Camille Francois: How I Wrote ‘Let us go down, and there confound’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

I like to think of poems as machines crafted to destroy what we know, in order to access forms of wisdom or something archaic about our nature which we might not otherwise have consciously encountered.

Let us go down, and there confound

Gen 11:7

We entered you like a body,
through darker ground where a memory
of water ran, following the white of little bells,
or the backside of a hare. Living in the language
of something else, the bird’s nest
orchid, whose food is not its own, whose leaves
are its stalk, whose roots copy the house
of a bird, reminds me of us – beige-brown and unable
to synthesize the light. It deals with the living as we do –
in pale-faced fear, and (fingering its leaves) my daughter asks
that we tread more softly – we’re waking it up she says,
meaning you, or something in our feet and legs.
We enter you, and you offer up your past
and future like a box of chocolates: a mint-blue
egg shell, the gleaming thigh bone
of a deer, an old trunk pierced with shoots
we walk through as through layers of time.
Sometimes a screech breaks in – a line of birches
pulling the silver thread of the high speed train.
On the edge of you live men who speak
as you do – my daughter worries for the mare
as flies skate on her eye, but the potter says
they like to drink her tears, in the same tone
I’ve heard him say before what we call pests
are eating his young tree, because the tender wood
tastes good to them. Outside his hut, we find by the river
an old clay goddess with a cracked back –
his children have stuffed it with red earth
and tufts of grass like a closed flowerpot and she kneels
in the mud, blue-grey like the river bed.
Hens come to peck her, sheep rub against her face.
Because of the crack, she is oddly poised,
like bracing, or turning at great cost; all over her
the crazed, starry glitter of powdered glass.
We kneel and cup our hands, and wash her hair
as I did years ago for the old village woman.
We’ll bring something back
from the woods today; a word or two.
We use language to wake up silent things. Or let them lie.

So, let’s begin at the beginning. Tell us about this Genesis epigraph.

It’s a quote from the Babel episode of Genesis, in which God sees men’s ability to communicate as a threat to him, and decides to weaken them by making language as we know it – multiple, and arbitrary. It’s only a few lines, but it’s such a key moment, because we go from a conception of language as potentially close to what Plato describes in the Cratylus, where the connection between sign and thing is such that naming is practically making, to one where the relation between signs themselves replaces that to the world, where human language develops separately from reality.

In a sense, this is what makes verbal craft possible, and so an origin story for all poets, but my interest in it is a little different, though not unrelated – I’ve always been interested in things that, from a human standpoint, appear to be located outside language. I wrote my PhD thesis on the figure of the child in contemporary literature because etymologically the child is infans, from the Latin in fari, that which does not speak, and I wanted to look at forms of the non-verbal in a verbal art – for aesthetic reasons, but also ethical ones. I wanted space to ask what we do to the non-verbal when it is inscribed in a system of signs.

With this poem, I return to this idea in how we relate to nature. Growing up, my closest friend was a passionate botanist and biologist in the making; she caressed plant sections in bookshops the way I did old sonnet prints, taught me to name things I could hardly see, and the symmetry in our relation to words made me want to explore our linguistic connection to nature. I want to refrain from limiting the poem to my interpretation of it, or what I hoped it would do, but it felt relevant for me to establish a parallel between the language we visit on nature, and the connection between language and power in the Babel episode.

I’ve always thought of the poet’s ideal attitude as that defined by Keats’s negative capability – the ability to dwell in uncertainties, and to let strange things come to us; yet we name, and naming requires a degree of certainty. There is something very human I think, in the temptation to go to things and call them, rather than tune in to their frequencies, which I try to explore here. Because of my rural background, I’m struck by how some people manage to resist a specifically human way of talking about nature, and how, on the contrary, what might initially look like empathy in our linguistic habits (the flies are hurting the mare; the pests the tree) is actually often connected to an unconscious logic of productivity, or anthropocentrism: we empathise with the bigger animals/plants, those most useful to us, when ‘nature’ might not always balance things in favour of the most ‘clever’/‘beautiful’, those most in our image. I see this as one of the functions of poetry as opposed to human language – to forget to speak only for us.

Jo Shapcott connects with this strikingly in Scorpion, a poem I love from Of Mutability, where the speaker lists reasons for killing a scorpion, and ends with ‘I kill it because it will not speak to me.’ There is something so archaic in this – it felt right to return, from the beginning of the poem, to a text of origins.

I love the feel of this poem like a Gothic folk tale. What brought that about?

I’m glad! To follow up from your first question, I think we are taught to fear the indistinct – not simply what is perceived as ‘other’, but what cannot be clearly identified as ‘other’ or ‘same’, and because the poem deals with realities ill-adjusted to language, there is plenty of that. In the imagery for instance, or in having more than just the speaker’s perspective. It is actually a commonly given definition for the monstrous – that which is composite; but to me, this is where meaning, and hopefully pleasure emerges – through imperfect correspondences and dialogism.

