Jackie Kay on rediscovering yourself in your 50s - REPLAY

The Shift with Sam Baker

In this episode of The Shift, host Sam Baker interviews acclaimed Scottish poet and author Jackie Kay about her new poetry collection May Day, which serves as an elegy for

Key takeaways

• Jackie Kay's new collection May Day functions as a secular prayer and homage to her late parents, Helen and John Kay, alongside cultural heroes like Nina Simone and Paul Robeson.
• Kay describes poetry as her 'shop floor' and primary survival mechanism, noting that its sparse, honed form provides catharsis when other genres feel too raw or unwieldy during grief.

Main topics

• Grief, loss, and the cyclical nature of aging in your 50s and 60s
• The creative process behind May Day and poetry as emotional survival

Notable quotes

"Poetry's my shop floor. It's a form that I can write when I can't write others... it helps me to survive, really."

Conclusion

The episode offers a deeply reflective exploration of how grief, identity,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Hello and welcome to The Shift, the podcast that aims to tell the no holds barred truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by me, writer and broadcaster Sam Baker. My guest today has blazed a trail through the British poetry scene ever since her work was first published in 1991. Born in Edinburgh, Jackie Kay MBE was brought up in Glasgow by her adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay, of whom much more later. She's had countless poetry collections, short stories and novels published to acclaim, as well as her glorious memoir, Red Dust Road, which tells the story of meeting her birth parents. And I have to recommend you listen to Jackie read it on Audible because it is fantastic. Anyway, the winner of over 20 awards, Jackie's a professor of creative writing at Salford University. And for five years, she was the Scottish Macca. And that's basically Poet Laureate for anyone who doesn't know. Speaker 1 (1:00) It takes some time before you realise that the conversation continues with your dead in some way or another, but you can almost, this is an open-ended conversation. It's why I think people can often feel out of culture or unbalanced, literally. I mean, physically, not necessarily even mentally, but physically when they're grieving. Speaker 2 (1:20) Her new collection, Mayday, is an elegy to her beloved parents who died within a year of each other and taught her the meaning and power of protest. I went to Glasgow to meet Jackie while she was on tour. Her beloved older brother Maxie had just died and she spoke candidly about love, loss and absence, living with nothing between you and the sky and how poetry helps her survive. We also discussed coming back into yourself in your 50s and 60s, where there should be lists after every white male writer's names, the art of living together apart and why her emotional age is 150. Speaker 2 (2:09) Thank you so much for coming on The Shift. I've got a bit of a girl crush. Speaker 1 (2:15) That's okay. I think Speaker 2 (2:17) it's because having heard your voice a Speaker 1 (2:21) lot, you know, in your poetry readings, it's actually, Speaker 2 (2:25) you kind of develop and you feel like you know someone, don't you? Mm-hmm. When Speaker 1 (2:29) you've heard... In a sense, you do, you know. In a sense, you do, you know, know someone. When you've listened to their poetry and you've listened to their voice, you kind of, you know, you do know someone. I mean, I feel like my readers do know me. And listeners do know me. They do know me because most of what I have to say that's precious or important to me or even private in some way is in my books. Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:54) I Speaker 1 (2:54) mean, you give a lot in your writing, don't you? Yeah. I think it's a relationship that you have, though, with the reader. It is a call and response, like the blues. And so I do feel like, you know, I get to know readers and they turn up for different things. But I like the idea of the, you know. I mean, I'm my own first reader, but I don't just write for myself. Speaker 2 (3:17) When I interviewed Kate Moss, she said that as far as she's concerned, the book isn't finished until it's in the hands of the reader. Do you feel like that about the book? Speaker 1 (3:26) No, I don't feel like it's not finished until it's in the hands of the reader because say something extraordinary and apocalyptic happened before it got to the hands of the reader. I Speaker 2 (3:37) hope Speaker 1 (3:37) not. Or say, no, no, no, but just say, you know, everything was too, whatever. I still think I would have finished my book. But I know what she means. And she means really what I was saying earlier, that the writer is having a conversation with the reader. It's Speaker 2 (3:52) important Speaker 1 (3:52) part of the process. It's not a soliloquy. It's not a monologue. And Mayday, I mean, it's about Speaker 2 (3:57) your parents. Though I love the way that you had put, it's dedicated to your parents, Helen and John, and it's about them. But I love the way that you put the poem about your birth parents. at the beginning, what made Speaker 1 (4:12) you decide to do