Stand up to the line and sing...

"Poets know this moment
when it's too soon to scream yet
but too late to hold your tongue."

Ewa Lipska

I wrote once that the world needed a new heart, and I asked of myself - what can I do to help create that? Recently, I have gone through periods of despondency as I have witnessed the poets and fools of my world increasingly allowing their spirits to become caged in the dullest of lead cells. When this happens, we begin to sing the wrong language. Yes, I want comfort, the security of belonging, the warmth of a fireside and the safety of acceptance, but I would rather live with the rain in my face than sleep in a velvet-lined cage, for when we allow ourselves to become too dictated by our desire for accolade, approval, recognition, security, reward - we run the risk of missing the moment when it is 'too late to hold your tongue'.

But it is natural, yes, to seek legitimacy, to seek labels that make us feel 'worthy'. I had big low lately when I didn't get a job I had applied for. Why? Because I had wrapped up somewhere in the mix that this was a signal of my legitimacy as a poet. And why seek this coded legitimacy? Because it gives us a label against the 'mad', against the feeling of it being somehow a decadence to live this way. STOP!!!

The poet and Fool tells us the stories of what is is to live, to be human. In ancient days, the poet-shaman went out and told the stories, created magic to explain the existance of their world. The troubadours told of our capacity to love, of the struggle of the free-heart against a growing political and moral oppressive force. In the 20th Century, women and men began to tell their stories in poems, to speak their existence and break the silence. They stood up and shared the individual breath, and in that action, showed that in each single life, all humanity is held. The war poets broke the myth of the heroic bloodshed. Prisoners have sung the poetry of the oppressed. The silenced children have grown up and spoken of the tortures of hidden abuse. Poetry is not about earning the legitimacy of a label (am I a real poet now? a little voice asks), but is about the willingness to break silence. It is a passion for the telling of the human, and the shared, experience. It is about the act of connection, much as this act is. And it is there for everyone. We can all break down the silences.

And this is why I continue the Fool's Path, why I continue to want to sing my songs and why I am blessed to meet and share the journey with so many beautiful travellers! It is why, in the end, I suppose I cringe at the thought of being absorbed into the mainstream, of releasing my autonomy of expression, of creation. I choose freedom and all it entails, the good and bad.

Perhaps in time, the value of the poet and the Fool will come to be appreciated in monetary terms, though it would be an interesting society that rewarded subversion! But if it happened, maybe I might be able to pay my bills once in a while, which would be nice (I have noticed that big business does not accept poems as payment!) but meanwhile, well - rice is nice and the rain feels good.

Hey baby, baby it's a Wild World...

WILD Living in a state of nature, not cultivated, stormy, furious, rash, extravagant, excited, unrestrained, tempestuous, eager, frantic, enthusiastic, random, feral, free, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrollable, turbulent, uninhibited, unfettered, delightfully enjoyable.

Wild Women Press, 2004

In 1999, I founded Wild Women and Wild Women Press. Together with other women from the original Wild Women collective, and my partner Adam, we publish our poetry and perform it at various venues across the UK. Recently, myself and fellow WW, Gill Hands, travelled to Sheffield to perform at their Literature Festival. It was a great night all in all, and I enjoyed sharing the new work from Byron Makes His Bed. It was a pleasure to be invited to read.

Last week, along with our payment, we received a feedback letter from our hosts, stating that:

"...whilst we enjoyed the performance we did feel that it was rather less 'wild' than we anticipated and did have a couple of comments from the audience to this effect..."

Whilst it is always good to receive feedback, this one got me thinking.

This isn't the first time such a comment has been made. The last time was at Stirling Poetry & Sexuality Conference, where an academic (male) came and said "...you're not very wild are you? You shouldn't call yourselves that...". At the time, I had the distinct desire to give him a Glasgow Kiss (headbutt) and ask if that was wild enough, but being non-violent and also tending to steer clear of confrontation, I tried explaining that the Wild was in the content of the poetry. Given that the other works dealt with sexual fantasies and the acting out of these, along with cross-dressing, sado-masachism and homoerotica, and in my case, on that occasion, a very tender account of a love affair, of sensual desire and of miscarriage (Fragile Bodies), it was a varied set and I wondered how he thought we should present it instead, how he thought we could 'make it wild enough'?

