image credit: Derek Adams
Your poetry collection titles are intriguing and memorable, and often have fascinating a backstory all of their own. Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press pamphlet, 2011) certainly did! Could you tell us more about Hide as a title, and also about the importance of collection titles themselves - does a collection seem to you to assemble itself around the nucleus of what a title captures in some sense?
Collection titles are important to me; for my own and for those I read and buy. I like a title for a book or a poem to add something, another layer or illumination. Quite often, I think a title doesn’t snap into focus until after reading the poem or book and then there is an ‘aha’ moment on looking back to the title – and hopefully the poem also snaps into sharper focus. I like ambiguity in titles, hence Hide and my earlier collection Occupation; both are slippery words with multiple meanings which I like because I don’t want a book (or a poem) tied down to too narrow an expectation before the reader starts. I find that titles either come quickly, early in the process, or it takes a long time to find the right one. Hide was one of the latter. I had a working title which I knew was only a placeholder and the collection was almost complete before Hide became the right title for it, in all its definitions. There is a poem titled 'Hide' in the collection which was one of the first ones written but that is co-incidental; I never had a sense of it as a title poem and I resisted Hide as a book title for some time because I felt it was already taken. In the end though, it was the only possible title to illuminate some of the slippery issues I had explored in the poems.
Your previous poetry collections have always found their grounding and inspiration in the stories and histories of others; in Hide it is your own stories and personal histories that inform the poems. This would appear to be a new approach for you - how did you find the writing process, and was it at first unnerving to write from this closer and more personal perspective?
Oh yes, definitely unnerving. I had always found the personal first person intensely uncomfortable and avoided writing the ‘I’ unless in persona. The reasons for this are complex but include a Methodist, working class, upbringing where talking about yourself too much was frowned on and the community took precedence over the individual. Added to that conditioning is a critical landscape where women’s poetry with autobiographical elements is often not taken seriously (an area I am still researching) and that I greatly value solitude and privacy. These things work together to create some formidable barriers for me in writing the ‘I’ but it was something I knew I had to tackle if I were to develop as a poet. I knew that I could continue writing the story-based poems and enjoy doing so but had become dissatisfied with the poems and knew I had to move forward. Although I don’t suppose a reader would see risk in the poems, they felt very risky to me and I sometimes even felt squeamish when I read them. My hope was that, if a barrier was so strong, there ought to be something interesting on the far side of it.
I did find that my usual processes would not work. I had always used storytelling to create, in my mind, a world in which poems could grow but felt I had to stop doing that if I was going to work with memory and history – I didn’t want the poems to take off into fantasy or fiction. As time went on and the collection started to build, I was able to relax a bit with the process and allow some storytelling into the mix although even those poems which may seem to be fantasy such as 'Sooterkin' or 'Reasonable' have connections to some of the personal or family history I’ve been working with. Working with the ‘I’ is fraught with difficulty apart from any personal barriers; the I is always a construct and only valid for that poem – the self is complex and multi-layered and no-one could truly present a poem, however personal, and say ‘this is me’. I don’t consider the poems to be ‘confessional’ which is a term I dislike anyway; it is so often used pejoratively. They are based in memory and family histories as well as being rooted here in Gloucestershire but I hope there is also enough of the universal human condition in them to resonate with readers.
I know that this collection has been in progress for three years, a great deal of your energy and time has been dedicated to polishing and refining it, and that you've also really benefitted both from an Arts Council grant and an Arvon course during this period. Can you tell us more about how both of these contributed and enriched the process of working on this collection for you, and what your advice is to others who might be in the early (and sometimes quite daunting) stages of compiling a collection of poetry?
This was the first time that I was conscious of setting out to write a collection. With previous books, I was just writing poems, following whatever obsessions were with me at the time. At some stage, enough poems reached a mass that felt connected and started to feel like a book and at that time I would start to put them together and follow threads I found in them to write in the gaps. Hide was (hopefully) going to be a collection from the first poem.
