Writer or Impostor?

The Glove of the Night

Am I a writer or an imposter? I thought to myself whilst walking last night. Some nights, I feel I’m totally impostering. The thought has a history. I became a ‘poet’ by mistake. It was a specific mistake, and not mine either – a teacher’s.  In my mid Teens, I was at a creative writing retreat in a place called Lumb Bank (‘an old barn in the hills of Yorkshire that was once lived in by a revered, proper Nature poet so don’t wreck the place,’ Teach informed the whole class, prior to our arrival by Johnny’s Executive Travel & Beach Holidays mini-bus).

And I fancied this girl. She had shot to fame in only one term, a new girl, just joined the school, already the star poet of the school. She was in what is now called Year 10 to my Year 11. And she’d been invited on this Retreat - which was a Year 11 thing - only because she was so precociously poetically talented.  She was also drop-dead gorgeous. And playful and mercurial and effervescent and… basically, I was infatuated with her. And tongue-tied. I couldn’t find a way even to sit next to her. First day at the Retreat, she was rumoured to have skipped a creative writing session on Transcendental Metaphor and gone down to the river to look at the water and she had been allowed to do this because that’s what true poets do, gaze at water and trees. And I was stuck in the Metaphor workshop. I did the necessary. I’d got the poetry thing pretty much figured: Teachers liked certain phrases. A light couldn’t just shine. It’s got to burn, or melt, do things. Anyway, we were doing our Descriptive Passages creative writing session and I write ‘yadda yadda… the harsh glare of the night.’  Well, Teach comes over and says ‘that’s marvellous, what a phrase, well done, that’s a wonderful line, Peter.’

And I’m thinking she – the girl I fancied – is back in the room and only two tables away, sucking the top of her pen and she might hear this. ‘Say it again, louder,’ I say to the teacher, ‘you like it, why?’

‘Yes, I like it,’ she says clearing her throat, and bending lower over my shoulder, denting my Afro: ‘the harsh glove of the night’’ she reads.

‘Uh?’ I’d written glare, not glove. She was misreading it.

‘Yes. Such a strong line.’

I’m stuck, thinking, I’d write glove if I was writing a poem about a wardrobe, or maybe in a Jane Austen Appreciation Passage (‘Oh the night is cold, pass me my gloves or I shall have the shivers.’). But this is outside and it’s about streetlights. This is glare. Surely glare is better here than glove?  I’m about to speak up, but Teach continues, giving the line even more love:

‘You see,’ Teach says, ‘most people would have written glare. But you didn’t. You wrote glove. Glove, with its sense of protection, enclosure, and yet entrapment, symbolising the paradoxical comfort that night can give. Glove is so poetic. Glove not glare. It’s the difference between a good poet and an exceptionally gifted poet. You could make a career in poetry, Peter, you could grow up to be reading poems in front of audiences of, well, more than ten – in libraries, and you could get reviews and accumulate huge mortgage debts…’

Teach was drifting off at this point, she had issues I suspect, she was rumoured to dabble in poetry herself. I used to think only kids got problems, but now I was older I understood that adults got issues too; and these three days trapped in a countryside barn were bringing them out in the adults. For instance, strange noises had been coming from the teachers’ quarters, then blubbing, late last night. I pay her no mind. I got my own troubles. ‘You like that? Harsh glove of the night? Yup, that’s the only phrase I felt fitted,’ I say, loudly.

‘Oh, I could kiss you,’ Teach said with a little laugh. But she didn’t. Neither did the poet of Year 10. That very afternoon, she went off down to the riverbank with some other boy who claimed to understand enjambement.

What happened to the star poet? How is she now? Where is she now? Truth to tell, I don’t want to know. I want to remember her as she was at 15, the shining school poetry star, immaculate, precocious, brim-full of promise.  And me, the poet-imposter, wide-eyed and tongue-tied. Teach was right though. I’ve since read poems in libraries in front of... oh tens of people.

*Her name may have been Shelagh. Shelagh, this is for you.