Karly

There’s a particular stretch of High Holborn that, for me, belongs to a poem I don’t even particularly like. I can be walking along it for an entirely ordinary reason, usually to pick up a friend after work, surrounded by buses, commuters, people emerging from offices and all the usual noise of London, and somewhere in my head I hear Celia, Celia. I don’t decide to think about Adrian Mitchell’s poem, I don’t have any great emotional attachment to it, and I certainly haven’t consciously appointed it the official poem of going to collect my friend from work. It simply arrives. At some point the poem and the place became attached to each other, and apparently neither I nor my literary preferences have any say in the matter.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I’ve also been reflecting on a conversation I had with Allie Esiri and the extraordinary number of poems she’s spent years collecting, arranging and giving to other people through her anthologies. There’s something inherently lovely about the premise behind books such as 365 Poems for Life: that poetry doesn’t have to sit obediently inside the book where we first encounter it, waiting for us to decide that today we’re going to read poetry. A poem can belong to a morning, a birthday, a season, a person, a terrible day or an exceptionally good one, and once it’s entered your life it can reappear without being invited, sometimes years later and occasionally when you weren’t particularly keen on it in the first place.

Perhaps that’s what’s made me notice these little intrusions of poetry more often. I don’t walk around consciously attempting to interpret my life through verse, which sounds exhausting and also faintly insufferable, but I’ve apparently accumulated enough lines over the years that my brain occasionally produces one when reality happens to resemble it. I don’t always remember the whole poem, sometimes not even the whole stanza, but the particular line I need has remained, detached from the page and tucked somewhere among all the other scraps of language we carry without quite knowing why.

The other day I discovered a grey hair. This isn’t particularly remarkable, except that I’m still young enough for every grey hair to feel like a tiny administrative error, and almost immediately I thought of Jenny Joseph’s Warning, and of the woman who, when she is old, shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit her. I’ve always loved the premise, but apparently I’ve also started developing my own version of it. Helena Bonham Carter, who has already provided ample evidence for the proposition that getting older needn’t involve becoming visually sensible, appeared in Liberty’s advent calendar videos with pink running through her greying hair, and I decided that one day, when maintaining my own red hair against increasingly determined greys starts becoming ridiculous, I might simply dye the greys pastel pink instead.

It’s a very small thing, but that’s precisely what I mean. Jenny Joseph didn’t tell me to dye my hair pink, and Warning isn’t really about purple clothes either. What stayed with me was its delicious refusal of the idea that ageing should involve becoming quieter, tidier and more appropriate. I encountered a physical reminder that I’ll eventually become an old woman and, rather than producing some solemn meditation on mortality, my brain offered me a poem about behaving disgracefully and a mental image of myself with pink hair. Literature had reached into an otherwise mundane moment and rearranged it slightly, giving me not an instruction for how to age but a language in which I could imagine doing it on my own terms.

Other poems arrive under rather less charming circumstances. Amid family trouble, Philip Larkin has an irritating tendency to appear with the opening of This Be the Verse, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, which might be one of the least subtle lines in twentieth-century English poetry and occasionally exactly what the situation requires. There are moments when nuance is useful, and moments when a spectacularly blunt sentence manages to contain an entire complicated history of family, inheritance, resentment, love and damage without asking us to pretend that any of it is particularly dignified.

The rest of Larkin’s poem is, of course, considerably more interesting than the line that’s escaped it and entered popular language. Parents were themselves shaped by parents, misery passes from one generation to another, and suddenly what begins as an accusation becomes something closer to a miserable little genealogy. That doesn’t necessarily make anybody feel better, nor does recognising a cycle absolve the people perpetuating it, but perhaps recognition is one of the things poetry can offer without pretending to provide a solution. Sometimes a poem doesn’t explain your life to you. It simply proves that the thought you’re having has been had before, possibly by somebody who found a much better way of phrasing it.

That, increasingly, is what fascinates me about the poems that stay. They aren’t necessarily the poems we’d identify as our favourites if somebody asked us to make a list, nor the ones we studied most carefully, understood most completely or could analyse most impressively. I don’t particularly like Celia Celia, and yet High Holborn apparently does. Some poems remain because we love them, some because they articulate something we couldn’t, some because they become entangled with a particular period of our lives, and others seem to find the correct crack in our memory and settle there without permission. Years later, all it takes is the right street, person, mood, white hair or minor existential crisis and out they come.

