Kathy Pimlott

January 2021 with hope and persistence

Clearing up my computer desktop, on 31st December, I jettisoned:

• the recipe for chestnut stuffing which I emailed out to family members I would normally have cooked Christmas dinner for
• the round robin note (something I’ve never done before) that went in with Christmas cards
• the click and collect codes for goods bought on-line
• the confirmation note for refunds on train tickets to see my mum, daughters and grandchildren
• the How-to-Zoom instructions kindly sent to me at the beginning of all this 
• the typed-up poem prompts for screen sharing in the on-line group that has been such a blessing all year
• a photo of the Christmas wreath I made at the socially distanced workshop in our community garden

 What I kept was a file titled ‘In it he posits that poetry’ – an extract of a critique of the late, lamented Tony Hoagland’s work – I forget who by – which reads, “one feels with Tony’s work a sense of the self as a performer lost within and fascinated by the enveloping circus of life, a self insulted by tawdry reality, suffused at times with anger, arriving often at the comic good sense of ‘What else can you do?’—except to say, as best you can, what you think and feel.”

My resolution for the year ahead? To write as best I can what I see, think and feel. In doing that I hope to be not drowning but waving. 

I'm reading

The Rialto; Nora Hughes' Under Divis Mountain (Templar)); and re-reading Emergency Kit (Faber)