that? Because it's the only poem in the book that's for my birth parents. And I felt as if they made me physically. And I like them being presiding spirits. And I wanted to free them from the memoir, if you like, free them from the life story and have them back to a meeting. because I knew that they'd met in the ballroom dancing in Aberdeen. And I just loved the freedom of that to give them something happy to the past and then to go forward into the rest of May Day. So it felt as if they were just, you know, it was a proper nod to them, but also, yeah, they're presiding spirits over the book. Speaker 2 (5:02) I love that because I'm reading it again now. It is almost like it's setting them free. It's like, you know, birds off into the air. That's nice. That's exactly, yeah. Speaker 1 (5:17) That actually fits it better than I just answered. It does. It does. It does, actually. Let me have that. Let me have that. It was to set them free. It was to give a sense of, yeah, free from the kind of, the weight of story. Almost like an air balloon. like an air balloon like feet in the dance floor it's Speaker 2 (5:39) so interesting because I think that one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is how so much of what people do is about the beginning I don't and I say the beginning and the end I don't mean the literal end but I mean you know the early it's almost like we're shaped by the early work and then we can work or life and then we come back into ourselves Speaker 2 (6:03) 50, 60. It's true. Do you feel like that? Speaker 1 (6:06) Yeah. I think that, I think perhaps that. Speaker 1 (6:11) all of life is a kind of a returning, but that you don't realise it's a kind of returning until you get to a certain age. When you're younger, in your 20s and 30s, life is a propelled forward movement, or so you think. You think you've got all the time to read all the books that you might want to read, to go to all the countries you might want to, to make all the friends. You think you've got lots of time, and then suddenly you get to 60. Speaker 1 (6:41) And you realise that you still feel like the girl that you were is just a skip and a jump away. But you feel as if you're going back to different points. So it's almost like your life starts to turn and you start to return to the things that really, really matter to you as a child. And those childhood years become even more important, paradoxically, in your 60s than they were in your 20s. And I think that's just to do with that. It's almost like a cycle. You know, if seasons have cycles and if fields have cycles, then we human beings have cycles too. We have our own harvest moon. I can tell you're a poet. Speaker 2 (7:27) Quite pleased with that myself. Tell me about writing Mayday. What was the kind of jumping off point for writing Mayday? What was happening Speaker 1 (7:38) with you? Speaker 2 (7:39) I Speaker 1 (7:39) think my mum and dad dying was the real trigger for the book. Although some of the poems I wrote before, They had died. And it was only really when I was about a third or two thirds of the way through the book that I realised that it was a book. And that's the funny thing that can happen with poems. You know, you write single poems and then you start to see that they're actually having a conversation or rather a congregation, that the poems are starting to congregate and interrelate and interact with each other. And so that's really when I realised that I had, I was writing Mayday when the poems started to congregate. And I realised that... that grief is very, very solitary and can be soul-destroying or destroy your faith. Because I don't have a particular faith, I'm not particularly religious, I started to think, what do you take comfort in? What's my form of secular prayer? And so May Day really became a form of secular prayer to me of putting my mum and dad alongside all the people that had been heroes. in their lives and having them form part of the May Day Parade. So the book's a homage and a love letter to my mum and dad, Helen and John Kay, but it's also really an appreciation, a homage to Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Peggy Seeger, Mick McGaughy, Albert Adams, Fanny Eaton, and a whole host of other characters that go through the book, like those floats on May Day Parades. Speaker 2 (9:14) What is it about poetry? Why do you turn to poetry more than all the other forms of writing that you're equally good at, you annoying person? Speaker 1 (9:24) Poetry's my shop floor. You know, if you think about what you learn on the shop floor, if you were a worker, poetry's my shop floor. It's a form that I can write when I can't write others. So I couldn't write a novel at the moment. My brain wouldn't be able to. Speaker 1 (9:43) to form a novel. And I probably couldn't write a memoir because it's too raw. But I can write individual poems. And because poems take several drafts, every poem in that book will have gone through several transitions to get to the final form, at least 12. 