For this instalment of the New Poetries VIIblog series, Toby Litt introduces his work and shares his poem, 'Self-Reminders', which you can listen to below.
Toby Litt was born in 1968 and grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. He is the author of ten novels, including deadkidsongs, Ghost Story and Notes for a Young Gentleman, and four short story collections. His most recent book is Wrestliana, a memoir about his great-great-great grandfather, William Litt – a champion wrestler, poet, smuggler and exile. He lectures in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
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Thank you, Emily Hall. If you hadn’t contacted me – through Myspace (that long ago) – to ask if I was interested in writing words for a children’s opera, I am not sure whether I would have written much more poetry. Before then, it had largely stopped happening. The opera didn’t happen either, but I showed you some lyrics, you set them to music, and then I started to write new words meant to be sung. We wrote a song cycle about love, then one about losing and then having a baby. Although I started writing Lifecycle as a male-female duet, you rightly insisted it all be the woman’s voice. And so I added ‘The gap so small’, ‘Not just milk’ and ‘The first turn’ to poems already written. The earliest, ‘Stillborn’, woke me in the middle of the night. I dreamed it for two friends, Jacqui and Steve, and for their daughter, Marnie. ‘Amnio’ arrived after a pregnancy scan for my second son. His bones glowed in cross-section. This was a brief period, before babies in the womb were visualized as 3-D putty putti. Some of the poems I’ve written since were written as poems – not to be sung, and so not for you. But I have kept writing about parenthood and its losses. ‘Self-Reminders’ was written as just that – as a parent speaking to themselves. ‘Awaying’ is one parent speaking to another, reassuring them they still exist. More separate is ‘Friday’ – one of the poems that come along in an anti-lyrical way, although I’m mostly (as you’ve made me) that strange half-and-half thing, a lyric poet. ‘Friday’ got written in between me teaching an Arvon course at the Hurst in Shropshire (the playwright John Osborne’s dank house, before it was exorcised by hope and made luxurious). I stood under a tree near the pond alongside which Osborne used to recline, and send his empties off to go splosh. The bottles were still there, beneath frog-spawn. I saw the image for ‘A glow-in-the-dark skeleton’ whilst walking near The Golden Hinde. I’m so stupid. It was only in choosing a title for a possible collection that I realized I had two glow-in-the-dark skeleton poems: prepartum and postmortem. Very often, I have no idea where what I’ve written has come from; almost always, though, I know exactly where it’s going –
Self-Reminders
First, please don’t expect them to be anything but clumsy. Don’t expect them not to break things – things, especially, which you especially don’t want them to break. Don’t expect them not to be as loud as they can possibly be. Don’t expect yourself to escape breaking. Don’t expect quietness of what you probably don’t call soul. Don’t expect please or thank you, even though you must constantly insist upon please and thank you. Don’t expect them to love you as you love them. Don’t expect them to understand you or even to try to understand you until you are dead. Don’t expect them, as children, to be interested in you, as you were as a child. In fact, don’t expect them to believe in your existence until you are dead. Expect painful joys and hilarious wounds. Expect strangers who do not know our ways here. Expect to be wrong. Expect their deaths, and hope to be wrong.
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Listen to Toby read 'Self-Reminders' here:
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order now at the Carcanet website, and will be published in April 2018.
