1.
The compliment came in swift and stayed with you your whole life. You in your blue sweater with the cowl neck. You with your dark hair. Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque: glass fronted, deeper and higher than wide. On the ground floor you’re walking to the conveyor belt for returning books. You’re a year away from having a baby and a few months married. Next you’ll go to the magazine section to read Poetry and The Paris Review. To dream on. You’re a few months away from having your first poems accepted by a journal. That’s all you want. You say if that happens you’ll never ask for anything ever again. You’ll say the same before your first book is published. You are and will always be full of desire. For this self-fulfilment. There will be a few years when your girls are nine and thirteen and you lose momentum. Something will shift, like ground giving way. You’ll wake, or not be able to fall asleep, with an entirely new feeling of annoyance touching on frustration. You won’t want. What? Just that, a lack of desire, and lack of want. You’ll realise that however difficult things may have felt, at least you were striving for something. Now your engine’s cooled down, you’re idling. You feel the motor is on, there’s a constant tremor inside you that you don’t know how to switch off. You’re on, but stuck. Time for a change, your self is chiming, but you don’t shift gear, not yet. You pick up the sweater in your thoughts. How you were in it, by the conveyor belt on your way to the journals. An older man, in his sixties perhaps, stopped without stopping you, said, without saying to you, ‘vous êtes magnifique’ and carried on. He didn’t take anything from you, he didn’t require anything, he left his impression for you to carry onwards at will. The only true compliment ever paid to you. The one that didn’t need to be said and that would live on, nurturing you, you. You were seen and this was said. Contact made. Thank you, you never said.
2.
How a childhood of not enough will stall you. Not enough, not any interest from the father. No play, no chat, no conversation. No knock on the door to see if all’s well. Just hints now and then that you really aren’t much. You’re on the path to nowhere. You could be so much better. What a message to take from home. You’d have thought you should be over it by now. But it’s buried in you this not-enoughness. You carry it with you. You could have done so much more if only you’d had a word of belief. Well now you know. You can make a life, have successes but always be fighting through a self-denial. Vous êtes magnifique. And for a split second you were published in The Paris Review or Poetry. You were wanted by the best and envied by all. Vous êtes magnifique. You were on your way to an interesting conversation with your postgrad students. Your words were enough. You look back at the man but he’s gone through the turnstile and out onto the streets of Montreal. He’ll have a happy wife and children who know they can count on him. How you envy the children of interested parents, fathers. Most of all, you have no permission to live like this. You don’t care, you tell yourself, but see how you seek approval. See how you have a number of older writers you go to for community. They are full of bitterness about the writing world, how little they’ve been regarded, and you take that reproach as your own. You fire it back at the rare contemporary you might meet. They soon regard you warily as someone whose scepticism bleeds into disapproval of their own work. Creative writing MAs aren’t for you, you explain. You believe in the real thing and that you actually are the real thing. You don’t see yet how a lack of self-esteem is a one-way ticket to a veneer of arrogance. Vous êtes magnifique. It’s ok, someone has seen you. You have been noted. On your way to the magazine section. You’ll destroy all in your path for no one is stronger. In fact you are shy, not arrogant, but the two can easily be mistaken by the onlooker. Your disdain of MA creative writing degrees is simply down to the fact that for you writing is the most precious and secretive thing you possess and you cannot risk losing it. It is all you have. The downside is that you won’t learn how to speak clearly about your aims and intentions. You won’t know how to sell yourself.
3.
It’s ok, you can lower yourself into the next one. The next question. The next discussion. Without self-pity discuss what it was like to grow up without any paternal encouragement. You thought you were free, you were not. You sense in a different world you’d have had a sense of there being something you could fall back on. Or more: less devastation. Less utter solitude. Let’s look at it closer. You don’t know what it’s like to have a father who acts as though he wants to be there for you. You cannot imagine what it would be like to have a father who you talk openly with about your hopes and dreams. You know he suffered. He’d have had to in order to become like this. And now it’s time, I’m telling you, it’s time to do it all anyway. Not move on, not put it behind you, not forgive, not reconnect. Just do it all anyway. It’s all buried in you. You contain it all. You can do whatever you dream of. Despite. How good that there is this word despite. It tells a story of possibility in the face of impossibility, of hope in the face of despair, of ability in the face of disinterest.
4.
Now with your children you are telling them what you dreamed of hearing at their age. You get it all wrong, of course. You reflect, too much, of course, but in time, things get good. They let you hug them even into their teenage years. They let you help them with their foreign languages. They see you laugh till you cry at their craziness and they feel good that they could do that. They see you think about what they could become, who they are, and most of all, most important of all, they see and know you want to be with them. You cannot make someone want something they don’t want. That’s as close to forgiveness as you’ll get. But after all, you are magnifique.
You walk with power through the central library of Montreal. You steam towards those journals of literature that will one day hold your work. You are in the right place despite it all.
5.
Years before when you had found your way to Moscow during a year abroad from university, you were introduced to a woman whose son you were to teach English. They lived in one of those Moscow apartments that seem to be made from books. Every possible wall space lined with the spines of books, stacks in the corners of the rooms: permanent structures now, Soviet relics destined to stand thus into the next century. She was an academic and you were introduced to her as a poet.