Ann Radcliffe theorised terror, which we have come to see as synonymous with the Gothic, as something which ‘expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life’, when horror ‘freezes, and nearly annihilates them’. I like to think of poems as machines crafted to destroy what we know, in order to access forms of wisdom or something archaic about our nature which we might not otherwise have consciously encountered. This means leaving gaps open, both in how we experience life and in how we write, for the unexpected to enter, including when the unexpected is something unpleasant about ourselves, which of course is a very Gothic idea.

In this case, it might be returning to how frightening our language can be, how violent, because I don’t personally perceive woods as scary places, even if I’m aware of how they’re mapped in the collective unconscious. Instead, I’m reminded of how even though as a child I loved words and stories, I always felt very uneasy when a story was crafted for me, because it often became a prescriptive tool to cause me to act or feel a certain way, whereas moments of joy tended to be just outside of language – watching the village potter hold his wet sponge to the spinning clay for instance, where I could have my own thoughts and emotions. I think this is why the child and language appear here again in connection to the sense of unease you felt, as they did in my PhD.

Perhaps this is why the folk tale dimension comes through – it likes the figure of the child as an archetype, and allows, like the Gothic, a place onto which we can project and play out psychic conflicts in order to grow. I read a lot of them to my children, so that must also have an influence on my writing, but I think as mature readers we never really outgrow this need for a place which holds neither too far nor too close something about ourselves we both want and don’t want to grasp?

You use line breaks very well to create tension in the line or a surprise (“you offer up your past / and future like a box of chocolates”). Does that come naturally or is it something you have cultivated?

That’s lovely to hear, thank you. There are aspects of my writing that don’t come naturally, and that I have to work very hard at – one I’m noticing at the moment, is how I integrate what John Stammers calls ‘encapsulating statements’ to my poems. They come closely connected with impressions as I experience something, but somehow that doesn’t always transfer onto the page – how naturally they are received doesn’t mean they feel natural in the poem or to the reader, and I have to edit hard to recreate an organicity which I mistakenly thought was there in the first place. This can be frustrating, but I also learn a lot from it about received ideas of ‘organicity’ or ‘the natural’ in writing.

Line breaks are different. I don’t think consciously of the reader when I draft a poem, but I am attentive to how my brain processes units – of sound, of meaning – in time, and this guides me to write a certain way, by integrating the possibilities offered by delaying. Because the reading brain hates a vacuum and will usually supply something where there is nothing, this means that for an instant, both the poet and the reader’s meanings are happening simultaneously in the time it takes for the line to turn. That’s where the word verse comes from, and it is also very erotic, this delaying, so that is where I locate a lot of the pleasure of writing and reading. Because of this, line breaks usually come at the earliest stages – slash bars in bits of lines on a note app – and I find I can’t really dissociate them from language or thought, no more than I would silence from sound in music.

Generally speaking, the way I experience writing is very connected to the body. French is my first language but what drew me to English at an early age was how ‘incarnated’ it felt. That might also be due to the fact that coming second, I’m more aware of how it feels in my mouth, but I think there’s more to it. In French, every word is stressed either on the last or last-but-one syllable. This means poetry is experienced more intellectually, because with so little variation, we relate to a line by counting syllables rather than feeling accentual patterns, as is allowed by the combination of both Latin (stress towards the end of a word) and Germanic origins (stress towards the beginning of a word) in English. When I studied and taught translation theory, a frequent reference point was Chuquet and Paillard’s definition of French as operating at the level of thought (le plan de l’entendement) and English at the level of ‘reality’, understood as something more grounded, physical (le plan du réel). This can take many forms (such as a preference for the nominal in French, and the verbal in English), and has fascinating consequences – linguistic, cultural, probably political too, but it means I’m aware of English poetry as something at least as much in the body as in the mind. So I tend to write and edit in movement, and when I have a draft I’m more or less satisfied with, I record myself reading it, and take it out for a run. I feel that listening to where the lines break and lift, while the conscious part of my brain is busy with tasks like not tripping on a root, liberates a more archaic, more intuitive part of my brain to feel the language in rhythm, if that makes sense. And to go back to my previous answers, it’s also a way for me to try and move away from language as logos, towards language as phone – voice.

I’m also wary as I write not to enclose the reader in a narrative. I love ideas in a poem, but as freeplay, and I try to resist the ideological or the prescriptive, even when I know the poem is trying to say something about the real world. In his study of Bacon, Deleuze makes a very helpful distinction between what he calls the figure, and the figurative. The second narrates, while the first allows the thing represented to just be, usually by isolating, or extracting. I try, even when my poems have a narrative quality, to halt narrative linearity through line breaks among other tools, so my telling isn’t something that is done to the reader, in the way narratives can do things to children. Instead, when I manage, the poem is in contained freeplay, engages with thought while remaining outside of it. I think I always found the Cratylean idealism I alluded to earlier a little sad – I love that language is broken, and arbitrary, because of how much we can fit in the gaps, and the joy that gives us.