POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY

Do we need to kill The Angel (or Devil) in the House

Photo by MIGUEL GASCOJ on Unsplash

It is Monday morning. I have a day before me in which I will write. I will write so many thousand words towards an article that will become the first chapter of my thesis. It’s about how poetry can facilitate the discussion of sensitive subjects. you probably know that already though, if you are a regular here.

So then, I have washed up, put a wash on, scrolled, talked to my cat. I haven’t got dressed yet and I have spent most of my morning in or on the bed. I moved to the desk so that I might feel (and look) more like a writer (albeit, in her pjs). And now, instead of writing any PhD words, I am writing a Sub Stack about why I’m not writing. I have read an article by bel hooks and an essay by Audre Lorde and an article by someone else writing about the essay by Lorde. I have a lot of women’s voices in my head. Except my own.

Virginia Woolf said women need to kill Coventry Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’ before they can set to to write, and I’m wondering if that’s true. Even today, in the 21st Century, do women feel that all other roles must be fulfilled before they can make art? Must we ‘do’ motherhood, career, housework and care before we can sit down and write. Is poetry a luxury? Audre Lorde thinks not.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language,  then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. (Lorde, 2017:8)

Poetry is certainly where I head for if I have something to say. It’s my ‘go-to’ it’s where I feel ‘safe’. And as a poet, if I have a poem burning its way out of me, it doesn’t matter how much washing or cleaning there is to do, that poem has to be written. I have got better though, at ignoring the household tasks I once felt I had to do before I did anything for myself. Once, I couldn’t leave a cup on the raining board before I could sit down to knit or read or write. Oh, how things have changed.

Today is one of those days where the voice in my head is not The Angel, rather, the Devil who suggests to me that this life isn’t for me. Social media is as much to blame as anything; it shows me other, brighter, more successful women than me, who I know for sure have had their own struggles. The Devil in the House tells me I’m not good enough, that I have got here by mistake and I have no business attempting the highest academic accolade. And perhaps he is right. I’m not naturally an academic. I have had to work really hard at every stage of my higher education, most of it whilst I was fulfilling all the female roles assigned to me. I wrote essays at midnight, or while watching Pepa Pig, I zoomed to uni and back, around part time jobs and childcare. Today the Devil is telling me I should go and work at Tesco and come home and knit.

I suppose I feel at the moment that I might be regurgitating what has already been said by much brighter and braver women than me and who wants to hear me dissect what they have said and attempt to put my own point of view forward? Poetry, is not a luxury, but a necessity to me, a poet. It’s the voice I have to find as an academic that might be that I must prioritise as less of something to do when everything else is done, but one that I need to use to give my opinion based on what has gone before.

For now, at least, I’ll keep on, keeping on. And try and stab The Devil in the eye.

Hooks, B. (1986). Talking Back. Discourse, 8(Vol 8), 123–128. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44000276

Lorde, A. (2017). Your Silence Will Not Protect You. Silver Press.