Mother's Day Poem - Knitting

Knitting

My mother is knitting a womb,
soft click of needles in the semi-darkness,
pictures from the turned down TV
reflected in the half-moons of her glasses,

she watches a mime of cowboys
slinging guns in a dusty street,
a stampede of shooting and horses;
all that death.

My mother is knitting a womb,
out of wool the colour of wine or blood,
her glass of wine on the low coffee table,
a man falls down dead in the dust.

My mother smiles,
she hears me in the doorway,
come in dear she says don’t just stand there,
I sit down next to her in the semi-darkness,

sinking into the cushions of the old red sofa,
she pours me a glass of wine,
a man falls off a roof,
a horse rolls in the dust.

Julia Webb

Family Albums and the Movability of Memory

Blow the bugles, bang the drums - I seem to have started a new sequence of poems, although I must confess that I am a little scared of looking at them in the cold light of day. The seed of the idea has been germinating away somewhere in deep in my mind for weeks. It started when I watched a film called Stories We Tell - a film that describes the journey of one family (or really one woman) through interviews with family members and friends, interspersed with old home movie footage and photos. It is a fascinating film and a moving story - or rather stories - because what the film highlights is how we all view events differently from one another, and how memory manipulates events over time to suit our own world view.

A few weeks later I went to my Grandma's funeral. One of the things that my aunts had done was to leave out some photo albums for us to look at, and in one were photos of my family (me, my dad and mum and brother and sister) that I had never seen before - as well as quite a few pictures of my father as a child.  Some of the photos in the album were identical to photos in our own family photo albums and this got me thinking about who might have taken the pictures. I had always assumed that it was my mum and dad - but actually it could just as easily have been visiting relatives.  We did have a family camera but I don't remember it being used very much. I guess developing photographs was expensive in the 1970s.  

Things have been busy since the funeral and I didn't think much more about the photos, but yesterday evening, for some reason, the whole idea of family albums came back into my mind. I decided to write a few poems or verbal sketches of photos from the photo albums of my childhood, but rather than get the albums out and look at the photos I would try and write about them from my memories of the photos.  This was an interesting exercise - writing a memory of a memory of a memory. It will be interesting at some point to look at the actual photographs and see if my memory of them is true. I may even write from some of the other photos, but for the moment it is the process that I am finding interesting. 

Another thing that happened was that writing about a memory of a picture led me to realise that I could take a leap further - what if I was to write about a picture that could have been taken but never was. We all have memories of things that happened and people who came and went from our childhood homes, but we don't always have any photographic evidence of these people. Nowadays we have mobile phones with photographic capabilities so everything is much more documented, but in the 70s and 80s developing film was expensive so people tended to mostly take pictures of special occasions - birthdays, holidays, that kind of thing. Human memory is pictorial - I have lots of memories of childhood that are like little home movies or still images that I can call to mind - like the children next door looking over the fence or my aunt coming to visit unexpectedly in her fur coat and bearing gifts of easter eggs and cuddly toys. I found myself writing about the non-existent photos of those memories.  Of course it could be that the poems will turn out to be nonsense - they may be more like small vignettes and be of no interest to anybody else but me. Whether this is the case or not it is interesting writing them and I imagine it may trigger other memories - if nothing else I will have fun. I wrote quite a bit about autobiographical poetry back in 2008. Here is a rough draft.

The Girl from Number 79

This is the girl from next door
who offered to take you swimming,
this is her standing on the top rung of the fence
looking into your garden,
here is your mother explaining how to hold
her hand as you cross the roads,
here you are with your mouth and nose
filled with chlorinated water,
and here you are again
under the wheels of a Morris Traveller,
the driver's mouth an O of surprise,
and here is the girl
whose name you can't remember
wearing her grumpy face
because your mum has changed her mind
and said you are too young to go.

Collections and Families

My collection is almost finished, I just have a little more work to do - a few small edits, plus a couple of poems to take out and a new sequence to insert. It feels very scary at this point. I have put in so much work - it will be hard if it gets rejected. I am being realistic about it of course. I know that not much new poetry gets published, and that for every new book a publisher takes on there will be dozens of equally good books that don't make it into print. Add to this the fact that Salt recently announced that they are no longer going to be publishing work by new poets and the chances of a book seem very slim indeed!

However, despite this, I keep on writing. I am currently working on a new sequence. The sequence features a kind of mythological family, but is set in modern times. The sequence revolves around the misogynistic father character who is called Sun Daddy. I have long been interested in the dynamics of families, the different types of family dysfunction, the ways that families handle (or don't handle) pain - the way they bury it, share it around, pass it on.

Family is of course as old as history itself, but the modern family is a much more recent construct. It is often disconnected from the wider family support networks that were relied on (for better or worse) in previous times. The modern family is often an insular, disconnected, and often alienated beast, without the safety net of the family network or organised religion to fall back on in times of hardship. We are an increasingly mobile society, so it is little surprise that the modern family unit is often located geographically far from parents, siblings, and home town. Given this lack of unconditional support it is hardly surprising that families make sometimes make up rituals, rules and coping mechanisms all of their own.

Homage to the Lame Wolf

I have been reading Vasko Popa's "Homage to the Lame Wolf" (translated by Charles Simic) and have it inspiring. Popa's poems are a brilliant example of the distillation of language. Each poem is pared right down until only the essentials are left. There are no extras here, nothing that could be added or taken away. The poems set me off on a train of thought that has inspired me to start writing. Popa references family quite a bit in his poems (Father, grandfather, grandmother, great grandfather etc) and this made me start thinking about my own family, their dysfunctions and quirks and I guess my heritage. For my work in the coming year I had been contemplating the idea of writing a kind of fictional autobigraphy as a series of poems, but reading this book has made me wonder about whether I should limit the poems to one voice, one narrator or widen my scope.