Shadow Dispatches

May

I’m really pleased to have three poems in the Spring 2016 edition of The Lonely Crowd, as well as an essay on the composition of the poems and recordings of them online.

There are several readings planned to showcase the issue – one has already taken place (unfortunately on the same night I was reading for Brewery Poets), but I should be reading at one later in the summer.

Composition Notes: Polly Atkin

Notes on ‘Sister Running’; ‘Strength in Winter’; ‘Perihelion’.

On the surface, the thing that most strongly links these three poems is that they have a lot of weather in them; a lot of sky. One of the things I most love about Grasmere is the sky: its ever-changing moods; the complexity of its little-lit darkness; the long summer light; the sharpness and excess of stars on a crisp night, when you can see the milky way. They are all also in some way about friendship, the ways we relate to our loved ones, and a sense of shared understanding. […]

I did the recordings whilst I was staying at the Watford Mercure for a three-week pain rehab programme run by The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore. It’s the only course of it’s kind in the UK, and the only dedicated programme offered to people with EDS (if you’re fortunate enough to be referred, as I was). Not everyone who does the course has EDS, and it was originally designed with spinal patients in mind, but has been adapted as Stanmore has grown as a specialist centre for EDS. I wouldn’t recommend the Watford Mercure to anyone (although their ability to cock up every dinner for three weeks in new and amazing ways was spectacular in a way) but the rehab programme was definitely worth it.

As ever, I came home to an enormous impossible backlog of admin and marking, and I haven’t had a chance yet to properly process everything I learnt, or to reflect back on the three weeks. What I can say, is that I now feel I have more of the tools and knowledge I need to help myself in the future, and to avoid the downward spirals of injury and de-conditioning that have made me more ill in the past. Also, that looking after myself needs to be a priority, not an afterthought. May is EDS awareness month, and though I’ve been talking to a lot of people about my experiences, I thought it would be useful to write something too, even if it is brief.

I was very nervous before starting the course. Like most people with EDS, and indeed, many people with chronic conditions, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with healthcare professionals. I try not to expect the worst, but it’s hard not to worry, especially when it is such a large chunk away from your usual life. I read a few accounts of the course on blogs and facebook groups to try and find out what to expect, as we weren’t given much information before hand, and they all seemed to say the same thing: the course is great if you’re willing to change the way you live, and awful if you’re not ready to think about that.

One of the best things about the course was the group of women I was with. We should have been in a group of eight, but one didn’t show, and the seventh sadly had to leave early because of complications. The six of us who were left bonded really well, which made the difference (as we often spoke of, mid dinner-disaster) between spending the weeks crying in our rooms, homesick and in pain, and crying with laughter together. I got the giggles so badly one day during our ‘water-based exercise session’ that I was crying into the over-treated water. We all remarked on how relieving it was to be around people who – whilst they might not understand the particularity of your personal pain – understood you were in pain, and could recognise when you were struggling, without you having to articulate it. I feel very lucky to have met them all.

The Watford Mercure is a remarkably ugly and poorly laid-out hotel: a post-war labyrinth of broken ceiling tiles and unnecessary steps. It is on a bypass road, and benefits from being completely unreachable by public transport. Our group in our various states of fatigue and pain felt very trapped there, with the disastrous food, the malfunctioning coffee-machines, and the world’s slowest stair-lift between our chair-using group member and the lobby. We joked about feeling like we were in Girl Interrupted. Although there was something about the whole thing that made me think of school too (not just the giggling and the crumbling building). It felt like a low security prison crossed with a summer camp for mutants with unhelpful powers. By the second week, we’d realised the only thing we could reach by foot was a McDonald’s right next door, which could at least supply us with snacks and drinks. When I broke out one morning through the permanently propped-open fire exit, and stalked across the needle-strewn car-park, I found a horse tethered on the patch of grass between the hotel and the drive-thru.

