Interview by Zoë Brigley
“My experience as a sculptor at art school makes me wary of trying to create something that is self-consciously an artifact… For me it is the subject and material of the poem that drives its shape”
Links
On damp days like this he doesn’t want to go out. All he wants to do is sleep. But I make him come for a walk and help him on with his coat, lifting the heavy bottle green jacket over his back. He grips the lining of one sleeve and threads back through, the other arm. Outside the aftermath of rain, bright and fresh, drips into the water butt and pools on the path. His arm is looped through mine. The brush of our coats as we walk is the rustle of loose paper chains. I remember him telling me once, as I stood on a chair, draping sagging tresses from the corners of the ceiling, how he’d loved being on the farm, but his parents had brought them back to London despite the bombs, because they’d lost the child allowance while they were away. And how it was hot summer but the Christmas decorations were still up.
This poem seems relatively free in form but with careful attention to the phrasing and line breaks. How do you decide what form is right for a particular poem?
Thank you. This poem forms part of a sequence I am writing on aging and dementia.
I don’t set out to write a poem with a particular form. That is not to say that I don’t think that form is critical. My experience as a sculptor at art school makes me wary of trying to create something that is self-consciously an artifact. I often write in plain, direct language. For me it is the subject and material of the poem that drives its shape. I have experimented with writing in more traditional ways, but a subject like dementia that is raw and jagged, can lose its attack if smoothed and rounded into a neat form. I don’t want to substitute a fresh or apt word just for one that rhymes or fits a metric scheme.
The poem starts grounded and unfolds through images. It is this chain of images that leads the poem on. The brush and loose link of arms that move to the paper chains and then the memory of the Christmas decorations in his dysfunctional childhood. I write poems from many different angles, tones and perspectives, but the loose linkages in this poem reflect the form of the sequence I am writing. The narrative unfolds in an indirect way, gradually building up layers of a life, one poem loosely linking to another.
The poem has three loose sections, the morose indoors opening, where the narrator is engaged in the mundane physical action of caring for an elderly person, the melancholy and unexpected revelation of the ending and the middle counterpoint of fresh air in the aftermath of rain, which breaks up the other two. Traditional form might have divided these into distinct verses, but that would have gone against the connective sense of the poem.
When it comes to voice, sometimes a sense of intimacy can work well. This poem feels like something told in confidence. Is there a particular kind of voice that you tend to use in poems?
Yes, I think there is an intimacy in the voice of this poem. It’s the familiarity of walking with someone elderly and known, the slow way thoughts meander off and move without a logical pattern. An uncertainty in direction that the form of the poem mirrors.
There is also, as you suggest, a feeling of something told in confidence. Firstly there is an intimacy between narrator and reader to whom the narrator is confiding their assumptions: that the elderly man is reluctant to go out for a walk, and how he is cajoled into it. There is also the intimacy shared by the elderly person when he reveals the story about his childhood. At the end the intimacy is gone and replaced by the wider ramifications of that revelation. I am aware of the danger of slipping into the groove where there is a default voice of an all- knowing narrator who tells the reader “the truth”. I try and check myself for this and let the narrator tell facts which the reader must weigh up.
This poem is about my father, however I am using his experience to write about aging and dementia. As the narrator I am trying to keep a similar distance as if I were writing in the third person. I want the poem to speak for itself and the narrator to stand back from the poem and what is revealed. It must tell its own story, not my story.
The subject matter is easy to relate to, as many people suffer the experience of caring for an aging parent or caregiver. This poem seems to grieve the loss of the past, of family histories which older family member provide, though that ‘link’ is miraculously restored for a moment at the end of the poem?
I think there is a point when you realise your parents have begun to die. People have described it as ‘anticipatory grief’: that sudden realisation that you will lose what has been an integral part of your life experience. You step back and see them as separate from yourself. It does make you reflect not just on your own life with them, but also of the stories you have failed to listen to or been curious about. My father only ever told me one or two stories about being evacuated during the war. But this small observation of his, that his parents hadn’t bothered to take down the Christmas decorations, encapsulated for him, their lack of love for him, their selfishness in bringing their children back to London despite the bombs, the chaos of war and how his experience of evacuation opened the possibility of a happier life. I think the reveal at the end, is a moment of clarity about the events that shaped a war-child like him.
