Permission in Poetry

In 2020, as one of the judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, I was lucky enough to be invited to interview the poet Rachel Long, whose debut collection, My Darling from the Lions, was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. During the interview, we talked about permission in poetry—who gave us permission to write in the first place, who can take that permission away, and who can withhold it. Rachel talked about the experience of working with her editor at Picador, Don Paterson, who at one point simply said, “Can you write more?” and about how empowering that act of permission-giving was.

In a similar vein, I sent a 3,000 word lyric essay about trumpet playing to Peter and Ann Sansom at Smith/Doorstop, with the idea of publishing it as a pamphlet. Peter emailed back to tell me it wasn’t finished yet, and to just keep going. I’ll never forget the excitement of reading those words. For weeks, I sat up every night after my daughter went to bed, and wrote until 1 a.m., sending extracts to Peter, who would write back and say, “What about some more on pedagogy?” or, “we need another section using the ‘fairy-tale’ language.” It was a time full of possibility—as if threads of story and memoir and essay and poetry were hanging in the air in front of me, and I just had to reach out my hand and pull them towards me. This essay eventually became a full-length book, What the Trumpet Taught Me.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that both of these examples are women receiving permission from men. I can’t speak on behalf of Rachel, but I’m not surprised on my own account. I feel as if I’ve been hardwired to wait for permission from men. In my other life as a musician and trumpet player, my most formative relationships have been with male teachers, and the model of learning in music is still very much geared around a master imparting wisdom to a student. 

Having said that, I imagine Peter would be horrified at the idea that he was responsible for giving anyone permission to write, although I would argue that permission-giving is intrinsically bound up with the role of editor, teacher, mentor. But maybe it’s just bound up with being human, because even friends can give us permission, or try to withhold it. When my friend, who is also a poet, found out I was pregnant, he said: “I hope you’re not going to write endless baby poems.” I can still remember how much it stung, and how I very briefly stopped writing baby poems. Then I realised, for better or worse, I was a citizen of what Liz Berry calls "The Republic of Motherhood,” that this was not a place to be ashamed of, but a “queendom, a wild queendom.” I gave myself permission to write about nothing but motherhood. I’m still in that space now, although I haven’t quite reached the point of publishing much on motherhood yet. Giving oneself permission is an ongoing journey, a life’s work. 

When I was first starting to write poetry, I wrote a poem about straightening my mother’s hair.  I showed it to a male tutor, whose verdict was that the poem wasn’t interesting enough, that it was just “women’s business.” I was young, and didn’t question his opinion, and have never been able to find that poem. I’ve always remembered his words though, and what it felt like to hear them. It didn’t stop me from writing, but it did stop me writing about certain things.   

My Darling from the Lions is full of poems about hair, and black women’s hair in particular. I remember the overwhelming sense of relief when I read these poems, and I told Rachel this during the interview—that I’d felt something shift inside me, or maybe something lift. I decided I’d try and write my own poem again. That poem became the final poem in my second collection, All the Men I Never Married, which looks at experiences of sexism and female desire through the use of micro-observation. Heather Love describes a focus on the everyday as a “significant site for the recognition and negotiation of race, gender, class and sexual inequality.” It took me nearly fifteen years to write this part of the poem:

I have held my tongue for years.
My mother’s hair. I did as I was told.
She sat for hours between my legs
as if she was the child, and I the mother.
I straightened her hair, every curl and kink,
dividing it into smaller and smaller sections.
The hiss of steam. The TV in the background.

The poem became about so much more—including the strength of my mother and of women, the act of permission and of speaking out, and how we return to and carry memory.

When I interviewed her, Rachel and I talked about how working with an editor is a way of being given permission, and about other ways of receiving permission. We talked about examples set by other writers, and about permission to circle around a subject, permission to not move on. My Darling from the Lions contains a series of five tiny poems, all called “Open.” Each one is only five lines and sometimes there is just a change in pronoun, or a change in a single word. Each of these poems explores relationality and language, perspective and confession, through these tiny shifts in word choice and punctuation. Here are the first and second, from pages three and 10 of the collection:

This morning he told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, like screaming?
He says, No, like abandon.

and

This morning, she told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, Tiff, like screaming?
She says, No, Rach, like abandon.

This idea of circling back round to thematic material is something that came up at a recent Q & A session at the Cork International Literary Festival, with the poets Liz Berry and Annemarie Ní Churreáin. Annemarie’s second collection, The Poison Glen, had just been published, and the host asked how she saw the progression of her work from first to second collection. I was struck by her reply and wrote to her afterwards to continue the conversation, and she’s kindly given me permission to quote extracts from her reply here.

Annemarie told me she was “struck by the comments of a male poet recently who expressed his surprise that I would be writing ‘again’ in this second collection about the theme of family separation.”  She goes on to say:

The pressure to move away from a theme, to not return to a trauma, to ‘perform’ a forward-momentum in our writing seems to me to be a patriarchal, misogynist and deeply capitalist idea that takes away from the lived experiences of women, away from the wild landscape, and further away still from a sense of the mysteries at the heart of the human experience.

This goal of giving ourselves permission to write what we need to write, rather than waiting for someone else to give it to us, seems to me to be one of the most important acts of political labour that we can carry out on behalf of ourselves. And not only to write what we need to write, but to circle back round to it if we want to. As Annemarie puts it, “to go back and turn a theme over with older eyes … is a natural and very worthwhile deepening of perspective.”

A few months on from All the Men I Never Married coming out, I can see that I was experimenting with the idea of permission the whole time I was writing it. Though I am as guilty as anyone else of waiting for permission from authority figures—like tutors, teachers, or mentors—with this book, I had to give myself permission to keep looking at sexism, to not look away.

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes that “noticing becomes a form of political labour.” When I began to think about sexism, I noticed it more and more. When I began to think about sexism, I remembered more and more of it happening to me and around me. I gave myself permission to notice, permission to write it down.   

I would like to ask anyone reading this blog to think about the times you’ve been told not to write about something. Have a read of this thread on Twitter if you need to feel that you’re not alone. Write your words down. See which one feels like a bruise when you press it, which one is a door to something else, which one has a whole landscape and a sky and birds inside it, which one has deep water. Which one feels like falling, which one feels like flying. Stand up and go to the nearest window, or the nearest open space.  Open your arms wide. Now sit down again and write.