THE PENCIL THIEF by Claire Crowther

On poetry, play and penitence

Sep 27, 2024

Hi friends,

Many of you will know that I’m taking some time away from The Murmuration to have (and recover from having) a baby. I didn’t want to leave you without something to read in my absence—so I asked writers that I enjoy reading to join an essay-baby-train. I’m very happy that the poet

Claire Crowther

agreed to hop aboard as this week’s guest essayist.

Claire has published five poetry collections with Shearsman, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Prize and has received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In October she is launching two new books, REAL LEAR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and SENSE AND NONSENSE: ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS. She is Deputy Editor of Long Poem Magazine and teaches Creative Writing at Oxford University.

Grace

Poems, even comic ones, are serious creations. I have written them since childhood. I remember fixing poems on the page in inky blobs caught out of an inkwell with the scratchy dipping pen I used at school till the age of ten. At home, I wrote with a hard graphite pencil. I sharpened them every day, preferring those made by Derwent, which sounded romantic and reminded me of Wordsworth, whose poems I knew from an early age. I thought of writing poems in the way that I thought of winning at board games.

I teach poetry nowadays and the way I teach it is through play, yes, even as each poem makes its terrifying observations. TS Eliot said that writing poetry is a mug’s game but others interpret the notion of a game more positively. Rabindranath Tagore understood the seriousness of child’s play and describes it in a poem, noting ‘I too am playing a game’:

Child, I have forgotten the art of being absorbed in sticks and mud-pies.
I seek out costly playthings, and gather lumps of gold and silver.
With whatever you find you create your glad games, I spend both my time and my strength over things I never can obtain.
In my frail canoe I struggle to cross the sea of desire, and forget that I too am playing a game.

I remember wandering down to the local park alone in the days when parents trusted children to re-emerge at the end of the afternoon, hungry for tea but otherwise safe and undamaged. I knew what games I had to play – building secret bridges over the stream or climbing the scarily tallest tree in order to see as far as the park gates. The poetry game was to put my knowledge of, say, the natural practices of the park, into shimmering keepers called lines. I knew I had to break sentences into lines. Lines had the sort of internal music that helped me recognise where to end them. And if I got the end wrong, I could rub out the pencilled lines and redo them at different lengths.

I felt also that there was a morality in poems, in lines themselves. They belonged with bibles and teachers and park games that ended in, for example, chanting cruel names at any child in a private school uniform – or shouting down the shouters. I found comfort, not just in my moral observations of a hard child’s world, but in the fact that every line, describing apparently endless suffering, ended.

One day, though, the game changed for me. Walking home from school, I saw a thin transparent pencil case lying in the snow. It was a freezing afternoon, children were hurrying to get home and, as I picked up the pencil case, I realised no other child saw me stoop. I could feel the varying points of pencils, surely meaning many colours, many thicknesses. I should have placed the case on a low wall near where it had dropped from its owner’s pocket, where its owner would find it when she came looking tomorrow. It occurred to me, though, that I could take these pencils home, stow them in the bedroom cupboard that served as my writing desk. My parents never tidied that up, it was my domain. So I kept the pencils and walked on. I had found something with huge capacity to please me. I was serving my lines.

It was then I started thinking about confession. I was brought up Catholic and, by that time, I was confessing to a priest weekly. It had taken me only a short time after being inducted into this game (aged under ten) to realise there were some tactics I could use – like confessing a sin I had not committed or confessing the same sin over and over. There were many, maybe most, weeks when I believed I was sinless. Having a sin handy to confess at the end of a sinless week was helpful. I chose stealing a pencil as my go-to sin. Something I had never done but believable, I thought, happily unaware that lying in the confessional is, at the least, an irony.

Now there was more irony. The bundle of pencils lay in my drawer and I saw myself now as the sinner, that stealer of pencils I had declared myself to be, over and over. The transition from guiltless to guilty was a harsh moment in my development as a social being. I had to claim an identity I didn’t want. I was a thief. I was a sinner, I realised, because I loved the writing game too intensely. Was writing a false god? I went in fear of my urge to write and it took me a long while to realise that, though a self-convicted felon, I was still a player.

I teach poetry (the writing of) to near-beginners and a common feeling among students is fear. Fear of using the term, poet, about themselves; this is a transition new writers don’t want to make. Many experienced poets don’t want to be known as a poet in their daily life. Almost any writers label, it seems, is easier to claim than poet, as if poetry is so true, so pure, that a shameful human can only approach it as unworthy. That anxiety brings up good questions, though, about the rules of the poetry-writing game. Students ask, for example, about the morality of using other poets’ published poems as a basis for their own tentative beginnings of a poem. Indeed, I tell them, that’s called appropriation, among other names. It’s a technique used by poets but do remember, I say, to credit the poet whose material you are using. Then it’s not seen as stealing.

Last year I was appropriated without a credit: many phrases of another poet’s lines, actually all the phrases in his short book it seemed to me, were made from another book, a book of mine. I discovered this appropriation through seeing my phrases credited to the appropriating writer in reviews of his book. It was a strange vulnerable feeling. I was in a snowy landscape; it was early evening. I could see a set of thin blue lines lying bunched together on the frozen ground. Had I dropped my lines when I published them? As I watched from where – across a busy road? inside a bus? – another poet bent down, picked them up and walked confidently and innocently away.

But they were no more innocent than I was. Confession, an apology and a credit came later. I got a migraine that lasted months. I wept. I said (for a day or so) that I’d never publish/share anything again. Yet one rule of the poetry game, that you have to share with other poets just as you’d share with any reader, was clarified for me.

I never confessed to the pencil theft. I can see it now, the worn transparent plastic case, the blue and grey pencils held by a rubber band. There is another game you can play, a serious game, called penance. It is less painful than you’d think. Though I’m no longer a Catholic, I shall view this calling, this joyful practice of writing poems, as penance till the end of my personal line.

Order copies of Claire’s poetry collections here. Claire will also be launching her latest books at the Swedenborg Institute in London on October 8th. Find out more about that event here.