Poetry and Me: Evolution and Fusion

I was recently asked to write a short blog, for an event at which I would be performing, to introduce myself and my poetry. I wrote (now slightly edited):

I don't remember when I started making poetry. Possibly before I could write.
I knew "proper poems" didn't have to rhyme, but somehow mine always did. The rhythmic brain game soothed me. Poetry was a distraction from my troubled thoughts and chaotic life. Later, when those became madness, it was a lifeline. 
 
If I could write four lines a day, I told myself, I must be real. When I wrote, the voices would quiet for a while to let the words emerge. Touching pen to journal-page was a physical act in a world to which I was no longer tethered. The poems didn't rhyme anymore; they were disturbing and surreal. A mirror to my mind. They helped to bring me back – or forward.

Now I make poems about that time - mostly in rhyme; a safe lens through which to explore my madness, and a tool for educating others. It makes something fun out of what was once unbearable, and still soothes me.
 
Having begun, I feel drawn to further explore my poetic history. It is a testimony to the power of art to heal, challenge, and create change, internally and externally. 

​I have dabbled in various forms of art and creative writing, but poetry was my first love. Apart from the little I acquired at school, I had no formal literary education, but I always “knew what I liked”. As a child I devoured verse that entertained me, and scanned well. If the rhythm was off, my small, pedantic brain would ruthlessly reject it. When I was six (already a prolific reader) my father bought me Robert Louis Stephenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. The book became an immediate favourite and when, just two years later, my dad was ravaged by cancer and quickly died, it was promoted to a symbol of his love. (I didn’t realise until much later that the poems were distinctly problematic, promoting, among other things, white British supremacy and damaging stereotypes of "good and bad children".)

---

​​Inspired, I practiced writing my own verses, some of which were published in our village magazine, all long-forgotten now.
 
​The day my father found out he was going to die, he wrote two poems of his own, both for me, as expressions of his love. Perhaps it was this profound example of how poetry could express those truths for which there were no ordinary words that inspired me to pour my anguish onto the page twenty years later, when madness gained its strangle-hold on me.

---

When I began to emerge from that madness, poetry was a tool that lanced the boil of accumulated rage and turmoil I had become. The four lines I'd somehow promised my distant sane self I would write each day, no matter how meaningless, came easily, my output usually far exceeding that modest number as it bypassed my conscious mind to pour forth from my pen.  For example:

…Evil is tapping on the vestry door
cajoling wingless bats to play
in streets where pavements shiver
and front doors back away with looks of terror
in reds and whites and blues and puces…
 
…The blackness threatens.
Colours shriek their warnings.
The evil rapist chuckles.
Birds fall, lifeless, from the sky.
The angels weep.
The survivors weep.
Shafts penetrate.
The sighted are saved by the tears of the sighted.
The blind march on.
(From Rage, the Rapist March 1991)

Sometimes there was rhyme; familiar, and more ordered, perhaps originating from a place closer to the surface of my subconscious well of words:

---

​Where barren branches softly tapped
with fingers, twig-like, made of bone
and bestial spirit, soundly trapped,
attempted not a bellow, just a moan,
now fists of iron batter til they bleed
hot molten metal blood that scalds and scars
and spirit howls and screams her raging need
to slash pretense with swords of splintered glass…
(from Rebirth, March 1991)

---

Over months, I filled multiple journals with my daily outpourings, reading them back to myself aloud, to hear what was going on in the deepest parts of me. This had a restorative effect, very gradually returning me to some level of consensus reality in which I was eventually able to function again among the “normal folk”.
 
It took some years following this crisis to allow my poetic soul a voice again, and my return to verse, while still autobiographical, was playful and light-hearted.
 
I wrote about my resitance to exercise:
 
I don’t want to go to the gym.
My thighs may be flabby and fat,
but we set too much store by the toned and the trim.
I don’t want to encourage all that…
(from Resistance, 2009)
 
And a “sorry-not-sorry” apology to my feminist sensibilities for my inadequacies as a car-owner:
​
I was stood in Tesco’s car park with my head under the bonnet
looking for a part that had an oil-can's picture on it.
I couldn’t find one anywhere – neither word nor can –
so I wriggled out and glanced about for a helpful-looking man…
(from Why use a Manual when you can use a Man  2009)

​A close friend died and I wrote long prose-poems to express my grief. But it took further years to properly return to poetry as a catharsis, a healing salve - and something new. 

