on New Year's Day was on my side but the so-called 'abonormality' in my body could only be reached through my back. I was told it would take two weeks to find out my results, but that if I wanted to I could ring them on Friday afternoon in case they got them done before the weekend.

'At what point did you know?' my friends asked me, when I told them the news of my formal diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The truth is I knew when I went to see my GP. That was the first time the possibility of Lymphoma was discussed. But it was not his use of the word (I only knew it meant 'bad') which frightened me, it was his eyes, a tiny flicker, not of doubt, but recognition.

Looking back at it now I think I knew even earlier in the process. It was another man's eyes, the radiographer who conducted my first ultrasound scan, which alerted me to the seriousness of my situation.

Long before he used the word 'abnormality' I saw them darting backwards and forwards with a kind of rapt wonderment in front of the screen (which I could not see) as his hand pushed the sensor around, not on my side, where I hurt, but on the lower right of my tummy, which felt fine.

Signed off temporarily from work so I could undergo these tests, I absolutely knew I would not be returning for a long time. Friends and colleagues, none of them doctors, reassured me with the mantra that it was 'probably nothing' and that the mass inside me was most likely a polyp, filled with liquid. 

The friends I looked forward speaking to the most were those who gave me advice in the forms of specific questions to ask or actions I could take, the best of which was to invest in a box-set of the American sitcom of my choice ASAP.

 

Tumour

 

You gave me time to notice –

apple blossom, hand movements,

the light taking leave of rooms.

I would like to claim

new attention to my children

but the truth is they grew up

whether I watched them or not.

Mostly I slept.

You began in midsummer.

It took till February to find you.

By then all I knew were symptoms:

insomnia, night sweats, a cough I could not shake off.

Because of you I revisited old Lps –

I did not want to die

not having fried onions to Grover,

made bubbles to This Mortal Coil.

The script writers of Frasier

helped me recover from you,

plus condensed milk and broccoli –

though not at the same time.

Eventually I drank coffee again.

You reacquainted me with my guilt –

the way I glared at S

after she’d poured out her heart

in the autumn of endless nights

with nothing but the wind for company.

I chose songs, having you,

and invented ceremonies by rivers.

(But I found no poetry in you.)

 

You saved me from talking about house prices.

You obliterated my craving for alcohol.

I would say I am grateful

but am not ready for that, just yet.

 

 

from Riddance (Worple Press, 2012)