12? Yeah, at least 12, yeah. So there's a kind of a honing process. I mean, sometimes it might just be changing a position of a comma, but it's just going through all of these different changes. Speaker 1 (10:13) So something about the purity of that form and the sparsity, the sparseness of it relatively to big, loose, baggy monster, as E.M. Foster called the novel, is cathartic, really, and helps. I find it a helpful form. It helps me, I mean, literally helps me to survive, really, writing poetry. And that sounds dramatic, but it really... Probably is true. Speaker 2 (10:42) Is that true of writing always? Speaker 1 (10:44) Yeah. Yeah. I started writing from when I was 12. It's always been the case that it's like your other self or your second skin writing. So I can't imagine not writing. And if I suddenly became unable to write, I just might as well pack it all in at life because it's not even that it's my profession. It's more that it's my vocation and it's more that it's my kind of raison d'etre. And if I kind of lose the means of, you know, like some of the things that I express in Mayday, I needed to say we're living in such a divided world, split world, harrowing world at the moment to live in that I feel like, you know, a poet has to have a place at the table in the world. at the world's table and has to be able to say things that contribute and that make people maybe think a bit or make them feel accompanied or give them some solace. But the first person you're giving solace when you're right is actually yourself. So that's a funny thing. You know, you're having the first wee bite of the things that's at the table because that's part of the process. You're kind of breaking bread with yourself. Speaker 2 (11:54) Do you feel like we've gone backwards a bit in terms of... What you were just talking about, the divisions in the world and how bad we've got at putting ourselves in other people's shoes. Speaker 1 (12:05) Yeah, I think we have, definitely, beyond all doubt. That's the thing that makes me feel the saddest about the world that we live in. Because it used to be in the 70s and 80s that there were fierce differences between different people. I remember that communists hate the trotskists, the trotskists hate the social... socialist workers, there's all these kind Speaker 2 (12:29) of Speaker 1 (12:29) social workers. And, you know, I remember not being able to understand that as a kid and saying to my dad, but aren't you, aren't your politics more similar? My dad maybe being more friendly to Teddy Taylor, that was the Conservative Party candidate for the same area that my dad stood in, the Garbles, than he was to the others. And I could never get my head around those kind of differences, but they were small fries, as it turns out, to the differences that we... And one of the things that's really sad is that people that you would have thought in the 70s and 80s would have been your allies, your comrades, your compañeros, your compañeras, are now split and at each other's throats. And it seemed that there was more space in the 70s and the 80s. with the LGBT and then the different letters that were being added to this umbrella of identity. There was more space to be yourself and for that to be embraced. And it now seems very, very at war, really, kind of a war. And yes, that really saddens me. That's one thing that saddens me. And then the other things that sadden me are the kind of the rush to judgment. I think that the ways that people have now of interacting has all been influenced by social. media so it's not it's an echo chamber it's not a listening chamber it's an echo chamber all you do is you reverberate your own voice back to yourself in the form of other people saying the same thing so we're we're out of the way of listening of saying oh really you think that how interesting what do you know um and and the idea that you might listen to a different point of view and you might learn something from it it's almost like for the birds now it seems such a fundamental shocking thing to say but it really is true so we just don't listen anymore we shout our we shout our opinion to the other person we get enraged and furious if they don't think the same and that's it but we're actually kids now are being brought up outside the echo chamber I mean it's straight Speaker 2 (14:32) isn't it it's exactly straight no from naught to a hundred and you never ever see anybody and haven't for a long time say why do you think that and people no longer try to reason with other people on social media. It's straight, it's immediately, you're Speaker 1 (14:47) wrong. Yeah, yeah. From Speaker 2 (14:49) nowhere. Speaker 1 (14:49) I know. And it's very hateful. There's so much toxicity. And it's so cowardly as well because, you know, I just think this is the age of judgment. And I've never really lived through an age of judgment quite like this, where people just jump on each other's backs very, very quickly for sometimes very small things. And people live in fear of somebody jumping on their back. And then the media is also to blame because they make these kind of storms. It's just very childish. It's almost like a... It's like a playground now. He said that to me and I'm doing that and you're doing that. People being sent to Coventry and people not speaking to each other and little groups forming and little cloisters of bullies forming and pointing at each other. And it really, really