Jill Abram chooses poems by Edward Lear, Lemn Sissay and Jacqueline Saphra to take to her desert island
I get overwhelmed by too much choice. I’ve been known to walk out of shops without buying any of the lovely things on offer because I can’t decide which I like best. Picking my favourite anything is never going to happen, so when I was asked to write about three poems I would take to a desert island, I was both delighted and daunted. There’s an extra impediment for me when choosing poems; I have so many friends who are poets, how can I risk offending all but three of them? So my strategy is to pick three which to relate to stages in my own poetry life – please forgive me!
I don’t remember being encouraged, either by my family or school, to love literature, except in my early years. I was reading by the age of three and soon authors on my bookshelves included A.A. Milne, Iona and Peter Opie, Dr Seuss, Richard Scarry and the ubiquitous Enid Blyton (my older sister collected The Secret Seven, I had The Famous Five).
In Junior 3 (sorry, I still do ‘old money’ when it comes to school years), Mr Gee had the whole class reciting You Are Old, Father William by Lewis Carroll, bit by bit, over and over, to learn it by heart. I’m afraid I have retained very little of it (you can hear Kei Miller read it on the Poetry Archive), but I can still tell you all about James James Morrison’s Mother’s Disobedience, which I learnt later, to compete in the Mid-Somerset Festival while a student (Highly Commended, since you ask).
I stood on a podium in my blue dress with white lace jabot and recited the whole poem from memory while the rest of the class, wearing green balaclavas and blue gloves, acted it out
I still have a hardback copy of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs (the Eleventh Impression published by Chatto & Windus in 1969), which my mum gave me and is the source of my first Castaway choice: ‘The Jumblies’. My class performed it when I was about five and I was chosen to be the narrator. I stood on a podium in my blue dress with white lace jabot and recited the whole poem from memory while the rest of the class, wearing green balaclavas and blue gloves, acted it out. Here’s the first verse:
The Jumblies
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
I always thought of myself as a writer – or at least someone who wrote. I occasionally took classes. In 1998 I did a workshop with Leah Thorn, who set us the exercise of taking someone else’s poem and using their structure as a model to write one of our own. I chose ‘Airmail to a Dictionary’ by Lemn Sissay, from his debut collection Rebel Without Applause (Canongate, 1992), which I choose again as my second Castaway poem:
Airmail to a Dictionary
Black is…the shawl of the night
secure from sharp paranoic light
Black is…the pupil of the eye
putting colour in the sea’s skin and earthen sky
Black is…the oil of the engine
on which this whole world is depending
Black is…light years of space
holding on its little finger this human race
Black is…the colour of ink
that makes the history books we print
Black is…the army. Wars in the night
putting on the Black to hide the white
Black is…the colour of coal
giving work to the miners, warmth to the old
Black is… the shade of the tree
sharp in definition against inequality
Black is… the eclipse of the sun
displaying its power to every one
Black is…the ink from a history
that shall redefine the dictionary
Black on Black is Black is Black is
strong as asphalt and tarmac is
Black is…a word that I love to see
Black is that, yeah, black is me
My version is also a series of rhymed couplets but they all start with “Jewish is…” and I twisted the end to comment on how much I identify with preconceptions of being Jewish. I met Lemn a few times, including a memorable occasion at work when he interviewed Linton Kwesi Johnson for Radio 4 (what a privilege it was to be the sound engineer on that session!) so I sent him my poem. He wrote back, a letter typed on brown paper but signed personally and with a handwritten postscript and smiley face. It’s still in my bedside drawer.
I received Arvon’s brochure for several years but never quite took the plunge. In 2007, I saw Lemn was tutoring a poetry course at The Hurst with Rommi Smith, whom I had also met at work while she was poet in residence for Radio 3. I booked, and when I collected together all my adult writings to take with me, it was a very thin portfolio. I loved being immersed in poetry and with fellow poets for a few days, as well as getting so much joy from the actual writing, and realised I must do more of it. Someone told me about The Poetry School and I enrolled on their monthly Saturday sessions with Jane Draycott. One of the first things I learned was that writing takes more than putting pen to paper. Thus, I took my first steps toward becoming a proper poet.
Before long, I was deeply embedded in the poetry scene, starting with open mics then receiving invitations to feature. My first paid performance and hosting gigs were both given to me by Russell Thompson, then the London programmer for Apples and Snakes. I started creating and curating events, including the Stablemates series of poetry and conversation, which were initially held at Waterstones in Piccadilly. I was invited to join the collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen in 2009 and became Director the following year. I continued my endeavours to become a better writer too, taking more courses, classes and had some mentoring with Mimi Khalvati.
My first two Castaway poems represent my early introduction to poetry and my initiation into being a poet, but what can I pick from all my years as student, writer, performer, presenter, producer and bring us to the present?
My first two Castaway poems represent my early introduction to poetry and my initiation into being a poet, but what can I pick from all my years as student, writer, performer, presenter, producer and bring us to the present?
Jacqueline Saphra has seen me in all those roles; I have introduced her at my events, we have performed together and now at last I am her student in monthly seminars. At our most recent session she spoke about what she does with her own poems, which I feel she does to mine as well – she shakes them out of the boxes I write them into. Jacqui is a humanitarian and an action taker – she has been the driving force behind events to raise money and awareness for all sorts of injustices, including a Poemathon for refugees crossing the Med in 2015 and the Poets for Ukraine gala just a month after the Russian invasion. She motivated the creation of Poets for the Planet, a community which engages with climate and ecological emergency.
Jacqui and I are both atheist, secular, British Jews – which is not always an easy thing to be, especially at the moment. One of the main themes in her recent collection, Velvel’s Violin, is the Jewish diaspora. Many of the poems have taken on new resonances since the actions in Israel / Palestine on and after 7th October 2023. She has written about this in a blog post for Jewish Renaissance, which concludes with my final Castaway poem:
Anxious Jewish Poem
Jewish Brits are quiet, mostly hiding
under hats and breathing lightly
eagerly inaudible in Jewish whispers
stretched and tuned to bashful British
as Jewish Deputies doff their kippot
and stand to sing for queen and country.
It’s been a Jewish while since records of
a Jewish wave and you might say we’re safe:
we pass for now, and some of us do not
observe, do not observe at all, but
Jewish who would trust the territory: its
Jewish folds and shifts, ancient slurs
that blur on, cringe and bleed through skin
of memory? Jewish history churns, red paint
spits the yids, the yids, Fagins, Shylocks, still
the Jewish money gags, nose jobs, sentries
at the gates. So keep your Jewish head down
and your Jewish case well packed and when
push comes to Jewish shove, as has been proved
and proved again, my Jewish friends, however
Jewish you are not, they won’t forget
your Jewish children and your Jewish god
your tarnished candlesticks, your stars,
your rusty mazeltovs, your Jewish books.
Never assume. Accept your Jewish bread
unleavened; always be prepared to move.
Photo of Jill Abram by Naomi Woddis