When I first started working on the themes that would become the collection, although it was difficult and uncomfortable it was also new, exciting, so I was thinking about it all the time and working every spare moment. However, there are many pressures on my time: I work full-time for a youth charity, do occasional teaching at the university, run the Buzzwords reading series, am features editor for Iota, and am studying for a PhD. By the time I had a critical mass of about half the poems, I had slowed down and was finding it increasingly difficult to get enough clear head-space to think about the poems and the themes. I applied for the ACE grant in desperation but with no idea whether I stood a chance of getting it so I was really thrilled to be awarded the grant. The grant allowed me to take some unpaid days off from the ‘day-job’ to concentrate on writing and paid for the Arvon course. I had never been on an Arvon course and wasn’t clear about how it would help except that I hoped some concentrated time in a writerly atmosphere had to help me get to grips with the collection. As it turned out, the Arvon course came at just the right time when most of the poems were written (thanks to the extra days off!); it was a tutored retreat and gave me the quality time with the collection I needed to work with it as a whole. Hide would eventually have been completed without the grant, I think, but it would have taken a lot longer and probably been a different book – or at least be missing some of the poems that I consider important to the whole. I am immensely grateful for the ACE grant and the time at Arvon.
Throughout Hide, a series of 'cunning' poems are subtly interspersed - could you tell us a bit more about these poems and about the themes of cunning, superstition and the unseen that also seem to be integral to this collection?
‘Cunning’ insinuated itself into the work from the beginning. It is cunning in the sense of the old knowledge, strongly connected to traditional lore, wisdom and superstition and wholly to do with family – specifically my grandparents. My (maternal) family have been in Gloucestershire a very long time and my grandparents, although living in town, were country workers at heart. My grandfather was illiterate and scraped a living by selling garden produce from an allotment. I spent a lot of time in their tiny terraced house and, while they were often ruled by superstition, there was also a sense of otherness, of a knowledge of what could not be seen or explained, particularly with my grandmother who seemed to be able to influence games of chance and could see a shadow in the face of a person who would die soon. It is a peculiar mix; an earthy sense of clairvoyance and pagan beliefs combined with our attending Methodist Sunday School and a matter of fact expectation that relatives came to ‘visit’ after they died. The ‘cunning’ poems needed to be – demanded to be - threaded through the collection because cunning, though never named, was so strong a presence in my childhood and hence so much a part of who I am now.
It seem so obvious to say that language is clearly important to you as a poet, but I am interested in how language itself, whether spoken, written or as a concept, seems to be something of a slippery and complex character in Hide; in 'Other Tongues' you talk of a mother tongue that "sleeps under your skin" and in other poems like 'Placement' and 'Some of These Things Are True' language is something sampled, tasted, "rolled around on the tongue" like a wine from a rare vintage. What comes across is a sense of language as both something that anchors person and place and yet also provides an opportunity for broader exploration and discoveries -I'd be interested to know more about how language works thematically for you, as well as technically, within your poems?
Yes, you’re right, it is all of those things. I have always enjoyed language (though, as a child, mostly in my head!) but it is slippery and words have power. When I first read about Masaru Emoto’s experiments with the effects of words on water, it felt like confirmation of something we should have always known. My relationship with spoken language is not straightforward; my grandparents were dialect speakers and a large extended family spoke with broad Gloucestershire accents. I, while always being quiet and private, had a voice for public speaking and enjoyed using language that way and was often picked to read the lesson in church. I was sent to elocution and entered into competitive verse speaking and Poetry Society medals from the age of 5 or 6. My ‘mother tongue’ speaks with a Gloucestershire accent and it feels like home when I hear the cadences of old men I meet walking their dogs when I am out walking mine – but at the same time, language has taken me into new places and new ways to grow. I have more words at my disposal than my family ever did but it still feels that the important ones, the ones etched on my bones, come from that old cunning and all it gave me.
