The new Write Out Loud Poem of the Week is ‘Echo and Narcissus’ by Karen Izod. The poem is inspired by a bronze by Glyn Philpot, and is also touched by contemporary events. Her regular open-mic haunts include Write Out Loud Woking; favourite poets include TS Eliot and Billy Collins, while Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, with its reference to “ignorant armies” in the last line “speaks so much to what is happening just now”, she says.  

 

 

 

What got you into writing poetry?

I've loved reading poetry since I was very little, and my parents gave me Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, followed a few years later by the Puffin Book of Verse. They opened up wonderful words like Ozymandias and quinquireme and images of distant lands.  As an adult, I've found poetry to be a powerful way to get in touch with how I feel about things, with the capacity to cut through the everyday, and I began writing poems at a time when I needed to do just that!

 

How long have you been writing?

About 25 years, though I've probably only taken writing seriously, and given my poems wings in the last 5 years or so.  I have been greatly helped by going on a number of writing courses at Ty Newydd in North Wales, where I've met writers of all genres, and developed good friendships, as well as benefitting from inspirational tutors.

 

Do you go to any open-mic nights?

I am a regular at The 1000 Monkeys in Guildford, and Write Out Loud in Woking.  Very different in style, both of these writing communities are warmly accepting of one's efforts, and good places to try out ideas and sound out responses.  They also push me to write something new every month, which is the sort of encouragement I need just now, when my poetry has to compete with my academic work.

 

What’s your favourite poet/poem?

Hard to say, since it very much depends on my mood of the moment.  I have a great love for TS Eliot which has endured since school days, and Billy Collins is also serious fun.  Writers about landscape and place also appeal like Kathleen Jamie.  Matthew Arnold's ‘On Dover Beach’ is probably my poem for the times, the last three lines – “And we are here, as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night” speaks so much to what is happening now.

 

You're cast away on a desert island. What's your luxury?

Can I have a laptop?  Or failing that, an endless supply of notebooks and pens together with my reading glasses.  My handwriting is now so poor, it needs all the help it can get.

 

 

 

 

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

by Karen Izod

after Echo and Narcissus, by Glyn Philpot (bronze with green patina)

 

 

Did either of them have a moment’s unease?

 

He, before the pool of social media reflected back all he wanted to see,

She, before she found herself cursed by the god of Abandon, that minor deity

of the Home Counties

 

who thought he had only to ask the people, give them a voice,

but leaving her with no more than an echo, brrrrexit, brrrrexit , bouncing

off the hard edges of our White Cliffs.

 

We all saw the ripple, grasping at her hand, the better to steady himself

on that slippery slope of state-craft, the downhill path of his first 100 days,

though she didn’t yet know that he should not be touched, nor she do the touching,

 

and that such a gesture would doom her to  that special relationship, 

for him never to offer anything that might speak of honour, of connection,

but dog her words, special, special, whenever she tries to speak her mind.

 

For now she knows that she is truly alone, his back turned to hers, blocking

out her sunlight,  for all she holds herself ready for that tender moment,

her own hands ready to caress.