I read something this morning that was both reassuring and revealing - a comment by poet and novelist Fred d'Aguiar, about a new collection by Grace Nichols, The Tracks of My Name.
He's written about her book, "‘To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers."
I haven't heard it expressed so well before, this issue of post middle age atrophy. I've heard about poets who shone when they were young and never again but not such close attention to that phenomenon. Beyond middle age where do we find that fire, how do we forget? This is going to keep me going for a while.
I chose a poem by d'Aguiar for the anthology
Ten Poems about Sewing recently published by Candlestick Press but I've known his work for years because he, like Nichols, is a writer who clearly turns up every day and does the work. His poem in the Ten Poems is about his grandmother's sewing machine.
My turning up in the last week or two is to sew. I have boxes of fabric - given to me, or acquired...and at least three bags of scraps I mean to make into bunting. I made a summer coat for a friend, demanding but fun and allowed me the excuse to go into
Ditto in Brighton, I made a dress from some wool given to me, for autumn's colder days and the other more wonderful reason is my daughter in a shirt I made in my 20s that she grabbed helping me clear out the wardrobe. There were matching trousers once! That top is nearly 50 years old and still being worn with delight.
This morning, then, I am indebted to d'Aguiar for his reflection on a poet writing past middle age, past the energy of youth, and I am grateful to anyone who acknowledges the struggles, setbacks, what it takes.
I'm off, shortly, to do a reading group in a hospice for the Royal Literary Fund and one of the poems I'm looking at is by Jonathan Edwards. He was asked the best advice he'd had for an RLF podcast and that is also where I began this train of thought, with the legendary Hugo Williams, who passed it to Edwards and so it goes.
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