For the occasion of World Poetry Day, 2013

I was born of poetry

on the underside

where grey makes writing easier

the printed side: too glossy.

—

I once read that those who buy poetry tend to be middle class, university educated women “of a certain age” (by this, the article implied over 50). Yet whenever I’ve been in Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road, most of the women are next door in the cookbook section and there are one or two corduroy-jacket wearing men at the poetry shelves. At university, those lecturers under whose tutelage I was introduced to Auden, Keats and Donne, were all male.

At the moment I am taken with the work of Charles Bukowski. From the poetry I studied at school during my adolescence, it is Pound’s “At the Station” and Hughes’s “The thought-fox” that still haunt me with their technical craft and sharp imagery.

My own mother is not much into poetry. She trained as a pianist and her interest lies in classical music. It was my father who had an abiding interest in literature and went as far as memorising verse. I write in the accompanying essay to my first volume, Shining in Brightness, about his influence. In fact, I may owe my very existence to poetry.

My mother had attended an ‘am dram’ production, for which my (later) godmother had painted the sets and in which my father played a bumbling, detective’s assistant. During the after party, he wooed my mother with a poem written on the back of Salticrax box.

I was born the following year.

—

If you would like to follow my regular musings on Twitter, I am @BeadedQuill.

You can order copies of my first volume, SHINING IN BRIGHTNESS: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012, here.