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

 

Herod

 

 

Herod

 

 

With Wikileaks in the headlines

you could say

the timing was perfect.

 

Three Iraqi profs in clown-suits

claimed they had intel

on a need-to-know-basis.

 

No one used the word coup

but it was clear what they meant.

 

Said they’d scoured satellites

to find me. Someone’s head

will roll for that, I laughed.

Not even a flicker.

 

I cut them a deal:

new Jeeps, immunity,

a map of the minefields

in return for his name.

 

We shook, nothing in writing,

everything clean.

 

How they twigged I honestly

can’t say. They didn’t look

like hackers, then who does?

 

Special forces, probably.

They were good, not a trace.

 

If they ever do go public

I will be waiting.

 

One thing I’ve learned,

if you can’t give the order

it’s time to get out.

 

 

Lifesaving Poems: John Logan's 'The Picnic'

 

 

If it is possible to identify one poem which acted as a kind of gateway for me into the world of poetry, that poem would probably be John Logan’s ‘The Picnic’. I encoountered it first in an English lesson at school.

 

Our third-form English teacher Mr Borton entered without speaking and with his back to us wrote at the top of the blackboard ‘DO NOT REMOVE BOOKS FROM THIS ROOM’, before turning round, smiling and beginning the lesson.

 

All we had to do was read the poem and then talk about it, but it changed me completely.

 

The poem is a narrative of two adolescent children walking across fields one school lunchtime to eat their packed lunches ‘away from the rest‘. The poem evokes perfectly the ‘soft caving in [the] stomach/as at the top the highest slide’ of giving and receiving a first kiss; and of the physical reactions to unexpected and barely articulated intimacy:

There was a word in my throat

with the feeling and I knew the first time

what it meant and I said, it's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

in my hand join the sound and word in hers

as in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

While the poem did not describe experiences I had actually had, it conjured palpably a world with which I was entirely familiar: that of school, lunch hours, fields, streams, games and a vague but undeniably real sense of longing for ‘something else’, of not wanting to conform, perhaps. 

 

You could say I connected with it.

 

Other important questions about this poem arose during the course of the lesson.  One was to do with the poem’s form, or what I would have then called the way it looked on the page.  Oddly, the poem was laid out in one continuous stanza.  Also, it did not rhyme, nor appear to have any regular rhythm.  Indeed, if anything, it sounded more like someone talking.  These were puzzling for several reasons.  While the ‘poetry’ I had experienced as a young child had largely been oral, I had not been made aware that printed poetry in books could attempt to replicate the rhythms of speech and appear to sound natural.  On one level, therefore, the poem did not conform to my early expectations of what a poem could look or sound like at all: I felt it was more of a story than a poem. 

 

On another level, however, I was more than intrigued because the poem was about experience I knew little about but was keen to discover.  Furthermore, while I felt that the poem was ‘like someone talking to me’ I also knew that lines like those quoted above were not the way that people spoke.  There was a sense that this was language which was both real and artificial at the same time.

 

I now identify these feelings as being to do with the interplay of concepts such as ‘form’ with ‘content’, or, ‘voice and feeling’ with ‘structure’. But at the time I felt a combination of intrigue and puzzlement.  To borrow another phrase from the poem, I now see that the poem enacted ‘talk in another way I wanted to know’.

 

Whenever I read or hear a poem I like for the first time I still feel that same caving as at the top of the highest slide. It is a kind of joyous nervousness. I want the poem to talk to me in a way I know and yet have no knowledge of. I am in the business of wanting to be surprised. I am already falling in love with the words taking shape in my throat and under my breath.  

 

 

 

 

The Picnic

 

 

It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring.

Ruth was third on my list of seven girls

But the first two were gone (Betty) or else

Had someone (Ellen has accepted Doug).

Indian Gully the last day of school;

Girls make the lunches for the boys too.

I wrote a note to Ruth in algebra class

Day before the test. She smiled, and nodded.

We left the cars and walked through the young corn

The shoots green as paint and the leaves like tongues

Trembling. Beyond the fence where we stood

Some wild strawberry flowered by an elm tree

And Jack in the pulpit was olive ripe.

A blackbird fled as I crossed, and showed

A spot of gold or red under its quick wing.

I held the wire for Ruth and watched the whip

Of her long, striped skirt as she followed.

Three freckles blossomed on her thin, white back

Underneath the loop where the blouse buttoned.

We went for our lunch away from the rest,

Stretched in the new grass, our heads close

Over unknown things wrapped up in wax papers.

Ruth tried for the same, I forgot what it was,

And our hands were together. She laughed,

And a breeze caught the edge of her little

Collar and the edge of her brown close hair 

That touched my cheek. I turned my face in-

to the gentle fall. I saw how sweet it smelled.

She didn't move her head or take her hand.

