Survivors' Poetry
Survivors’ Poetry is a group founded in 1991 by four poets with first-hand experience of the mental health system, and inspired by Frank Bangay of CAPO (the Campaign Against Psychiatric Oppression, formerly the Mental Patients; Union, then People for the Rights of Mental Patients in Treatment).
I didn’t have anything to do with the organization administratively, but as a former nurse in the field of what was then called Mental Handicap, and recovering from a traumatic relationship with someone who spent a significant part of her life in psychiatric hospitals, I had and still have a great deal of sympathy with its aims. In the 1990s I frequently played and read at benefit concerts and readings in the days of Razz, Frank Bangay, Peter Campbell, Hilary Porter and Joe Bidder, and contributed verse to two anthologies: From Dark To Light and Under the Asylum Tree. This article includes those four poems. They’ll also be posted (individually) to (Un)Symmetrical Symmetry and are likely to be part of at least one longer project.
From Dark to Light
From Dark To Light was an anthology published by Survivors' Press in 1992 (ISBN 1 874595 00 3).
I-Level
Well you did it, all by yourself:
you selected a particularly fine piece of elm
and sawed, planed, moulded, mitred,
sanded and French-polished it
into an impeccable frame:
then you climbed into it.
It’s no use at all
hanging there at eye-level
whimpering
and waiting for me to smash the glass:
what makes you think this is an emergency?
What I will do for you
is leave the room
so that you can just
disappear….
(Exit, singing:
“You always hurt
the one you love…”
Or maybe “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the dumbest of them all?” Published in “From Dark to Light” (Survivors’ Press 1992) and Chaff 3 (1986).
Photograph by David Harley (a manipulated street scene detail from Krems, Austria, May 2011).
Nomads
Trekking the transient tarmac
Overrunning the striplit watering holes
Our days are spent underground
Operating machines
Carried by machines
Feeding and fed by machines
The city is choking on travellers
Who have forgotten their destination
As if every hypermarket was hyperstocked
With canned lotus juice
We have forsaken the tents of our forefathers
to rebuild the caves of our ancestors
Published in Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette) (1985, 2022) and in ‘From Dark to Light’ (Survivors’ Press, 1992: ISBN 1 874595 00 3
Photo: Valetta, Malta; Louvre Pyramid, Paris.
Logical Error
Body and mind have both left me behind
all my conversations take place
a roomsbreadth away: facts and faces
sliding off the porcelain
leaving me tracking condensation
it takes all my resources
to follow the cursor
text and subtext
are beyond my comprehension
The machine hums and creaks
much as before
synapses firing late
but hitting the right barn door
an approximation to reality
as good as most I’d say
and who’s to notice a few bytes
chasing unicorns along the wrong pathway?
(somewhere along the network
my chest is still raw
from the cruel kindness
of the stomach pump
it was not rape
for I wanted it enough
to spread my vital organs
but a vacuum still aches)
headcrash
logical error
division by zero
the walls crowd a little nearer
whispering
Published in Vertical Images 4 (1989) and From Dark to Light (Survivors Press, 1992).
Under The Asylum Tree
A second volume of verse published by Survivors' Press, 1995 (ISBN 1 874595 01 1).
Glass was my only contribution.
Glass
…between me
in my personal space
and you
safe and alert at the nurse’s station amid
glass
worked into
medicine bottles
specimen bottles
hypodermic barrels
glass
protects the fire alarm
and you, the fireman
glass
litters the floor
where a tantrum exploded
Outside
peers nervously between
metal bars protecting
glass
and you from me
and me from you
or me
Mostly
this locked ward resembles
a glass case
or a cage of mirrors
Published in ‘Under the Asylum Tree’ (Survivors Press 1995: ISBN 1-874595-01-1) and Vertical Images 3 (1988: ISSN 0269-0063)