I Was Not Always There and I Am Not There Now

by stephanie ritzema

Not too long ago, I learnt that Original Thought is an unidentified

species. It is January, or February, or March. I am late for a poetry

workshop that boasts the snippy title:

PROSE AND CONS

Poem or not?

It is a good title.

The woman walking in front of me has a cane and veers left. The

Cambridge streets are packed, and the almost-8pm pavement is

spanned curb to curb with Thursday night partygoers. I cannot quite

make my way around any of them as each time my eye spots a light

gap — a break – in the interlinking chain of warm drunk arms, it is

closed again by another loving embrace.

Because I am late, I am bouncing up to them and then back. Back

and forth. Back and forth. Until finally the crowd teeters into the

road, and a dart weave path unfurls through which I can dash

toward the red brick towers.

I have it on good authority from my already present friend to turn

left under the archway — make a right –– then a left — then

through a courtyard — then up a flight of stairs — then make

another left — then don’t get distracted by the bathroom — then

turn right — then I’ll be there.

Hot and considering leaning my forehead on the cool door after the

left right left stairs bathroom miss right again left again white door with sign, I enter the room.

The group has already started, and after taking the seat closest to the

session runner, I gauge the layout of the exercise that has one person

talking at a time in tandem. The question is not dissimilar to the one

in the snippy title, and I am able to get it after a couple of

perambulating answers. I realise that nearly everyone has spoken,

and I have missed most of the initial discussion on account of the

sidewalk sardines. The question is:

What is the difference between prose and poetry?

The person before me speaks. Eloquently dictating a key point about

Other Worlds and the concept of transporting one out of one world

and into another with relation to a poem’s ability to give the reader a

different sense of reality; the group nods, and some people tut in

disagreement, deciding that apparently that is the function of

literature in general and has nothing to do with poetry and prose. I

am sweating a lot by now, and only able to think of two points to

add to this huge unanswerable trap that could potentially have been

either already skirted around, or not said before, as the discussion

leader is keeping track of each point on post-it notes laid out in front

of me like a pastel mosaic. My turn comes around, and I flick my

eyes up to smile at my already present friend.

“What is the difference between prose and poetry?” The discussion

leader asks.

“Movement.” I say. “The difference is movement.”

My already present friend smiles.

Everyone smiles. Everyone laughs. Everyone looks at my already

present friend.

My already present friend opens his mouth to speak and says, rolling

eyes,

“That, of course, is exactly what I said.”

*****

I am sometimes on Monk’s Hill beach in Southampton laying on a

tiger towel facedown with my back to the weak English sun. I am

sometimes watching the planes as they take off from the sea-bound

runway that leads to the open ocean. I am often shoving my chin

into the stones so my sunglasses hang over the edge of my nose and

form a slit through which to watch the residents of the beachside

houses make their way back up the slowly eroding cliff and back to

their salty houses. I am often thinking of seashells. I am usually

thinking about changing, and being changed. I am always thinking

about being loved and loving.

Poetry has an innate way of moving through time. And we, as

readers, are moved. We say it all the time. “Your work moved me.”,

“Deeply moving.”, “How did it move me like that?”. I have been

moved, many times, and actively seek it out in both my reading and

my writing practice. I want my writing to move me, as its own reader

and I want to be moved by other people's work. But the question of

where — of what that action is — of asking ourselves at what

position we began and to where were we relocated within ourselves

on the other end of a poem is an odd one.

Each time I revisit On Monk’s Hill, I am moved again; not strictly in

the emotional sense, but in the psycho-spatial sense. Having been

within the poem’s genesis, its point of writing, I go directly back to

the exact beach on which I wrote the poem. You probably do too

with any poem you write. But you do not just move psycho-spatially,

you move within time. A friend once told me that when you

remember something, you are only remembering the last time you

remembered that thing. Perhaps I am not moved then to Monk’s Hill

beach looking at the bad tan lines and the dripping ice cream cones,

but the last time I remembered what it is like to be fundamentally

altered by the course of being known.

Having studied creative writing for the last two years, I have become

accustomed to lecturers asking me what I want to do with my poetry

and why. The answer has always been to create some kind of

movement through which the reader can experience the strange

fracturing nature of memory, perhaps reflecting on their own sense

of it, their own beaches and their own notion of being within a

single moment.

The discussion between the present — ’the hang gliders gliding

swiftly on’ — the past — ‘they’ve seen the smoothness of the silt’ —

and even the future — ‘could you and I drink salt water from empty

oyster shells?’ — serves as the tension through which this movement

can be experienced. Each separate time talks to another, and

different presents overlap like black sheet slate. We ping from state to

state, wondering how we got from mode to mode. In this way, it is a

kind of wandering that serves as the movement at the centre of the

poems I try to write.

But perhaps it is also in the talking. A brief chat. A question. My

already present friend laughs from his notebook and says to the rest

of the group

“No it's fine we know each other. This happens all the time. We say

the same things over and over again. We agree on almost

everything.”

Perhaps it is the questions asked within a poem that result in a

shared answer that make up the core of the thing. Could you and I

— the reader — drink salt water from empty oyster shells? Would

then we ascend to cleanliness in the eyes of the local passersby?

Would it make us think of anything? Would it get us closer to a

memory?