The Poetry Exhange

I first became aware of The Poetry Exchange after meeting John Prebble at the 2019 Chiddingstone Literary Festival. It was a wonderful day full of treats: a fantastically lively event, a surprise appearance from one of my former English teachers and Joanne Harris making friends with my mum in the Green Room, making her the envy of her book club. Meeting John and learning about The Poetry Exchange was another gift. I so hope we can have those experiences again soon.

The Poetry Exchange invite people to talk about a poem that has been a friend to them. They have an excellent podcast - I’ve recently enjoyed interviews with actor Brian Cox and about Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ - but they also give people the chance to explore their relationship with a poem in depth, with the Exchange’s poetry gurus. I was beyond thrilled to be asked to participate, and the poem that first sprung to mind was Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - which you can read in full here - so I asked to bring that to the discussion.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing edits on my eleventh anthology, and I must have read many thousands of poems over the past decade, many of which have become cherished talismans. But to have the opportunity to dive deep into a poem I love, to pore over what it meant to me for an hour or so, was a novel luxury and a completely wonderful experience. It felt medicinal. I recalled the first time I met ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, stumbling across it online when my youngest daughter was one and we were still in the grip of baby madness. I was electrified. I had never seen a poem that spoke like this or about this.

The image of the totalitarian state of motherhood - the uniform, the ritual, the red book bureaucracy, the prescribed choruses - is perfect.

‘As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.’

I know Liz is saying something deep and true about the expectations placed on mothers not to deviate from the sanctioned hymn sheet of baby-wrangling bliss, but she also managed to remind me of my bafflement at parachuting into this strange territory without having learned the language. Where did the five little ducks go swimming one day? How did everyone else know when to Zoom Zoom Zoom their nonplussed babies? What actually was weaning, or mastitis, or cluster feeding?

Liz captured so vividly how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border, the mundane made strange. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. My suddenly small world was landmarked by draughty church halls, weighing clinics, libraries offering Rhyme Time and coffee shops with enough space between the tables for me to bump and shamble my buggy through. On the outskirts of one of the world’s most exciting cities, I pottered between municipal amenities in an exhausted daze.

I had been so avowedly urban, such an indoors cat, that I hadn’t owned a waterproof coat until I had my first baby. I always figured that if it rained I would use an umbrella (impossible to hold while pushing a pram) or just, I breezily told my husband, “go in a shop.” With a baby who was frequently incensed in company but tranquil when I pushed her for miles, I became an outdoor creature. When Liz writes of pushing her pram through freeze and blossom and, later, daffodils, I was reminded - by the sensitively incisive questions from John and Andrea - how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. I don’t think it was just that I spent so many hours tramping the Common, although my daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels. There’s something about parenthood that links us to the turning world again: a growing baby is a yardstick against which to measure the years.

What Andrea and John helped me to understand was something I already knew on an intellectual level: that we bring our own emotions and memories to every piece of art we encounter. When speaking about poetry, I often point out that nobody expects two people to listen to the same record and have the same response - there might be a sticky-floored nightclub in my mind’s eye and a sun-soaked beach in yours - but school has left most of us with the idea that there’s only one way to understand a poem. Discussing the poem in such detail made realise just how deeply, vividly personal my response to Liz Berry’s Republic had been. It looks like Tooting to me, but everyone who reads it will map their own psychic geography onto the poem, and it will belong to them.

Liz also talks about the physical toll of childbearing, in a way I hadn’t previously seen literature of any kind do: the fistfuls of moulting hair, the aching, exhausted ‘spindled bones’. If you’re lucky, a first pregnancy can be a deliciously cosseted time: take my seat! Don’t lift that! Build yourself up with nourishing meals! The poem brilliantly evokes the shock of being plunged into an unfamiliar, manual job with round-the-clock demands - the tender drudgery of ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ - while feeling like you’ve been run over. There never seemed to be time to get going on that vegetable garden I had so naively planned for my maternity leave. There was barely time to prepare any food for myself that required more than one hand. By four months in, I was about 95% biscuit. I have a shoulder and a bladder that will never be the same again, and Liz told me I wasn’t alone.

The image of the doctors in the poem - ‘slender and efficient’ - is quietly devastating in opposition to how the new mother feels. And the three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase ‘its unbearable skinless beauty’. There’s a poem called ‘Vixen’ by Glenda Beagan, also in Night Feeds and Morning Songs, which opens with the line: ‘motherhood peels me bare’. With John and Andrea, I probed these phrases. Why had they struck me so emphatically? There was much to unpack about the vulnerability I had felt in early motherhood, poised to panic when my baby erupted and, later on, the heartache of your children’s fragility when they are out in the world, out of your arms, blithely oblivious to your agony that they could be scalded or trampled or sneered at by the world.

It feels, to me, as though ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ builds to a climax that is a shout of sisterhood. Fervently, devoutly, the narrator asserts her citizenship of this wild queendom and her solidarity with its denizens - especially the traumatised, especially the haunted. The poem underlined the sense I had all through editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs of these verses forming a literary community during a locked-down time when we couldn’t access a physical one. Poetry of all kinds has been important to me this past year, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It can be gobbled even when time is short or attention is scattered to feed us by reminding us of our fellow travellers and our shared feelings.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem felt intimate, emotional and deeply therapeutic. I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and savoured each beautifully constructed line and striking image with new relish. The sheer indulgent pleasure of being asked to examine the chords it struck in my memories and mind shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone who has been working with poetry for over a decade, but somehow it was.

There are now many people, publications and organisations who bang the drum for poetry’s mental health benefits: William Sieghart, whom I was lucky enough to interview about his Poetry Pharmacy books and Deborah Alma who edited The Emergency Poet anthology and runs the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire among them. I’ve often written on the subject myself for publications including The Daily Express and Red Online. But being given time and permission to spend this long with a poem that has been a friend to me was an extraordinary and unexpected gift that gave me a deeper understanding of how poetry works on us as well as a greater love for this poem in particular. I resolve to make time to sit with a poem in this way more often, to suck out its marrow and let it work its magic on me. The Poetry Exchange is a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful to have encountered it.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here.

You can buy Liz Berry’s wonderful pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood here or from your local bookshop.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, an anthology of poems about motherhood, can be bought here or from your local bookshop.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)