Over the years, I have encountered some interesting notions around the word WILD. Some, like the people above, obviously had pre-conceived ideas of what that meant. Often, it seems, this entails some kind of political ranting of radical feminism or alternatively, a fantasy mix of sexual depravity and dancing girls. Which of course, we could manifest, but that is not where the origin of the name Wild Women comes from.

I call myself a Wild Woman because I honour my innate self, my true self and I am determined to be that person, wherever I am, whoever I am with, whatever I am doing. I honour my creativity and my sexuality in my daily living, and as much as possible, I live close to the truth of the heart and express that in my actions and reactions in the world. When I started to think about it, I began to see what, in my own life, defined the WILD act, and I came up with the following...

the act of creating without limitations, of publishing my own work without intervention, of standing up and speaking out loud my lived experiences and perceptions;

the refusal to dismiss my creative life as secondary, and the rejection of usual capitalist, status-driven modes of living;

the ownership of my sexuality and my sexual desires, and my freedom to express this, in my life and in my work;

the active questionning of all experience, and the search for truth beyond the media-fed images and political saccharine of 21st Century global politics;

the creative act of establishing and nurturing a space where other women and men are encouraged to do the same;

the celebration of the beauty, magic and mystery of life, whatever it brings, however bloody hard, however full of ecstasy, through the creation of music, song, dance, love, food;

the willingness to get up every day and keep on the journey, to turn my life inside out when it becomes entrenched in crud, the willingness to face myself and my soul every damn day, however much it hurts and to keep smiling and keep believing;

to dance and not give a damn what people think or who is watching;

and to believe that my single existence can change the world for the better, just as is true for each of us.

The work of Wild Women is honest, real, often raw, beautiful, naked, sensual, unafraid of its spirituality, its eroticism, of challenging boundaries and asking questions. It speaks out on love, on loss, on sex and passion and nature and violence, on the body and its decay and glory, on divorce, parenting, friendship, food and everything that makes a human being part of humanity. It often speaks of the politics of being Woman and Poet, of the creative feminist, of the destruction of this planet, of attitudes towards what is feminine and the imbalance of power (still) towards a patriachal, moralistic society, but we do this within our words, within our living.

We get up and we speak our truth without shame, though oftentimes it feels terrifying. We howl, growl, play and say our words out loud, and we live our lives free. To me, that is what the Wild in Wild Women means. And you never know, next time this Blissfool puts on her Wild Women cape and joins her wild sisters in poetry, she might just surprise you!

To close, here is a little something from Byron's Bed...


Legacy

Doctor, what am I
if not wrong?

Wrong in the head and wrong in the heart,
wrong in the flesh and wrong from the start.

Am I not like my deadly playmates –
the other girls who grew into their lives
misshapen?

We know them by the little lives
they laid down in verse,
by the ways they calculated
the brief
and final full stop.

Oven-baked and drowned in a lake,
counting out pretty pills to take.

Am I shaped that way too?

I was spoon-fed on imagery,
given the world in words
then told it was not mine,
to let the old dogs lie
and lie some more.

Beyond this, the only choice -
they called me crazy whore:

sticks and stones can break my bones
but the words will surely hurt me.

But what am I,
what am I, Doctor,

if not this body,
if not
this errant voice?


Dr.Kaufman (2000) conducted two historiometric studies. The first study, which examined 1,629 writers, both male and female, showed that female poets were significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than both other types of women writers (fiction writers, playwrights, and non-fiction writers) and male writers (fiction writers, poets, playwrights, and non-fiction writers). The second study, which examined 520 eminent women from various fields, showed that women poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than journalists, politicians, actresses, and visual artists. This finding has been given the preliminary label the “Sylvia Plath Effect”.
(from Byron Makes His Bed, Wild Women Press, 2006)