Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I like to gather together all manner of things to see me through the making of a poem… I don’t know what to expect so I take everything, just in case.”
Solo
A green carcass had run aground in the harbour. The rent was cheap, in one wall stood a tree. The shower drained through a plant pot. Snails streaked the bricks until they shone luminescent as the wakes of boats. I left her in childcare and headed to the bar at the yacht club over the road where I was a bar- maid frothing up foam as if the harbour’s minion. Mornings, I drove round the boats’ moat of seagrass, brought her home to our tree mooring and the blue ring that shone a fountain under the moka pot. We held in our blubbering, the pot and I. Alone around 2am in the bar’s cool room, my briny face would shine in bright collusion with the bottles and harbour beacons, the slow yellows and reds. In the tree house, I rolled in my sleep like the boats we were becoming. The green boat house with its low sink, cups hooked, pots stayed by galley shelves, stout tree mast. We broke loose once, slipped past the bar, the sheets on the line sailed us out of the harbour. Through louvres, I saw the abyss shining. The night’s takings and beer tray shone piss gold as I poured each away. The pale boats chimed and slapped, restless in their harbour pens. Back home, I sloshed out her potty, tripped over a wrack of handlebars, dress-ups, blocks, then walked into a tree. What a double, insomnious life the tree led: homebody, smuggler of moonshine. I was falling sideways. It was the bar’s constant fizz, cider, coke, champagne boat sunset shandies. Driving my rustpot wreck on empty round the salt-spuming harbour I didn’t know to lean into each bar and harbour marker, the evening shifts and shining pots of days in our green shell of a tree of a boat.
I have an absolute weakness for sestinas – I love that feeling of circling around and around the same things, almost obsessively. Are there any sestina writers that you admire and how did this poem become a kind of sestina?
It almost goes without saying but Elizabeth Bishop. Others who spring to mind are Paul Muldoon, Colette Bryce, and Raymond Antrobus. I love all your own circling and the continual reinvention that this entails in Conquest.
The subject, that is to say the place in the poem, seemed to necessitate the form. If I could go back to that overwhelming time in my life, I would look around me and say yes, this is very much like a sestina. The sestina seems to be a reverie, a sorrow, a complaint, a trap, a cycle, a spiral. Richard Wilbur is said to have called it ‘a horrid doily’ but actually this only makes it more appealing.
In this poem, different kinds of stories rub up against one another: sailing a boat, being a mother, and working in a bar. It is a very intriguing combination and I wonder how it came about.
I wanted to conjure up a place from my past – a strange green house I lived in when I was a single parent with a three-year-old. It was dark and dank, hence the snails, and I suspect the plant pot shower drain didn’t connect to anything, how could it. A dead tree was trapped in one wall with two pointless wonky shelves attached to it.
I like to gather together all manner of things to see me through the making of a poem. In this instance, I had a map of the harbour detailing the timings and colours of various navigational lights, photos of the house, drink pricelist, bar lock-up procedure (written on a brown paper bottle bag), and a social security letter of debt. I don’t know what to expect so I take everything, just in case.
I enjoy the lack of explanation in this poem and that it refuses to enter the anecdotal. Instead, we are left with a series of impressions. What power do you think it lends the poem that it refuses to explain?
Thank you. I think I’m probably failing rather than refusing to explain. I suppose if the poem is left open, something indefinable, the creature that is uncertainty, can come and go. There’s some displacement, for example, the house transforming into a boat, and the barmaid falling sideways instead of the customers. And so maybe what would otherwise be a factual account becomes a little unstable. The facts also bring their own surrealness to the table.
