Blog: 'Writing in my head' - Tracy Gillman

In this link Voices above the chaos published in The Observer review section yesterday, Bejan Matur speaks of her year spent in jail, twenty-eight days of that in solitary confinement and how she: '[...] started writing poetry. In my head. To bring back to life an existence they were trying to obliterate. My poems are about the reconstruction of a shattered being [...] the words gave me balance in the darkness. I was not theirs anymore.'

The writing of poetry in the head while incarcerated is a recurring theme of poetry of witness and can involve not only extraordinary endurance but remarkable feats of memory. I am put in mind of the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien who over three decades in prison 'wrote' over 700 hundred poems: to learn more about Thien's work follow this link to his obituary in The New York Times: Flowers from Hell 

Perhaps as a testimony to the achievements of dissident-poets we should incorporate some of that Herculean skill into our own practice, or maybe you have experience of that process - if you do, or have something to share leave comments below, on FB or Twitter... 

After a twitter conversation today, please give @bejanmatur a follow, Bejan is happy for us to upload one of her poems: Winds Howl Through The Mansions', to our poetry of witness digital archive: find it on the blog and hopefully in the future we can get Bejan over to do an event for us...