This is perhaps why my conversation with Allie has stayed with me too. Her anthologies are full of the idea that poems can meet us where we already are, arranged around days, Shakespeare, childhood, Christmas, love, loss and the endless number of occasions for which human beings have apparently felt compelled to put something into verse. Talking to somebody who’s spent so much of her life thinking about which poems belong beside which moments inevitably made me think about what happens after the anthology has been closed. A book can give a poem a date or a theme for a moment, but the reader can give it something much stranger and more permanent: an association.

A street, for example, can become one of them. High Holborn has existed for considerably longer than I have, and Adrian Mitchell certainly didn’t write Celia Celia for the purpose of accompanying me while I go and collect a friend from work. None of that matters. The association has formed anyway, so that the geography of my own London now contains a tiny piece of somebody else’s poem, despite the rather inconvenient fact that I wouldn’t even rank it among the poems I particularly enjoy. There are places we remember because of what happened to us there, places we associate with people, songs, smells or particular versions of ourselves, and apparently there are also places that acquire literary footnotes.

This is one of the things literature does rather sneakily. We talk a great deal about identifying with characters, seeing ourselves represented in books or finding language for experiences we thought belonged only to us, but perhaps less about the fragments of literature that become incorporated into the way we describe things to ourselves. A phrase becomes the quickest route to a feeling, a line becomes shorthand for a person, and occasionally somebody else’s words are simply better than whatever we might’ve produced on our own. After enough years of reading, it becomes difficult to tell where the library ends and ordinary thought begins.

Poetry is particularly good at this because it’s portable. A novel can change your life, but it’s difficult to accidentally remember 400 pages while waiting for the bus. A poem can leave behind a line. Sometimes it leaves behind only a few words, stripped of the stanza that originally surrounded them, but those words retain the ability to reopen everything around them, rather like remembering the first line of a song and discovering that the rest has been sitting there all along. We don’t need to carry the book for the language to come with us.

There’s something wonderfully undisciplined about the way this kind of remembering works, too. The poems I carry around haven’t been selected according to a syllabus, period, movement or even personal taste. Adrian Mitchell can live next door to Jenny Joseph, who can be interrupted by Philip Larkin, and none of them particularly care that they’ve been placed there. The personal anthology is assembled largely by accident. School contributes something, university contributes something else, books are recommended by friends, lines are encountered online or heard aloud, somebody gives you an anthology, a lecturer reads something at precisely the right moment, and years later a completely ordinary event presses the correct button.

Perhaps that’s why the idea of a poem for every day is more profound than it initially sounds. It isn’t that every day requires us to ceremoniously select an appropriate poem and become better, more literary people by bedtime. It’s that poetry was always written out of the same raw material our days contain: getting older, falling in love, being furious with our parents, missing somebody, noticing the weather, walking through a city, fearing death, wanting dinner, being bored, being ridiculous. Eventually life catches up with a line we’ve read.

And sometimes the relationship changes when it does. I understood Jenny Joseph’s poem perfectly well before finding that white hair, but I understand its invitation differently now that ageing is no longer an entirely theoretical activity reserved for other people. Larkin’s opening line is funny when quoted casually and much less funny when family life gives it somewhere to land. Celia Celia, despite my general indifference towards it, has acquired something no amount of literary analysis could’ve given it: a location on my own mental map.

Perhaps this is also why returning to poetry through conversation can feel different from returning to it through study. Talking to Allie about the poems she’s gathered, the voices she’s invited to read them and the extraordinary afterlives poems can acquire reminded me that literature doesn’t only survive because we preserve books. It survives because people keep finding uses for words written by people who couldn’t possibly have anticipated them. A poet writes from one life and, decades or centuries later, a reader borrows a fragment for another. The context changes, the association becomes intensely private, and somehow the words continue to work.

I suspect there are dozens of these associations I haven’t noticed yet, which might be the loveliest part. Somewhere in everything I’ve already read are lines whose circumstances haven’t happened to me yet. There may be poems I know now that’ll mean something entirely different at forty, sixty or eighty, others I haven’t encountered yet that’ll eventually attach themselves to a person, a room or a particular afternoon so completely that I won’t be able to separate them again, and probably at least a few more poems I don’t particularly like that’ll inexplicably claim ownership of major London thoroughfares.

Maybe that’s one of the ways we know a poem has really stayed with us. Not because we can recite it perfectly, identify its metre or remember when it was published, although all of those things have their uses, and not even necessarily because we love it. It’s because, somewhere along the way, the poem has stopped belonging exclusively to the circumstances in which it was written and acquired a place in ours.

Eventually we stop needing to go looking for it. Life does something, and the poem comes looking for us.