13 ways of looking at Monday
or how starting a poetry club changed my life
Every Monday morning, I’m going to give you a poem, whether you want one or not. It’s one of the reasons I started Juvenescence. A simple notion but there it is. I have no idea who you are but I know you deserve one. A poem doesn’t who you are or what you’ve done.
Not a poem by me, but a previously published one, by an actual poet. Or maybe unpublished one, if I come across one I like. (I’m not a poetry editor, but I’m open to submissions. Fire away.)
The point is: An offering. An artful arrangement of words to start your week. I shall endeavour to be consistent. (Speaking of consistency, if you haven’t yet subscribed, here’s your obligatory reminder. Button below. Please do press it. Free or ideally paid, it’s cheap, etc. etc.)
Before I get to this week’s poem, I’ll explain why I’m doing this. (If you’re in a mad rush, scroll down, the poem is pasted below.) To be precise I want to explain why I believe reading, absorbing, thinking about and discussing poetry, ideally social setting, is not just integral to good writing but to living a more fully considered and pleasurable life, no matter who you are.
A few years back my friend Aida and I started a poetry club. The idea was simple. It’s explained in the first email I set it out:
Dear everyone,
If you're receiving this you've agreed to join a poetry club. Incredibly nerdy, I know, but it's time to live our truth.
The concept: Simple and (crucially) ultra-low time commitment. One Thursday a month during term time, a group of likeminded people who are interested in stories, language and writing, to meet up to discuss a couple of poems, which we've read over wine and snacks.
The format: We take turns picking poems. Probably no more than two or three per meeting.
Why it will be fun and not annoying: Unlike book clubs where you end up being forced to read a Jodi Picoult* novel recommended by your friend's cousin Libby, this is a poetry club for people who already read books and are genuinely interested in language and writing.
(Please note: You will not, at any point, be required to write poetry, though if you want to knock yourself out.)
In a way it's meant to be a writing group where you don't actually have to write. If we agree that good writing is mostly about rhythm, cadence, word-choice and sound (i.e. the mechanics of poetry) why do we read so little of it and even more rarely discuss it? I'm speaking for myself here, perhaps you read poetry all the time in which case now you can read more.
So let's embarrass ourselves to death and talk poems together, shall we?
Like fight club, poetry club has only three rules: 1) that all members should live in or around North London, for convenience sake 2) that it should require absolutely no homework, so if a member turns up on the night having not having read any of the poems it’s fine because they’ll be read aloud anyway, 3) that the primary objective of the club will be reading and discussing poetry. Meaning it should not evolve into a competitive cooking club or some kind of literary networking salon posing as a poetry club, or just become an excuse for a bunch of likeminded women to get a bit squiffy and chat, which in my experience sometimes happens with successful, long-running book clubs (and is of course perfectly fine, it’s just not the purpose of this club).
When poetry club began it was seven or eight of us. By accident rather than design we were (and remain) a group of female, creative types. Aida and I asked a few friends, then some of those friends asked some of their friends. There was no initiation process or membership criteria or pressure to turn up, it’s absolutely not exclusive but nor is it all comers (in London, that would be dangerous). Attendance usually hovers somewhere around six to eight. In the beginning it included a dramatist, a leader (editorial) writer on a broadsheet newspaper, a TV executive, a screenwriter, a novelist, a biographer and English teacher, plus two journalist/authors in me and Aida (who’s book, The Wife’s Tale, is amazing by the way, you should check it out).
Inexplicably, it worked. Over three years later poetry club is still going strong. If I had to guess why, I’d say a key element was dumb luck, by which I mean alchemy — that magical cohesion that can occasionally occur in randomly assembled groups. But mostly I think it worked because of the poetry.
The first meeting at my house in Kensal Rise started off like typical North London dinner party. Lots of wine and olives, hummus and crisps and smack talk about the Tories. As we edged toward to the takeaway portion of the evening there were flurries of nervous laughter and an abundance of self-deprecatory jokes. The tension mounted until it became as excruciating as the embarrassing silence (I imagine) takes place before the kick off to a suburban orgy, except in this case it was worse, because we were middle-aged women horny for poetry. Could there possibly be anything more lame? More precious? It was awful. We were like a poe-faced, collective version of Bougie London literary woman (a viral anonymous semi-fictional Twitter account, popular at the time, about a woman who bakes sourdough and is a devotional worshiper at the House of LRB). As the night wore on I became deadly, silently certain that it wasn’t going to work. A whole club centred around poetry? Too decadent! Too austere! Also: nerd alert. It was as bogus as a Victorian ladies phrenology session in some some ghastly South Kensington drawing room. I felt faint, then dizzy, like the protagonist of an Anita Brookner novel. I envisioned everyone leaving early, ruing the price of the cab home and tucking themselves into bed shuddering, Poetry club. Christ on a cracker, NEVER again.
It was a bit like that moment in a spur-of-the-moment-night-time skinny-dip when you find yourself standing, possibly swaying, at the water’s edge in the dark. Everyone around you is taking off their clothes, and you think, Why am I doing this? It’s cold and I’m fat and, frankly, a bit drunk, and besides that, it’s dangerous, there could be snapping turtles or sharks or eels in the weeds, or, or… then there’s a loud splash a voice shouts out THE WATER IS AMAZING and you think, Who cares? No one cares! And in you go. And it does feel amazing, all silky and cold, way more freeing than swimming with a bathing suit on in the day, and you float on your back and look up at the stars and find the big dipper and wiggle your toes and marvel at how it could possibly be true that the single best decision you’ve ever made in your life seemed so totally stupid ten seconds ago.
