I have just won a competition! I think this might be the first time I’ve actually won – I’ve been placed a few times, but winning was very exciting. Especially as the competition organiser didn’t tell the winners in advance. An email came in announcing the winners and I therefore knew I wasn’t one of them, because if you win anything you’re always told before it’s made public. I read the email on my phone, scrolling through the highly commended, third and second placed poems, thinking how good they were and how unsurprising it was that I hadn’t won – and then the winning poem was mine!
I was also surprised because I knew the poem wasn’t finished yet. The brief had really interested me – Rebirth Notice – so I had fun playing with the idea of the Goddess Demeter announcing the arrival of her daughter Persephone, who comes up from her husband Hades in the underworld in the spring, bringing warmth and fertility to the earth, and then submerges again for the winter. I wasn’t happy with the poem but I ran out of time and the competition was free, so I fired it off. Let that be a lesson to us all about subbing and self-censoring.
The judge, the splendid publisher of Valley Press, Jamie McGarry, agreed with me that the poem isn’t finished yet and gave some useful critique which I’ve begun to work with, so I’m looking forward to the rebirth of the poem. I’m also looking forward to enjoying my prize – books from Valley Press’s attractive back-catalogue, some chosen by me, some random. Can you spot which book isn’t one of Valley Press’s but has just been passed down to me by my aunt?
I think I read fairly widely. I read fiction and poetry and nonfiction. I read newspapers and magazines and recipes and I love how the different genres make conversations in my head. Often fiction might inspire me to write nonfiction and vice versa. At the moment textbooks are inspiring poetry (as you can see in my poems in Northern Gravy.) This can cause difficulties. It’s easier, or simpler at any rate, to dig deep into one area, to resist the temptation to go down rabbit holes, it feels more disciplined in one’s reading and one’s thought.
However, I’ve always been interested in too many things for that to be possible. Even my PhD sprawled over two disciplines and two millennia. I had supervisors based in different departments and it led to difficulties in assessing it, and that tag of Jack-of-all-trades, which is never a compliment, has followed me like a shadow through life. Maybe that’s why I come top so rarely!
I am coming to think, though, that being a Jack-of-all-trades, or many, at least, may be a good thing, after all. My life is richest – and most creative – when it’s full of variety, and, importantly, when the different bits are in dialogue with each other. And I don’t seem to be alone. Some of the books I’ve enjoyed most, learned most from and got the most out of in recent years have been hybrid books. The poet Kim Moore’s little book of short pieces of prose, What the Trumpet Taught Me, which is and isn’t memoir, is and isn’t poetic, is an isn’t about learning a musical instrument (something I know from the inside). Aja Barber’s Consumed, an deep dive into fast fashion that shows how some of the world’s biggest challenges are interconnected with each other, enabling readers to see the immensity and complexity of these challenges without despairing. Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto on Never Giving Up, a memoir with an agenda. Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, which may or may not be an epic but certainly both is and isn’t about a recipe for tomato sauce.
These books inspire me to lean into my propensity to be caught up by too many things, even though I know it’s perilous. It’s easy to lose your way; it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you don’t know that you suddenly feel you should and by all the people in each field you’re working in who are so much better qualified than you, and therefore so much more worth reading.
But connections matter. They matter at least as much as anything else, and I can be brave: I need not fear mistakes, because they will happen whether I fear them or not, and because if I don’t fear them I have a much better chance of learning from them. Like Persephone, I can have warm, sunny times and cool, dark times – and maybe, like Persephone (like the earth) I need both.
There are at least seventeen directions I could take this little reflection from here; rabbit holes to the left of me, tangents to the right. We could talk about metaphor or canon or networks or intertextuality or truth or experience or … maybe next time…