Even out there at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, with Bardsey Sound beneath me, the bleakness of our environmental predicament felt inescapable. I envied [Plath] not writing under that weight.
Content warning: mention of suicide
Rereading Blackberrying in Uwchmynydd
Plath’s flies devour blackberries
and they believe in heaven.
I guess by this she implies she didn’t.
I guess heaven can be beheld
by the sugared feet of a fly
as tarred atomic crystals.
I guess it must rain soon.
September, and this thirsty hedgerow rasps
too loudly for this time of year.
Plath’s choughs are bits of burnt paper
wheeling in a blown sky.
I envy this metaphor. I even envy
her foreshadowing suicide
and species extinction.
The coastal gale is slapping
its phantom laundry in Plath’s face
whereas I adjust a toggle on a string
and my hood tightens around my head.
At least the blackberries are not too fat this year.
At least the young kestrel
dives into the centre
of its own boundless focus.
At least the yearling stems of bramble
possess a similar immaculate elegance.
Plath’s blackberries squander blue-red juices
in a tightly-necked milkbottle.
No one else ever picked fruit
with such an impractical vessel.
I try to think of another word for heaven
and find some fruit is always out of reach.
Do you often directly respond to the work of another poet, and could you say a bit about that?
Maybe poetry could be seen as a shared cooking pot, from which we feed ourselves and occasionally tip in something fresh for others. For me, the original spark of a poem is usually something out there in the world, which often makes me think of other poets. At other times, reading poems also draws me to a certain subject matter, or opens my eyes to new ways of writing. Yet by being as direct as it is between myself and Plath, this poem is something of a one off.
Do you think it is fair to think of Plath as an ecopoet?
I suppose ecocritical readings of her work are reasonable. It’s interesting that both Ariel and The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson were landmark publications of the early 1960s, when the environmental movement was emerging. I find Plath’s work has much to teach me about how to write about denuded and contaminated natural landscapes. I’m thinking of the sky in Poppies in October, ‘Palely and flamily / igniting its carbon monoxides.’ Yet, if I’m honest, I’m also hesitant to label her as an ecopoet. The strategies she sometimes uses, such as anthropomorphisation and the pathetic fallacy, coupled with her Late Modernist flair set her apart from most contemporary ecopoets. My poem could be seen as a dialogue between myself as an ecopoet and her as a poet of a different time.
Your poem is tightly structured with a lot of anaphora and several parallels between the narrator and Plath. How did you arrive at this structure? And is form something that you prioritise?
That’s true, and the way we both use anaphora is markedly different. Plath expands her vision and gains momentum with phrases like ‘nothing, nothing’ and ‘protesting, protesting’; whereas I casually hook together different ideas with ‘I guess’ and ‘At least’. Although there is a certain playfulness in my poem, I hope the comparisons I draw between us are heartfelt.
The poem is also about the differences between us, and I wanted the structure to reflect this. So, my poem is a narrow single stanza, deliberately unlike the three chunky stanzas which make up Blackberrying. I might be alluding to form when I describe Plath’s milkbottle as an ‘impractical vessel’. The container and berries could serve as metaphor for form and language. In reality, an old ice cream tub would serve as a better alternative, but by being too practical might have given her less to write about.
The presence of the poet is very marked in lines such as, ‘I envy this metaphor. I even envy / her foreshadowing of suicide / and species extinction’.
I was grieving when I wrote these lines a few years ago. These feelings coupled with my anxiety about the poor crop on the bramble, scorched by the wind and parched after a dry summer. Even out there at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, with Bardsey Sound beneath me, the bleakness of our environmental predicament felt inescapable. I envied her not writing under that weight.
Needless to say, the envy is complicated. Her metaphor for choughs, ‘bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky’, evokes both the birds’ flight habits and the lability of human emotions. The image also seems prescient of her suicide. Yet, for what it’s worth, rereading Blackberrying after many years moved me to write something new. So, maybe there is a kind of poetic envy which is healthy, guiding us towards the direction our work needs to take.
It feels like there is a mix of both admiration for Plath and irreverence in this poem. Could you tell us a bit about this please?
I am full of admiration of Plath but a hagiography would not have provided me with the kind of tension I needed to resolve. Perhaps it honours her to write about her work without referring to her public image, but it takes a conscious effort to do so and I agonise over seeming tactless. Despite the palpable anguish in Blackberrying, the poem has always filled my mind with light, which I attribute to many things, including her mastery of poetic craft. Poetry often makes the darkness shine, and lifts things away from the life of the poet.
I was sixteen when when my fabulous English teacher introduced me to this poem in class. Looking back, I knew nothing of Plath other than what her poetry told me. She gave me permission to scream— but in a structured way. I have always liked Tracey Emin’s remark about her favourite painting, The Scream by Edvard Munch, which makes her want to ‘climb inside the mouth’. I sometimes think poetry is about tempering visceral energy and finding a home, even if the home is a bit unusual.
I love the final couplet of the poem. Could you say a bit about how you got there and what impression you might have hoped to leave with the reader?
I simultaneously abandon my search for a better word for ‘heaven’ and notice the unreachable blackberries. I land on a familiar image with which to end the poem and am also handed a metaphorical gift. I can’t reach for another word for a place I cannot see, just as I can’t reach something I see right in front of me. The poem seems to lead me towards sharing a sense of a limitation with Plath, with regards to both choosing words and autumnal foraging. I think in our different ways we both acknowledge the abundance of the fruit— she with her ‘blood sisterhood’ with the juice, and me with my unreachable berries.
Thickets of blackberries overwhelm boundaries and colonise the footpaths, alleyways and embankments between gardens and farms. They are tough resilient plants, capable of growing anywhere there is sunshine and soil. Yet however transgressive they are, even they have limits. They remind me that a degree of human neglect seems to be a pre-condition for the survival of some non-human species. It only occurs to me now that both our poems could be about how we all shape absences in our minds and become them in the end.
Sean is featured as one of our 60 poets to watch in our 60th Anniversary issue – find out more here.
Sean Swallow
Sean Swallow (he/him) is originally from suburban Cheshire, in the north west of England. He is a poet and garden maker with a lifelong connection with rural Wales. His poetry explores nature with a gay sensibility, and hopes to subvert traditional pastoral themes. His poems navigate themes of identity and belonging whilst always paying rapt attention to nature. Alongside making gardens he is slowly cooking a collection of poems about grass.
Photo credit: Charlie Hopkinson
How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.