This poem is from the collection Slattern, published in 2001, which won Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Saltire Prize for the Scottish First Book of the Year. I came across it when searching for poems about hats! Sharing as an image as it contains some nice yet subtle formatting.
The text reads
Tip
Get a hat, a homberg, keep
it on bars, tipped
so just your profile shows.
Imply a smile, one-sided. Perhaps
a scar to hold it.
Seek out the half light, stand
oblique, a silhouette. Smoke
a blue edged trail
in icy air, by a lamppost, let
your few sharp words intensify
to clouds. Be lean.
Be leaning on the bar I plan
to enter. Irony’s the ice I keep
my dreams in. Drop
some in your whisky. Hold it there.
This filmic image says so much in so few words. The collection is described as, “poems about men and boys: married men, self-sufficient men, wounded men, and men ‘who own/the earth and love it’; poems about memory and time.”
If you are a women you know this scene, in fact we all do if we’ve seen enough movies. Here imaged with the emphatic line breaks, the repetition of the long i sound that runs throughout, the short lines and short sentences building tension to the bitter, “Irony’s the ice I keep/ my dreams in.” As the absent narrator becomes present sharply in focus out of all that smoke (and mirrors.)
I am aware that more recently Kate Clancy’s work has drawn controversy. This post is not an endorsement of that. I can’t comment on it specifically as I’ve not read the offending text: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Nor as a white writer do I feel it is appropriate to comment on a debate about the representation of race.
However I can’t help think it’s quite right that writers take issue with discuss and debate not just what has been represented but how. Though in my opinion if that then leads to hounding and “cancelling” it helps noone, except perhaps the right wing who in the USA who are currently carrying out a fury of “cancelling,” benefits. I absolutely respect that was never the intentions of the critics of Clancy’s work.
Hence I share this not as a political statement or ”taking” sides but because it is a brilliant poem. My position, if I have one, on discussions of oppressions is we are all learning and growing. We all make mistakes. We all hold unconscious bias. We all have different lived experiences which inform those bias. A very different thing from conscious prejudice, I think. Though perhaps the experience of such can seem very similar to the oppressed. These are is thoughts in progress.
Brief bio
Kate Clanchy was born and grew up in Scotland. She is a writer in several genres, and has won the BBC National Short Story Award for her fiction, a Forward Prize and the Saltire Prize for her poetry, and the Writers’ Guild Award for her much acclaimed memoir Antigona and Me. She was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for We Are Writing a Poem About Home, a radio poem by the students of Oxford Spires Academy where she has been Writer in Residence since 2009.
More info
https://www.reading.ac.uk/english-literature/our-staff/kate-clanchy
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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