One of my fellow internees wrote a blog post about the programme a few weeks ago, which says pretty much what I wanted to say. The days were a mixture of groups activities and talks, and one-to-one physio and occupational therapy sessions. The PTs and OTs were humane, human, and helpful (on the whole). This shouldn’t be an unusual combination, but all of us had experienced otherwise in the past. As I’ve said before, this is one of the most important things to remember about people with an under-diagnosed condition like EDS – we have all been written-off, gas-lighted and insulted by medical professionals at some point in the past, if not continually, for decades. We’re the rescue-cats of patients. It’s no good telling us anecdotes about patients having different views of their treatment to their doctor, and expecting us to side with the doctor (no names mentioned!).

Apart from meeting the others, the physiotherapy was the most useful part of the course for me. We all went away with physio programmes tailored to our needs, and I certainly felt the difference immediately. It is up to us to keep working on what we have learnt. The most important thing the programme teaches, however, is around the tricky idea of acceptance. We were all there because we have chronic conditions that cause pain. We weren’t there to eliminate pain from our lives, or to reprogram our genes like neolutionists. We were there to learn to turn huge peaks and troughs of pain and activity into rolling hills or gentle waves – to live more comfortably – not to ‘get better’. A lot of what we talked about was how we can change our lives to make them less disabling, and to remove factors from them which make us more ill than we need to be.

There is a lot more I could say about this in relation to trying to function in academia with chronic health issues, and the insidious ableism of Academe, in a week when many friends and colleagues are striking for better pay and working conditions. Instead, I need to get back to my marking, to pace it a bit better than usual, and try and not let it hurt me too much.

Being Mutant

In October 2014 I was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a connective tissue disorder caused by a mutation in one or several of the genes responsible for collagen production.

Unless you’re reading this because you or a friend or family member have EDS, it’s likely that you’ve never heard of it before. You’re not alone. The only people I talk to who know about it are those who know someone else with it. This needs to change so that fewer people have to suffer in ignorance, without diagnosis, treatment or understanding from their communities.

So I’ve started this new strand on my website, Being Mutant, to share some of my experiences and knowledge of EDS, in the hope of chipping away – in my tiny way – at this vast damaging ignorance. You can find more information on EDS at the Being Mutant page (just click on the link in the menu at the top of each page) and I”ll keep adding to it as I go through the process of finding out more about the condition in general, as well as my personal experiences of it.

Shunting in reverse through the steps of a dance/nobody else can join in with.

This week I got the news that a poem of mine, ‘Begin’, was chosen as one of the runners-up for this year’s Fish Poetry Prize, judged by Nick Laird.

This is what he says about it –

Begin by Polly Atkin

The poem had impressive, confident turns, and I admired the way its syntax broke across its line endings. It had certain phrases that I liked too – ‘the bluetime when everyone sleeps’.

‘Begin’ will be included in the Fish Anthology, which I’m really pleased about. I wrote it towards the end of my MA year, although I think it changed a little after some further redrafting in 2008. In many ways the poem is about mistrusting memory, so I’m going to leave this recall vague. For a long time I’d thought of it as being quite essential to the imaginary collection I had put together in my head, but after several years of sending it out to various places and getting it sent back it got superseded. I went back to it this year because it suddenly felt very pertinent again.

The summer I turned fifteen I started to suffer from strange dizzy spells. I remember standing on a famous bridge in Italy rubbing the famous brass nose of a famous statue of a wild boar, and feeling like the world just fell away from me like a piece of stage scenery. Nothing was quite the same after that.

I had tonsillitis for the best part of a year and a half and had my tonsils removed and didn’t get better. I had a lot of tests. I documented ‘feelings of unreality’ in journals. Frightening possibilities were raised, then discounted. I dislocated my knee and fell and broke my elbow and forgot how to sleep. I got sicker and sicker and thinner and thinner. I was sent to CBT and got diverted to an anorexia specialist, because he’d ‘treated thirteen girls with Anorexia from my school’. I went to a nutritionalist who told me to avoid yeast and sugar. I swam. I tried to Be Normal. I got used to seeing the sky as flecks of moving matter. This is what ‘Begin’ tries to approach. The months when I thought I might be dying, or mad, or both.

