Last year during the Covid-19 lockdown and the impending sense of doom which it engendered, I decided to publish a collection of my poetry. It took several months of frantic Youtube watching, reading the fine print of print on demand publishers and scouring the manuscript for errors. To make matters even harder for myself, I wanted to add 20 or so illustrations from my own art and photography. Finally it was uploaded and I felt like I had just given birth. The emotions were quite strong. I was equally stoked getting copies of it finally from the online publisher and on demand seller. Due to Covid, I couldn’t have a book launch, even at home. So I set up a website and a Youtube channel for the company, Duck Farm Press. The marketing of books is not something I am very good at and I am seriously distracted from the marketing by the compulsion to write- atm it’s a history book- well part history and part family history.
To add to the diffculty, poetry is not a popular genre. Some book distributors won’t touch it. I can guarantee to you now, that no poet is going to become wealthy through the publication of their poetry, though, some young poets are making money with compelling Youtube videos. Mine are not compelling because I believe my poem is more important than what I look like reciting it. My husband told me to make myself “look more pretty” and that my editing and video angles were poor. Yep, I can see that, though my feminist heart rebels a little at the surface shallowness of my ‘image’ ie what I look like not the images I am reading to you. My mother is on there too. Her video is equally unprofessional and one continuous take but she’s compelling because of the early 1930’s lived history she is talking about. She’s not a poet. She’s a fiction writer but the book, ‘Land of the Rippling Gold’ she is talking about is largely autobiographical.
Back to poetry. Picture me at my local High School ‘teaching’ poetry to a group of Year 10’s who, honestly don’t give a fig about poetry. They drew on their carefully constructed sheets provided to me by their teacher whom I was temporarily replacing, one even shredded theirs in their contempt for the poem- it was by Emily Dickinson. I did some annotations of the poem on the board and said sarcastically that copying was the lowest level in an intellectual hierarchy and I “couldn’t make it any easier.” The better among them read the poem and answered the questions as best they could. I began mingling among them, helping them individually. I told a small group of boys I got it that they didn’t identify with a feminist poem and a difficult one to interpret at that. One reminded me that white males were the most maligned group in society now. I didn’t disagree because this is how they feel, but I had to ‘teach’ the poem so that kind of discussion wasn’t appropriate. I picked the toughest kid in the class, one who is just biding his time until he can leave and work in a proper job, ie as a tradie. I did ask him if he had a part-time job. He did. He commented that if we paid him at school then maybe he would do the work then. I didn’t bother to add that he was working to get an education. I continued to circle the room. Some kids work in their own vacuum, bless them, obvious to the negativity around them. The best one, had already finished the sheet, and I got him to interpret lines on the board and he did this very well.
Then I went back to ‘tough guy’. He’d written nothing on his sheet. Not even his name. I read a line to him: “They put me in a closet.” How would you feel if you were shut up in a cupboard? I asked him. He said “claustrophobic, trapped, angry.” I wrote out on the paper for him, ‘Emily Dickinson is feeling claustrophobic, trapped and angry in this poem.’ See, I said, you can do this. Yes, they can do it. They do not realise that life lived in all places and in all times has been captured in poetry. I told the class, “Poetry is a time capsule. Poetry captures someone’s emotions so that everyone hereafter can see and feel those emotions again.” Poetry does this better than prose because poetry is trickily not explicit, it is open to interpretation. You can keep delving down into the layers like peeling an onion and get more and more out of it. Even more than the poet themselves thought they put in the poem.
This is one of my poems from the collection ‘How to Smoke the Soul-Poetry for the Heart and Mind’ published in the Covid-19 year of 2020 but written 15 years earlier. I put it on Facebook and asked my friends to tell me what it was about:
Theatre of the Thimbleless.
Knitting, we patch and darn the air
worn thin at bedtime.
A clock in the morning ticks harder,
exposed skin is abraded,
nerves are fringed.
If we open an op shop
of ragged knees and rubbed elbows:
‘You’ve knocked the stuffin’ outa me, love’,
we’ll re-tailor the décor,
wadding is what we want.
______________________________ 2005
This is what my friends commented (Names deleted):
Friend 1: Long Term pain?
Me: More heartache.
Friend 1: I was in the ball park then.
Friend 2: You are working too hard and need help and comfort.
Me: Hi I think it links a bit to Macbeth’s speech in the play: ‘sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care’. The idea of trying to correct what’s wrong with sewing techniques. Relates to how the kids and I felt about the divorce.
Friend 3: I Love the striking prosaic metaphor that sets the dark tone of emptiness. ’Theatre of the Thimbleless’ using a forgotten art. Darning is immediately revealing our vain attempts to repair the damage that comes from the abrasion of everyday “wear and tear” living… especially in the darker hours. Your symbolic clock that is in itself an enemy with its punishing strokes wearing us thinner daily.‘ Fringed’ keeps the knitting imagery moving forward where only the exposed parts are decorated to keep our worn ness hidden…Your vision of tired and worn people collecting in places where there is second or third life possible in the op shop is startling but most inventive. Comparing notes about past hurts that have left you ‘ragged and rubbed’ but still substantially intact. The colloquial expression is light hearted but also cuttingly honest. You have played with the ‘Stuffing’ to suggest the inner things we all need to survive as humans: love, acceptance, relationships. You have a positive view of recovering what you can with the threads available and whatever wadding can be pressed into the ‘re-tailoring’ of this exterior we present to the world cleverly described as our ‘Decor’.Your economy of expression and suggestive imagery give me the view of a strong person who has been worn down by breakdowns and the rough and tumble of ordinary life. But also looking to the fellowship with so many others who come together in the op shop of people at ease with their state of wornness but celebrating what can be darned and repaired. Pretty bold and forthright ideas???that may well be my own world view pressing into your words… but the associations came thick and fast with a consistent theme of being remade not discarded.
Me: Wow! A really insightful analysis, D—-s. You are spot on. Sometimes, trying to rework the clothing of habits we have draped ourselves in won’t work when we are thimbleless ie we don’t have the tools. What we want is a cushioning or wadding against those raw emotions.
As you might guess, Friend 3 is a retired English teacher. He gave me insights into the poem I didn’t see myself.
I hope when you read this, you might like to try your hand at interpreting poetry and unraveling it for yourself. One that comes to mind is the only poem this poet wrote and he wrote it as he was waiting to executed in the Tower of London. I find it haunting:
Tichborne’s Elegy
BY Chidiock Tichborne
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,
I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I am but made.
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.________ 1586
Courtesy: http://www.poetryfoundation.org
Enjoy, Mes amies!
amundr 