Interview with Geraldine Paine

[sheenaghpugh]

Geraldine Paine's collection The Go-Away Bird is available from the publisher, Lapwing Press of Belfast, at lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com and I reviewed it here.  It contains her sequence "Leaden Hearts" , partly-found poems derived from convict tokens - these men and women, leaving their homes and families for transportation to the other side of the world, left tokens with last messages for loved ones:

There could be no flowers,
no grave, just this voice
left behind, barely heard.
Did he guess
family shame
would gouge out his name?
                                                       When
                                                       this you
                                                       see remember
                                                       me and bear me
                                                       in your mind Let
                                                       all the world say
                                                       what they whill
                                                       Don't prove To
                                                       me un kind



SHEENAGH: When I read about some 20-year-old poetic genius being "staggeringly inventive" I think, well, yes, he'd have to be, because he has no experience to speak of. You write a lot from your experience and it comes from several different places, including travel, art and an unusually diverse work background. I'm interested in how you reinterpret and reinvent this experience.

GERALDINE: I suppose I have led a varied life, and yet it’s always been anchored to home. Maybe that’s what has informed all my choices, the need to be anchored. I spent my early years with the uncertainty of war, the presence of sudden death, separation from people I loved, being evacuated to unwelcoming places, coming home to a changed landscape. Of course I accepted the circumstances as children do but I’ve always been aware of the fragility of things. And the awfulness of leaving possibly never to return. It was an unspoken thing. To a small child on one level it meant having to leave your dog behind every time a siren went while you were taken to the safety of the communal air-raid shelter, or at a deeper level perhaps realising your parents were somewhere else, or finally going from the familiarity of London to damp fields and the homes of strangers. I put down how it felt. The smell of burning, the silences, the bombsites. A child’s view. Odd things: a field of cowslips, shining underground rails and a scene is recreated. Occasionally I wrote in prose to get the memory down and reshaped it, picking the strongest images to develop into a poem that conveyed the feeling, the time. Some I wrote as poems straight away.

I’m aware fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes and will do so subconsciously, maybe the better for it. Which leads me to question whether experience is not partly behind the poems about convict tokens too? I’m no psychologist but looking back I’m acutely aware of interrupted lives, the randomness of things. And what life does to good people who for one reason or another can’t make it work for them.

SHEENAGH: Your poems about the tokens left for their families by convicts about to be transported are not just found poems, as they might be if you'd just reproduced their texts; you add your own words to them. And two things strike me about your contributions. First, the sense of frustration that comes from these illiterate people having to trust others - not always particularly literate themselves - with their most important messages. I get the impression that really gets through to you. Secondly, there's a softness, a sympathy, that nearly always appears in your work when young people are involved and it intrigues me because as a magistrate you must have come across a lot of young people who, if they didn't make you cynical, at least must have often annoyed and disappointed you. How have you managed to maintain that sympathy, and were you conscious, when looking at the tokens, of that part of your background?

GERALDINE: I was. The inequality of things was brought home to me very young. And I grew up realizing that someone could live their whole life for and through others because of initial poverty. How for many people there was so little choice, so little control then. In some places, third world Zimbabwe for example, it’s still so, only now there is corruption and terror too. And maybe there we have it. The reason for as you say, my frustration at illiterate and semi-literate people having to trust others to be their voice. I am acutely aware of it. How important it is to be independent, to be allowed dignity, your own voice heard.

I became a magistrate because power needs to be used sparingly. And I wanted to be there. And it turned out I could be. So many of the accused are young, inadequate, their lives blighted by poor education and the lack of security, drugs featured heavily too – old lags seemed to be in the minority but I watched the young grow older as they returned, very often repeating the family history of petty crime.

I can’t claim to have their experience but my upbringing was not conventional, and I may, only may, have understood them better than some on the Bench. That doesn’t mean to say I was always right, sympathy can lead to disappointment. I wrote very few poems based round my experience then but certain memories stay with me and may emerge.

SHEENAGH: In another part of the forest, you were an actress, and performance is a recurring theme in your work - eg the poem dedicated to Michael Donaghy, whom I once saw perform too, and he was certainly unusually memorable. It's also something you have done as a poet, in the performance group Scatterlings. Many poets don't have this experience of their own poems as something other than flat on a page. How does this part of your work affect your writing - when you write, are you already thinking how it'll sound in performance? And does performing the poems ever alter your way of seeing them, even suggest revisions?

GERALDINE: No I never think how a poem will sound in performance as I write it but certain poems lend themselves more to being read aloud. I know what will work best. Having said that it’s a moot point whether page poetry does always work in performance. I’m uncomfortable with actor-ly interpretations but equally a dull reading is unhelpful and makes a long evening. It helps to be aware of the pitfalls!
Scatterlings has always had some musical input – guitar, piano, for contrast.

My paternal grandparents were Variety artistes, my dad was originally a Song and Dance man. As a child I was taken to see him in Jack Buchanan musicals. Happily I’ve inherited his sense of humour, in life if not in poetry! I find humorous poems tricky, wish I didn’t, they could enliven many a reading! He met my mother, who wrote too, on a film set. So, in the blood you could say. I loved it, still do, and admire many of the doughty, talented, risk-taking performers, legit or illegit.