After the first Covid 19 lockdown, in my professional capacity (Founder and CEO of Hope in the Heart CIC), I attended an online training day entitled “An Introduction to Open Dialogue”. I knew a little about this revolutionary treatment for extreme emotional states diagnosed as psychosis, and was keen to learn more. I did not expect an intense personal reaction that would change the course of my emotional and creative life.

​​Hearing about teams of practitioners who respond immediately and compassionately to an individual in crisis, placing that person at the centre of a loving and respectful exploration into what they need in order to recover, and involving those the person loves in the entire process, cracked me open. This contrast to the casual, dehumanising cruelty I had experienced three decades earlier was stark, and memories I had locked away came pouring out. I spent the next two days stomping for miles in the rain, ranting internally, then sobbing as grief replaced the anger. On the third day a poem emerged, to the psychiatrist who dismissed me then, and those who are still dismissing people like me to this day:
 
You said I was psychotic, and you dosed me up with meds.
What was happening in my head wasn’t there in normal heads.
You said that hearing voices meant I clearly wasn’t sane
and the things I saw were products of a sick, disordered brain.
I wish it had occurred to you, instead of calling lunacy,
to ask what I experienced; embrace the opportunity
to gaze across the border and begin to hear the language
of the fascinating territory that lay beyond my anguish…
(from Ask Us: To a long-ago psychiatrist, and some current ones too. January 2021)

This poem was cathartic in a new way. It allowed me to offload a corrosive hurt that I had carried for three decades; to articulately express the wrongness of how I had been treated, and the way I could, and should, have been supported; the way others should be supported now. It equipped me with a resource I knew I could use to affect change. It liberated and transformed a part of me that had been shackled and stuck.
 
I read the poem to a maverick psychiatrist who had become a friend, and she wept as she told me “You’ve got to get this out there”. I felt intensely vulnerable, but I arranged for an associate to video me reading the poem, uploaded the film to YouTube and shared the link with trusted others in the radical mental health community. They responded just as positively as my psychiatrist friend, and my confidence grew.

This was the first, and most important, of an ongoing collection of poems about my mental health experiences that I now use to challenge mainstream services; psychiatry in particular. Each time I speak to a group of professionals about my history, peppering my account with poetry that usually hits its mark, I feel a little more heard, a little more healed, a little more restored and reconciled. Fellow psychiatric survivors relate to my words, and their encouragement further motivates me.
 
Soon after personally experiencing the restorative power of framing a vital message within a piece of art, it occurred to me that this might also prove beneficial to others. Messages from the HeART was born soon after; a Hope in the Heart project developed alongside my colleague Sophie Coxon, which invites people with lived experience of all kinds to create art with a message for someone (or multiple someones) in power, and organises exhibitions and performance events for power-holders to attend, and receive the messages; a potent communication for artists and receivers alike.
 
Inspired, like many others, by this project, I have created visual art to accompany my poems; paintings, drawings and 3D pieces, which feature in the exhibitions, and contribute to my ongoing healing.

​Since turning sixty in 2020, I have unexpectedly become a "public facing" poet, artist, exhibition organiser and "gentle activist", and learned to make short videos combining poetry and illustration.   

---

I have also discovered zines; informal publications whose creation transports me back in time to the joy of childhood making. I have embedded poems within the pages of some of these, finding yet another level of catharsis. The messy, glorious imperfection of creating zines amplifies that potential to make something fun out of the formerly unbearable. Zines like those in the Madzines collection can challenge the mainstream, and create connections with others who relate to their content. 

---

Poetry will always be a special medium for me. Its evolution throughout my life, and its capacity to immerse and captivate, challenge, transport and transcend, in fusion with other artforms, has elevated it to ever-new dimensions. It still soothes me. But it gives me so much more besides.