Paul Deaton: How I Wrote ‘Harvest’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

I find that some poems I write, luckily, just seem to happen – I might get a first line, like a fish biting, and then, if I have time, I let the poem unfold itself, and see where that line takes me

Content warning: mentions of depression/depressive thoughts

Harvest

You weed out the tubs, toss the rich peat.
Dig drills. Wait for the seeds to un-sleep.
Radishes, spring onions, fennel from a friend.
Answer now the urge to self-sooth, soul-mend.
In one pot pinch them out to give ground,
there they burgeon, little up-starts, proud.
The private turn in you at last to follow growth through.
Sun-blasted April. Skies a paint-pot blue.
Why annihilate your nurture with lack of watering?
Let life sink incomplete. Presage disaster.
Put the same pains in as at the start.
Break historic self-sabotage and finally, yes, self-master.
Not let the good work go to waste.
Those years you furrowed but failed to taste.

I really enjoy how the tightness of the form in this poem reflects the discipline of gardening.
Is the sonnet a favourite form of yours and what do you think is its enduring appeal?

I do seem to write quite a lot of poems that ‘house’ themselves in the sonnet structure. It isn’t strictly intentional, which in itself seems curious, and perhaps corresponds to how the sonnet has something universal, a go-to-form, in the way it can capture an experience or emotion, or an argument or idea powerfully in just fourteen lines – or sixteen, as Tony Harrison used in his fabulous fifty poem sonnet sequence in the School of Eloquence.

Looking over my Seren collection A Watchful Astronomy I see I have eighteen sonnets. That’s quite a lot! I find that some poems I write, luckily, just seem to happen – I might get a first line, like a fish biting, and then, if I have time, I let the poem unfold itself, and see where that line takes me and what it might reveal from the waters of my mind. More often than not, these ‘spontaneously written’ poems that just happen end up being sonnets for me. As if, like netted fish, something I’ve been mulling over compels itself up to the surface pretty much fully formed.

What might happen though, of course, is that I tighten up the content, and see if it is ‘worthy’ to fit and be shaped by the sonnet form. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. But the curious thing is just how often the poem emerges, almost, by only one or two-line differences, perfectly fitting the form. I try not to over think it and just accept it. But each time it happens it both surprises and excites me; that feeling of here we go, I think I might have netted another one.

As to the forms’ enduring appeal, my theory is that they are like small, narrative self-letters packed into the tough little tin can of the sonnet structure like sardines. Mine follow the Shakesperian idea and tend to end in that rhyming couplet. Again, I can’t say exactly why. I think they do have an element of the confession to them, a privatised thought gets articulated and externalised. Alice Oswald has a great many in her first book, The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, which is probably my favourite book of hers. Most of them run as arguments and questions, to herself, of her lover and also as narratives with the natural world, principally the sea. In them she’s voicing those thoughts, those very private self-narratives we ask ourselves, when we are looking in at our own experiences and giving ourselves the space to do so, (not avoiding them, as, in this world of distractions, it is so easy to do); that idea that Yeats put so neatly, ‘out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.’ Oswald’s quarrel is an inhabitation with the otherness of the natural.

So, in that sense, coming back to my theory, I view hers as self-narratives, her strikingly evocative sea sonnets, breathed-out in a monologic way, and uttered to oneself, but they are also alluringly very discursive. Which I think is a response to something natural that we are all doing – asking ourselves questions, all the time: What should I do? Who should I love? Where should I live? What can I trust? Will it all be, ok? etc. There’s a discursive element in my Harvest poem, which was written when I used to be an addictions counsellor, and I saw in my clients those patterns of self-harm that were so very hard to escape from, that in spite of the desire to escape them, got repeated over and over. I’m aware of this trait in myself and the poem was really my discursive challenge to myself. Both recognizing and also wondering: Why do I do this? Get something going then let it falter? The garden / growing metaphor seemed natural to house the larger idea of self-sabotage. The condensed form of the sonnet is hard to better; the pithy, pack a punch, articulations that can arrow out from the heart, in one single speech bubble, words that might escape us, explosively, and spontaneously, in spite of ourselves. When this happens, the form itself helps scaffold and tie down or contain lines that, when written in the pentameter rhythm, often can become very memorable. In a world that is reducing its attention span, it doesn’t seem likely that sonnets will disappear anytime soon. In the deceptively simple way they work, they are enduringly effective.

