poet

Remember, remember, words can punch

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I am occasionally quite critical of my old school and that’s completely unfair. For one thing, it is entirely because of its teaching that I remember, remember the 5th of November and if that is less of a political education than it could have been, sometimes it can be all the politics I can take.

Then, of course, I can count the number of times I’ve needed to know that September hath thirty days. I can count because I presume I lean on this fact at most annually, but I won’t count because then I’d have to think about how many years it’s been since I was a schoolboy.

Apparently someone I was at school with is now in charge of the place. I want to assume he’s made it better, I keep wondering instead if he’s actually always been stuck there in some kind of purgatory.

Anyway. Something that would surprise my teenage self about what became of me is that I once had a request on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. I presume my school taught us some poetry but not well enough to remember and certainly not enough to mean that with a combination of their teaching and whatever writing skill I have, that I can write any poetry at all.

I cannot, cannot write poetry and all of this is partly on my mind because tomorrow I’m running a workshop that is all about it. It occurs to me that you might well think now that I am keeping up the high standards of my school, but I promise you, no. I’ve got a poet helping me in the workshop. I say helping me, I’m going to throw the ball to her and then soak up every syllable she says.

I think a lot about syllables, I think even more about words, and it’s an enjoyable kind of thinking which it rather needs to be since I’ve yet to actually get anywhere with the thoughts. Especially not when the words and the syllables are poetry. I can do it with prose, if you give me some prose I can express why I do or don’t like it, and I can vocalise why I do or don’t like a script.

Not poetry.

I am incapable of assessing a poem, just physically unable to have any kind of coherent opinion. What I can have from poetry, though, is a slap to the face.

Last night I re-read “Sweet Sorrow”, a stage play by Alan Plater. A group of people are having their annual party celebrating the life of poet Philip Larkin when an unexpected guest comes to the door. It’s the late Philip Larkin. And the play reeks of being Alan’s tribute to his friend, but it’s also very simply – in every sense of that phrase – moving.

It features many of Larkin’s poems and you also realise in the last moments that the entire play really comes straight from one of them. Like the script says, I only know the famous one about what your parents do to you, but across two acts, I am shown very many more and shown so well that these could now be favourite poems of mine.

That’s not why I wanted to talk to you about this today.

No, the reason is that the play has a brief nod to another poet, Christina Rossetti. It features a few lines from her “When I am dead, my dearest” and, for me, specifically these:

And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

That’s it. That’s the poem I asked to be read on Poetry Please. I was at the live recording in the Birmingham Literature Festival and practically first met poet Jo Bell there because she was sitting next to me in the audience. I remember she knew to put a sympathetic, empathetic hand on my knee. I want to say she knew to hold my hand. Those two lines make me weep and I was sitting there, shaking.

Last night I was in my office, reading an old stage play by a friend I miss, and those lines are the ones that slap me.

I am actually crying right now, writing them to you.

This is what my school should have taught about poetry. I have a sense that they would’ve said, and surely my teenage self would have thought, that crying over a poem means you’re weak. Now I know that it means the words are strong.

And that’s what I really needed to learn. Not poetic structure, not the fact that Rossetti died 127 years ago, I’ll take all of that and know it’s interesting, but fuck explanations, the point is that words are so strong.

William Gallagher performing poetry at Waterstones Bookstore.

Rhyme of my life

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I’m truly not sure that I can convey to you what this week has meant to me, not least because a huge part of it is dizzying surprise. But here goes: last night I performed my poetry on stage for the first time.

It sounds straightforward when I say it like that and actually I’m conscious now that a real poet would’ve imbued the line with layers of meaning. You’d read their version of that line and not just comprehend that this was a life milestone for me, you’d also feel the tug in your heart that it was a milestone for you.

Poets do that and I can’t. All I can do is talk. Privately – no, now I think of it also quite publicly – I’ve been terrified of poetry. The power of it. There are poets who can make me weep on cue and that’s just evil.

I’ve been glad that at least I get this now, that while I came to it very late, I do at least read some poetry and I get this. I get to be made to weep, I get to have my heart tugged and my head wrenched.

But that’s different from writing the stuff.

Only, would I ask you to do something I can’t do myself? Of course I would. Consequently when I’ve run writing workshops that have been required to cover poetry, I’ve happily told you it’s beyond me and I’ve very happily learned from you.

Except a few weeks ago when poet Nyanda Foday conned me into writing a piece when myself and Maeve Clarke were running a summer school for Writing West Midlands.

Maeve Clarke is now the key part of that sentence.

