Chasing Philip Larkin

Lockdown-style, I have recently been doing an online poetry course with Billy Collins (ex US Poet Laureate and one of my favourite poets) and have been reflecting on the state of my poetry just now.

My poetry 'high water' mark was probably from mid-2015 to mid-2016. It had been building since 2010 or so but in those twelve months, my writing was really flowing. I went on a couple of courses, one quite unexpectedly, and both had a huge impact on me. I made friends at both, my first 'actual' poet friends, a number of whom I still have.

Importantly for me, I found like minds at those courses. They made a huge difference to me. There is some (rather obvious) theory in creativity circles that being with a group of people who are somewhat (but not ridiculously) better than you is the most stimulating place to be. Certainly the second of these two courses was exactly this. I felt that I had scraped on to it, and I was certainly one of the least 'accomplished' attendees. There have been quite a few collections published by people on that course, a number of prizes won. Several are starting to make their names and you, even you non-poets, may well end up hearing of them in the future.

I was star struck by the fact that the course was taught by Carol Ann Duffy (then Poet Laureate) and Gillian Clarke (an ex Laureate-equivalent for Wales). We all were all quite star struck, to be fair. Feeling like an ingenue helped me a lot. Whilst some others have told me that they were a bit reticent to approach Carol Ann (who is, like many poets, quite shy), because of her 'status', I had few such misgivings and drank quite a lot of red wine with her listening, learning and just chatting. But the single most important thing for me that week was to be considered, genuinely, as a peer and an equal with others there. Carol Ann and Gillian left me in no doubt that, at its best, and in its way, the quality of my work was as good as anyone's there. And I began to think of myself in those terms. In the following nine months I got my first two poems published by a decent magazine and was highly commended in a respectable national poetry competition. I was thrilled. Real baby steps if you are taking your writing seriously of course, but an important barrier crossed.

In the second half of 2016, I could feel my self-belief ebbing. 2016 was a shitshow on so many fronts. The peace and calm inside that I needed was crowded out so hard and fast that the place I went to try and find words just seemed inaccessible and full of noise. Then 2017 happened, with a serious family medical situation that required an intense, all-absorbing focus for the next two years.  There was no space in my head. And whilst that was going on, of course, the world just ploughed on around us. I am trans, the public and media holler of hate directed at people like me has been growing relentlessly for five or more years now and they scream louder each month now. This has made me very frightened. That, and life, and Brexit, and Trump, and family issues, and Climate Change, and making a living (my career has crumbled, though I am trying to re-orientate it now)...and all the rest...and now Covid-19...with Brexit coming back hard and fast. The external din of it all. An ever-louder tinnitus. I ended up on anti-depressants.

Meanwhile, others have fought through the fog and the screaming and they have written. Some have I think been stimulated to write by the world they find around them. Some are probably mentally insulated more, it's who they are. It is also very possible to write in a time of crisis. You can ignore it, use it, bargain with it. It's just that I am not good at any of those things. I have always needed inner quiet and to still the deep fears inside.

The result in me has been a huge loss of self-confidence in my writing. I have barely written anything of self-defined value in the last three years. About four poems stand up I think, maybe six at a push. But I have no real understanding of whether they are any good - a very different psychology from that year in 2015-2016 when I could feel it when my work was hitting its stride. I will write and rewrite something fifteen or twenty times now, without an idea of if it's improving or dying in front of me. I will produce something that seems pleasing and let it sit - the acid test - then come back to it, a few weeks or months later and see it as garbage. Some of the work of which I have been most proud for months I hate all of a sudden three months later. I have recently taken the plunge and shared some work with poet friends, but in doing so immediately felt the gap between them and I once more. The gap that wasn't there before. Though encouraging, I felt a patronised by some of their remarks. I felt like the fangirl approaching the rock star.  That's my 'material', I guess. I hope. For many of the same reasons, I have sent nothing out to magazines since 2017. Rejection - a normal, routine, part of being a poet - might play too directly and too hard into my lack of belief. I have been concerned that the internal damage caused by failure could be too great.

But let's see. I have, in lockdown, written a few things that - thus far - are holding up my testing-to-destruction mentality. I have been back to them dozens of times now and as yet haven't heard that familiar voice telling me they are rubbish, embarrassing even.  I might - just might - send them out.

Last night I read a poem by Philip Larkin and rather than being 'asphyxiated' by its quality (as Collins talks of sometimes being creatively immobilised by really powerful work), I thought 'I genuinely could have written that'. And when the voice piped up again to say 'Hold on, who do you think you are?!', I did have a quiet reply ready to tell the voice that it was wrong and that yes, I could.  The Whitsun Weddings may be some way off yet I guess, but it's all about trying to tune into that voice once more.