Content warning: pregnancy loss, childlessness
“It raced through my mind, unlocking all the bars, yelling ‘no compromise – you must and can and will write’”
Announcements
Two in one day/
the holidays will do that to you/
secretly/in rooms all over
winter/women must come together/
to plan black and white photographs/
preened in between plastic tree firs/
Here/the older daughter/
sonograms haloing her/
Another/underwear tucked
beneath the new swell/
Everything needs an announcement/
grandmothers would wait
until the flowers stopped/
until their linen was pure
for three months/
they’d take cover/
in dark/stuffy rooms/
burn the bundles
of dirty bedding/dead babies/
then return to the chickens/
the potato rot/announcing
to no-one/
wherever they are/I return
their silence/I learn
for us all/Here are my words
For me it was startling and unsettling just how much was left unsaid in your poem. Was this something you did consciously, and is it a technique you often use in your writing?
Yes. This poem opens up Fruits of Labour, my collection with Seren, and the collection as a whole is very concerned with language, which also means silence. What do we do when language is insufficient and inaccurate? What do we do when there are no examples of language to use, when we are discussing silenced topics? How do we say things that aren’t said? The whole collection is concerned with these questions – how to say the unsayable. Issues such as childfreeness and childlessness are silenced in wider society due to the stigma still surrounding such conditions. There isn’t an accepted language for how we discuss these things, as they’re rarely discussed at all (much less written about) Leaving things unsaid, and querying the validity and accuracy of language, is a cornerstone of the collection as a whole, in an attempt to accurately portray the experience while still, paradoxically, relying on a language that cannot truly capture it.
Could you talk a bit about the inspiration behind this poem, please?
It was around Christmastime, and I was seeing lots of pregnancy announcements on social media – several a day for a while. At the time I was also reading The Other Boleyn Girl, which I did, admittedly and guiltily, find enjoyable if not exactly factual. I was really struck by a particular scene where Anne Boleyn has a miscarriage and the bundle is quickly burnt to destroy the evidence, in an attempt to save her (ill-fated) marriage. I’m really interested, in my writing, about this idea of ancestors – I think it probably ties into the theme of childfreeness, where the future of the family line is uncertain, and taking stock of where you’ve come from. I was struck by how different pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering is now – how women I know are comfortable to share their pregnancy news a few months in, when women of the past had no tests so had to wait a long time to be 100% sure. Looking back is fascinating to me; to see where we’ve come from, and how things have changed. While language still is ineffectual and inaccurate when discussing issues such as pregnancy loss and childlessness, I do hope it has improved greatly from a time when women were explicitly blamed for pregnancy loss and infertility, and were told very clearly it was their duty to move on and bear more children. Those women had no language, and were very actively silenced. The declaration at the end of this poem – ‘here are my words’ – felt very pertinent, and acts as a sort of agenda for the whole collection. I wanted to make it a declaration, to bring what has been silenced to light.
I’m really fascinated by the different tributaries that flow into a poem’s whole, and how they present a truth to us before we have consciously accepted it ourselves, and how these images – perhaps seemingly unrelated at first – can be married together to speak to a whole. I remember finding that Anne Boleyn image very arresting, and I remember noting several social media announcements of pregnancies on the same day, which struck me as unusual, and the poem knit these images together from the deep storage of my mind and unravelled something in front of me that I didn’t pre-plan. That’s the magic of poetry – it knows things about us before we do, and presents these revelations to us not only in reading but also in writing. It is very good advice, I think, to not know the ending of the poem when you start writing it. Let yourself be surprised.
This is a poem about female characters in which ‘women must come together’. Could you say a little about writers who identify as women who have been influential upon you, and in what ways they have informed your writing? Thank you.
As a child, I really loved Jacqueline Wilson books, and I remember really loving the ‘Girls’ series which were aimed at teenagers. In that series, there’s a character called Ellie I really related to, and in one passage she lists some books she receives as a birthday present so, when I was 13, I added these books to my Christmas list. One of those books changed my life, and that was The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I read it in one sitting on Boxing Day, and it raced through my mind, unlocking all the bars, yelling ‘no compromise – you must and can and will write’. I think, at the time, even though I was so young, I was a bit daunted with what to do with my future – I loved writing, but how do you earn money from that? – so I’d resigned myself, thinking poetry would just be my little weekend hobby. But Plath’s writing electrified me; it showed me I had something to say, and I needed to say it. I owe my career to that Boxing Day – it sounds over-dramatic but it’s true!
Other women writers who have been influential – all of the writers I examined for my PhD are female, and they enormously informed my writing at the time. Ada Limon, Wendy Pratt, Fiona Benson, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Robin Silbergleid, Natalie Whittaker, Sharon Olds, among others. It is easy to look at the culture surrounding childlessness, and figure out there isn’t much poetry about it, but these women have invented their own languages and forms to tackle a silent and silenced topic, and I find their inventiveness and resilience very inspiring. I find myself returning to the work of Victoria Kennefick and Cecilia Knapp when I’m struggling for inspiration. Equally, there are more and more women writing about the realities of women’s bodies, and I’m compelled by and drawn to the poetry of Laura Warner and Wendy Allen, and their approaches to bringing the subject of menstruation to poetic form in such thoughtful, inventive, brave, and important ways.
Betty Doyle
Betty Doyle (she/her) is a writer from Merseyside. Her work has been published in Agenda, Butcher’s Dog, Propel, Poetry Wales, and The North amongst others. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Girl Parts was published by Verve in 2022; her second, Fruits of Labour, came out with Seren in October 2024.
How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.