For last night she produced the Birmingham heat of a poetry contest called Superstars of Slam and it was held at Waterstones. I went to support her and to just have a good time listening to the poets.

It turns out, though, that poetry contests will apparently often want what they call a sacrificial poet. This is a new term to me but then the term ‘poem’ isn’t exactly familiar yet, and Maeve had to explain. Judges will listen first to a poem that is not in the competition and to a poet who is not competing. It’s like warming them up. It’s like being the dull first questions in a lie-detector test, you know, where they are setting a baseline.

The judges assess this sacrificial poet and that’s the baseline for the night. Apparently it’s better than them judging the first real poet cold.

The only requirement to be a sacrificial poet, then, is to be a poet with a poem. One poem. Maeve knew I had one poem. She knew I’d written one at that summer school.

And she also knew that because I wrote it on my iPad, it would automatically be on the iPhone I was texting on when she called me over before the start.

I feel like I’m writing a Dear Diary entry here and I’m grateful that you’re putting up with me wibbling on, thank you. But I’d like to ask you to do one more thing: make sure I keep some perspective here.

I was not in competition last night. Having one poem does not make me a poet. And most of all, poetry evenings are supportive and welcoming and kind.

But this was a big thing for me, made possible both by Maeve and specifically by how she sprung it on me. I wish I’d shaved, but otherwise it was perfect: I had no time to get nervous.

Well, there was one moment. The three judges – Maeve Clarke, Giovanni Spoz Esposito and Afshan D’souza-Lodhi – had large laminated sheets with their scores on out of 10. Like Strictly Come Dancing paddles, but with less glitter. And as I looked over at them for approval, I saw all three sheets had the number 1.

That’s a bit harsh, I thought: scoring 1, 1 and 1. Fair, but harsh.

Then they turned them over. For content, I got a 6, a 7 and an 8. For performance I think I got a 7, an 8 and another 7. I was a bit too dazed to take it in but I believe so.

I think it goes without saying that these were the worst scores of the evening but you didn’t have to bring that up.

Mind you, I don’t have to bring up this last point but I see no possible way for you to stop me. That dastardly Maeve who needed a poet and like the producer she is knew where to get one, also filmed my performance. It’s an entire 35 seconds long, which means I’ve now gabbled at you about something forty times longer than the something actually took.

I have no problem with that. You’d best avoid me for a while or I’ll tell you about it all over again.

Anyway. Here’s Palimpsest – about the type of ancient document where words are written over over over each other in layers because the paper was so scarce – as performed by me. Poet William Gallagher.

Poet time writer

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Please don’t ever ask me who my favourite writers are because it would be about eight hours before I finally asked who yours are in return. Still, if you were nutty enough to enquire, then way up in the first ten minutes of mine I’d be saying Emily Dickinson, Suzanne Vega, Christina Rossetti and Dar Williams.

Spot what they’ve got in common.

They’re all poets.

Actually, I don’t know that Williams would say that of herself as she, like Vega, is a songwriter, but to me her finest work is exquisite poetry.

Only, I don’t know when it happened that I spotted that or when so many of my writing heroes turned out to be poets. I can’t write poetry. Not a single line. And while I’m reasonably half or quarter sure that my school must’ve mentioned poetry at some point, none of that went into my head. None of that made me like the stuff.

I can tell you that it was when a TV show called Head of the Class claimed you could read any Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas that I first heard of “Because I would not stop for death / Death kindly stopped for me”.

Then I associate Christina Rossetti chiefly with “and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget” which pops up in Alan Plater’s work. That is a chasm of a poem. I swear Rossetti sat down one day in 1862, cracked her knuckles and said right, I’m going to upset that William Gallagher bloke.

I can’t read it, can’t hear it, can’t even type that extract without feeling the centre of my body yanked down into the dirt.

That’s the other thing this bunch have in common: they upset me. Emily Dickinson does have that gleefully, joyously conspiratorially friendly “I’m nobody, who are you?” piece which balances out a lot of things, but still, on average she upsets me greatly.

There’s the one of hers that begins “Hope is the thing with feathers” and when that line, just that line, was read out over a scratchy tannoy at a breast cancer rally, I stopped and wept.

Dar Williams has You’re Ageing Well, which in its original version has seen me pulling over to the side of the road to let hot tears fall out of me. Curiously, she did a version with Joan Baez and I find that one a shrug.

Then Suzanne Vega has Tired of Sleeping which used to double me up in pain and can still be a blade in the gut.

I think you and I can also conclude that poets are really nasty people while I am a hard, macho man. But, grief, I yearn to write like them.