Photo credit: Suzie Larke | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“The poem is an attempt to look back as well as forward, to acknowledge the creativity of women past, present and future”
Unremarkable
after Gwen John A woman paints a corner of an attic room, the window closed and veiled against the heat. A woman paints a small, secluded corner of herself – an open book upon the table, open window, open, slanted light. It orients her West, towards the sun. A woman paints a corner of her mind, a half-open window, to let the sunlight in. She paints the scent of a boulangerie, drifting from below. A woman paints the table in again, removes the book, removes all traces of herself, begins, again, with spring blossoms and a parasol. A woman paints because she can, because the universe allows her to. A woman paints the soft stripe of shadows on the sloping wall, like bars on a window. She dips her brush, begins again. A woman is still painting, in a corner of a room, in Paris, in London, Madrid, in a small unremarkable corner, in a house, a flat, a garden, a studio. A woman paints a newer version of herself. This one is polished, yellow, flat, serene. A woman paints her way from rue du Cherche-Midi to rue du Cherche-Midi. But what awaits her there? Another slant of yellow sunlight in a corner of the room? A woman paints, a woman writes. A hundred years pass. Another thirteen years. And here is another corner of another yellow room.
So this poem comes from your fascinating collection, Octopus Mind. Could you tell us a bit more about it?
The poem came about gradually, as many of my poems do. To begin with, I was gathering poems and images ready to deliver a creative writing workshop, and I came across two slightly different versions of the same painting by Gwen John – A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris. One of the paintings is on display in the National Museum of Wales1, and the other is in a museum in Sheffield2. I was intrigued by the fact that Gwen John painted this same scene more than once. Both paintings feel rather like self-portraits, as if the artist is an invisible presence in the scene itself. As I was preparing for the workshop, I was thinking about how we construct different versions of ourselves throughout our lives. Life is full of unexpected challenges, and we have to adapt, to re-make ourselves again and again. The first few drafts of the poem were very short, and I knew it wasn’t working, so I left it for a few days, to see what would happen.
Gwen John is an intriguing artist, who is being written about quite a bit at the moment, and it feels like a link is being forged here between John and the speaker in this poem. Could you talk about what John means to you?
Gwen John lived and worked as an artist in the pre-war period, at a time when it was far more difficult for women to be independent than it is now. But she managed to carve out a life for herself. She earned money as an artist’s model, and this enabled her to focus on creating her own art. I admire her determination. She didn’t let society’s expectations hold her back. Gwen John’s work was perceived, during her lifetime, as fairly unremarkable, compared to the work of her more famous brother Augustus John, and her lover – the sculptor Auguste Rodin. I can identify with that sense of feeling overlooked.
Repetition works well in this poem to reverberate through generations of women, as well as the interesting use of single sentences or paragraphs of just two sentences or so. What inspired the form?
The poem began in a very different form. It was the process of trying, again and again, to get the first line exactly right, that led me to the refrain ‘A woman paints’, just as Gwen John tried painting the same scene again and again. I wanted to express that sense of determination, of not giving up. I decided to use a prose poem form, with separate end-stopped lines and double spacing to emphasise the amount of effort we put into each creative act. Whether we are literally creating a poem or painting, or when we re-imagine ourselves anew, each of these creative acts is a monumental achievement. It deserves to be celebrated. Yet each of these creative acts is often not the last. It can be exhausting to keep on working at something, especially when you feel unappreciated or overlooked. I began to read the lines out loud, and the repetition felt important. I wanted this poem to honour the individual creative acts of women throughout the generations who have kept going in the face of rejection and failure. The poem is an attempt to look back as well as forward, to acknowledge the creativity of women past, present and future.
