" One's real duty is to preserve one's dream "
Sally Crabtree's Dream Shoes Photograph ©Daisy Rickman
Last year was the year of the Poetry Posties and what fun we had ! Here are some of the images taken at festivals and events around the country . In 2015 I hope to go China and create a cultural exchange that will see the Poetry Postie delivering poetic inspiration to lots of Nations ! Tune in to Poetry Postie FM every week ( available in podcast version soon !) to keep up with the news .
People are often intrigued that I was a gymnast ( at the age of 14 , I won a scholarship to train in Russia and then went on to become the youngest ever member of the GM Women's team .) This pic is of me on the beam at the World Championships . I was recently asked to write a piece about how I went from this to being a poet and whether there was one particular book that inspired me. So here it is :
T S Eliot and the cartwheels
Between your fingertips
and your pointed toes you hold your body like a smile . A happiness that you
are able to place in the air , to dance with or to twirl upside down , hoping
to find in that turning world a still point , a touching of the moment . And
sometimes you do touch it and that’s what keeps you going , keeps you
practicing , learning different ways to hold it again – to make your body
smile.
Gymnastics was a happiness I gave to
myself , a personal thing. It wasn’t about ambition or competition ( “ It
doesn’t matter who wins “ I would say to my exasperated coach . ) It was the dialogue I had with my body
and the air around it . Had I been able to put into words this conversation ,
the words you’d hear might have
been “exhilaration , excitement ,
delight, despair , disappointment
, danger , focus , passion or precision
“ but you didn’t need to
put it into words because gymnastics was all about feel . How it felt as a little girl to do handstands on the garden
wall , or run down the lawn trying to learn to do a cartwheel with no hands ,
or fling yourself towards the sky in a somersault . And then some years later
to be standing on a beam at the world championships and to step simply into
these moves , landing perfectly on those 4 inches .
I didn’t always land perfectly , of course … In
the National finals for a Russian scholarship I managed to fall off the beam and the bars and still win - I was good
, if even a disaster at competitions ! When I came back from Russia I was
chosen as the youngest ever member of the GB women’s team and went on to
compete around the world . In
Russia I met an old man who wanted to tell me a few home truths about communist
life – but only after I had
convinced him I wasn’t a spy. In a corridor at the gym ( which didn’t have much
in the way of equipment but still produced Olympic champions ) out of view , I swapped Mars
Bars for a coveted USSR tracksuit , or sat in the Metropole hotel in Moscow
while a dodgy interpreter slipped
bags of Russian dolls under the table for us ( who knows what he had been given
in exchange ? I didn’t notice – I was too busy looking at the builders on the
scaffolding outside the window , intrigued that they were all burly women . )
In Czechoslovakia ,
there was a gymnast with 6 toes and I felt , rather ungraciously , that
she had an unfair advantage on the beam . We were treated to 26 course banquets
which seemed a bit daft as we were all tiny and had the appetites of birds. We
performed outside temples in Southern Italy where the crowd booed us vehemently
and the condensation made it hard to run down the mat , but where I also
discovered enormous watermelons and a strange stuffed tortoise to take back as
gifts and souvenirs . The watermelons of course didn’t make it but I still have
the tortoise , the stuffing of which is now oozing out like a sadness .
I learnt a lot from gymnastics , some of
which was sad , some poetically philosophical , some of which I wish I’d never had to learn but all of
which held me in good stead . I
learnt that when a lad takes you for a moonlit walk along the shore and says
you have beautiful hands he is lying
( My fingers opened up to reveal
handfuls of red raw blisters ,
like I had raided a jar of sweets from some kind of horror movie .
)
I learnt something about patience from a gymnast
who was like a star on the edge of the sky. No one really noticed her at first
. She wasn’t particularly brilliant . You could almost say she was a plodder - but she could do one particular move
especially gracefully and it became her sort of trademark . She would
backflip on to her hands but
before they hit the mat she would do a full twist with her body . After a time
, the rules happened to change in the vault which meant that you could now fly
backwards onto it. The gymnast managed to transfer her full twisting backflip
trick onto this piece of apparatus and became the first person in the world
ever to do it . She had invented a new move and as a result she was now a star
. She had moved slowly , slowly to centre stage ( or centre Heaven ! ) so that suddenly you looked up and
there she was , shining . I often
think of her when I want something to happen quickly and know that I’ll have to
wait .