Your language is very rich and has great mouth-feel – the crunchy, tangy sounds of words. Is that a skill that you have always had as a poet or did you have to cultivate it (so to speak!)?

This might be an odd response to your observation about my use of words, but I have for a lot of my life battled depression. In my experience this is a bleak and often black-grey-monotone place, where life has lost all colour, and where future, present and past hangs in a petrified, foggy winter. However, through and in this darkness, I always felt there was a deeper meaning, although it was hidden. Every so often the flawed tragic brightness of things might shine through; a place that allowed an intense light, and at times a rarefied, sharp, though sometimes painful, brilliance.

People with varied mood states often experience a high sensitivity to light. The darks are black, the lit world often ecstatic, but more often than not, too bright. In better moments, though, we can see this world intensely and lucidly. Often simple, ordinary things: wild daisies in a cracked pavement, soap suds in a kitchen sink, an arm of sunlight moving across a wheat field, can evoke a startling explosion of feelings. I have a poem, Glass, in A Watchful Astronomy that explores this idea and ends with the lines:

I think now, if we can’t change,

we can’t live, if our stones won’t crack,

we’ll never reveal the mineral elegance

of our best most colourful parts,

cavities of surprising crystal,

the lights of our rare coloured glass.
Paul Deaton, Glass

My early poems, certainly in my twenties when I was exploring the medium, were spartan to say the least, and lacked all crunchiness or any mouthy feel. I think this was a reflection of living in a wintered world. I spent a lot of those years on antidepressants, which tend to numb emotions as well as help quieten, anxious fly-wheeling thoughts, and aim to furrow a middle ground so that the delirious highs and the fall-through-the-floor lows are less extreme.

If you were to read any of my poems from that time, you are likely to notice just how much they differ from my recent work. They were very low on extra growth, very paired down and all stuck, in their etched little ways – to lean on Sylvia Plath – in a stasis in darkness. But life is, thankfully and miraculously, rich and varied and full of colour, all the time, with good feelings and affirming sensations. As I worked through my depression, the winter landscape shifted and faded and spring and summer colours came back into my life, and my writing naturally started to reflect this increased richness and texture.

I think words offer the chance to ground emotions and our emotional response to things and ourselves; just through words and their sounds, we can bring meaning and displaced emotions back together. Words can actualize who we are. Heaney was well known for this talent, that both localised his work, to place, and permitted him to express how he experienced the world’s materiality, with his hallmark celebration of ordinary things; while Plath, in a different way used sounds to map out her own highly strung, suffering psyche-space. I guess, in my own way, I’m searching and trying to do this too: amplify in words and their sounds a fuller sense of experience, capturing it – which was how Ted Hughes saw the process – like trapping a wild animal, while being careful not to overstep the mark and let the words run away.
I’ve always fervently admired Boris Pasternak’s nature poems for their tang and taste of real experience and the natural world. The poems I am proudest of in A Watchful Astronomy are some of the nature poems, where I’ve tried in my own way to take Pasternak’s lead. I’ve allowed myself to concentrate on the meaning and richness in simple experiences, to concentrate on noticing; whether it is walking around the block of terraced houses at night where I live, or walking up a Welsh mountain. If that is the same as cultivation, then I guess I have cultivated my poems.

Many of your poems think about healing, vulnerability, and the journeys that we have to take as adults towards understanding ourselves: ‘Break historic self-sabotage’. At the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival, you talked about running as a healing practice. Do you think that we ought to be taught more when we are young about mental health and healing?

I don’t think there is a simple answer to this; it depends on your starting point – how long have you got? All of us, I think, are learning how to live. There is no road map and there never can be. And there’s no arrival point either, we just have to keep learning about ourselves and life with its existential conundrums – or ‘givens’, as psychotherapist Irvin Yalom calls them: death, freedom, isolation, meaninglessness. Life is about choices and the freedom to explore and find who we are, what we might be good at and what we enjoy. Jung calls these things our ‘personable possessions.’

Running for me is a case in point. You have to stick with it, even though, at times, and before it became habitual for me, there was a strong desire to quit. That’s a form of self-sabotage that needs overcoming; to know what we can do with something we need to stick with it; salsa dancing, painting, it doesn’t matter. Like that old Guinness Book of World Records idea from Roy Castle, ‘dedication is what you need.’

