Week three begins in muggy Edinburgh, and the sudden change of climate is most welcome after a long weekend sweltering in Munich at the Nature Writing Conference – us Scots are not built for consistent good weather.
Being in Edinburgh has given me the chance to explore and utilise the vast resources of the Scottish Poetry Library. Closed on Mondays, I have directed my research with the help of the library’s online catalogue, an amazingly thorough and accessible subject thesaurus which allowed me to filter my results via pertinent tags, female author, personal poetry, psychiatric illness, mental health, etc.
From this I was able to find an incredible book by the name of ‘Beyond Bedlam’, which I dutifully marked into my planner with the aim of consulting it on Tuesday at my visit.
Finding this book gave me the poetry scope my focussed research had been missing – the mingling of voices and experiences that was needed in order to fully explore and inform my own creative voice. ‘Beyond Bedlam’ is an incredible montage of poetry brought about by ‘mental distress’, covering a wide range of backgrounds in poets and attitudes to their health issues. As per the direction of library staff, I was also prompted to pick up the work of Olive Fraser, a writer whose work deserves more ready praise that it receives. The gut-wrenching honesty of Fraser’s work is testament to the ‘stripping back’ of the self that occurs in confessional poetry, bringing the poem its honesty and selfless narrative. The distress in Fraser’s work is palpable, born out of a desire to belong – to be loved – to be noticed. I think in the throes of despair this might be writing to which anyone could relate.
Further poets of interest included Emily Dickinson, whose familiar verse patterns gave a lilting method to mental considerations – her rhythm belies the serious nature of her work, something I felt I might introduce to my own writing. A selection of various poets - picked by chance - gave me further insight into the world of women’s confessional poetry – ripe with searing insight and a desire to commit to paper the thoughts that might otherwise go unspoken.
Reading and researching in the Scottish Poetry Library was an absolute joy, personally and academically. (As a side note – if you cannot make it to the library, you can borrow by post!) To have the resources of such a carefully curated collection so readily available, to have a space created for poetry in a city iconic to Scotland’s landscape, gave me a very real understanding of poetry’s place in the world and how this related to my project.
Poetry has a resonance that most people don’t consider. The poet Helen Mort, who I met in Munich and shared an interesting conversation on hair dye (conclusion, the best colours, which we condensed to grey, pink and purple, unfortunately have the least staying power), spoke a little about this in a discussion panel. Poetry can be memorised and can travel with us – in novels, we might remember a certain quote, or moral tale, but poetry can be fully absorbed by us and exist within us to be shared. I still have vague remnants of a Doric Walter Whitegate poem I memorised in primary school rattling around in my head ‘You’ve hurt yer finger, puir wee man!’… Mort talked about the beauty in this idea, taking a poem with you, so deeply within you, that it has a new home in you and can travel at will.
To bring this back to the project focus, I realised the importance of including mental health issues in poetry, and the honesty and direction that the medium affords the poet. This week, in considering a varied selection of authors, I really gave myself the scope of the issue and considered lots of different voices while writing my own poetry. Mental health needs to be in poetry as much as beautiful verses about love, or friendship, because all of these are issues of life. And poetry is life – it lives on the page and in the head, and if we cannot cover the whole and varied scope of our lives in poetry then we have missed the point.
In not only researching mental health issues in female confessional poetry, but also adding to it, as a fellow female poet, I hope to contribute to an area that has resonated so fully with me and validated my feelings. Literature has power as a conversation – it has somewhat the daft credence of ‘if you read it it must be true’ – and it has the availability as a medium that should take it to the forefront of our considerations.
So how did all this factor into my own writing? The poetry I worked on this week had a somewhat looser basis in terms of the objective.
Write…
Poems that are open – challenging - inclusion of humour? – trying to find the balance between personal and reflective – experiment – connect with the poetry.
In this way, the poems this week became all about the voice – my voice. Hopefully that shows in the poetry. I’ve experimented with poems a little more abstract – ‘Bladderwrack’ – and with a little more of my personal life thrown in for good measure – ‘Anniversary’. I also managed to write a poem about self-harm featuring – of all things – Harry Potter. This grew from a small interaction in Munich and a line that wouldn’t stay out of my head.
Next week is based in Inverness, where I will be lucky enough to return to Moniack Mhor and use their library (The Northernmost branch of the SPL) and perhaps soak up a little of the creative atmosphere that abounds there for my own inspiration.