This poem addresses the anxieties I feel around my hearing loss – including being able to share the experience of watching a film with my husband. It then reveals the creative adaptations I seem to have unwittingly put in place.
Deafhearing watching TV, Vol.1 -2
(After Llio Elain Maddox)
Vol.1
Christopher Plummer’s handsome face
seems crest fallen,
as he and his onscreen wife argue.
Words dart back and forth,
next to me my husband sighs
and instinctively I fill in the blanks for him:
“It’s not you, it’s me, it’s you and me”
and he responds in astonishment:
“How did you hear that when I didn’t catch any of it?”
But that’s just it, I didn’t
really ‘hear’ any of it,
didn’t need to;
just the corners of words,
a general structure and intonation;
gestures as she rushed to his side
in an apologetic manner.
My guess-hearing is better
than all of his real hearing
and attention put together,
for this mumbled,
‘dynamic dialogue’.
*
Vol.2
We’re watching Interstellar
and there’s an interrogation scene
which leaves me reeling
for any clues or meaning.
I turn to my husband,
who smiles and says:
“No idea, I think they’re having
a mumbling competition!”
And I relax, knowing
that I’m really not missing
anything.
This is a beautiful poem about both the creative adaptations and the anxieties of being d/Deaf or hard of hearing. As someone who is themselves hard of hearing, I found myself nodding along in recognition. What made you decide to present adaptive deafhearing and the inability to comprehend a dialogue as two distinct volumes?
Thank you for your kind words – it’s so lovely to hear that it resonated with your own experiences!
This poem is part of a somewhat ill-fated collection called Inter Mundos. The collection has been on an exhausting journey around numerous publishers, first in Welsh, then in English, then bilingually, but to no avail. However, along the way I garnered some useful feedback.
One editor felt that she was being told the same thing over and over. This was disheartening, because to me the collection is like a prism, exploring progressive sensorineural hearing loss from a plethora of angles; however, readers may not appreciate this and switch off after a few poems because they are bored. So, I had to find a way of presenting the poems which would mitigate against this, by highlighting the various shades of light offered by each ‘story’.
One option might be to group poems by theme, in this case a couple watching television, and then choose the most illustrative example in each theme, omitting the rest. The problem was, I didn’t want to delete any of the poems.
Then I remembered the ‘in several volumes’ technique, as seen in Llio Elain Maddocks’ poetry pamphlet Stwff ma hogia ‘di ddeud wrtha fi. Basically, in her pamphlet, each volume reflects on instances of boys saying ridiculous and irritating things to Llio. I had used this technique before, as a way of grouping disparate experiences of cognitive dissonance into The Non-Welsh woman, Vol. 1-5 (which is in my pamphlet A Goareig patchwork quilt), and it had worked really well, so I tried it as a way of bringing these two subtly different stories together into one poem. I am happy with the result, but I’d be interested to hear what others think.
Incidentally, I put ‘After Llio Elain Maddocks’ as a subheading, to tip my hat to Llio for the inspiration; I have seen this done by several poets, but I had a conversation with a publisher recently which revealed that this isn’t a widely understood phenomenon.
The speaker’s husband is central in this poem, sharing the experience of not hearing (in vol. 2), and, perhaps contra-expectation, hearing less than the speaker (in vol. 1). I can imagine other permutations, such as the husband hearing what the speaker cannot. How did you variously consider the role of the husband in relation to the message you wished to convey?
Well, going back to the idea of the poetry collection as a prism, whilst I have several brooding, introspective poems which explore my own experiences and personal reflections, I felt that there were just as many vivid shafts of colourful light emanating from our experiences as a couple; we often discuss instances and experiences, which is really nice for both of us, and I thought this might be interesting for others – like the switching of narrators in novels like Wide Sargasso Sea.
In terms of compiling the poem, this one is simply drawn from life. I have written as closely to verbatim as I can recall, adding my own Aesop’s fable-style ‘moral of the tale’ at the end of each ‘story’. However, Vol.1. has a bit extra as I stick the boot in about a comment made to me about a libretto I had written. The comment in question was about the need for more ‘dynamic dialogue’; the problem was that I was trying to write a deafhearing opera for audiences of people like me, who struggle to follow ‘dynamic dialogue’! I love challenging ignorance through my writing!
Emotion is charged throughout this poem; the reader moves from astonishment, to reeling in confusion, to then relaxing. This is quite a journey! What influenced you to emphasise these particular feelings?
This is a fascinating insight from the reader’s perspective, and I am deeply grateful to you and this process for bringing this to my attention. I also like how this highlights the added value of reading these two ‘stories’ together as one poem. Because if you just read Vol.1., you’d be left with just confusion. But Vol.2. takes you through another, simpler instance, which as you quite rightly say, ends with a feeling of calm and relaxation.
I think all of my art, including my writing, can be seen as an attempt to make sense of the world around me and my interaction with it. As you point out in the first question, this poem addresses the anxieties I feel around my hearing loss – including being able to share the experience of watching a film with my husband. It then reveals the creative adaptations I seem to have unwittingly put in place, and the way this then shapes our experiences.
I think it is also a reflection of my process and practice. I understand that some poets set out to write a particular kind of poem and they have specific criteria in mind, or something they wish to include. However, more often than not, and particularly in this instance, the poem found me and, as I.D. Hooson said ‘insisted on being written’!
Please share with us the one thing that’s transformed your writing practice that you wish you knew earlier.
In short, I wish I had heard Rupi Kaur’s story sooner. By themselves, some of the poems in Inter Mundos are little more than aphorisms. As a collection, it is seen – by comparison with those readily accepted by the establishment – as being too narrow in focus and quite repetitive. I have spilled much ink trying to adapt my esoteric writing to fit a poetry scene mould that will just never be able to see any value in what I do.
This closely mirrors Rupi’s experiences of finding it difficult to place her short poetry with magazines, and publishers not seeing the potential of her collection as a whole; yet her work had garnered much admiration and a favourable response on Instagram. So, she self-published through Create Space – one of the Amazon platforms which has now merged with Kindle Direct Publishing; she very quickly went from obscurity to becoming one of the most successful poets of all time! In fact, so the story goes, Milk and Honey helped to regenerate interest in poetry collections more generally.
I was already several rejections in by the time I heard Rupi’s story at a publishing workshop, hosted in Wrexham by Natasha Borton. And whilst I was relieved and filled with new hope, I remember thinking “Damn! I could have published this collection by now!” And that was a long time ago now and I continued to hawk Inter Mundos around until fairly recently, just because I was so sure I had something so valuable to say that surely one of the Welsh publishers would take a chance on me?
However, in the meantime, I published an even more esoteric collection called Trawiad | Seizure through Kindle Direct Publishing; this was initially print on demand only, however after a few sales and some positive feedback, I printed a few copies at a time, at author’s price, and placed them in the shops – a kind of hybrid-publishing! This in turn has been a most illuminating and enjoyable experience.
And as an Aesop’s fable-style ending, I would say: these days there are many routes to publishing, which have opened up a plethora of opportunities, for even the most niche of collections; there’s room for all of our voices and we can stay true to ourselves, rather than becoming weak versions of our mainstream, popular counterparts.
Sara Erðig
Sara Erðig (she/her) writes the columns O’r gororau (Barddas) and Synfyfyrion Sara (Golwg360). She won Disability Arts Cymru’s 2022 Creative Words award (Welsh medium) with Ablaeth Rhemp y Crachach – subsequently published bilingually in Trawiad | Seizure (2023). A Goareig Patchwork Quilt (Fahmidan, 2024) is Sara’s latest chapbook.
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