Of all the difficult moves I learnt, this
one was my favourite : You’d be on
the top bar in a handstand with your back to the lower bar that was down below
in front of
it . You’d let yourself
fall so that it seemed as if you would crash onto that lower bar and break your
spine – but at the last minute you’d hop your hands and change your grip so you
could still hold on and jack knife
and straddle your legs and swing between the bars , bringing them together once you’d missed the bottom bar so that you could
then swing up high backwards , higher and higher ,
until the point that you’d let go , fly upwards somersaulting backwards
underneath yourself as you straddled your legs once more to catch
the bar again . As I
perched on that bar ready to swing in to the handstand to begin this move I
would be shaking with fear but I knew that it was worth it for the exhilaration
and sense of achievement if I mastered it .
Gymnastics was dangerous . One beautiful Russian gymnast broke her neck when she
landed on her head dismounting from the beam . The end of my career came at 17
when I landed from a twisting somersault and my leg carried on twisting ,
snapping backwards . It hurt and I was disappointed , especially as I was training to go the Olympics
and was just about to compete in Romania where I’d heard you could get ‘ gold ‘ earrings for 25
p . But my childhood had been
colourful and the gymnastics was just one of these colours – perhaps it was
time to add a few others again to the picture .
About this time I was
given a present - the collected works of T S Eliot .
I had always loved books
but it was a respectable kind of love. I was moved , stirred , but never shaken
. Suddenly here was a poet who shook me up with a wild , exciting kind of love – the kind of love I’d had
for gymnastics . And who at the heart of his work seemed to searching for that
same still point I’d touched upon , where
‘the dance is ‘
His poetry danced in front of your eyes to
a silent music , leaving
footprints of words that you could follow to an idea that would linger long after you’d shut the
book - that would ‘ echo / Thus , in your mind ‘ He turned the page almost into a stage . Lines
from poems came on like different acts in a cabaret . Some showed off .
There were can-can girls high kicking quotes into the air . You wondered
if something this clever could have a heart , but then Eliot would introduce a line that melted you with
its sweetness ‘ I shall measure out my
life in coffee spoons ‘
Words went from the sublime ‘ the
future is a faded song … Pressed
between yellow leaves of a book that was never opened ‘ to the seemingly
ridiculous ‘ if you don’t give it him
, there’s others will ‘ Except
of course it was never ridiculous – there was always a hidden meaning , as if a magician with a new trick up its sleeve . Some lines sang
like a sad chanteuse ‘ Weave weave the sunlight in your hair
‘ or were beautiful like an
arabesque perfectly balanced on a beam ‘ soul stretched tight across the skies ‘ Others somersaulted backwards
landing on the page , like exotic acrobats tumbling from books I’d never heard
of .
It was like some sort of
gymnastics . The word gymnast
comes from the Greek gymnos meaning naked ( it was performed naked of course at
first ! ) And a poem uses words to create a form out of ideas and feelings–
words stripped down to their very essence so that the poem will have a
lightness about it that will allow it to soar off the page and land perfectly
in your imagination. Eliot’s work landed perfectly in mine and then dipped its
toe into my soul causing a ripple …
I knew then that I wanted to be something as exciting as a poet .
“ You’re mad “ said friends as I
gave up offers of better paid jobs
( I suppose any job is
better paid than a poet ! ) but as
Rumi says ‘ Penniless one has a thousand
dreams .’
I dreamt I could do something different like Eliot had done . I wanted to
sprinkle my words with theatricality and take them off the page to a new space
. Not necessarily to a stage but somewhere they could be colourful and be
something that anyone - the Lils ,
the typists , the J.Alfred Prufrocks , and Tiresius’s of the world - could
engage with .
And so I began . I tied poems to a ‘
Poetree ‘ and busked , picking poems off the branches , playing music and
wearing stilts , whilst doing handstands in the splits ; I ate my words in the form of edible poetry cakes ; I presented a show on a
bed of roses in a palace ; I
became a poet on the platform
; called games of poetry bingo ;
serenaded tramps and Counts in
Venice ; put poems in tins on the supermarkets shelves , had Dr Who play the
spoons on my legs while I was upside down on stage , performed cartwheeling
poems in Cuba , delivered poems on a postman’s bike , and tried to light up the
heavens with my words by tying poems to rocket fireworks.
All the while inspired by Eliot to squeeze
‘ the universe into a ball ‘ - dance on it even and‘ roll it toward some overwhelming question . ’ The question I was trying
to answer was could I make life a cartwheel ? Could I find at the heart of
everything that still point ?
Could I keep turning and re-turning to the joy I’d felt when doing
handstands as a kid ? Or doing a cartwheel with no hands floating in space?
Could I join up the circle of my being -
‘ In my beginning is my end ‘ - and fill in
that empty space with all the colours that I was , turning with the turning world until
all the colours spun and there was a white light , a heart of light , a silence ?
I could try … If I
practiced hard enough – ran down the lawn of my own existence and flung myself towards the sky -
maybe I could even make life a cartwheel with no hands !
