Lemon Cake & Poetry
An evening of readings for our friend and poet, Liz Willis
Stroud Poets gathered for lemon cake and poetry for Liz Willis, our friend who is dying and facing her terminal diagnosis with the straight-up fortitude, openness and honesty we love her for.
It was a book launch of sorts for Setting The Record Straight, a collection in which Liz confronts the sexual violence and abuse she has experienced.
Fiona Benson has described Liz’s collection as ‘terrific, absolute fire.’
We read as the sun went down and the light faded, almost to black. We shared some of our own work and words that mean something to Liz, including 'Daughter Song' from Fiona Benson's Bright Travellers, a redemptive poem for this evening, the polar opposite of what Liz herself experienced.
You can buy Liz's collection - all proceeds to Stroud Women's Refuge, the only refuge left in Gloucestershire. It has a capacity of just 9 women and 15 children.
When life gives you lemons, eat cake, read poetry…
An Introduction ~ Caroline Shaw
Wabi Sabi is a Japanese term which celebrates imperfection.
Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. The cracked vase, for instance, is not thrown away but cherished even more so for its wound. It encapsulates the beauty seen in aged and worn objects. The qualities the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho most valued in the poetic form of Haiku embodies these principles - everything is just right the way it is - defects and all.
I’m saying this because when I suggested to Liz we have a reading of her pamphlet she wanted me to make clear in the introduction - and I quote;
“They were not written with any sort of technique in mind – my priority was to get raw feelings onto the page. So I know they are not technically polished.”
I would argue otherwise. These poems work because they have not tried to be perfect. The raw experience has not been compromised by form, device or pretension. In fact I would suggest the simplification has made them more powerful – shocking even -like finding out John raped Janet.
We all know as poets how massively hard it is to write direct truth – saying it as it is with nothing extra. Liz has achieved this effortless effort, with the extraordinary skill and bravery of a master craftsman.
Now the pamphlets are in their second print run and are being made available to women’s aid and refuge centres up and down the country. Recently, Liz had a message from a woman in New York saying how much they had helped her.
In February Liz, was given six months to live. She’s meant to die next month but she says “At the moment I feel fine, and death seems a very long way away, but then I remember that I am taking buckets of very powerful drugs so I actually have no idea how I really am!!”
Liz has approached her illness with the same forthright candour that gives life and energy to her poems, her reasoning being that if her sharing helps even one other person to embrace or overcome their suffering then it is all worth it. She says;
I decided, right at the beginning of this ghastly business, to be as open, frank and honest about the whole thing, because there is far too much secrecy around cancer. Bearing in mind that 50% of us will get cancer at some point, I think we should all know more about it and what it's like to experience. If I had a bit more energy, I would write some poems about it.
Setting the Record Straight: the readings
From the Other Side of Silence by Maxine Relton
“You don’t know me…but you did.
We met that winter in Berlin”
I read those words, your name and
turned a cartwheel of delight
which flipped me more than half a century.
Of course I knew immediately. The best
of memories, I replied. (The sting of loss
and harm soon gone in lives well lived).
Did either of us seek to heal – my sin,
your hurt – in that initial innocence
of re-discovery, that simple joy?
We sent new smiles, old memories, across
a virtual sea of unreality. Then met,
with carefully casual references that somehow
failed to hit upon a common truth.
The ground beneath our feet began to shift,
unbalancing the certainties of fond recall.
But we’d kept letters, inky page on page
of closely written script, which surely proved
the past we shared. And so we interleaved
these chronicles of our young selves,
agreed to undertake a light review,
exchange our grown-up verdicts sometime soon.
Re-reading I am touched by our intensity of
hungry words, our urgent search for purpose,
clarity, the Meaning of Existence
(which neither you nor I could spell).
Enchanted by our earnest quest for Truth
though wincing at the tangle of my mind.
You couldn’t know, I didn’t tell. I never
shared what came before, what came between.
I circumscribed with care, tilted the mirror
to enjoy the light, basked in your fluency, your wit,
admired your ease, your agile mind, loved in you
all that I lacked and longed to have.
From eager first to poignant last, the
letters took us further than we thought to go.
I delved deep into my guilt and shame,
my part in obfuscation. You recognised perhaps
the lover’s wilful disregard of telling signs.
We strove to understand, accept both truths.
.
We’re freed at last to see the beauty of our imperfections.
Two Poems by Philip Rush
The English Landscape Garden
The path in a park like this
is asked to weave
around its subject
in the manner
of a well-ordered essay
with precisely judged digressions
polite and skilful hesitations
and subtle changes of pace,
pauses for thought
or for thought to sink in.
The heron
at the edge of the island
is poised like an Olympic archer
or the first half
of a perfectly phrased insight.
Where ignorance is bliss,
says the heron:
’tis folly to be wise, says its prey,
gobbled.
The path in a park like this
seems to have been composed
in heroic couplets;
there is a relic
of formal symmetries.
