Interview by Zoë Brigley
Nearly all my poems begin as scrawled notes in a notebook, often so messy I can barely read my own writing.
This Pot of Earth
I do not know why I keep watering this pot of earth with no bloom, except that nothing that thirsts should be left to go dry. There have been miracles before, new buds appearing after long years of drought, that prisoner locked in his cell, floodwater rising up to his neck. Ten days waiting for rescue without drowning is a kind of hope. Dis-aster on the other hand is total desertion, the stars and whole universe turning away. Neil Armstrong took his daughter’s bracelet with him into space, dropped it into one of the moon’s dark craters, not for it to be found, or lost, but to show the vast capacity of love that one man for his daughter might bring with him, take beyond the ends of the earth. The crater is a metaphor, something bottomless, like hunger, desire, missing. The bracelet is nothing but a bracelet – a trinket that was never meant to last. This pot of earth may be that too, but who can say how real regeneration works? This mauve oxalis triangularis that once thrived may not have died but just gone back into dormancy. Without water nothing will grow. In the exclusion zone Chernobyl’s red forest is turning green again. Stadium returned to grassland. Stalkers squat apartments in the Dead Zone and the long-stayers tend to their dogs and gardens. Wolves are starting to roam in packs, and rain – when it comes – extinguishes fires, stops them from spreading, and nourishes the field for Przewalski horses to graze upon. See how gorgeously they gallop?
Something that I admired about this poem was its beautiful phrasing tightly arranged across lines. How long does it take you to hone that phrasing or does it tend to happen intuitively?
Nearly all my poems begin as scrawled notes in a notebook, often so messy I can barely read my own writing. Sometimes it is in my misinterpretation of my own writing that the true poem is to be found. Eventually I will turn immediately to my computer to transcribe what I’ve written so that I can begin to play about with the ideas and see what I’ve got. More often than not the scrawlings get put away and it may be months or even years before I look at them again to try to decipher what’s there. If what I find produces some spark of recognition, I know there is a poem there that still needs to be written. Otherwise, I will throw it away. If a poem is a ‘keeper’ I generally keep the piece of paper that the original notes were written on. I find it interesting to see how much or little it changes. For ‘This Pot of Earth’ I do have the notebook where the ideas first began to form themselves. In those notes I pose a question to myself, ‘I do not know why I water a pot whose blooms have all gone…’ Very little else that ended up in the final poem is contained in the original notes, however a page or two on in this notebook I have reworded that question at the top of the page and the rest of the poem pretty much proceeds from there.
My poems, in note form at least, tend to come out as a stream of consciousness but once I am working on the screen the forming of words into lines does happen, and yes it is very much an intuitive process. I rarely set out with the intention of writing a poem in a particular form. I try to trust that the poem will find the form that it needs to contain it.
There is a bittersweet feeling about this poem which wavers between hope and failure. I love the chain of association set up by the many intriguing images and scenarios, and it seems to me to express well the kind of mindset we all have in the face of climate emergency. Is this what you were aiming for?
Bittersweet, yes. I love your description of this poem as something that wavers between hope and failure. In a crisis I prefer to err on the side of optimism. That is not to deny the severity of a situation but simply to believe in my own strength to confront it. My mother criticised me in my teens for being too trusting of people or situations she thought needed to be heeded or avoided altogether. The climate emergency is not something I can be complacent about but of course the enormity of the crisis does make me waver between hope and failure as you say, or perhaps more specifically between determination and helplessness.
I have just listened to this powerful address by Noam Chomsky (aged 94) to the American Solar Energy Society’s (ASES) 51st Annual Conference, which took place on the 21st June, 2022 at the University of New Mexico: Noam Chomsky Issues Warning. Some years ago I came across the word ‘disaster’ in an etymological dictionary which broke the word down as dis- (expressing negation) + astro meaning ’star’. I found that so compelling, that disaster might literally come from a turning away from the stars and a failure to heed what they might have to tell us. Chomsky opens by telling the conference ‘there is no need for this audience to take time to discuss the fact that we are at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that must be made right now will determine the course of human history, if there is to be any human history.’ So yes, this is definitely some of what I was aiming for in the poem.
Finally, could you talk about your use of tercets? Is that a form you enjoy particularly?
Tercets. I can’t tell you exactly why I wrote ‘This Pot of Earth’ in tercets except perhaps to say that of course three is a number laden with with spiritual and symbolic significance. Three is the first number the meaning ‘all’ was given, containing as it does it a beginning, middle and end. Past, present and future. In this poem I think the tercets help to suggest something that is all encompassing, universal, like the tripartide nature of the world as heaven, earth and waters or the human as body, soul and spirit.