Jehane Markham

YOU may have read Jehane Markham’s work in these pages. Our resident poet, who contributes a piece every month, has spent a lifetime creating poetry and this week is performing live at Kentish Town’s bastion of the spoken word, the Torriano Meeting House.

Poetry as a means of expression has been with Jehane since she was a child – she recalls penning her first poem aged seven and then, as a teenager, going to the Albert Hall in 1965 to see Adrian Mitchell and Allan Ginsberg, among other beat poets, read their works.

Aged 21, encouraged by her mother, the poet and children’s author Olive Dehn, she had a piece accepted for publication by the Sunday Times.

“I used to go to poetry readings with her, and she was always encouraging,” she recalls.

“My mother had lots of Edwardian books, lots of nursery rhymes with wonderful illustrations.

“My mother would let us take the books and colour in the pictures. They were not seen as museum pieces but something we could almost ‘ruin’. They were not objects we had to be terribly careful with but things we could use, interact with.”

Poets she enjoys include the likes of William Blake, Adrian Mitchell, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Cavaner and Seamus Heaney.

Mitchell, who lived in Dartmouth Park, became both a friend and mentor.

“I first met him when I was a teenager,” she says.

“He was an inspiration – he was such an exciting person, an exciting writer.”

Others whose craft reveals Jehane’s criteria for writing poetry include the American poet Mary Oliver. “She does not overuse words – she is very original,” says Jehane.“She is full of wonder, but not in a namby-bamby kind of way. Her work is always fresh, not sentimental, but moving.”

As for her own pieces, she draws on a wider range of inspirations, from family, children, love, loss and much in between. For her first series in Review, she wrote one a month and focused on what a passage through a year meant. “I started with January and wrote it as a blues piece,” she says. “It felt right. I decided to write one for each month, but I wanted the month to come so I could see how it felt. Sometimes it would be obvious, sometimes not.”

Poetry can be a way of using words to make you think about a topic in an entirely new way, she adds.

“I think with poetry there is an element of bravery to write about things that you are not always entirely sure about,” she says.

“And poems can remain mysterious – they can be intellectually challenging for the reader. It can be funny, how poetry can feel offputting – sometimes they can be too clever. But a good poem will always have a way in for the reader. It can be a very personal thing.”

Jehane is performing on Sunday with fellow poet Cheryl Moskowitz and some of Jehane’s works are set to musical accompaniment.

“Music can help make a work,” she says. “It becomes collaborative. A poem set to music is different from a song – songs tend to be simple, they can be repetitive and look like that when just on a page. If you have too many adjectives in a song, it doesn’t tend to work – but not so with poetry.”

And the Torriano Meeting House, established four decades ago by the late John Rety and his wife Sue Johns, is still providing a platform for all.
Jehane says there is nowhere quite like it.

“It feels a little like a theatre – it has a real atmosphere, because of all the past voices that have read there. It holds on to that and it is a lovely feeling to know so many poems have been read there over the years.

“It is also not hierarchal – the Meeting House allows anyone to read. You don’t have to be invited, you don’t have to be published. People can come and read from the floor. It has a particularly inclusive reputation – and that is what poetry should be about.”

This is another reason she enjoys having her work in Review.

“Having a poem published in a newspaper is a particularly satisfying,” she says.

It means, she adds, poetry reaches a large demographic of people.

“I have had letters from readers who have picked up the paper outside Morrison’s, for example, read my poem and then written to me,” she says.

“They perhaps did not expect to see poetry published, and when they read it, it meant something to them.”

• Jehane Markham and Cheryl Moskowitz will be at the Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Avenue, NW5 from 7.30pm on Sunday, June 4.