Interview by Zoë Brigley
“It seems to me that all language grows out of the dirt, the shapes of hills, the mud of the fields and barks of trees”
Split Tongues
Oh yes. Indeed. If you split a starling’s tongue with a silver sixpence
the bird can be taught to speak more impressively.
Anon. 16th Century
I was born into the music of Somerset. The music of udders & milk, herons & rhynes. Our mouths were mirrors of earth. Thick with it. Ridged and gorged with it. I couldn't wait to get away. Please, I said can I go to university? I might as well have said Mars or Pluto. Yes, they said, even though the factory was all we knew. So many sons & daughters of lawyers & doctors laughed at how I spoke. Everything Somerset sounds stupid, they said. Wurzels & baler-twine & scrumpy. I found a silver sixpence & split my tongue. Leaned into posh. Spoke less impressively.
So why don’t we begin with you telling us about the epigraph? And what about epigraphs generally? They always feel to me like an extra piece of puzzle.
I rarely use epigraphs. I think they’re a distraction. That said, I sometimes love them because they’re a window into another world. When I came across this quote it helped me to say something that I hadn’t been able to say before in the poem – and I wanted to keep this source of this opening as an epigraph. I had been doing a lot of research around starlings because I’d been going down to the Levels at Ham Wall to see them flocking in at dusk and dawn. The quote struck me and reminded me that humans can be so bizarre and how much violence is involved in splitting a tongue to make it sound more impressive to a
human ear. It resonated with what I felt about my own tongue and the way in which I consciously altered how I spoke as a way of trying to fit in. I thought posh accents were more impressive back then. Only five percent of students at universities were from working class backgrounds when I went to study for a degree, and I was the first in my large, extended family to not go into the factory. In some ways I felt as if the split tongue went all the way through my body – I no longer belonged to where I’d come from and I’ve never quite belonged to the culture I was moving towards either.
This is a poem about language and how we speak and there are lovely sounds here and musicality when talking about the Somerset accent. Do you approach the musicality of poems in a very conscious way or is it something that just happens more instinctively?
Before I wrote with words, I made things up with music. I had piano lessons when I was young, and that was where I first began to improvise and tell stories with notes and sounds. It was very odd learning piano because there was only ever the sound of Radio 2 in our house. I think this clash of classical music, popular music and improvisation has never left me. Equally, it seems to me that all language grows out of the dirt, the shapes of hills, the mud of the fields and barks of trees that I was intimate with as a child. The sounds come first in a poem but then I come back to them, look at the composition, the meaning, how the gaps and spaces are working. I think everything is music (John Cage said this and I agree with him) – and then I’m curious about how to let this show through in a sequence of words. It’s all composition – and choreography. The dance of the word to the music of rhythmic space. Or something like that.
This is also a poem about class and culture. My grandmother was from Somerset, and it has some things in common with Wales I think. In my family, there were lots of marriages of Welsh and Somerset folk. What does Somerset mean to you and what enticed you to write this poem?
It took a long time to realise what Somerset meant to me. I feel that if you were to saw me in half you’d find the strata of the land inside. I’m made of Somerset apples and potatoes, the minerals that bubbled up through the roots of carrots, the mist that hovers over the Levels at Dawn. I spent a long time away from here and then felt a pull in my bones one day, something drawing me back. And so I returned, not to where I’d lived as a child but to a village near Bath. There’s a power in living close the to the land where I grew up. My relatives are all buried here. I can visit their graves. I feel as if I’m indigenous to this land and that gives me an energy that I haven’t found elsewhere.
I’d been trying to write this poem for a long time. I was aware that something happened to the way I spoke when I went to university, but it was hard to write about without sounding like a victim. It was so different back in the eighties. I have often felt like an alien in the poetry world and I think this had something to do with where I’m from. I’m still working it out. I needed to write this poem to admit to myself what I’d done with my voice and why. I like that it’s come together with the starlings. And that I could nudge in my own bit of politics at the end by suggesting that splitting a tongue can lead to speaking less impressively, not more. After all, who’s the judge, who gets to say what’s impressive? There’s violence in splitting a tongue, there’s also violence in the way people make judgments about what is and isn’t impressive. I wanted to write about that. I wanted to explore the link between where I was from, where I went, and the little bit of self-mutilation that went on inside my mouth.
