Apprenticed

Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet

The Anxious Poet and David Whyte in Ballyvaughan 2019 | Photo Credit Adrian Scott

Apprenticed

'By painting one becomes a painter' -Vincent van Gogh


You repeat your poem’s lines, rolling
them from your lips—over and over—
voicing phrases and rhythms, speaking
Huddersfield with a rich Irish chaser.

Earthen mantras, economies of longing,
memorised beats that soak into the heart,
the hearth-baked bread of belonging,
images with which to arrive or depart.

Over your shoulder, I have served
an apprenticeship, nervously working
into the circle of recital. I apologised,
but you called for a second reading.

The after-speaking silence lifting
my words from the scribbled page
into a rounded reverie, sifting
my line’s affect—the poet’s gauge.

Reaching beyond to a new sowing,
entrance to which is only allowed
when the voice is owned, flowing,
furrowed in my own hefted stride.

Submitted to the contracting womb,
to the bravery of doubt and a willing
faith in the ground-out lines that plume
from the stone of apprenticed milling.

Written for David Whyte.

I first heard of David Whyte, the poet and speaker, in around 2008. (I wrote of him in my last Substack) I was on a wild camping trip with the men’s group I was part of, in the countryside of Derbyshire. We had all agreed to bring a piece to share around the campfire on the Saturday evening. One of the guys pulled his car up to the circle and said he wanted us to listen to something on his car stereo. It was someone reciting poetry in a way he had never experienced before and it had turned him on to poetry in a new way.

The recitation was by David Whyte¹ and when I returned home from the weekend, I began searching for his work. My walks with the dogs, for a few months after, were filled with listening to various talks and sharings of his. I had always loved poetry and hearing David’s distinctive style of recitation, repeating lines over and over, reawakened two things. Firstly my love of poetry as a way of delivering short and concentrated raids on the unspeakable and secondly my own desire to try and become a writer of poetry.

As I had signed up to his communications it happened that in 2010 I received an invitation to what David called a Salon Series; three two day gatherings, in that year, exploring a theme, which I think was ‘What to Remember When Waking?’. We would gather in a lovely hotel in the Cotswolds on a Monday evening, have a session with David and then a meal together. The next day would be spent sharing, walking and listening to one another. This was the first time I realised that David had memorised hundreds of poems; his and other poets. He would begin a session by launching into one of these. Repeating the lines until they deeply penetrated the mind, the heart and the soul.

David is from Mirfield near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire and I am from Sheffield in South Yorkshire. This immediately created an affinity between us as Yorkshiremen. I had expected everyone else on the Salon to be interested in poetry and writing. It came as a massive surprise that the rest of the twenty odd folk were involved in organisational work and management coaching. I had not twigged David’s other hinterland of organisational and personal development. In my Anxious Poet’s Podcast I talk about this experience.

In the course of these three salons I made a first foray into writing poetry and wrote my piece The Call of the Unwritten that formed the title poem of my first collection. At one point I shared the draft of this piece with one of the other participants. She encouraged me to read it to the group and to David. I had that feeling you get when one part of you really wants to risk a thing and the other is terrified of humiliation. I obeyed the first slightly hubristic voice but also gave way to the other one by apologising for the piece and then when I had read it apologising again. David stopped me and said ‘just read it again and then be quiet!’. I did and found that the group reacted really well to it. My apprenticeship had begun.

I am very grateful to David, that in many ways over the years, I have been able to serve a writing apprenticeship over his and other’s shoulders. People like Daniel O’Leary, Belden Lane and Helen Mort. It is so affirming to watch and listen to how other’s go about the business of writing. David said to me very early on, when I asked him about trying to find a publisher, to do it myself. In these days where there is an array of avenues for self publishing he felt it an easier way to get one’s work out there. The corollary of this advice was equally important though. He said publish it and then ‘go on the road with it’. If you find the corroboration of appreciation then you will know you are not wasting your time and energy. I have done that and at times in his company.

He asked me, after the Italian tour to be a guide on his Lakeland tour. Which entails driving a van through the winding lanes and byways of the National Park and looking after his guests in what is, as equally a magical tour as the one we experienced in Tuscany. He always extends the invitation to me to share my own work with the group and it is always daunting yet rewarding. He has taught me so much, not just about writing but also sharing our work as a performance before all manner of people. To trust and find my own voice, my own way (as he puts it) of entering the conversation. I have recited in cafe’s, churches, pubs, social clubs, retreat centres and on the radio, on Podcasts even on a TV show. As I say in The Call of the Unwritten the poem I read at that first Salon Series, the day I first entered the poetic conversation and apprenticeship:

The Call of the Unwritten

A feathery uncertainty

in the swallow-thronged loft,

I am tongue-tied in a company

of singers, these fleet poets of the air.

Yet well fed and ready for flight,

I tremble on the claw-pocked ledge

and wait. Wait for my turn to squeeze

through the tiny round chance

that leads to the sky.

Never before has the call felt

so inexorably feral nor the wind so

giddy. Then the instinctual draw rises

in my feather-bound chest,

and I burst out of the loft

like an arrow at a target, though

no target I have ever seen. Sweeter

than the nectar of the honeysuckle

is this jubilation of flight. Suicidal

to the praise-seeking self that kept me

loft bound for so long, in constant

comparison to finer feathers. Can I trust my

inner compass and continue this

migratory flight to a rewritten me?

Can I accept the unnamed future

whispering in fragile beating wings?

A flight that captures the fierce jeopardy

of living so I can render its path for

others to read, a slow crossing to an

undisclosed country, with a chorus of chanters.

In whose throng I have found my voice,

and besides the loft is behind me now.

It has all been a testimony to that contracting womb of creativity, to the bravery of doubt and the need for a poet’s faith.

1. https://davidwhyte.com