This rhymes with that,
to the left a figure of Ceres
to the right a naked Mercury.
The gravel path enjoys
the classical allusions
the park provides—
the pavilion
between the bridges,
the obelisk
amongst the shady trees,
the rotunda
at the viewpoint
with its clever plasterwork
and three children
who have requisitioned it
as a playroom for the gods.
A young couple in summer clothes
walk beside the canal
and define the function
of the walk beside the short canal.
The art lies in concealing the art,
says the young woman’s midriff,
the shadows in the car park
and the concrete stanchions
supporting from behind
The Temple of Eros.
The Lake
It is early, and we don’t feel properly awake.
Most of us have walked up through the trees
in twos and threes.
We gather beside the lake.
There is usually a chill in the air.
We can never
rely on the weather.
But we are prepared.
We greet neighbours and friends
with nods and half-talk.
We know the real job is the walk
and (we fool ourselves) we’ll have something to say at the end.
After a while we decide it is time.
One of us recites the shout
and we all step out
for the long hillside and a steep climb.
Four Poems by Diana Humphrey
Dawn Chorus, April, Forest of Dean
There's a greening in the trees, a lightening in the sky
The birds call each in their own voice, over and over:
rhythmic, lyrical, piping, narrative.
Their songs chase the notes, one on another,
They're a charged entity. I make out
sketched patterns as they stretch their
morning wings. The quick crescendoes,
brief trills modulate and distance
themselves into the new day.
All that energy sucked out of me!
I lie back,, no nest-building for me today
I lack the feathers, the grace notes,
the urgency to collect or create
The Sea Path
Pick some pink thrift for luck and watch for dead gannets.
They smash into the cliff on the times the driftwood comes.
If you find one not yet dead his eye curses you. Pick some thrift.
The way is steep, let yourself slide...forty feet to the
smooth flagstone shelves that keep the sea back,
challenge the spray. Feel them shake with sea power.
Today no geos, puffins or brochs, we must go south.
Keep walking, past Keiss castle where the lady makes
yellow Argyle golf socks all day. Keep walking.
See the beach, that long curve under the sand-dunes?
Ten miles of sands, empty,scoured by the winds
from the North Sea. And twin castles.
A pair of rival clans that gobbed sneers and whisky
at each other over the dyke, built Sinclair Girnigoe.
Out of the wind at last, rest. Let the sea-thunder numb you.
Let the salt-drop rainbows mesmerise you. Don't let
the far horizon draw you. Here you are liminal, a borderer
on sea- land, alive between cliff and sky, water and wind.
A Bunch of Red Tulips
These are young, firm, strong of stalk,
green about the gills, polite, tentative;
petals wrapped like a finger bandage,
long pointed plums with the sheen of an apple,
folds and creases to tease the eye and catch the shadows.
I like my tulips ebullient, wanton,
with a crazy spread of petals,
and a languid arch of stem;
sunworshippers showing all they've got
on a Grand Day Out, flamboyantly
ruched and ruffled for Carnivale,
their parrot colours
jazzing under the cerulean sky.
Camping with flowers
This morning's sweet peas,
are purple,white, red.
But that doesn't tell you that
the purple is the blue of a late
evening sky, a hyacinth, a shadow;
that the white blushes to a hint of pink,
a curl of yellow with an edge of mauve
and that the red sweet peas are crimson,
fuschia, maroon, red-pink like nothing
I can name.. Their petals are rumpled
by the warm breeze.They intoxicate me.
I sit at the formica table and absorb them
with greed. The grass is green, the sky blue,
my coffee black but I am inside that
sweet bouquet, my soul in a silent riot
of white, red and purple.
Liz, a poem by Jacqui Stearn
Sunstroke by Caroline Shaw
The girth’s wide at this point under the limestone cliff fall black monolith giants of the Carboniferous
we’re talking 300 million years old stark naked. The tide’s out - pulled
way out - full moon reeling the sea back laying
bare a larder of sand alive
and kicking
with cockles, razors
periwinkles, whelks, sand crabs belly up
nose-dived shrimps in their thousands and carcasses of spider crab claws
strewn every which way butchered by fat gulls and grey top shells opulent in sodden golden
grain waiting for the sea’s return. If that’s not enough the sun is ringed
by an insanely large rainbow halo which makes you long
for the prehistoric before science
diminished
the preternatural.
Can you understand why I didn’t
want to give you my credit card for an ice cream?
It wasn’t just the steep hill. It was my pin number vanished.
Early signs of dementia ruled out when you said there were three numbers in a pin
not four and you younger than me. Banjaxed like lamped hares there was nothing we could do.
Two Poems by Jacqui Stearn
Caroline reads Tim Wilson’s poem ‘Trojan Horse for Michael’
Fiona Benson is one of Liz’s favourite poets. We asked Fiona to choose a poem for this reading and she suggested this …
From Fiona Benson Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014)
