Sunday Poem – Sarah Littlefeather Demick

I’m tentatively starting this blog post by saying I’m feeling a lot better this week.  It’s been two weeks and 5 days since my emergency operation, but I’ve been gradually getting back to normal for most of this week.

I’m the first person to admit I’m not the best at taking it easy but I’ve been left with little choice after my recent adventures.  The strangest thing has been limiting myself to doing one, or at the most, two activities a day so I don’t get too tired.  Normally, I just charge about from one thing to the other, but this level of normality is not possible yet.

Monday was supposed to be a day of working on the RD1 form, but I got distracted by a poem.  It’s been sitting in my folder for a while now in first draft form, but it suddenly felt ready to be worked on.  I had loads of fun with it – it is a bit of a rant poem but it does fit with the theme of my PhD so I suppose I was kind of on task.

The poet Tony Walsh posted that he was running a poetry workshop in Barrow at a primary school a week or so ago, so I messaged him and offered him somewhere to stay for the night.  It was lovely to see Tony again – last time I saw him would have been in 2012 when we worked together on a 12 week poetry project in a men’s prison, so it was nice to catch up again and hear what Tony had been up to.

On Tuesday I spent most of the day doing a bit of PhD reading.  My lovely friend John Foggin sent me a brilliant book called ‘Man Made Language’ by Dale Spender.  It was published in the 80’s but it is kind of blowing my mind.  The first couple of pages talk about insults when directed towards men and women – that the word ‘tramp’ about a man might make you think of someone who is scruffy or dirty, possibly homeless, but the word ‘tramp’ about a woman could mean all of these things, plus negative sexual connotations.  The word ‘bachelor’ – we don’t have an equivalent word for it in English to describe a woman – the closest would be spinster, but again that has negative connotations in the way that bachelor doesn’t.

I am curious about why these observations are not more widely known – as they have been around since the 70’s/80’s.  I can accept that I am quite naive about feminist research.  I’ve only just read Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics for example, so I know I’m playing catch up all the time.

I talked to a few of my friends from my running club about it (men), and my mum (not a very representative sample I know – but you have to start somewhere) and they all said they’d not thought about it before.  I suppose it’s the problem of disseminating research into the wider society and how you go about doing this, and then what do you do with this knowledge?

I’m three quarters of the way through Man Made Language now, and really enjoying it.  On Wednesday I went to Manchester to meet the subject librarian at MMU and she showed me some techniques for more advanced searching around my subject.  I’m in a bit of a mini- panic this week about the PhD.  I reckon I’ve had nearly three weeks off with being in and out of hospital and then recovering from the operation, so I feel like I’ve got to get a move on.

On Thursday I went to Manchester again to do my teaching.  It was nice to see my students again after missing the last two sessions.  On Friday morning I decided to try a little jog down the Furness Abbey path with a few of my friends.  It was very slow – in fact it took us about 40 minutes to run what would normally have taken me about 18, but I didn’t want to jolt my insides up and down too much.  I didn’t have any pain when I was running and woke up the next day without any, so I’m pleased with that, but still a bit nervous about doing anything more strenuous.

I had my Dove Cottage Young Poets session on Friday afternoon – four of the new poets from last week came back (out of eight) and one completely new poet who hadn’t been before, plus Hannah Hodgson, who has been coming for a year to the sessions.  This week’s session was a lot easier – the young poets seemed more confident this time and read out a lot more.  They also wrote some fantastic stuff during the session.  I’m getting excited already about working with them towards their performances at Kendal Poetry Festival next year.

On Saturday it was the end of year Barrow Poetry Workshop session.  I’ve been running these sessions for a year and a half now, and decided it would be great to make the December workshop more exciting by inviting someone else to take the session instead of me, so Peter and Ann Sansom from The Poetry Business came down.

I’ve been really looking forward to being in a workshop instead of running it for ages now, but I don’t think I was quite with it yesterday.  My whole face on the right side was tingling in a disturbing fashion and I found it really hard to concentrate.  It was a great workshop though, and I enjoyed hearing everybody else’s contributions.  I also took my poem which I’d been working on and got some feedback on it in the afternoon session which I think will definitely make it stronger.

