“[No] matter how many words I put down, it didn’t touch on what I was trying to get to. Instead, what I have tried to do is not say it, but use the space in-between, the felt space, and use that as a vehicle to get me, and hopefully the reader, closer to something.“
Is this ok?
Glue, we watch clips of the family friend
swimming and swimming for his sister’s life;
we cheer on – not brave enough to cry –
and we ask our friends if they’re ok;
we ask your Mother if she is ok;
we ask each other if we’re ok;
it is not ok.
Our homes are flooding,
the land is burnt,
and still we ask:
Is it ok?
Is it?
You’ve got an intriguing opening line, and it’s the positioning of ‘Glue,’ with its subsequent comma, ahead of what could easily have otherwise been an opening of ‘we watch clips of the family friend’, that is pivotal to the instant piquing of interest. It feels to me like the opening word has significance to the context of the wider piece. What can you tell us about your thoughts and intentions when writing your opening?
The word ‘glue’, sounds remarkably like the texture or feeling of the substance it describes: an adhesive, often used to stick things or parts together. I wanted to bring out a feeling – a sort of stuck gloopiness – that certain moments create within us. These moments reveal an incongruity in ourselves that is not apparent in our day-to-day goings on; then, sometimes, we are confronted by this reality and do not know how to feel or respond to such an affront. In short, this was/is what preoccupies me.
To be specific, I guess the word ‘glue’ was an attempt at setting up a tonal frame for the poem. I’m conscious of how we are exposed to footage of catastrophe every day and at a much higher rate than before digital media facilitated this exposure. We see not only the accredited legacy media’s footage, but also multiple smartphone clips, live responses from citizens and a confusion of misidentified or misinformational material. Our attention is demanded, from the time we wake up, and we are stuck in news cycles as long as we are stuck with our eyes on a screen. This creates, or is part of, weird responses of feeling. These feelings are not so much numbness as they are a quiet sort of horror — at ourselves, at humanity, at others. I think we should open up to this horror. Try and meet it. We often think, what else can the average person do but watch the world burn and flood? Then, we tend to carry on. Sure, it is too daunting to face much of the time. Sure, there is a lot we can do, with the freedom of our thought and action, and many people are doing things, but that was not my point of interest here. The interest was in how, during these moments of disaster watching, we often feel futile, petrified. There’s this sort of disembodied feeling, a feeling of things not being right but being too far gone.
In this case, the poem’s voice already knows the family and friends, knows the location of the disaster, but it is separated from it and can only access the moment through digital technology. The voice has seen someone they know doing something brave and necessary, and all they can seem to do at the start is watch as if it’s a scripted reality show. This has all sorts of results: repressed anxiety, masking, a collective checking in. Ι wanted to look at the ways we seem to be coping, collectively and individually, with the climate crisis as well as humanitarian catastrophe more generally. None of it seems adequate.
This is a poem rich with questions. The title is a question. The final two lines are questions. And many of the lines that are not direct questions feature the act of asking, in turn imploring the reader to search inside for questions to stimulate responses about, amongst other things, the nature of human behaviour. But, for me, the real strength in this poem is its ability to conjure additional questions without even committing specifics to the text – quite a skill – reflecting a feeling that this poem lingers unapologetically in an uncomfortable sense of its unsaid, untold, unrevealed components. Can you tell us more about your intelligent approach to embedding questioning in your poem and what you were hoping to achieve with it?
It is about the unsaid and uncomfortable because that was the state in which it was written. I think this follows on from how we are responding to climate disaster as well as other human disasters both domestic and international. We live in a world of disinformation, but I sometimes think that information technology has only amplified a long evidenced behaviour of human societies. Just think of old broadcast tv, the function of accents on the BBC, the royal insignias, and all of the unsaid and unconscious work that this achieves. Think about the benefits documentaries in the 2000’s and how this was primarily digested by working class Britons. What were these things saying while not daring to actually say it?
For me the poem is about asking questions without hope for an answer. It was written very fast and in direct response to flooding in Greece. The flooding affected much of Southern Europe as well as Turkey and North Africa, with particular devastation in Derna, Libya. I tried to write out a detailed response to these events but found my words lacking because, no matter how many words I put down, it didn’t touch on what I was trying to get to. Instead, what I have tried to do is not say it, but use the space in-between, the felt space, and use that as a vehicle to get me, and hopefully the reader, closer to something. To what, I am unsure. I am wary of saying anything like ‘this can lead to truth finding or a commitment to action’. That wasn’t the intention. It would also be a vast overestimation of the form and my ability with it. If I had wanted to do so I would have written a political pamphlet. That form suits such an intention better. There are also many people doing this important work and doing better than I would.
Really, it was just me trying to get at the strange feelings and states of anxiety many of us find ourselves experiencing. It was just me trying to do something with those feelings and get it outside of myself. This situation felt very direct to me. I had been visiting family in Greece a week before it flooded. I had just been on a plane. This made me feel all sorts of things that don’t come to me in a simple way. That’s why I settled for questions, and the poetic form in general. I wrote hoping the blank spaces would lead to something, but there’s no resolution. I worry the whole exercise is self-indulgence.
The poem feels to me like a poem of fragments, potentially co-existing simultaneously in memory and in real time, especially the first stanza. And yet, the poem presents itself to the page with such measure and control, managing to do so whilst eloquently pushing contrasts at the reader. For example, the contrast between a start with relatively long lines when compared to the shorter ones we end up with as we journey through the piece, as well as the divergence between the emphatic and decisive ‘it is not ok’ and the concluding ‘Is it?’, regardless of whether the reader interprets the close as doubting or defiant. So, I’m really interested in understanding the role form played in arriving at your finished piece, and whether you feel subconscious elements had any influence on the way the poem eventually presented itself to the page?
The poem was written in a state of anger as a response to the clash between recent memories and footage of destruction. It was initially an impulsive composition that I later refined. At first I tried to reach a conclusion but found I couldn’t. Perhaps that is why the use of questions dominates. As a result, the form that emerged points to these internal contrasts and clashes of experience. It could be said to be a product of repressed distress, so in that sense I would agree that the motivation is subconsciously derived. The deeper underlying ways we respond to humanitarian disaster and the constancy of the contemporary information landscape is impacted by the unconscious, but of course that’s more difficult to ascertain. I’m not really saying much here, other than the obvious. Perhaps that is why the use of questions dominates. It meant I didn’t have to know or be sure. It allowed me to explore.
To me the closing of the poem is doubting as well as defiant. To other readers it could mean something else. I suppose it could be seen as indicative of a cop-out mentality. Hopefully, it doesn’t demand agreement because that doesn’t appeal to me, but I think what is unavoidable is that these things are happening and we are going to have to respond to them. I think the unconscious will catch us out even if our response is to play pretend.