I felt a soft caving in my stomach

As at the top of the highest slide,

When I had been a child, but was not afraid,

And did not know why my eyes moved with wet

As I brushed her cheek with my lips and brushed

Her lips with my own lips. She said to me

Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,

Because she wasn't calling me, I think,

Or telling me. She used my name to

Talk in another way I wanted to know.

She laughed again and then she took he hand;

I gave her what we both had touched; can't

Remember what it was, and we ate the lunch.

Afterward we walked in the small, cool creek

Our shoes off, her skirt hitched, and she smiling,

My pants rolled, and then we climbed up the high

Side of Indian Gully and looked

Where we had been, our hands together again.

It was then some bright thing came in my eyes,

Starting at the back of them and flowing

Suddenly through my head and down my arms

And stomach and my bare legs that seemed not

To stop in feet, not to feel the red earth

Of the Gully, as though we hung in a

Touch of birds. There was a word in my throat

With the feeling and I said, It's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

In my hand join the sound and word in hers

As in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

We put back on our shoes and socks and we

Sat in the grass awhile, crosslegged, under

A blowing tree, not saying anything.

And Ruth played with shells she found in the creek,

As I watched. Her small wrist which was so sweet

To me turned by her breast and the shells dropped

Green, white, blue, easily into her lap,

Passing light through themselves. She gave the pale

Shells to me, and got up and touched her hips

With her light hands, and we walked down slowly

To play the school games with the others.

 

 

John Logan from Touchstones 5

 

Lifesaving Poems

 

Lifesaving Poems: Mandy Coe's 'Let's Celebrate'

I will forever be grateful to Emma Metcalfe from the Bath Festivals' Write Team for recommending to me Mandy Coe's wonderful book Clay, from which the poem below is taken.

I am slightly ashamed that I needed to be recommended the book in the first place, as Mandy is an old friend and colleague whose work I have always loved and admired. My excuse for not knowing about Clay is that in my slow recovery from treatment of cancer in 2007-08 I did not much feel like reading very much. I am not proud to admit that when news did reach me of books of friends I was content to let the opportunity of reading them pass by.

I was exhausted, physically and mentally. And I could not understand why I kept wanting to cry in public places.

Without overstating it, I do think that with a small number of other books of poems Clay is what got me reading poetry again. If you have not seen it, please check it out, you will not be sorry.

For one thing, Mandy does great titles. 'Sunflower Sex', anyone? 'Creationist Homework'? 'Sometimes it Occurs to me That I am Dead?'

For another thing, Mandy Coe is an original. No one looks at and writes about the world like she does. 'Stair-space is mysterious;/altering time and matter' she says in one poem ('You Only Notice Stairs During Strange Times'). In another poem a gecko 'pauses, receiving'. I love the minute attention to detail in that line, an almost Blakean sense of the divine in living things.

Everything in Mandy's world seems light. This is not to say she is not serious. I think everything Mandy writes is deadly serious, but wearing a grin and a cackle. Her project I think is to notice absolutely everything; not to do so, she seems to be saying, is not to live properly.

Which brings me to the perfect and devastating poem 'Let's Celebrate'. As I say, when I first read it I was still feeling my way into recovery and 'normal' life, including that of work. If I am honest I found it hard to believe that my diagnosis and treatment had happened to me. I could not believe that the world seemed to have gone on perfectly well without me contributing to it in any significant way other than to shuffle with my son backwards and forwards to his primary school. 

When I reached the end of the poem I actually felt winded. Few poems have the power both to acknowledge life in extremis while offering a vision of how it might be otherwise. I think Yeats called this a possession of both 'reality and justice'.

All I want to say to Mandy, and to her wonderful poem and book of poems, is thank you for noticing, and in noticing, giving me time to notice what is around me, even when 'nothing' is happening.

 

Let's Celebrate

 

the moments

where nothing happens.

The moments

that fill our lives.

Not the field bright with poppies, but

the times you walked, seeing

no leaves, no sky, only one foot

after another.

 

We are sleeping

(it's not midnight and 

there is no dream).

We enter a room - no one is in it.

We run a tap,

queue to buy a stamp.

 

These are the straw moments

that give substance 

to our astonishments;

moments the homesick dream of;

the bereaved, the diagnosed.

 

Many Coe, from Clay  (Shoestring Press)

Lifesaving Poems: Peter Sansom's K563

In my last blog post I wrote about the importance of following one's nose in terms of developing a taste in poetry. This is how I first came across the work of Peter Sansom. As I remember it was a piece by Ian MacMillan in Poetry Review, in which he compared Peter's work with that of Alan Jenkins, which sparked my interest in his work. In amongst talk of the TLS, The Northern School and The North, MacMillan spoke with both delicacy and power of the sensibility at work in Everything You've Heard is True, Peter's debut collection for Carcanet. His point was that however slight the poems appeared, there was a much more subtle and restless spirit at work than the easy-going surfaces of the poems gave lie to.