This summer that summer when it really began is twenty years ago. I still have to tell myself every day to get up, to shake out my limbs, to keep going, that this is – and always is – where it begins. But I know now what all this meant, in a way I didn’t ten years ago when I was trying to face it in small ways for the first time in my poetry. I now know all my mystery symptoms were products of my hypermobile body, of that defect in my collagen that effects how everything works, but which no one recognised. I can’t undo all that time when no one saw me or believed me, including, at times, myself. But I can speak about it.

May is Ehlers Danlos Awareness Month. I’ve been wanting to write something about it – for it? – but couldn’t work out how or what. Do I try and explain what it is like to live with it? Do I try and explain why it’s important to try and explain?

One of the amazing things I’ve found out since my diagnosis is that – for a supposedly rare disease – there are a remarkable number of poets with EDS. I hope that together we might be able to change the narratives on EDS, so that fewer people have to go through the years of misunderstanding and mistreatment that I, and many others, have done.

So I thought I’d share a few others poems I wrote during that MA year, which perhaps express how it has been for me to live in an Ehlers Danlos body in a much clearer way that I feel I can do in prose. I’ve been writing about it much more consciously in the last few years. But it is only looking back at these poems now, knowing what I now know about the breadth of my condition, that I understand how much I was always really writing about it. I didn’t know, for example, the diagnostic significance of my narrow high-arched, over-crowded mouth, how it was directly connected to my long arms, my tumbling knee-caps, my pain – and yet it’s there in the poems. These poem are all in my first pamphlet ‘bone song’.

The Shuffle Tap Shuffle

She sings a song to bring herself home,
counting the bars to the end of her street,
she moves her feet in time to the music,
dream-scenes the bone-cracking walk as a dance
where shuffle tap shuffle the drag is deliberate,
the thick-blooded leaden-limbs part of the act,
where heel toe sliiiiide the slabs on the pavement
are dance pads with neon touch-sensitive lights,
and she step stamps the beat on them, brushes a pause,
timestep and ball-change she pirouettes, glides
to a note-perfect finish, expertly timed
so the claps start to come as she reaches the door,
fumbles the key in, trips into the hall
and the held last note fills the drum of the house
as she slumps to a rest like a curtsey, a bow,
a puppet unstrung, on the floor.

Tree Dreams

If she holds her twig-brittle finger bones tight
in a fist, her knuckle bones rise up white;
stub-buds of new limbs, pressing her skin.

They hover close, under the surface, wait
for a signal, trigger. They itch for the light
and to move in it, grow to it, drink it all in.

They’re greedy. She glimpses their dreams some nights,
dreams of branches, galaxies wide,
of fruit like planets, seeds like suns.

She frisks herself for gnarls and twists,
reads each bone-knot as a sign, its time
to change, the spring has come;

they shoot from her like splinters, scythes,
leave her skin-split like a pip and rise rise rise

sunday morning

I expect it is only last night’s drinks
taking their sunday morning bow,
this way I feel; almost as though

I’m growing backwards,
shunting in reverse through the steps of a dance
nobody else can join in with.

It is a sad dance, but happy too;
no one could move their feet that way
if they were not glad to be dancing.

I jerk, dip, as the music directs,
travelling the length of the past, the possible,
in strange slow arcs like broken ripples

raising my arms, stroking the ground.
It is sunday morning. Another week gone.
It all will be gone by evening.

Teeth

Her teeth were rows of sarsen stones
fixed in an arc like a half-set sun,
a henge that would fit in the dip of a palm
but heavy, too heavy to carry for long.

He took the weight. She told the hurt
of fissures and fault-lines, sinking earth,
of fractures, loosenings, crumblings apart.
He ran one finger over the curve

and found himself lost amongst cairns and tors,
ruined palaces, mounds of bones:
a thousand things one human mouth
could never hold or own.

