A MAd dash to Manchester

I wore my bee earrings to my graduation ceremony in Manchester, as Chris Palmer and Jinny Peberday of Skyravenwolf had given them to me and I probably wouldn't have even enrolled for my MA at Manchester Writing School without Jinny's insistence I'd regret it if I didn't. So it was important they - Chris and Jinny - were there with me in some form yesterday (along with The Satchel of Poetry, which they also made and which was carrying a pair of comfier shoes for when the Northerner and I got lost walking back to the car park, which we did, hopelessly, despite the Northerner being Northern and having lived in Manchester for several years in the late 90s and early 00s). (It's changed a lot, apparently.)

Deborah means 'bee', of course, and when I'd put them on, I wasn't thinking of the fact that bees are important for Manchester too. In fact, they're everywhere as a symbols of defiance post the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and it's good to see them.

Rochdale Canal

Canal Street

Manchester looking simultaneously like its 21st-century self and 1920s Berlin

First stop, the Midland Hotel to enrol and get togged up. It was great seeing my fellow-students, Tina, Liz and Cherry, in the queue as I'd never met them in person, having followed a distance learning course via Teams. (Although it was all distance learning anyway during the worst of Covid.)

Then we proceeded across the concourse to the Bridgewater Hall, where the ceremony was taking place.

There was a lot of clapping to be done, of course; important to keep clapping as you yourself have been clapped across the stage for that brief don't-fall-over moment in the bright lights. (The Northerner did some whooping too, which proves you can't take him anywhere, not even up North.) As a bonus, the speeches were pretty good, as these things go, especially the one by Letitia Jones, President of the Student Union, whose mum got a clap as she was simultaneously getting her PhD 'somewhere down the road'.)  

Oh and at the end of the row behind, a glimpse of Mohammed, who was also on our course, and the swish of our superlative tutor Kim Moore in passing as she exited the stage, all very pleasing.

(I'm really quite proud of both of us for getting all this studying done in our old age.)

Unfortunately we couldn't hang about and socialise afterwards, as we'd been up since 3am in order to get to Manchester comfortably by 8am, and despite a marathon dog-sitting session in the middle of the day by Son the Elder, Cwtch the Collie was waiting patiently for us in her crate back home. (Although since there was someone getting her doctorate with her dog in her shoulder bag, I could have tried stuffing her in The Satchel of Poetry, I suppose.)

A lovely, if exhausting, day ... and meanwhile the poems I wrote during the course continue to make their way in the world, with one of them being shortlisted for this year's Plough Prize and another being Ink Sweat & Tears' pick of the month in April. Thank you, Manchester and the Manchester Writing School. 

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2019

Every day is World Poetry Day in our house. I love the fact that poetry is such a big, comforting, startling thing in our lives. But today is the official World Poetry Day that only comes once a year ...

... and to mark it, I'm posting my poem 'Oystercatchers', which recently won the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. (Still haven't quite integrated that information into my life.)

And also some photos of Uphill Slipway in Somerset, which is the landscape I had in my head when I wrote it. 

Uphill is where, according to local folklore, the boy Jesus landed with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, en route for Glastonbury. For me it has a deeply creative, rather more pagan resonance that feels just as divine.  

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                                                                

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission      

©Deborah Harvey 2019 

'Oystercatchers' is from my forthcoming collection, The Shadow Factory, which will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing later this summer.  

Spending fairy gold

I’m so used to the idea, or first line, of a poem coming to me while I’m in the bath that I usually take a notebook and a biro into the bathroom with me. Maybe it’s to do with the neither-here-nor-there driftiness of wallowing in warm bubbles while staring at the ceiling, now graced by spotlights in the approximate shape of the Plough, a whim indulged when the house was rewired. What’s more unusual, for me at least, is an entire, somewhat water-blotched poem materialising, via divine dictation. On the few occasions this has happened, I’ve learnt to regard the apparently finished article with suspicion. It’s not a trustworthy creature.

The sensible option is to put such poems to one side and rework them later, but when it happened last October, I ignored my  own advice and spent my fairy gold before it could turn into dead leaves, packing it off to seek its fortune in the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. I figured that when it came nowhere, I’d decide whether it was worth polishing up or fit only for compost. I was not a little stunned, then, to learn the poem I'd called 'Oystercatchers' had won first prize.

And consternated. For some reason unknown to me, the poem came with an epigraph, namely the famous first line from ‘L’étranger’ by Albert Camus: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Which is not quite as notorious as the second line, but even so, how would this play with my 90-year-old mother, should someone unhelpfully provide her with a translation? Possibly not well.

I decided to work out where the poem might have come from. I recalled that when it arrived, I'd just had a sequence of poems based on four paintings by Leonora Carrington accepted for publication. The Giantess, who is depicted arriving on an alien shore in an echo of Botticelli's scallop-born Venus, is definitely still hanging about in this poem, with the wayfaring geese flying from her opened cloak transmuted, for some reason, into eponymous oystercatchers; and spookily, she was referenced by the judge, Pascale Petit, in her thoughtful, intuitive report. 

But what about Meursault, Camus' emotionally detached protagonist. How does he fit in?

Bath water. A warm sea. A glaring, African sun. It's been 40 years since I read 'L'étranger’. What, exactly, was the link between Meursault's mother's death and his subsequent, murderous behaviour? How true is his conviction that he was sentenced to death for not crying at his mother's funeral, rather than for murdering an Arab on the beach? 

Is this 'betrayal' his real crime, as far as the society that sits in judgment of him is concerned? 

I started thinking about when my grandmother died 28 years ago: the feeling that the ensuing generations had all shuffled one step forward towards death. I and my (many) cousins were no longer ‘the youngsters’. Some of us were already parents, myself included, and our children were taking our former place in the junior rankings. Meanwhile, our parents had unceremoniously become the old ones. And now, all these years later, they’re the ones who are dying, among them my father. I already have the sense of disembarking in a strange land.

Is it only when you’re parentless that you finally stop being a child and become your true self? I think so, even when family relationships are relentlessly uncomplicated, or contact with a parent is minimal. Perhaps my poem is suggesting this.

Whatever, when it does happen, I promise I won’t drive down to Severn Beach and shoot someone on the bleak and muddy foreshore.

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                             

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission       


©Deborah Harvey 2019



'Oystercatchers' will be published in my forthcoming collection from Indigo Dreams, entitled 'The Shadow Factory'