A week or two later I found myself with a half-hour to spare in a bookshop, fell in love with the book's cover, and snapped it up on spec having read the poem below. At the time I did not understand the references to the music and life of Mozart (the title of the book is the tag-line used on the posters for the film Amadeus), but this did not put me off feeling compelled by the delicious feeling of witnessing scenes from my own life flash in front of my eyes.

The poem is about the end of an affair, but as I have returned to it over the years I increasingly think it both fits with and prefigures many of the themes in Peter's subsequent work: the place and 'use' of art in everyday life, and the cost of making such artefacts (music, books, poems) in the lives of individuals and their families and loved ones. His third book, Point of Sale, is particularly interested in descriptions of 'the money coming in/[not] covering the bills', for example.

The poem's speaker appears not to have a choices: he can neither prevent himself from nodding off, nor the arrival of 'someone new'. The poem's energy is derived, it seems to me, from the tension set up by these descriptions which are in contrast with the choices the speaker is very explicitly active in presenting to us: 'the cat,/who will be staying, stalks a daytime moth'; the churchbells tolling exactly 'eleven'; the poppies' 'splash of colour'. The finish of the poem is indeed 'very civilized'. But what it seems to be doing, however, is questionning the work of the artist in noticing and articulating these details, as it were celebrating while cautioning its own artistry.

 

K563

 

As on most fine summer Sundays

we are breakfasting outside with our books.

This morning it is one of the Divertimenti

keeps the neighbours to themselves.

Now I can remember that man's name -Puchberg-

who funded Mozart when his wife was ill

              and the money coming in 

wasn't covering the bills.

This is Vienna in 1788 in sunlight.

 

What are we supposed to do?

I open a connversation about Mozart

and you look up from the Penguin biography.

               The sky is a Prussian blue

and our back-yard garden is lit with music.

 

We are not yet thirty, and our lives

                are just about to start.

There is someone new, but that

is not why you are leaving. The cat,

who will be staying, stalks a daytime moth;

two stray poppies add a splash of colour.

 

It is very civilised. We are parting like friends.

On the breeze the churchbell tolls eleven.

Coming so far he won't arrive till three,

but your cases are already packed in case.

I've not slept properly for days

and now I need to be awake I find I'm dozing.

                When the record finishes

it is the hairfine crack in a teacup, ticking,

or a clock, perhaps, loud and very exact.

 

Peter Sansom, from Everything You've Heard is True

Lifesaving Poems: Mark Robinson's 'Domestic Bliss'

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of getting back in touch with Mark Robinson, poet, author and former editor of the late and wonderful Scratch magazine.

Mark had written to say that he had noticed he was in my Lifesaving Poems list and that he was chuffed to be next to Keats. Here is why I love Mark's poetry and 'Domestic Bliss' in particular.

I chose 'Domestic Bliss' because it saved my life at a time that was incredibly exciting for me, around 1991. I had just rearranged my working life around reading and writing poetry, part of which process meant I had begun subscribing to a range of small press poetry magazines which were new to me. Scratch was one of these.

Also around this time I began running a writers and artists group called Bull, with my friend Luke Bretherton, in my kitchen in Brixton. For the price of a bottle of (usually very cheap red) wine friends of friends of friends could descend on our house and read/show/play their latest piece of work. As I say, all of this was new and exciting to me.

Up to this point I had written alone, in the dark and in secret. It had taken me a very long time to notice that no one knew my work because I was not showing it to anyone. Subscribing to magazines like Scratch and taking part in Bull were among the most the most formative experiences of my writing life, therefore. Suddenly I was in contact with people who cared about words and poems and metaphors in the same way I did. I realised I was not alone.

So I would send Mark my wry little poems about changing nappies and I would see his in Scratch and in other places like The North and The Wide Skirt. I liked them immediately because, as Kenneth Koch said about Frank O'Hara, there was nothing in them I did not like. There were references to the music of Mowtown and making curry, all shot through with a gentle cynicism which never overwhelmed the poems or threatened to become less than generous. 

I love 'Domestic Bliss' because it reminds me of that time and because it is a lovely domestic poem that achieves much more than it appears to do, all in the space of 16 lines (or a glass of blackcurrant wine). I do think you would have to be from Mars not to be able to relate to what it describes. On a personal note I want to say that 'The world is hard but worth it' is one of the great last lines of any poem, and I wish I had written it.

'Your smile leaps out from behind your teeth' is not far behind.

 

Domestic Bliss

 

The mess gets worse as the beautiful world

tries harder, expands on its original mistake -

something crass blurted out in a fluster -

making a mountain out of moleshit.

 

You and I aren't bothered. Too busy to 

beat the wolves back from the doorstep, too tired

to be pissed off at anything, tonight

the blackcurrant wine is dying our tongues

 

the colour of our hearts. We're saying what we mean,

for once, and it feels good, making plans

for the future as if there were no tomorrow.

Your smile leaps out from behind your teeth.

 

We can do whatever we want.

What we want to do right now is 

get sordid in front of the fire.

The world is hard but worth it.

 

Mark Robinson

from The Horse Burning Park (Stride)