Haunts of the Poets
November 30th, 2011 § 1 Comment
I never quite made it to London. A Canada-born northern girl, with a Scottish adolescence thrown in, I lived abroad before I seriously tackled the south of England. I barely even saw London before my early twenties, when an ill-advised foray into writing for men’s magazines took me to the top floor of Paul Raymond’s offices above his most famous Soho club, Madame JoJo. I wrote my first ‘proper’ poem as I like to think of it in a tiny room in a small Hungarian town long ago, but all my development as a writer happened afterwards in the bit of the south I finally came to and called home: Oxford.
Place means everything to me as writer, and nothing. An equally nomadic friend once told me that places are like people: you have a relationship with them and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Oxford was an accident, a chance encounter. It could have been a one-night stand, but turned out to be a fifteen year marriage, and we are still friends. My stay coincided with that of many other exciting poets who are still my friends today, and crucially, there was funding available which I won, and which gave me the money upon which all decent writing depends to survive. The place of Oxford was, for me, a confluence of several things essential to my survival and development as an artist. I had no other tie there, but I became myself there.
Now I live on the West Coast of Scotland, so different that it may as well be another universe. The only thing we have in common is that both populations breathe oxygen. I have mountains instead of meadows, seas instead of rivers and I am far from my familiar ‘cultural base’. But it is my home, and has, in a different way, profoundly affected my writing. My new relationship (to take the metaphor further) has been stormy and difficult. My landscape has demanded attention and forced me to change. My child has been born here and knows nothing else, and that too has a profound effect on what I consider home.
Where shall I haunt when my poet days are over? It’s an atomised world now and so many of us do not stay in one place all our lives. I shall have a busy afterlife haunting lots of places, or perhaps, if I’m lucky enough I’ll finally get my opportunity alluded to elsewhere and go to New York where I’ll start a whole new movement of Dead Poets. Or maybe I’ll just be frightening cats.
Download the details of the Poetry Society’s exhibition, Haunts of the Poets, here: Haunts of Poets at Poetry Cafe
Thank you for your post. Being a nomad writer myself, forced, by chance or opportunity or fate or by no-other-choice, to call home a place with which I have not fallen in love, your words really resonate within me. A few years ago I found that your poem ‘Beheaded’ described perfectly how I felt in my new landscape. Four years down the road and very few things have changed, although I got married here, bought a house, did most of my writing here… I am still beheaded. By reading your post I have realised I have only written one story placed on my new landscape, and this is the story of a kidnap and a rape!!!!! I like your idea of a relationship with places, mine is one that needs some work, I am afraid. Maybe the idea of frightening cats, one day, in the afterlife is the one that feels closer to reality!!!!