When COVID lockdown loomed again in 2020, many of us panic-bought bathroom rolls – however I stocked up on notebooks and my favorite pencils.
I have been impressed by means of the writing of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In Letters to a Younger Poet (1929), a choice of ten letters written to a tender army cadet who had despatched his poetry to Rilke for critique, Rilke prompt: “Confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”
In a BBC radio programme, The Essay: Letters to a Younger Poet, first broadcast in 2014, the English poet Vicki Feaver answered to Rilke’s query. She mentioned: “Of course I wouldn’t literally die, but a part of me would die, as it did in the years when I didn’t write.”
Poet Vicki Feaver.
PA Pictures/Canva
My husband, Arthur Gardner, who died of motor neurone illness in 2008, would have known with this. He began studying and writing poetry in his early 20s and his enthusiasm and ambition greater as he grew older.
Right through his previous couple of months, he had misplaced the usage of his fingers and fingers and was once depending on a gadget that driven air into his lungs. Nonetheless, he used each and every imaginable alternative to paintings on his poems, specifically taking a look ahead to the weekly discuss with of a delicate and sympathetic Marie Curie nurse who would patiently scribe for him.
Feaver had sought after to be a poet since studying the paintings of William Blake as a kid. Nevertheless it wasn’t till she was once in her early 30s, married with 4 small children, that she started to jot down severely. The poem 1974, which seems in her assortment, I Need! I Need! (2019), features a dialog she had at a celebration when a person requested her what she did. The general stanza finds how important an have an effect on it had:
‘I’m a poet!’ I lied
jolting myself to existence:
a lady buried below ice
with phrases burning within.
Feaver’s first complete assortment, Shut Kin (now out of print) was once revealed in 1981. 13 years later, her assortment The Handless Maiden received a number of awards. Many of those poems are reworkings of news from different assets.
The name poem, one who Feaver has mentioned is essential to her, is a retelling of one in every of Grimms’ fairy stories. A lady whose fingers were severed by means of her father has them restored when she plunges them in water to save lots of her drowning kid. After all, fingers are used for writing, and that is emphasized within the final traces of the poem: “And I cried for my hands that sprouted / in the red-orange mud – the hands / that write this, grasping / her curled fist.”
In a later poem, Bramble Arm, Feaver explores the perception that writing may also be empowering. The speaker of the poem describes a dream the place her proper arm, “the arm that wields / my writing hand”, is roofed in brambles:
It is usually a punishment
for unlocking the voice
I used to be taught as a kid
to melt or silence.
Or an indication of its energy –
a vulnerable girl’s arm
reworked into
a fearsome weapon.
Now in her eighties, Feaver has endured to jot down. Her most up-to-date e-newsletter, The Yellow Kite (2025) is her first assortment since she was once identified with Parkinson’s illness. Within the first poem, Ode to Parkinson’s, she addresses the sickness which “began as her enemy”, however may also be noticed as a chum as a result of: “You jolted her awake: / challenging her to live / every minute left to her.”
The phrase “jolted” is in all probability a planned hyperlink to her previous poem 1974. The jolt led to by means of the person’s query was once the incentive to start out writing, and now sickness has given a brand new sense of urgency to dwelling totally – and for Feaver, that suggests writing.
There are 25 poems within the pamphlet. Lots of them are about what it’s love to are living with Parkinson’s, a few of them the use of the moniker “shaking woman”. One poem, Her Misplaced Phrases, finds how laborious it’s for a poet who feels as though “the inside of her head”:
was once a shaken snow-globe
the place phrases, mingling with the hurricane
of whirling flakes, settled randomly,
revealing some and burying others.
In Parkinson’s Speaks, the illness is given its personal voice, and this can be a merciless one: “But I’m patient. I can wait. / You’ve already fallen / and broken a hip.”
The poems withstand the truth of getting old and critical sickness however refuse self-pity or false optimism. The name poem, the final one within the pamphlet, refers to a kite that was once a present from a ten-year-old son “the year his father left”. The poet remembers “watching it as it soared” and the impact it had: “My spirit that I thought / would never recover / struggled up from the floor / and flew into the air.”
Writing does now not take us clear of the tough and the painful. If we write with braveness and with integrity, it may possibly take us to the very middle of it.
It was once after my husband’s dying that I began writing poetry. Lots of the poems I wrote then have been uncooked and self-centred, however writing them helped me to make sense of my grief. Now I write with extra consciousness of the craft and with ambition.
It’s steadily tough and irritating however incessantly soaking up and interesting. I bring to mind Rilke’s query. Will have to I write? My solution is sure.
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