For my final post, I wanted to revisit the last 12 months of The Writing Squad’s residencies with The Poetry Business. As Helen Bowell calls it, in her first residency post, I wanted to create a ‘patchwork poem’ – collaging my favourite lines from each Squad writer’s contribution & using them to build something new.
The result is a cursed little poem, a Frankenstein’s monster, which feels like a perfect amalgamation of 2021’s pandemic reality.
Thank you to the Squad for their wonderful lines & thanks to you for journeying with me this January.
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Where to find your favourite lines
• ‘This was before everything started happening and not-happening’
Helen Bowell in collaboration with Lenni Sanders
• ‘Before these still and peach colour-evenings’
• ‘Romeo, I’m trying to teach you something here’
• ‘Everyone there / was overwhelmed by something, nobody’s voice / rose above the water level, everybody’s hands / were trembling’
April – Lydia Allison in collaboration with Lenni Sanders
• ‘People ask how we survive and honestly
even if you have family members odds are they
won’t even notice
you may have
left’
• ‘This thought-trip has been out-of-this-world, up there, and all about exits, then it’s been coming down, unearthing, engendering, building worlds as critique, or building potentials.’
• ‘Sometimes we’re forced to do as our enemies do, or the enemy is in us, which is not down to lack of integrity, but about available resource and strategy.’
• ‘I don’t know who is who. Are you the ground-stone and me the heart-starter?’
• ‘Every time you access a memory it will change slightly’
• ‘I’m still shielding even though legally shielding doesn’t exist’
Hannah Hodgson’s Digital Poetry Reading
• ‘sometimes it can feel like a continuous state of mourning’
• ‘people rewrite history within their heads’
• ‘it was not a nice area
and it was winter
meaning
but not saying
what that means.’
• ‘I can’t keep fighting the fear’
• ‘I’m beginning to realise that life can only ever be lived in the knowledge and presence of many deaths’
• ‘There have been so many glazed eyes of death surrounding me’
Jessica Wood in collaboration with Nasim Rebecca Asl
• ‘I can almost pretend
the families inside are happy, not hiding’
• ‘we’re all at a campfire, we’re all around this burning brazier at the end of the world’
• ‘The end of the world may have never felt so close’
• ‘‘diagnosing the dead’ is a ‘legitimate activity’’
• ‘at home, in the wild, in my head’
• ‘I slowly sink into it; my body could be a filling bucket’
• ‘Distance has cemented the borders of my body shut’
• ‘When you grow, I will fold you into such a wonder’
Prerana Kumar in collaboration with Jasmine Gray
• ‘January’s are plagued’
• ‘gaining control over desire’
• ‘I watched men, watching me, watching myself become strange. / I became a ghost.’
