Every now and then you catch one of those moments, flitting about tiny as a dust mote, but golden and shivering off a tiny glimmer that you can ignore or chase.
I caught it.
There is a poet friend of mine and knowing him has helped me to realise that I might be a poet too. Maybe one day. He writes poetry and about poetry, introducing me both intentionally and not to poem-mirrors that make me wonder. Perhaps I can do/am doing this? These moments are a kind of equation, a logic that appeals to my maths-geek brain. If fragment of poem (x) = fragment of poem (y) and x is the work of a ‘real poet’, is perhaps y the work of a ‘real poet’.
Reading my friend’s new book (about poems, of course), I come across this thought. When was my first poetry experience? In fact, what is my poetic history? These questions have literally never occurred to me before.
(What is more, these questions answer the matter I pondered in happy birthday extraplorer: whether to write about creative living. The answer, I think, is not to write about how to do it, but to discover more about my own creativity.)
So another avenue of extraploration opens up…
To answer the first question (and to hop over nursery rhymes, songs, my parents’ banter), my earliest poetic memory is not of reading a poem, but writing one. This makes me think that I must have read one, otherwise how would I have known what a poem was? But it seems that the poem at the heart of my own poetry has vanished. What is left is a memory of creating tiny poetry books, maybe an inch and a half square, hand-illustrated and stapled, with rhymes like this:
My mummy is very kind
when you’re hurt she’ll bathe and bind
she wraps me up in bed
and kisses me on my head.
I love my mummy.
As far as I recall I was about six or seven years old. (I also wrote songs.)
While I must have read poetry at primary school (and maybe it will come back to me; I have a vague dusty feeling thinking about it, as if the poems I encountered must have said nothing to me), my first memory of a poem is from an English class age ten or eleven. There is a line in it I still recall, although extensive googling does not retrieve the poem. It is my first memory of being stirred by poetic magic:
‘interminable flocks
hives of the archipelago’
The captivating five syllables of ‘interminable’ have never left me and I see flocks flying still as I breathe these lines, as far as the eye can see.
extraplorer 