Claire Askew: Why I write poetry

My relationship with poetry began practically at birth.  My mother has worked in childcare for most of her life, and has always been very keen on songs and poems, understanding that rhyme is something that appeals strongly to small children.  So I was exposed to verse of all kinds at an early age – not just nursery rhymes, but strongly rhythmic poetry (Jabberwocky, of course – and Hillaire Belloc was a favourite of my parents’, because he delivers moral messages too) and the old songs my Dad used to play on the piano.  Once I could read, I began to hunt out poems for myself.  Often animal poems – I loved DH Lawrence’s The Snake, and practically learned TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats off by heart.  At that time, animal literature appealed because I wanted to be a vet – the serious writing of poems hadn’t crossed my mind back then.

Writing poetry really came with adolescence, as it does for so many people.  When I was about eleven, I got hold of a Ted Hughes animal-themed collection called What Is Truth?, and for some reason, those poems in particular led me to put pen to paper seriously for the first time.  I also began listening to popular music – in my early teens I suffered from insomnia, and heard Bob Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) on a late-night radio show.  After that I became hooked on lyrics - Joni Mitchell, Donovan and Don McLean - and longed for a time to write a poem that could match the gorgeous, cryptic resonances of American Pie.  I also started to read poets like Carol Ann Duffy and Liz Lochhead in school, and discovered contemporary female poetry for the first time.  I think those two writers in particular have a lot to do with my decision at about age fifteen to seriously think about writing as a major hobby, and possibly a career.

Obviously, I didn’t just write poems.  In 2003, I wrote the three-act play On A Wing And A Prayer.  I was in sixth form, and running my high school’s large and unruly drama group with no funding and no help whatsoever from staff.  The group needed a performance to raise morale – and some money! – but we couldn’t afford to buy scripts or pay royalties.  In the end, I wrote the play from scratch with my own cast and budget in mind, and it was a huge success.  At the time I was also toying with short stories, journalistic pieces and monologues, but I think I knew that my real interest and strength was always in poetry.

My English Literature degree has taught me the importance of poetry, its deeper resonances, its socio-political roles.  It has also introduced me to a wealth of previously unknown literature and criticism, and I’ve learned that nothing improves your writing than a lot of serious reading.  A University tutor introduced me to the literary love of my life, Allen Ginsberg, who believed that contemporary poetry ought to be about social commentary, renewal and change.  I can’t help thinking that poetry generates those three things automatically – it changes its writer as well as its audience; it utilises old ideas and generates new ones.  My only sadness is that – though Ginsberg foresaw the problem and tried desperately to do something about it – poetry readerships are dwindling. 

We are turned off poetry by an education system that misguidedly teaches Keats to twelve year olds; that says poetry is difficult, old-fashioned and dull.  With our fast-paced lives, we claim to just want something quick to read on the way to work, but can’t see that a stanza or two of verse is that very thing (we tend to turn instead to pulp fiction and magazines).  We live in a materialistic, ‘now now now’ society where print media is being strangled by higher demand for online news and “literature” beamed to mobiles and iPods.  I write because I love to, and because sometimes I have to – but also because we all need literature in our lives, whether we realise it or not. 

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Claire's Latest Poem Post on 16.02.08

Bridesmaid

The function room is filled, like a fridge,
with the edible and the dead.  Filled
with blank, fish-like stares
and limp handshakes - limp
like the green, week-old lace
of a lettuce - it is cold, white, too-bright.

Here am I, bleeding under my purple dress,
quivering female aubergine.  I gulp
at words that drift my way,
but eat nothing; pad the cream
linen chair with napkins, secretive.
I switch the place cards and stuff
my handbag with cutlery, a domestic magpie.

Later, in the softly buzzing kitchen
(a grey-metal Marie Celeste, strip-lit)
I find a trifle, untouched; a beautiful,
shuddering pool.  I plunge a hand in,
but do not find Excalibur.
Sugar-spattered, I check myself.
Guilt leaves the stolen cutlery at the door.

16.02.08

Claire's Poem-Post on 20.01.08

Christopher's wren

Christopher's wren

I shiver at the kitchen window, watching Christopher
as he works the garden.  A dim figure
in the dusk, he ducks in and out
of the steamy greenhouse, flexing his hands
over the heaters.  I remember the time
we slept in there - drunk, and locked out, lying
on concrete under glass and sky.  His tall marijuana
hid among the tomato plants, and we were sleepless.

I blanch the window with breath.  He throws a match
onto a mound of leaf-mould, and the lawn
stutters with sparks, then smoulders.  Back-lit by this bonfire,
he muddies the path to the door, arrives - boots
and everything.  He holds out a skinny hand, black -
dirt in the creases from hours of splitting soil,
sowing, stirring the earth like dough.  Look.

