Today we have the first in a series of poets from Bad Betty Press; a press which is publishing some really interesting work from both established and in today’s case new poets. Check out their publications here (and if you can buy a publication or two, you won’t be disappointed). William Gee will have his debut pamphlet ‘Rheuma’ published late summer. Here he talks about his struggle with Fibromyalgia with some really interesting insights about how it affects our ability to work in a society driven by profit.
*************************
“For much of my life, I struggled with a range of symptoms which seemed to bare no correlation to one another. Chronic fatigue, an increasingly constant nausea level, violent aching without reason.
Early poems sought to connect these disparate symptoms without acknowledging them, through the general sense of depression and anxiety they unknowingly induced, and I think, as I attempted to distance myself from the experience of living in my own body, that distance found its way into my writing.
Coming to terms with my Fibromyalgia lines up pretty perfectly with the conclusion of my studies, as an MA student at Royal Holloway, and the beginning of my search for full time, meaningful employment.
It feels, at least in my experience, that living with chronic pain is more often than not an act of negotiating the desire to be seen and believed, with the hope that people won’t pick up on your vulnerabilities, and become predisposed in the way they think about you.
Disabled and chronically ill lives are, more often than not, unprofitable lives, and that is largely down to the perception of what it means to be self-sufficient. We are, at our most basal, a measure of our own output. Creatures of capacity. Bodies that need assistance to operate, fail to chime with that age-old capitalist ideal; that each and every one of us is capable of providing for ourselves. Earning our keep.
There’s also this feeling, particularly as a young man, that so much success and opportunity comes off the back of your ability to project virility. A sense of surety and assertiveness that comes with believing there are no limitations to your body’s capabilities.
As I searched for work, these preconceptions really weighed on me, and the value in concealing my physical difficulties became apparent, as did the need for me to be open about how unwell I often feel. The tension between the exposure of my symptoms leading to a depreciation in my perceived economic value, and the support I desperately needed to find and maintain work, became a key concern in both the way I started to lead my life, and in the way I was writing.
My poem, ‘young man,’ was really one of my first explorations of this tension between distance and closeness. It felt like an act of empowerment, as I initially struggled to find work, to admit defeat. To acknowledge flaws, and to ironise them. As it turns out, to be vulnerable in life makes it far easier to be vulnerable on the page, and soon a body of work began to form around the experience of living within my own body.
I was able to make connections between my chronic pain, and some of the traumas I’d been concealing, along with my symptoms, and produce a short collection of poems that have made me able to begin to understand my own life experience.
William Gee is a poet and writer based in East London. His work focuses on chronic illness, trauma, and the intersectionality between the two. His debut pamphlet, Rheuma, will be published by Bad Betty Press late this summer.
young man,
you are an expert in having lives to waste and how are we to love you like that
your body lacking in the confidence of your bedroom your body only faking
three-dimensional separate from its own politics incapable of sending its meats
to the right places of un-sending its acids and instead how hard
are you willing to work to get away from yourself young man take all
your beauty out from your natwest student account your beauty is modest as a box
room your beauty is always hungry in the same coat too small to be saved I’m sorry
come back when your body is its most successful factory when you’ve died
at all the punctured versions of yourself
And as I looked for ways to complete my father’s portrait, I noticed how proud I am of him, how his work ideals and diligence have come to define him. Coming from a more working class background and without a university education, he wanted a different future for me, a future alien to him and his class, where more doors would be open with the promise of a good education.
“When we rang in the New Year, I don’t expect any of us thought our 2020 would include supermarket queues, panic buying, empty motorways, or an invisible Prime Minister, but here we are. The world is a quieter place, where we keep our distance from each other, do our weekly shop, and – in my case at least – spend far too much time online, seeking some kind of social interaction. For better or worse, our worlds have shrunk to our immediate neighbourhood, the few streets round us, the distance we can walk or cycle in an hour.