A few years later she asked, are you still writing poetry, not moved onto prose yet. Still. How that word cut into your private world. With it came a whole idea of progress and expectation of growth, direction and surely maturity. You were lagging behind some implied idea of what it was to be a writer. Yes, you had to admit.
A few years later she asked, are you still writing poetry, not moved onto prose yet. Still. How that word cut into your private world. With it came a whole idea of progress and expectation of growth, direction and surely maturity. You were lagging behind some implied idea of what it was to be a writer. Yes, you had to admit.
Moscow, whose dust you loved. Whose streets you walked. Whose seasons you learnt. The past was closed down, but down every street you saw freeze-frames from those times. In your first year interactions all spoke of the old ways. But a year later you returned and were astonished to see the present sending out new shoots: 24-hour shops on every corner, supermarkets with trolleys and free plastic bags, underground clubs and places to go. And the future was something that could happen at last.
Still, you were a poet. If you ever tried to write a line of narrative it bored you so intensely you felt drained. You could only do what you could do. You came to your notebook and wrote what came to you. It was a process of give and take. Expectations always low, gratitude unending. Progress was not the word for it.
6.
You navigate the spit-patched asphalt in the vicinity of the metro station. There’s General the street dog basking in the sun. Past the kiosks selling Mars bars, washing powder, tights, beer, shawarma, stationary, under the mainline railway and there, ahead in the archway to your dvor, your yard, your home. Moscow did feel like home. But not all of it, this part. The tall Stalin-era apartment blocks, the grand archway, then the sea of poplar trees. Under them, the creaking swings and see-saw, the dust, crows, old Soviet-Ionic rubbish bins with scroll-like legs, benches with curved wooden backs. Sitting on your fifth-floor balcony, big enough for two, you are in the greenery of the poplars. Late sunsets and an evening walk out through the yards and to the stadium, heart racing with the screaming swifts. Mornings are sparrow gangs chirping in the low bushes and the dvornik’s rough broom sweeping the dust. The day sets up shop. You are in love with the morning light coming through the lace curtains. Under those tall windows you are stretched slowly into the day. Such extravagance is yours. The wooden floors lead you to the white kitchen. Simplicity is when the early sun falls on the small table where you place the sketchbook you write in. Notes and scraps are all you hope for. You rewrite them over the pages to see what they’ll become. When you go out into the day it is there for you, or you are there for it, the reciprocal attention to one another results in both your existences: you and day. You live in a built environment but it is nothing without the sunlight. The corners of the high buildings at sunset, the swifts racing round cupola in last light. This is for you and you are there to see it.
7.
The more desire there is to get published in a magazine, the more meaning being published in that magazine there is. O, those North American most desired places to see your own work published. The compliment buoys you. Through this wet start to summer. Years later. Those hot streets of Montreal will never change now. The humid air, close the windows early on before the hot air can get inside. You pick your damp baby up from her nap, always the fan directly on her. Can we stay here for good? Time is yours, do with it as you wish. Pack up and leave or put down roots.
8.
The aisles of the library invite you in. You know where your favourites are and wonder if your name will ever grace those pages. You await every ‘editor’ email. They have an aura. The same aura as your sketchbooks, the first notebooks you ever used, anything that is yours that is connected to your poems. This aura speaks of precious things, things with real value, things you would take out of a burning house first, they speak of you, your self and what you are made of. You believe that without this thing you are not truly you. Over the years you experiment, give in to despondency, question its value and see you are doing something that doesn’t do any good to anyone. Each time you come crawling back, relieved and remembering why you do this. It is who you are, you are almost sure of that. The pristine pages of The Paris Review filled with strange and often difficult writing. You want to be part of that, rather, you want to be accepted as good enough to be part of that. With each small achievement you set your sights on something more impossible. Only the impossible is good enough for you. You must be good enough for the impossible. That way you are free. Free. No one will take this away from you. No one will tell you how to do it. But you will listen to a select few and learn.
9.
Dopamine highs got you through your young mother years. How you carry on those habits well past the best before date. A glass of beer, a packet of crisps all loaded with the release that sputters in your brain for a nanosecond. Long enough to make you want more. You and I are at an age now where we have to choose, yet again, who we’ll become. Puppets of desire or creators of the future. Dopamine destroyer or potential, communication, attention, connection, peace. As before a midnight sun you move in an air of rarity. Everything is laden with your doing now, intention. O beautiful thing, this is what you meant, and from meaning came creation. Philadelphus and lime blossom still ahead. But you won’t rush anymore. And what will come will come without your grating anticipation. To a life of smoothness and clarity. The dream of distant mountains from your childhood arises once more. There will be a past and a future you can step into. It is yours.
Caroline Clark has published three books: a collection of poems titled Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions, 2012); a collection of poem-stories and photographs titled Sovetica (2021) and a work of non-fiction titled Own Sweet Time (2022, both CB editions). Recent work has appeared in Firmament magazine, Snow lit rev and is forthcoming with Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Bluesky: @cclarklewes.bsky.social Twitter: @cclarklewes
minor literature[s] 