It’s very easy to let the little negative voices triumph over starting anything new. And, indeed half the battle, if you struggle with low confidence or low self-esteem, is starting anything and then staying with it at all, or one step further on, putting your head above the parapet with what you’re doing and letting it be seen. Those self-defeating, self-perceptions, those little earworm doubts that say ‘no’ and find various little reasons to withdraw or close off from an intention we may have had, these are hard to challenge and harder to break. To draw on Yalom again, ‘until one realises that one has created one’s own dysphoria, there can be no change.’ In anything we do, we can be both the solution, and the problem that maintains our problems.

In terms of writing, we might not take the risk to send work out, fearing rejection and failure – or, going back to running, we might find entering a race or joining a running club intimidating. I certainly did. I found that sort of exposure took time to get used to, and this actually is very closely related to the self-exposure that comes with writing, which I also found difficult. If we’ve lived a ‘hidden’ life previously then these changes to how one is perceived in the world can feel deeply challenging.

I’ve gained an awful lot from running and being a part of a running club – more than I could’ve imagined at the start: it’s given me friends, rich memories, excitement, a sense of purpose, a realisation of discipline, a way of getting through the winter’s dark, a release from stress. But additionally, it’s changed my mindset to life and living as a whole – and because these changes come validated and seen by others, what ultimately occurs is an identity shift. One isn’t who one thought one was. There is a breaking of historic self-sabotage, new patterns are formed, and new patterns of living are created. And as far as depression is concerned, which I see as a stuck stasis, and self-denial, it puts movement into that congealed state and helps break it up.

I think it’s very important to be more open about mental health and healing. I’ve needed to be. In our overtly socially-stimulated screen app world, the temptation is to become continually caught up in the lives of others, and that’s a hard world to keep in check and in balance. While it might offer apparent connectivity, it is also a world that can exacerbate our insecurities and feed on them. These spaces can delude us into feeling connected. It’s a complicated dynamic that can play havoc with those young people who are vulnerable in their yet to fully form self-identities or any person who is vulnerable in their identity.

Despite what social media might have you believe, people still live very private emotional lives with a lot of hidden emotional deprivation, pain and suffering. Humans are very skilled at putting on a front, play-acting through difficulties, passing themselves off as this or that and pretending everything is ok. It’s often the case that people have no idea how close to a crisis point someone might be until it actually happens. It surprises us when we learn about someone and we might say, ‘I never knew they were struggling’. There is an awful lot of emotional pain, unfortunately, out there and we’re less connected, in healthy ways, than we’d assume ourselves to be.

I’ve had my own journey here, specific to my own experiences, and I have had to work it through. That’s been the most important journey for me, and is no doubt, in part, reflected in my poems. It is to my surprise that I’ve survived some deeply negative mood states when I was younger, when I didn’t believe in my future and saw very little reason to live; for a painful length of time, I was lost and hanging-on. Finding a voice, a means of expression through writing has been equally as important to me as running. In fact, I realised, with epiphany, when preparing for the Cardiff Poetry Festival running / writing discussion that my running and writing journeys coincide far more closely than previously I had reflected. Both were a ‘coming out’ for me, stepping into the world and not hiding somewhere in the shadows, and in both activities, I can timetable a significant turning point to the same pivotal year.

Writing is the best way I know of checking in with myself. It’s a good way of naming what is going on and making meaning, or finding meaning, in a world that often appears to have very little shape or form. I’ve paid a fair bit of money to therapists myself over many years to relieve myself of the unprocessed pain of my father, and hopefully not pass it on. In this, I don’t feel I’ve had much choice, it has though, also, brought me my career. I love what I now do and where my life has got to. It’s a rich, meaningful, present based existence, which is all I ever wanted and a far cry from my childhood, where the adults were self-centred and I have to say it, damagingly hopeless. We can teach about mental health, but ultimately, so much depends on the lottery of your family of origin.

I think it is just important to be open and not to be afraid of the journey inwards, which isn’t a journey in our culture that gets much air time. The goal of society is not authentic selfhood, it’s not something we appear to care much about. But for me this is all wrapped up in the crux of good writing, whether this be Diana Athill or Alice Oswald. I don’t think of writing as therapy though. I don’t see my own writing as therapy – that, I believe, is something else – but words are a good mirror in which to understand ourselves and the world we live in, and to connect to others and to take our inner lives seriously. I see writing as self-engagement and self-discussion. We are what we are able to talk about. The blank page grants us space. And, as you shouldn’t fear the page, it’s good to put yourself on the therapist’s couch if you feel you are stuck and going round in circles. My main health message is that there should be no shame in seeking help. Why suffer in silence?