Weary, he pressed them back into place
and closed the ground of her face.

Dark Days for White Moss/WWWD.2

White Moss common is once more under threat, as the application to ‘improve’ it into a visitor hub has been renewed with (very minor) adjustments (the cafe is slightly smaller).

You can see the plans here and here.

This comes as the Lake District National Park Authority are also selling off large swathes of the Lake District, including Stickle Tarn, Baneriggs, and Lady Wood, the wood above Town End which William and Dorothy Wordsworth knew as ‘John’s Grove’ after their brother, drowned at sea in 1805, and which is described in the last of the Poems on the Naming of Places, as below. This is one of my favourite Wordsworth poems, and, I think, particularly evocative of Grasmere and the Lake District more generally.

I have been both a listener and leader in walking seminars that have taken students and visitors to The Wordsworth Trust into Lady Wood to hear these words along with that ‘sea-like sound’ coming through the trees. Almost everyone cries, whether they have any interest in poetry or Wordsworth or sailors or woods or not. It’s actually kind of creepy. In my critical work, I argue for the central importance of this poem, and this place to the Wordsworths’ Grasmere, and the Grasmere passed down through their writings.

It’s almost as though no one at the LDNP or Lowther or GoLakes paid attention to that excellent protest poem I posted about back in early November. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. Maybe you do, and would like to write to them to tell them.

The Old Road by Lady Wood, a little clogged with snow, during my first winter in Grasmere.

‘When first I journeyed hither’

When first I journeyed hither, to a home
And dwelling of my own, it was a cold
And stormy season, and from week to week
The pathways and the publick roads were clogged
With frequent showers of snow. Upon a hill
At a short distance from my House there stands
A stately fir-grove, wither I was wont
To hasten, for within its shade I found
Commodious harbour, a sequestered nook
Or cloister with an unencumbered floor.
Here is safe covert on the shallow snow,
And sometimes on a speck of visible earth,
The red-breast near me hopped, nor was I loth
To sympathise with vulgar coppice birds
That hither came. A single beech tree grew
Within this grove of firs, and on the fork
Of that one beech there was a thrush’s nest,
A last year’s nest conspicuously built
At such small elevation from the ground
That even an unbreeched Boy might look into it:
Sure sign I thought that they who in that house
Of nature and of love had made their home
Among the fir-trees, all the summer long
Dwelt in a quiet place: and oftentimes
A few sheep, stragglers of a scattered flock,
Were my companions and would look at me
From the remotest outskirts of the grove,
Some nook where they had made their final stand
Huddling together from two fears, the fear
Of me and of the storm. Full many an hour
Here did I lose. But in this grove, the trees
Had by the planter been so crouded each
Upon the other, and whithal had thriven
In such perplexed array that I in vain
Between their stems endeavoured to find out
A length of open space where I might walk
Backwards and forwards long as I had liking
In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness.
And, for this cause, I loved the shady grove
Less than I wished to love a place so sweet.
I have a brother: many times the leaves
Have faded, many times the spring has touched
The heart of bird and beast since from the shores
Of Windermere, from Esthwaite’s cheerful Lake
And her grey cottages, from all the life
And beauty of his native hills he went
To be a Sea-boy on the barren seas.
When we had been divided fourteen years
At length he came to sojourn a short while
Beneath my roof, nor had the sun twice set
Before he made discov’ry of this grove
Whither from that time forward he repaired
With daily visitation. Other haunts
Meanwhile were mine but from the sultry heat
One morning chancing to betake myself
To this forsaken covert, there I found
A hoary pathway traced around the trees
And winding on with such an easy line
Along a natural opening that I stood
Much wondering at my own simplicity
That I myself had ever failed in search
Of what was now so obvious. With a sense
Of lively joy did I behold this path
Beneath the fir-trees, for at once I knew
That by my Brother’s steps it had been traced.
My thoughts were pleased within me to perceive
That hither he had brought a finer eye,
A heart more wakeful: that more loth to part
From place so lovely he had worn the track,
One of his own deep paths! by pacing here
With that habitual restlessness of foot
Wherewith the Sailor measures o’er and o’er
His short domain upon the Vessel’s deck
While she is travelling through the dreary seas.
When thou hadst gone away from Esthwaite’s shore
And taken they first leave of these green hills
And rocks that were the play-ground of thy youth.
Year followed year my Brother! and we two
Conversing not knew little in what mold
Each other’s minds were fashioned, and at length
When once again we met in Grasmere Vale
Between us there was little other bond
Than common feelings of fraternal love.
But thou a School-boy to the Sea hadst carried
Undying recollections, Nature there
Was with thee, she who loved us both, she still
Was with thee, and even so thou didst become
A silent Poet! from the solitude
Of the vast Sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear
And an eye practised like a blind man’s touch.
Back to the joyless ocean thou art gone:
And now I call the path-way by thy name
And love the fir-grove with a perfect love.
Thither do I repair when cloudless suns
Shine hot or winds blow troublesome and strong;
And there I sit at evening when the steep
Of Silver-How, and Grasmere’s silent Lake
And one green Island gleam between the stems
Of the close firs, a visionary scene!