I think the tingling face was just a symptom of being over tired as I woke up this morning and it was fine – another reminder to take it easy!

Two pieces of good news this week as well – this blog was included for the third year in a row on Rogue Strands ‘The Best Poetry Blogs of 2016’.  Matthew Stewart at Rogue Strands had this to say about my blog:

Kim Moore’s Sunday Poem feature is a bit like Marks and Spencer’s Dine in for Two deal: imitated by countless competitors but never matched. What’s more, its timing is perfect: a lovely read at the dog-end of the weekend.

Josephine Corcoran also included my blog on her roundup of her favourite poetry blogs as well – you can read her post here – so lots of new blogs to look up over the holidays if you’re a bit bored!

Today’s Sunday Poem is by Sarah Littlefeather Demick who is a wonderful poet who lives in Ulverston, not far from me.  Sarah is a fantastic singer as well and performs wtih her husband Rod as a folk duo called The Demix.  She has a completely unforgettable voice and often makes me cry when I hear her sing.  She started writing relatively recently, in the last couple of years but I think her poetry is completely unique – very lyrical but often unsettling, as you will see from the Sunday Poem.

Sarah is an Ojibwa Indian.  She was born in Toronto, Canada and raised by adoptive parents in London, England.  She travels around the country working as a respite carer, mainly for people with dementia.  Sarah has recently published a pamphlet called Another Creature.  The production of this pamphlet is really beautiful – you can see a photo of it here.  I think Sarah has actually sold out of the pamphlets already and it was only published a few months ago, but if you’d like one, you could comment below and it might persuade her to print some more!

I’ve decided to use the title poem of the pamphlet for this week’s poem.  It’s the first one in the pamphlet as well and I think it is a brilliant poem to put at the front of a pamphlet because it introduces a lot of the themes which occur later in the book – the importance of animals, self-discovery, power and memory.

This poem also has a slightly surreal feel, or as if things are slightly off kilter.  I think Sarah establishes this straight away with the use of ‘I recall’ instead of ‘I remember’.  I think the word recall distances the speaker a little – it makes the memory a little more formal and less personal somehow maybe.  Yet this contrasts with the content of the poem – and makes the first sentence of the poem ‘I recall being given away as a child’ very shocking.

The recollections in the poem feel very spontaneous – almost like stream of consciousness memories because of the lack of punctuation.  I really like that effect – it felt like each memory or image unfolded seamlessly after the next one.

Some of my favourite lines are ‘how I came to live with goslings when I was another creature’ and ‘I recall how most of my life was an untamed forest’.  I think they are beautiful lines, and have a ring of authenticity and truth about them, and yet, they are strange and slightly surreal at the same time.  The line ‘I found a person who was my mother’ is heartbreaking – again, there is that distancing effect, but there is also something interesting in the assertion of the mother being a person, a person in her own right.

I hope you enjoy this week’s poem.

Another creature – Sarah Demick

I recall being given away as a child and how I came to live with
goslings when I was another creature

when I had walked for nearly a dozen years I recall riding on the back
of a motorcycle from outside our house I recall being free and feeling
the heat of a summer evening on my skin as I was taken into the
night

and roundabout that time I recall a hospital ward with the heads of
dying men silently queuing for their final journey and my father was
there with them

and two years later I recall being in my room and being in there with
amplified solitude and when I was asked why I was crying I recall
being unable to answer but tearing out my hair with grief and with
rage

I recall how most of my life was an untamed forest where I was
hunted and brought down by men whose temptation was tempered
only by lust and no one told me there was another way

and I recall how any other way eluded me for a very long time but
when I found it my shadow became an eagle

and when I was thirty-five I found a person who was my mother but
she didn’t know me and was only glad I’d been raised up good and
wasn’t fat

I recall thinking that being raised up good was not so easy