38 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
<p>It’s interesting how your perspective on things shifts as you get older.</p>
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<p>A little while after Valentine’s Day this year, I remembered an experience (many
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years ago) when I came across a poem while browsing in a bookshop, just after
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Valentine’s Day. I had just endured a very painful and messy break-up of a
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relationship, and my bookshop meandering was an attempt to distract myself for a
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while. I picked up a book of poetry at random (Michèle Roberts’
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collection ‘All the selves I was’), and opened a page at random. Bam.</p>
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<p>The poem I had opened the book at was ‘poem on St Valentine’s Day’. My heart
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beat faster. I read the short poem and it was one of those magical moments where
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it felt as if the poet was inside my head, reading my thoughts, and had written
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a poem — right there on the spot — especially for me.</p>
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<p>The poem is beautiful but brutal. It describes the aftermath of a break up when
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you have to separate your life from someone else’s, and uses surgical imagery to
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evoke the pain and difficulty of this process, unpicking stitches and exposing
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“the wound / red and raw to the february wind”. The shock of the poem nearly
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brought me to tears on the spot and I (of course) bought a copy of the book.</p>
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<p>Happily, I haven’t had to endure that kind of pain for many years, but for some
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reason, I thought of the poem this past Valentine’s Day, and read it
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again. I remember the shock of reading it originally, but I found it interesting
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that one particular part of the imagery in the poem has subtly shifted its
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meaning for me in the intervening years.</p>
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<p>At the end of the poem, she writes:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>learning to save myself, learning to live <br />
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alone through the long winter nights <br />
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means so much unknotting, unknitting <br />
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unravelling, untying the mother-cord <br />
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— so much undoing</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Over the intervening years, I’ve done a lot of metaphorical unknotting and
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unravelling, and plenty of literal unknitting and unpicking too. I’ve come to see
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those processes not as failure but as an integral part of the making process.
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Making and unmaking are part of the same thing, and if you want to learn, to
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grow, to experiment, to be bold, you often have to unmake. Yes, it can be
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frustrating or even painful, but it’s a good thing. Unmaking and making anew
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almost always results in something better and stronger, and in the process, you
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learn. You just have to be brave, take a deep breath, and get out your seam
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ripper.</p> |