Many of the poems in my new book ‘
“The title poem for my debut collection, Her Lost Language, feels a bit like a ‘cuckoo’ in that I usually write about the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement, with direct reference to Jamaica. This seems to be where I find my voice, and can cover subjects from the maternal, food, past, present and future.
It feels clear on re-reading the poem that the environment I describe is not just ‘hostile’ for the character but for everyone who has to live in it. The phrase, ‘A lift shaped by urine is’, to me, about real suffering – for those that have to endure it and those that cause the offence in the first place. How alienated do you have to be, to literally piss where you live?
“Cardiff has one of the oldest BAME populations in the UK. However, it wasn’t a slave town like Bristol. The majority of the Black population were merchant seamen – who settled in Cardiff’s docks area, or Tiger Bay as it was known back then. My grandfather came to Cardiff via a familiar route in the 1890’s. 
Gradually people migrated to other parts of Cardiff, My grandparents moved out in the 1940’s. Unfortunately my grandfather was on a ship which was torpedoed during World War 2 – so we never met. I grew up in what I jokingly referred to later as a Black & White family with a ‘coloured’ telly…. It’s funny when you’re a child, you don’t think of yourself as a colour…. I discovered I was black accidentally. We would always watch the news at teatime. It was sometime around 1972, and the newsreader barked “and the Blacks are rioting in…”. It was somewhere in London. I said, ‘Dad – who are the blacks?’. My dad looked at me quizzically and said ‘We are son…’. It was a light-bulb moment. “Aaaah – that’s why people call me funny names at school”, I thought. They were strange times – ‘
The poem I have chosen from my collection, has to be ‘On the death of Muhammad Ali’. A) Originally, it was one of my poems that Eric Ngalle Charles chose for his ‘
“It seems to me, that this global pandemic leaves me unable to write a thing except maybe clichés; tired phrases. I can’t write about it but writing about anything else seems unthinkable. I’m aware that for some poets I know, the opposite is true and poems are pouring out of them. One way or another we are all affected and not just in regards writing; some people find themselves unable to do anything productive whilst others throw themselves into activity – we find our own ways of dealing with the anxiety. There is a definition of trauma that makes a correlation between the perceived level of threat and the perceived level of helplessness we feel in response to it; essentially when an event overwhelms our ability to cope. The reverberations of this collective trauma will be around long after the lockdown ends.
I remember the helplessness I felt then too and how painting led me to writing this poem, ‘Drowning’. I wanted to send something cheerful and uplifting for this guest post but of the few more cheerful poems I’ve written nothing seemed right. I read a Facebook post a friend shared recently by someone who said the last time they were in lockdown was during the 
internationally touring DJs and members of an all-female band of adults with learning difficulties. My aim wasn’t to get famous names but to talk to women who lived and breathed music in their everyday life, either professionally or at an amateur level.
But for all of this, this little area houses many people, or perhaps a better word, it homes them. Above the shopping centre are two residential complexes, Paige Heights and Sky City – architecturally unique when they were built – like neighbourhoods in the sky. You wouldn’t know they were there, looking up from the street. And on one side of the high street lies the vast Noel Park estate, street and after street of Victorian cottage style houses, originally built to home artisan labourers.
“I am very grateful to Peter for inviting me to submit a blog post and poem for this great website. It’s always nice when someone you respect shows an interest in your work and places you amongst a growing collection of talented artists… especially since I’ve been a little down on my debut ‘poetry’ book, Contained recently. It’s like staring at your own face in the mirror for too long – my features have lost all relevance and no longer make up what I remember. Perhaps, worse still, they make up exactly what I remember.
I don’t know anything about film theory – except a short (but excellent) YouTube series narrated by a feature film producer, preoccupied by the ‘oner’ – but I’m sure every character in these dramas is supposed to have an ‘arc’. But all I see is JT standing there barrel-chested, mush-faced, wide-lapelled and NOT BEING JOHN TRAVOLTA. The whole thing is very distracting. And, of course, maybe he just looks like that now.
“Three years ago, 