It was the first poem that did it. Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (posted below). It would not be an exaggeration to say it was a poem that changed my life, that it was a complete revelation. Not the poem itself, although it is a great poem, but the feeling it inspired. There was a a sensation of immediate connection. It was as if all our self-consciousness had been instantly sloughed off and replaced by intimacy — a deep, enriching commonality that was not based on where we worked or grew up, how old our kids were, how much money we made, the street we lived on, how we voted (if we voted), whether we were vegetarian or teetotal or lush or staying at the same hotel or united in hatred for the same jerk-off boss but something much better than that, a higher purpose: A shared love of poetry.
I do think part of it was that we are (and continue to be) women. Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about women: Even highly intelligent ones with passionate interests, often find it difficult to relate to each other outside professional/academic environments without the social lubricant of personal disclosure. We like to indulge in a bit of butt-sniffing and stroking, a purring game of you-show-me-your-shame-and-I’ll-show-you-mine before we can talk about less immediately important stuff like politics and philosophy and the state of the Premiere League. Don’t get me wrong — as a general rule (with some notable exceptions) I adore this oversharey tendency in women. There are very few things I enjoy more than an introductory chat with a woman that feels like first date shag in the toilet. But poetry club isn’t like that.
And that’s also part of why it works.
As the group has evolved so has the level of trust. We’ve become friends, obviously, we get along, we talk about stuff, we gossip and laugh, it’s not stiff or formal. What I mean by trust is the intellectual and emotional security required to be open to the work itself. At times I’ve felt deeply frustrated, had to stretch myself as I tried to articulate an idea or struggled to grasp a concept. It’s not unusual for one of us to be moved to tears, which sounds a bit weird but honestly it’s not. Poetry, if you focus on it long enough, give into it, can be as intense an experience as a song or a film or a book or a painting. I’d like to emphasise that none of us (save the English teacher who has a PhD in poetry — god knows what she sees in us), is an expert. It’s not competitive, quite the opposite in fact. It’s a rigorous enjoyment. The time we spend absorbing the poems, laughing about them, boisterously arguing or just trying to explain how they work, how they make us feel, is deeply sustaining, intellectually — and yes, even spiritually. I’m conscious of the fact I’m beginning to sound like an insufferable twat, or worse, that I might be overselling it. Honestly, it’s not the Road to Damascus. But it is, without exception, worth the price of the cab.
During the pandemic (surely the ultimate test of any extra-circular social gathering) poetry club did not just survive, it thrived. Through lockdown we had more frequent Zoom meetings (at one point it was once a week — though for some of it I checked out, I had a book to write and young children). The format changed to accommodate our needs. First we dispensed with small talk, then eventually, any kind of intelligent discussion. In the grimmest days of London lockdown, before the vaccine roll-out, we simply took turns reading poetry to each other over Zoom as we sighed or drank or fell asleep or wandered away from the screen to deal with a kid or a pet or to just lay down on the kitchen floor and breath. There were periods when one member or other vanished, with or without explanation, to attend to family crisis or a work deadline or to have a baby or a nervous breakdown, then later resurfaced, or chose not to. And no one minded. No one cared.
The dramatist moved to the country, the screenwriter had a second baby and shortly after that an art dealer joined, followed by an opera singer. We’re now a United Nations of poetry lovers — Italian, Canadian, Irish, Ethiopian, American, Australian, with a couple of English chucked in for the hell of it. This is all to say, if you’re a bit bored or restless or lonely or uninspired or generally unsure of what to do next, you might consider starting a poetry club. We call ourselves the Bawds of Euphony — a ludicrously pretentious inside joke which you’ll understand when you read the poem below (at least in theory, the point of the joke, the name, is that we never understood it and still don’t).
I’ll leave you with the poem now. If you enjoy it please do let me know. As mentioned, my aim is to start posting one every Monday, with a view to recreating an online version of poetry club here on Juvenescence.
It could be a revelation. Or it might suck. In either case, tell me what you think. You can do it with a “like,” or a subscription, or if you’re feeling like a mensch, by chucking a few pennies a week into the cup (a paid subscription is just $5 -- £4 a month). Paid subscriptions will, eventually, give you access to the best of the good stuff… I have plans! It will also help me to keep the Juvenescence show on the road, ensuring I don’t starve to death in a cellar or a garret or more realistically my unheated London writing shed like a some 2022 version of a pre-Rafaelite bougie London literary chick, which would not be a good look.
This was selected by Aida. It was the first poem, the one that changed everything.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Good isn’t it?
If you like poetry (even if you think you don’t know anything and talking about it makes you feel stupid) message me recommendations. I’ll post the best ones with your insights. Please leave a comment! (As a former newspaper columnist I can assure you that’s the first time I’ve ever written those words — and the weird thing is, I mean it, for once, I welcome them). I’ll respond to each and every one, even if your name is @hatefuck82 and you write in green ink and make overzealous use of the word “drivel.” I genuinely enjoy chatting to Juvenescence readers almost as much as I enjoy skinny dipping at night, not sure about you but these days, I’m starved for the latter.
I bet you are too. So let’s chat about poetry instead.
*apologies to Jodi Picoult, that was bitchy.
Thank you. l find Wallace Stevens difficult, not here.
Oh this is SO funny! Brava! Also, have you pitched this as a series. It has HBO vibes. I know I’d watch it…. Even as a reality series.