Helen Evans chooses poems she has memorised by Mary Oliver, William Stafford and Marie Howe, adds three from Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Kathryn Maris and Rebecca Elson, and slips a copy of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales into her sleeping bag
A castaway on an uninhabited island? Sounds nice and relaxing to me. But only three poems? Tricky. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible. Because the poems I would pack first in my rucksack are already committed to memory, and there are more than three of those. So I’m going to cheat. I’m going to talk about three poems I love and will be carrying in my head/heart, then briefly mention three unmemorised poems I would like to take so I can get to know them better. Finally, I’ll add one extra poem that I would take if I could. Hidden in my sleeping bag, perhaps. The three memorised poems are short and their language is straightforward. Which is not the same as saying that they’re slight or shallow poems.
The first is ‘Praying’ by Mary Oliver, which could almost equally well be called ‘Writing’. It’s a poem I come back to again and again, and is a great way of introducing beginners to some practices they might find helpful as they grow in their own writing lives. “It doesn’t have to be / the blue iris”, the poet tells me, “it could be / weeds in a vacant lot, or a few / small stones”. Or the sand or the driftwood or the shells or the washed-up carcass of a whale on the beach of my new home. Nothing is off-limits for the contemplative pray-er or for the writer. And that’s only the start of what Mary Oliver has to say. “… just pay attention”, she continues. Not a “SIT-UP-AND-PAY-ATTENTION-AT-THE-BACK!” kind of attention, but an invitation to become present to the world around, through touch, sound, smell, taste, sight, and all the other senses … perhaps to pause with Wendell Berry [in ‘The Peace of Wild Things’] “where the wood-drake rests / in his beauty on the water”.
Then, Oliver goes on to explain, all I have to do is “patch / a few words together”, without trying to “make them elaborate” – for me, that means I need to avoid being clever-clever, to have the courage to ‘murder my darlings’, to ignore my inner critic. To get out of the poem’s way. After that, she reminds me that “this isn’t a contest”. I need to hear that often: to write (and to pray) from a headspace of abundance, not of scarcity. Finally, she points out that this whole strange, wonderful, messy process – writing and/or prayer – is nourished by thankfulness, and tends towards creating space for “a silence in which / another voice can speak”. And so the poem opens out at the end into mystery.
It’s a poem I come back to again and again, and is a great way of introducing beginners to some practices they might find helpful as they grow in their own writing lives
My second poem is ‘The Way It Is’ – an unrhymed ten-line poem by William Stafford. Written in the weeks before his death, it feels to me like a meditation upon his long, reflective, creative life. It apparently modestly – but actually brilliantly – offers us a metaphor that sounds mundane, but keeps open the possibility of radically different meanings. “There’s a thread we follow”, Stafford asserts, through our changing lives, through isolation (“it is hard for others to see”) and through tragedies and into old age – we have to explain it, and we never let go of it. He does not, however, tell us what the thread is. That’s something every reader has to work out for themselves. Is it being a seeker? A person of faith? A writer? Maybe. Maybe not. It could be something entirely different, and different for each reader.
This is a poem that trusts its central metaphor and feels no need to dress it up with any of the other stuff I might look for in a poem: no imagery, no rhyme, no obvious soundscape other than the quiet repetition of everyday vocabulary: “you”, “people”, “change”, “thread”. This poem is, unapologetically, the way it is. And every time I come back to it, it offers me something more. So much so, in fact, that I’m running a residential poetry retreat inspired by it later this year.
You reading this (as William Stafford addresses his readers in another poem) – perhaps your writing life (or your faith life) is one where you pay the right kind of attention at the right time, while finding and following your own thread through all challenges, and never letting go of it. If this is the case, you have my respect. But I don’t want to give the impression that my faith life or my writing life is like that. Definitely not. Which is why I value my third memorised poem – Marie Howe’s ‘Prayer’ – so much. I can identify with this narrator, preoccupied as she is with the “more important” things that distract her from writing the untold story of her life and from speaking with God.
In the poem, those apparently more important “beauty products” and “luggage” immediately take on a metaphorical existence of their own, as do the “piles of falling paper and clothing”, and “the garbage trucks outside / already screeching and banging”. The distraction the narrator experiences (and I recognise) is the opposite of the attention that Mary Oliver proposes. “Why do I flee from you?” Marie Howe asks God mid-poem – a question at which any writer, or any believer familiar with their own habits of avoidance or resistance, may find themselves nodding in recognition. “Help me”, she concludes. “Even as I write these words I am planning / to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence”. Help me, indeed – and not necessarily by dispatching a helicopter to rescue the castaway!
I can identify with this narrator, preoccupied as she is with the “more important” things that distract her from writing the untold story of her life and from speaking with God
Which brings me on to three poems that I know much less well but would love to spend time with during my island stay. I’m not going to say much about them, because I still have so much to learn from them, but I want to share them with you.
First of all is ‘The Ultra-Black Fish’ by Victoria Adukwei Bulley. I heard Bulley read at Ledbury Poetry Festival and was blown away. This superb poem, like William Stafford’s, puts absolute trust in its central metaphor. And, as an additional gift, it will remind me, whenever I encounter some amazing creature on the island or in the seas around it, that I did not discover that creature but “came across it by accident”.
Second is a sestina by Kathryn Maris, ‘Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books?’ Maris has repurposed this ancient poetic form, with its associations of courtly love, to perfectly express the contemporary voice of its narrator, ignored and gaslit, addressing the male partner whose hoovering she does and in whose books she does not feature. It’s an anti-love-poem, perhaps. Stunning.
Third is ‘Antidotes to Fear of Death’ by Rebecca Elson, a scientist and poet who died at the age of 39. This poem’s juxtaposition of the conversational, the scientific and the metaphysical is extraordinary, from the very beginning. I can’t help wondering what else she would have written if she had lived longer. And just look at those last two stanzas.
There’s so much more I’d love to include. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Song’ (complete with its own islands); Mary Oliver’s ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ and, of course, ‘The Journey’; George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’; John Glenday’s ‘Woodston Burn’; Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Blue Boat’; Fleur Adcock’s ‘Things’; Kona McPhee’s ‘Self Portrait Aged 8 with Electric Fence’; James Fenton’s ‘The Ideal’; Denise Levertov’s ‘Talking to Grief’, and RS Thomas’s ‘The Bright Field’. Then there are the as-yet unmemorised ones, including Louise Gluck’s ‘Wild Iris’, Greta Stoddart’s ‘The Curtain’, Lucille Clifton’s ‘Slaveships’, David Knowles’ ‘Lapwings Against Cloud’, Roger Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’ – in fact, starting this list makes me realise that before I’m transported to my new insular existence, I need to memorise these, and more.
We come finally to the bonus poem I’d like to hide in the sleeping bag
We come finally to the bonus poem I’d like to hide in the sleeping bag. I’ve only ever skim-read fragments of it before. As a castaway I’m going to have plenty of time. And I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to pilgrimage. So I would like to take Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, in a parallel text. What better opportunity to read it? I would return to the mainland with a smattering of Middle English and a deeper understanding of medieval pilgrims – assuming, of course, that I chose to accept the lift in the rescue boat.
