Tim Relf: How I Wrote ‘Teeth weren’t fish’

“Handling time shifts can be difficult as they can be disorientating for readers and can present tonal challenges, but I’m interested in how people – and their priorities – change over the course of a lifetime.”

Treat them well and they’ll last a lifetime, 
the newly crowned kid was told, rinsing 
with the red stuff, gutted he hadn’t got to try gas, 

picturing pools and monster fish. He swallowed 
his secret – half of both front teeth snapped 
clean off when a bigger boy tossed him

into a wall. Who cared! They were only teeth 
and teeth weren’t the splashing strike 
of a twelve-pound pike or the gut-thump you got 

at that line-taut tug. The whole class called him hith,
howled at ingenious ways to take the pith,
dubbed him Fang then Dracula’s son

but he still had those jointed lures, 
the dream of hand-sized jaws, 
the eye, the eye.

And they have, too. Lasted a lifetime. No, that’s not true: 
not yet, not quite. Unfathomable, really, this desire 
to tell an almost-definitely dead man in a white coat I’ve remembered 

him chanting numbers and letters every time I’ve vowed
to smoke less, cut back on Coke or floss. I guess, Mr Hall, I want 
you to know that for many years my ex complimented me

on my smile, but life got kind of muddled in the middle
– crooked – 
and now I couldn’t tell you how it feels to cradle a jack pike’s

out-of-water wrath or sit, silently, by a frozen lake and wait. 
What I wish I could say is thank you because the teeth you gave me 
have held fast, despite it all. Even yesterday as I tried to hang onto 

a job cutting grass and a mower-thrown stone struck me 
clean in the mouth, they didn’t break.
They simply refused to snap.

I’m really struck by how deftly this poem contrasts the priorities of a young boy with those of an older man. Did you begin with a more generalised theme of changing priorities across the lifespan? Or did the specific examples of teeth and fish appear from the start?

The genesis was a real-life event, as it is for many of my poems. A couple of years ago I did get hit by a stone thrown by a lawnmower and, as a child, I did need some dental work after getting pushed over at school. But the poem spooled out from there (as my poems usually also do), deviating from what actually happened in search of, as the saying goes, ‘truth’ rather than ‘facts’.

As regards timescale, I often find myself bouncing around chronologically in poems – sometimes starting in the distant past and flashing-forward, other times doing the opposite. Perhaps that’s the novelist in me? A good place to start, though, is often ‘in medias res’ – i.e. somewhere in the ‘story’. And wherever you begin, you don’t want too much warming up, either. ‘Throat-clearing,’ I once heard it described as. Handling time shifts can be difficult as they can be disorientating for readers and can present tonal challenges, but I’m interested in how people – and their priorities – change over the course of a lifetime. That’s part of the poet’s job, isn’t it: to explore and articulate change. In this case, we have a speaker who, as a child, was totally preoccupied by fishing and who many years later remembers the joy and simplicity of that – both the joy he once found in the hobby, but also the opportunity it brought for ‘escape’. Remembering childhood can be dangerous for a poet, as it’s all-too-easy to sentimentalise, but it can be a rich vein of material. Graham Greene once said ‘childhood is a writer’s bank balance’.

There’s an ambiguous sense of loss and surprise at work here, including being taken aback by a wish to convey a message to someone from one’s distant past. What was your intention behind addressing ‘Mr Hall’ the dentist directly in the poem’s second half?

Sometimes we struggle to communicate with the people closest to us and end up having the important conversations with those who we are less close to. In some ways, that’s natural and inevitable. I think frustration at this can often manifest itself as a desire to speak to people from our past – to reach out, back, and say the things we only realise now we should have said then, but didn’t, perhaps because we were too confused or self-absorbed or inarticulate or simply, young. I was torn about whether to give the dentist a name because a name in a poem does draw attention to itself. Would it matter, after all, if we didn’t know he was called Mr Hall? In this instance, I concluded the name would be a detail the speaker may have remembered, so it felt fair to include it. It feels to me that the dentist is both central and incidental to this poem. I liked the idea of how, in the child’s mind, that man’s whole life is crystallised to pretty much that – his surname.

You employ tercets throughout. Did you try out any other forms while writing this, and, if so, what helped you decide on the poem’s final form?

Yes, I absolutely did. I tried it in couplets, quatrains and as one long single stanza – even as a prose poem at one point. I was once told by Owen Sheers (when I interviewed him about his fabulous poem The Farrier for How I Wrote) that putting a poem into tercets can be useful if you want a poem to feel ‘sprung’. I find tercets can be a good form for a poem that covers a span of time: they propel the reader through – an effect that can amplified, of course, by stanzas which run on from each other. As you may well have noticed, there is only one stanza in this poem that ends with a full stop. That point felt like a definite ‘break’ in the poem – a little like the volta in a sonnet. When I was studying Faber Academy’s Advanced Poetry course, one of my tutors was Daljit Nagra and he gave me a lot of confidence to explore different forms. Just try it and see what it looks like, he’d say. Just try it and see what it feels like. ‘Play with the poem,’ he’d say. I like the notion of that: there being an element of playfulness in finding the right form for a poem.

Please share with us the one thing that’s transformed your writing practice that you wish you knew earlier.

That there’s no such thing as entirely unhelpful feedback. I love getting comments on my poems and constructive criticism is important to developing as a poet. I’m lucky in that I have a lot of friends in the poetry world, but it’s taken years to build those relationships. Don’t misunderstand me – it’s been a joy to do, but it takes time and effort. I’d advise new poets to try to build relationships and establish a network. Writing can be a lonely job, so it’s lovely to have encouraging peers who you respect and trust. Good poetry friends celebrate your successes and support you in the periods when your writing is not going so well. You can meet them in all sorts of ways, but workshops (either in-person or online) can be a good way. I’ve always tried to see the poetry world as my ‘community’, just as the place where I live is my community. I try to contribute to both and, in return, I feel I get a lot back from both.

Tim Relf

Tim Relf’s (he/him) poetry has been published in such journals as Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, Under The Radar, The London Magazine, The Interpreter’s House and Northern Gravy. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, has been translated into more than 20 languages. He was 2023 poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden.

• @timrelf

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.