Vanessa Napolitano: How I Wrote ‘The list’

Photo credit: Stephen Napolitano | Interview by Zoë Brigley

“I often find when I write that there is a syllabic pattern emerging and it forms the basis for how I structure my poetry. It’s rarely deliberate in the first instance… but gives me a foundation to build the poem on.”

The list

They’ll come like enchanted godmothers
wise and calm,
now the blood rush of their own newborns
has settled, carrying advice and veiled favour.

Amongst their offerings is the list
of all that you should do now.

Symphonies of sleep,
pearls of milk,
nets of nurture, of knowing,
spells for every second growing.

Muslin for miles, forests
of fatigue, lights and temperatures
calibrated for your evaluation.

Tales meant to be an education.
A sisterhood of witches, well-meaning;
a noisy village that can’t stop interfering.
You, my darling, riding waves of advice -

please
just do 
what your gut says is right.

This poem takes the tone of an experienced person giving advice. How do you settle upon the tone of a poem?

When I was writing this poem my daughter was six, so I had a lot of distance from that newborn phase but could well recall the vulnerability of it. One of the most imposing and memorable things about early motherhood is the amount of conflicting, passionately championed and often very didactic advice that you’re given. But it’s almost impossible not to want to pass on advice yourself, too. I wanted to weave that into the tone of the poem – the speaker is summarising kinds of advice, the dangers of it, but they’re also giving counsel of their own.

Generally for me, the tone of the poem will emerge relatively clearly from the imagery and drive of the subject matter, but I was very conscious of the tone being important as it functions in this poem.

Motherhood comes with all kinds of demands on women. I believe that the work you are doing here to highlight such unfair expectations is directly related to the fight for reproductive rights. This poem seems to be asking society to let up its expectations for mothers?

Yes, I feel like expectations of mothers start well before their baby is born. As a dual British-American citizen I’m quite worried about what is happening there, and more autonomy being taken away from those seeking to manage their own reproductive rights in the US.

I think it’s very hard to feel adequate as a mother, and many choices are positioned as battlegrounds – sleep schedules, feeding choices, whether you return to work and when – that it can be exhausting. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed even by the smaller pieces of advice that arrive unsolicited. I don’t feel entirely negative about this, and nor is the poem; hopefully some of the language shows that advice can be a kind of magic force too. But it’s easy to get lost in it, particularly as a new and first-time mother, and to feel that your instincts are wrong. I think we need to empower mothers too, and encourage them to do what is best for both them and their baby. There are few one-size-fits-all solutions to most of the situations of motherhood.

I like the emphasis in this poem on polysyllabic words. Was that intentional or intuitive?

That was mainly intuitive, but something I noticed and made more prominent when I was editing the poem. I often find when I write that there is a syllabic pattern emerging and it forms the basis for how I structure my poetry. It’s rarely deliberate in the first instance (unless I’m writing in a strict form), but gives me a foundation to build the poem on.