Ankh Spice : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

An English teacher introduced me to the work of Janet Frame when I was about 12. Although most of her well-known work is not poetry, she did write a great deal of it. Many writers and poets have signposted new pathways in my brain, but Janet was the one who affirmed that the steps into weird-shadow, into the strangeness of personal-lateral, and into being shaped by the particulars of place and different-brain attention to small details as very significant, all those steps I was already taking even at that age, were valid. During that year, I was admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit for the first time, deeply unwell, and surrounded by deeply unwell adults, because there were no adolescent-specific inpatient services at the time. I took a few of her books with me, including a copy of ‘The Pocket Mirror’’, the only volume of her poetry published in her lifetime. My own story echoes hers to a mild extent – she was famously saved from a lobotomy when a doctor learned she’d won a literary prize for that book. I was spared electroconvulsive therapy at 14, partly because a psychotherapist fought against it after reading my poetry journals. I suppose this is a lateral answer – perhaps Janet Frame didn’t change the way I thought about writing so much as let me know that perhaps there was already worth in the ways I couldn’t help thinking about it and everything that feeds it. And I think she gave me permission to write from the deeply personal, sometimes scary places – conscious that there’s little silver hooks of universal hung all the way through the net of the confessional. Other people who have been caught on them recognise their glimmer, and know they’re not alone in being caught, that when the poem allows itself to swim free (there is a redemption in most of my work of this type), just maybe they might, too.