Jenny Danes: How I Wrote ‘In Emergency Break Egg’

“I think it took me many years of writing for humour to have earned its place, and for me to acknowledge it as part of my poetic voice.”

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The egg we hold between us is aquamarine, 
huge, speckled with sugar dust. A thing of beauty
and deliciousness. I worry about how fragile
the shell is, but you say reassuring things about
structural reinforcement beneath the membrane. 
You introduce me to your people 
and we all pretend not to notice the egg
even though I’ve drawn up an extra chair for it. 
Each time you get texts of approval, the egg grows 
more magnificent, a deeper teal
with flecks of gold. We take turns to cradle it
and meanwhile practise our tender lives. 
There are various things in my flat which belong 
to you. I have become a person who by default 
wakes up next to another person, and an egg. When we talk 
about the future the egg is on the table between us, no cup 
big enough for it, or else it’s hulked across both our laps
on the sofa. You say you’d always assumed you’d 
get married, and I wrap my arms around the eggier end.  
I mention the kind of bookshelves I want in our future house, 
and you start crying. I want to handle you so carefully 
that it hurts. I’ve seen you in those raw moments, lying 
on my side of the bed with your limbs monkeyed around 
the egg. I am frightened by the preciousness of it all, by 
my ability to break things. In the drawer in my bedside cabinet, 
beneath the nest of tights: a tiny hammer.

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The title of this poem has a kind of playfulness and I know humour is definitely part of your poetic style. What part does humour play in your poems?

If I’m honest, I only really became aware of humour in my poems from other people pointing it out. Which is not to say that I’m such a hilarious person that it leaks out of me unconsciously! It’s more that I think it took me many years of writing for humour to have earned its place, and for me to acknowledge it as part of my poetic voice. In my opinion, there’s a certain ease or confidence that comes from using humour in writing, and when I was first starting out, I was clenching myself so tightly, trying to write emotional poems or resonant poems that humour didn’t get much of a look in. One of the first times someone observed humour in my writing surprised me: it was in a poem about a selective-mute child, and I’d mentioned the six-year-old speaker eating this silent girl’s Nutella sandwich in place of her own boring ham. (You can read the poem here). To me, that poem was part of a body of work about speaking voices, I didn’t really intend on injecting it with comedy. It made me realise that humour in my poems emerges naturally in small moments of mundane truths, in wry observations, in little details that a reader might relate to.

Since then, I’ve learned to be more mindful and appreciative of the connective power of humour. I think it can be a great counterbalance for poems that deal with difficult subjects. For example, I wrote a poem about biphobia and bi-erasure, but deliberately leaned right into the anger so that the speaker was luxuriating in her own grumpiness: walking by the sea, she wanted to ‘eat this whole beach, gobble down / everyone in sight, dryrobes and all, karate chop the pier / like a stack of poppadoms’. Other times, humour in my poems is more to do with linguistic playfulness and the surreal: there’s a poem in my debut pamphlet Gaps which translates German idioms literally, so the poem is layers of nonsense; I have another poem entirely made of found text in a tropical fish shop, warning the reader about ‘nipping inappropriate tankmates’. I love reading funny poems, because it suggests that the poet has a real command over their voice and subject, and ultimately has had a good time writing that poem.

You have some very striking and original images. Something that I often mention to poets when I am interviewing them is Peter Blegvad’s comment that writing is observed, imagined or remembered. Are your images observed, imagined, remembered or a mixture of all three?

What a great comment! I would say definitely a mixture of all three, but I’d also add ‘dreamed’ to that list. I love using dreams as a basis for poems; I have a lot of vivid dreams and it’s like being gifted with ready-made bizarre images. In ‘In Emergency Break Egg’, the images are mostly imagined. From counselling training I’d learned about treating the relationship between two people as its own entity or existence, an additional presence to be nurtured. So, it’s not just the two of you, but also the thing between you that you are making. I liked this idea so much that my imagination quite naturally pictured it as a huge egg. It’s quite rare for me that I have one extended metaphor running through an entire poem, so this poem felt experimental or challenging in some ways. Probably my favourite of Peter Blegvad’s list, though, is ‘observed’. One of my main aims in my poetry is to specify, distil or capture something that will be familiar and accurate to a reader, but they perhaps won’t have paused to observe it or name it before. I get very excited when I come across this in other people’s work. I remember reading Shine, Darling by Ella Frears – one of my favourite poets – and telling anyone who would listen about her micro-observation of how soap dispensers in a public bathroom ‘dribble / silky puddles’. Yes! Exactly!

I really enjoy the enjambment in this poem. What do effective line breaks bring to a poem in your opinion?

Line breaks can feel like a mysterious force. I would say that for me, the most effective line breaks create surprise – a freshness that comes from pausing when you weren’t expecting it, or the tiny jolt where the next line goes in a direction you hadn’t anticipated. When I first started writing poems, it took a lot of unlearning to not do the obvious: for example, trying to avoid a line break next to a word like ‘drop’ or ‘fall’.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of that paragraph break. I also approach line breaks as a pacing tool. Denise Levertov described them in her essay ‘On the Function of the Line’ as being equivalent to ‘roughly one-half a comma’, which felt very helpful and demystifying when trying to maximise a tool that ultimately has endless possibilities. I think breath and reading aloud are really important: ultimately, your line breaks should aid you if you are reading the poem out loud. Even if you aren’t married to the ‘poetry is an oral tradition and should always be spoken aloud’ line of thought, the chances are you will sometimes have to read your work out loud if you’re going to be practicing as a poet. Doing this can quickly reveal where your line breaks want to be, based on where you are pausing and speeding up.

Since this poem is about the fearful stage of early romantic commitment, I wanted to place line breaks to echo the speaker’s trepidation or avoidance, so overt references to the other person often come after a line break. For example: ‘things in my flat which belong / to you’ and ‘you’d always assumed you’d / get married’. To my mind, these little drops feel like the speaker having to swallow nervously! It’s fine if this is not what the reader perceives, of course – but it was helpful to my writing process.

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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.