As I embark on an MA in Writing Poetry I’ve been reflecting on my road to poetry. It’s been a long, slow, twisting and sometimes torturous one. If you like it happened after a series of shifts. Though our house growing up was full of books, not one was a poetry book. Art in general was considered another country. Social science was scorned.
I heard often, “Science is what you want if you want to get ahead,”” from my parents, and “Don’t do what we did,” was the only other advice I got from them. Dad working at the time as a clerk for British Rail, Mum as a short hand typist for the NHS. Poetry was not just another country, it was another continent and we couldn’t afford foreign holidays.
Though I’d always scribbled, like many others I began writing poetry to save my life. I’d always wanted to write professionally, when I told my mother at age 18 I wanted to write for the NME her reply was stark and forthright, “Yes, I imagine a lot of people do but you’re going to get a proper job. People like us don’t write.”
And with that she drafted a letter, ordered me to copy it out and send it to all the chemical companies in the county. My A levels had been in Maths, Chemistry and Physics. My choice of English, History and Chemistry overridden my parental persuasion.
Hence I got my first “proper job” at ICI in Welwyn Garden City. I held this position until a shaft of redundancies coincided with an UCCA application I’d made secretly, gaining a place at the University of East Anglia in the school of Chemistry. My choice of study reflecting the still blinkered vision of my possible future.
University was both a challenge and revelation to me with a working class background. Within a few months a decided to change tack and was offered a place in the School of Development Studies on condition I finished the first year of my chemistry course and submitted an essay, to show I could write presumably. This was the first big shift.
When I graduated I felt directionless and adrift, in hindsight experiencing PTSD following the death of a close friend in a fire in our shared house, a fire I felt irrationally responsible for. After some years of part time work waitressing, life modelling, oh and the chip shop I walked out of after the owner sleazed on me, I trained in Welfare Rights and was offered my second “proper job” in London at the Mary Ward Legal Centre.
At the same time I joined the Open Door Writers Workshop, just up the road from my room in a shared flat in the notorious Barrier Block in Brixton. This was the next big shift I guess. I was the only women and the only white person in the workshop. The first evening I stumbled thru the door, hesitating at the entrance to the back room, looking around thinking is this some kind of men’s therapy group, said, “Oh, I came for the writing workshop have I got the wrong night?” The bookshop owner replied, “No, this is it, come in! Sit down!”
Learnt a lot about the legacy of slavery; how it abided in the blood of those around me, etched into their last names. I was introduced to the work of James Baldwin and others and politics of Malcolm X, began writing short stories after work using the office computer. Had one published in their first and only magazine before the bookshop closed down. Though despite their encouragement and acceptance I still had a sense “people like me” don’t write.
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Fast forward a few years by which time I’d met the bohemian Brixton Poets, though I never joined their open mike, I yearned to, it orientated me, another shift. I decided to give up Welfare Rights to, “do something creative and sort out my health.” By this time, despite working and everything else, I had been suffering an unrelenting crippling fatigue for five years. But had no plan, no destination. Actually I did have a plan, to take a video course, but it fell through taking me with it. Rather than release me from this fatigue this leap in the dark plunged me into a desperate state of what I know now was anxiety and depression.
All I remember is this: sitting in bed, in an attic room of a shared house, often after a night of fractured sleep, drenched in sweat, almost too weak to make it to the kitchen or bathroom, drowning in guilt and shame, often reading. I’d read anything I could get my hands on to try and avoid the churn of cortisol and adrenaline (presumably) that ran around my body leaving my nerves jangling and feeling me with dread, remorse, more guilt and shame.
Then I found Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I identified with it… The description of the anguish of the protagonist seemed to put into words, vividly, what I was viscerally experiencing. I began to find words that described my pain and desperation. I found other words that challenged what I knew was unjust; insane and absurd; the potential for global nuclear suicide, The Poll Tax, the way our sexuality, the most intimate part of our lives, is distorted by societal values.
The words came out not in sentences as such but fragmentary lines, proto poems, I thought, maybe. Around the same time I stumbled upon The Gateway Clinic offering free acupuncture and chi gong. Somewhat dramatically at first, collapsing to the floor sobbing mid session, it began to release buried feelings and I began to feel lighter. I like to say this is where I, unknowingly and accidentally, fell onto the path less traveled. Sometimes I’d sit in a Brockwell Park and just weep. And then the words would flow a little more easily.
Only when I was introduced to someone as a poet (I’d never dared use this term) at the Gateway Clinic a few years on, did I really reach that other continent the next big shift. Andy Balcer, founder of Poets Know it, promptly invited me to perform at a benefit with them for The Landmark, a resource for people with HIV. They loved the raw, honest, painful truths in my words and I guess a poet was born.
It turned out “people like us”, or rather people like me, were working class, damaged and a bit deranged. Male, female, trans, old and young; survivors of domestic violence, personal tragedy, battling mental health issues and, in Andy’s case, openly living with HIV. I performed with them for 10 years while also graduating to be the mc for Trulips founded by the blind poet Michelle Taylor.
It wasn’t the end of my mental health challenges midway into that part of the journey following the immense stress of an ex partner turned psychotic, unhinged and stalkery, not too mention moving house three times… I experienced a manic episode and was diagnosed bipolar. A condition I’ve spent best part of nearly 30 years learning to manage while also learning to write for the stage and eventually the page.
Joining the influential writers collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, which I attended for 10 years was another important big shift. It kept me afloat and I began to learn the importance of craft and was introduced to poetic forms. Witnessing the success of others I began to see new paths ahead I had had no idea existed and could never have imagined.
I guess this course is another shift. I look forward to what follows. I guess if there is a message in this for others it’s to dream, dream big, have a plan! I’ve stumbled through life! Surround yourself with like minded souls who share your dreams and supportive friends. Collaborate and co-create. Take inspiration from others, above all believe in yourself, your work. I’m only just beginning to and I reckon the journey would have been a lot less tortuous had I been able to before.
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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