how not to read a poem
and a poem for you not to read
I went to poetry club last week. First time in a while.
When I arrived everyone was standing around the kitchen marvelling at the fact it’s been going strong now for nearly five years. How did our larky little experiment survive the social dislocation of London lockdown? I have no idea, except that it’s a testament to the women in it, a randomly assembled collection of hearts and minds. Isn’t it astonishing when something — especially something requiring collective effort and commitment— just works somehow?
I’m glad I went, I always am. We often talk about how nourishing and restorative it feels — not so much the food, wine and conversation (which are admittedly excellent) but the poetry itself. This, come to think of it, must be why it works better than most book clubs: We are all there for the poetry, first and foremost. With that central plank laid, the rest of the shelter builds itself.
This winter has tested me, stretched me to the bone. The arrival of a cold wet spring has pushed me out of my chrysalis, blinking and shivering. Each morning I wake up and stare at myself in the mirror — pale face, chapped lips — wondering, ‘Who are you now?’ I’m still me but it’s as if I’ve changed breeds within the category of my species: Woman, mother, writer. Because of this uncanny alteration, for long stretches of this winter I have found myself unable to read much of anything at all. My prefrontal cortex seems to have lost the knack of processing narrative, let alone arguments and ideas. Characters lay flat on the page. Plots lack propulsion. Following one feels like trying to start a VW diesel without block heater in an Edmonton winter.
For most of the winter I could tolerate only two things: Soup and perfection. So I lay in bed at odd hours sipping bouillon and Auden. I administered medicine to myself with the wary tenderness of candy-striper in a war tent — Oxo cubes, boiled water, Eliot, Milton, Lowell, Larkin, Shakespeare and Plath. There was no method to my reading, just whatever I happen to land on when I flipped open the battered old Norton that squats at my bedside among the discarded stacks. The Norton. My fat, stalwart three-decade companion, with his bald slippery pages trimmed with the bubble scrawl of a girl I once loathed. Oh god, that girl. But why did I hate her? Is that what this is all about? No, no, wait. It doesn’t matter. I remember now, she accepted my apology in a therapist’s office in April, 2004. At the time I was tearful, contrite. She was distracted. It’s fine, she said twice, looking at the ceiling like whatever. I smiled.
And it is fine, actually. The thing I failed to notice is that it always was. For all my agonies and prostrations, nothing so awful has ever happened to me or people I was given to love. Nothing, so far, has left an irreversible mark, the kind that spreads like a leaking ink well until there is nothing left but yawning grace or the mire of self pity. I am so lucky.
Another poem and other sip of broth.
All winter I alternated spoonfuls, swallowing with measured obedience and after a while I slept. On waking I felt…. I feel… better.
Much better actually, thank you for asking, and not just because outside the bedroom window I can see out the magnolias prying and straining from their hard green shells, longing for the murderous sun. A calm has come over me. It’s the recognition of her arrival. The girl, the woman, the mother, the writer. Oh hello, hello. Come in. I knew all along you’d come.
So poetry no longer scares me. This is the gift of the club. It’s less that I learned how to read it than I’ve relinquished what little I thought I knew. I’ve discovered what poetry wants, which is only to be encountered without resistance. You do not need to understand a poem to know it. You just need to give it your attention, however fleeting. A poem doesn’t want you to try.
The one below was Aida’s pick.