It falls in my palm - a smooth, white skull, the size of
a matchbox, once a bird.  Christopher blows silt from the sockets,
and it sings, an ocarina.  He leaves, to tend to something
still alive - amyrillis, snapdragon - this man my mother
is right to disapprove of.  The leaves on his fire sigh
into smoke, then nothing; dusk settles.  I let the skull fall,
smash, soundless on the tile, and see him shudder.
As if he'd listened for it, heard.   As if he felt. 

20.01.08

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Contentment

I could live quite happily without the rings
and beads, without the curls of silver wire
around my wrists; without the varnished box
that purrs with cut-glass, clasped in chains.
I could sweeten the sink with the last
of my scent, sprinkle rouge like fairy-dust -
my fridge-notes would be smudged with kohl,
or the skittering scrawl of my mascara wand.

I could live without the favourite patchwork hat,
the floor-scuffed skirts, without the cowboy belt,
the gloves; without the phoenix-pattern dress,
the flea-market treasures and park-railing finds.
I could donate my high heels to homeless girls,
play cat's-cradle with the severed clothes-line -
the unravelled woollen veins of my scarf
could be kite-strings, my handkerchiefs tiny flags.

I could even live without the whispering hoardes
of books, the weekend paper's doormat thud;
without my secret journal, and its sharp-pencil smell,
without the comforting clack of typewriter keys.
I could scratch our initials on the beetle-back skin
of CDs, punctuate snapshots with biro moustaches -
I could string up silver spoons in the windows,
uproot houseplants, turn the cupboard doors to kindling.

I could be content among mirror-shards with shoelaces gone;
happy without the friendly weight of my thesaurus,
without the thumb-print of my grandmother's brooch,
with her teaset outside, filling with rain water.
I can live with windowpanes that loosen like teeth,
with the sloping bed, the radio's inevitable static.
I am quite happy with the four bare walls of this room,
if I can hear your tread on the step, and know you are home.

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The last cigarette.

All day he's been reminiscing about them,
one by one, as if they were lovers. 
There was the first, of course - surreptitious,
cold in the concrete backyard with Brother.
He claims he never coughed - a natural,
exhaling his absent youth into the coal-dust air.

Then there was the pack his mother found,
hidden in a cassette-box on the floor of the car.
She yelled, but bought him a filigree case
for Christmas that year.  Later, his parents
divorced downstairs, and he amassed ashtrays -
wore the tang of their scent with a strange pride.

I met him when his hair was long.
He'd been to Canada, loved and lost - learned
to cut with herb and cloves, a connoisseur.
For a while he kept a pipe like a pet,
liked one in the pub, when you still could -
thick smoke and a dark pint, seething, half-alive.

For years I tore myself in half, trying
to stop the endless draws, the late-night
filterless flings, save his lungs.  And yet
at the same time, loving his shaking hand
as he lit the first - of the morning, of the pack -
loving his hunger; this devil's curse, his flaw.

Now we sit, silent and transfixed, like chess-players
in the presence of his swan-song cigarette.
He says he's picked it specially - a beauty,
the best of the pack - fizzing with the silver foil
of his favourite brand.  This is the last, he says,
the very last - and the Zippo's delicious click.

I almost believe him.

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Mrs Beksinski remembers

Mrs Beksinski remembers the Beatles playing her town.
It was the year her husband died, in the backyard -
bled to death under the rope-swing tyre.  He was Polish,
haemophiliac - she never cried.
Out back of the theatre, her girlfriends waited
for the Beatles.  Mrs Beksinski buried her man, alone;
drank black coffee in some diner somewhere, went home.

Next year, the poppies grew up where his blood had been.
Mrs Beksinski learned to sleep a little,
stopped wearing black, cut down the swing.  That year,
the kids didn't come by on Hallowe'en.
Some folk said Mrs Beksinski turned to the dark;
she made blood-potions out of tomatoes
with pomegranate-seeds.  She spoke Polish to herself,
whistled on the streets - folks whispered at her crooked eye,
her goulag skirts, her eye-ball beads.

She thought she heard her man's heart-beat in the dark,
and hung a stethoscope on the rope-swing tree; prayed
all night, waited, but he never appeared.
Every year she cut the poppies in their prime, spread
them, quilt-like, across his tomb - and more grew.
Old tales say the dead want for blood, and in return
are guardians - he was.  Mrs Beksinski knew.

And some nights, under a teacup-edge moon, she brews herself
a mixture in a pomegranate shell.  The whole neigbourhood
hears those crackling records, catches the sharp-edge
of red, burned-sugar smell.  She goes out to the poppies,
and pours him his fill.  Sings Hard Day's Night,
Please Please Me, Honey Pie, I Will.

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Copyrights @ Claire Askew

David Mclean:November 2007

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