And while I gaze upon this spectacle
Of clouded splendour, on this dream-like sight
Of solemn loveliness, I think on thee
My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost.
Nor seldom, if I rightly guess, when Thou,
Muttering the verses which I muttered first
Among the mountains, through the midnight watch
Art pacing to and fro’ the Vessel’s deck
In some far region, here, while o’er my head
At every impulse of the moving breeze
The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound,
Alone I tread this path, for aught I know
Timing my steps to thine, and with a store
Of indistinguishable sympathies
Mingling most earnest wishes for the day
When We, and others whom we love shall meet
A second time in Grasmere’s happy Vale.

Composed 1800-4.
Published as ‘When to the Attractions of the busy World’, 1815.
This text from MS. W recalled that ‘The grove was a favourite haunt with us all while we lived at Town-End’ .

Ed. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, (Oxford World Classics, 2000) p.220-223.

What will be found in England’s lost corner?

Tomorrow I’m making the excessively convoluted journey from Cumbria to Norfolk, for the Cafe Writers Poetry Prize reading. The night before New Year’s Eve I got the news my poem ‘Tiny Glass Horses’ had been placed third, with first prize going to Jonathan Davidson’s paean to ‘Brickwork’, and second to Jo Bell’s take on A Natural History of Selborne, ‘A Nightingale for Gilbert White, April 5, 1768’. It was great to go into the new year with this news, and knowing my lucky streak, or whatever you might call it, wasn’t quite over.

So I realised this will be the first time I’ve done a poetry reading in East Anglia. It’s been a decade, I think, since I’ve been to Norwich (not because I’ve been living with an Ipswich supporter for the latter half of it – mostly just because of the difficulty in getting there from these far reaches of the North-West). This means I haven’t been to Norfolk since I first read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, in which Norfolk is figured, quite compellingly, as ‘England’s lost corner’. I always think of this now when I think of Norfolk, especially when I’m trying to get there via the train network, with it’s refusal of east <–> west:

‘You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a lost corner.’

Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England’s ‘lost corner’ because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.

Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that ‘when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.’
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

I hear great things about the writing community in Norwich and the surrounding area though so I’m looking forward to seeing a bit of it. And whatever I’ve lost that might reappear. Unfortunately David Morley, who judged the competition, can’t be there because of work commitments, but that does mean there’ll be a decent hearing from the winning and commended poets who can make it.

The next day is the first of my appointments with one of the specialist clinics I’m being sent to to try and help limit the Ehlers Danlos Syndrome damage. This one is for the autonomic problems that come along with it, which are some of the hardest things to deal with on a daily basis. Hopefully the poetry will take my mind off the appointment, and vice versa …

The reading starts at 7.30pm, at Take 5, 17 Tombland, Norwich in the upstairs function room.