I haven’t really thought about it before but it’s interesting how it affects my writing, not so much the performance side but in the relating of and to the characters or story within the poem. I’m ‘there’ as I write because not all the poems relate directly to experience of course. In a way I become what I’m writing about if that isn’t too fanciful and I enjoy the dramatic monologue. I do listen to myself reading each poem as I write it, to hear the rhythm, but I think most poets do that, don’t they? Certainly revisions are prompted by any jarring note. I need to hear a certain music although, despite my background, while I can sing in tune, music doesn’t play a big part of my life. Finally I aim for a balance in the poem, an accuracy, no unnecessary padding, a cleanness if you like. The best performances try for that too. And again I suppose my acting experience of playing different characters allows me to imagine other lives, to put myself in their shoes a little more easily than some. That helps the empathy.

My acting days were not long, four years in all, give or take, before I became a teacher of profoundly deaf children etc. ( an actress’s face an ideal prop!)

SHEENAGH: So basically all your life you've been a sort of professional speaking-tube, the voice for both your own thoughts and those of others, and I can see how that informs all you do – as with your Zimbabwe poems. And in the poems about your own past as an evacuee child, when you say, "fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes", that would be a concern not only to record that personal experience but to depersonalise it, to find the universal in it so that you can speak for and to anyone who's been in a similar situation?

GERALDINE: I do aim for that. Of my Zimbabwean poems the one that most Zimbabweans mention is “Harare Song”, and the image of the ‘blood umbrellas not trees’ but “The Man Who Knows Flowers” is my favourite because it is a celebration of an individual and a relationship that challenges perceived opinion. I wrote “A Patient Man” for the same reason in a way, a white African in love with his land, bereft. I’d have probably extended it if I were writing it today. And the poem, “The Go-Away-Bird” is how it was and still is for a generation of people bewildered by the country they were born and bred in, no longer recognizing the place they see. I was a witness to the leaving and was glad I could tell it as it was.

SHEENAGH: Your Zimbabwe poems are very striking and clearly deeply felt. I'm particularly struck by how they manage not to harp only on the negative, as they well might have, given the current state of affairs there. In fact a lot of vibrancy and beauty comes through them too. How did this country come to be part of your work?

GERALDINE: I came to know it because my second husband is a third generation Zimbabwean. His grandparents went there at the turn of the Twentieth Century, his parents were born there; his mother has lived to see the country destroyed by a despot and her family’s life’s work with it. They were essentially farmers. We returned every second year for sixteen years to visit her and watched the country turn from a prosperous fertile land to one where the people were starving. It is so beautiful, the people open and friendly, full of initiative and gentleness. I was beginning to know them, tentatively learnt a little Shona (one of the African languages) from Chenga, the old gardener. I’d climbed a sacred mountain in the tribal lands past small boys herding cattle up near perpendicular hills, seen rare cave paintings, held (only just) a wriggling, amazingly strong baby crocodile, been rowed round a dam, walked through a game reserve at dawn with a guard with a gun at the ready, heard elephants rumble in the night as I slept under a mosquito net, watched an African carve a perfect elephant from a single piece of wood ( I still have it); picked, smelt and tasted fresh guavas and avocados from trees in my mother-in-law’s garden. All this and more, the colour, the generosity, the sun. The vibrancy you speak of had to come through despite everything. And yet I didn’t miss the signs. I wrote what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced but unlike some I was able to leave to come home. Several of my husband’s extended family lost their farms, their businesses and everything they owned, but they are alive. Many black Zimbabweans, and a few whites, are not, tortured and killed by Mugabe’s thugs. There are young, black Zimbabweans being published at the moment. Their poetry is powerful, often very political and angry. Some of it will survive. We are all witnesses.

You ask how I re-interpret and re-invent my various experiences of work, art, travel. I suppose through people, set in a specific, recognizable time or place. Perhaps through a sound, a smell, a taste – “The Pink Shop” was prompted by my first taste of oysters but it was also an imaginary take on Whitstable. Often in observing the moment, just snapshots often - the girl with dirty nails in “Brief Encounters”. In recording the commonplace, or elevating it in some way; relating to it, often obliquely. Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship. And in the case of art often through dramatising what’s before me, interpreting or re-interpreting the painting’s mood. I wrote “Once Seen” after seeing a Poussin painting, it turned into a poem about Warhol’s perceived influence on Edie Sedgwick! It is people I want to celebrate, those still here and those long-gone. And the loss of them. One of the reasons I love Cavafy is just that. The ache that is left.

SHEENAGH: "Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship."

That very much makes me think of your poem "Hopper's Window" (which follows this interview). I'm not normally much for ekphrastic poems, because I feel they often repeat rather inadequately in words what the painter has expressed better in paint. But in that poem you totally reinterpret the still-life of objects and create a rather creepy, disturbing relationship between two people, centred around power and control at a distance. If I recall rightly, that poem came from a period when your work seemed to me to be getting quite suddenly more adventurous and bold; in poems like "Hopper's Window" and "The Pink Shop" you were doing things with language and ideas that surprised; it was as if a window had been opened and a blast of air had come in. I think writers do have turns like this, when maybe something suddenly clicks or they find a new way of seeing, and something is permanently added to the voice. Were you conscious of anything around then that "turned" your work in that way?

GERALDINE: I get fired up by the company of creative people, not necessarily writers, often artists. It’s the buzzing energy of it. Rightly or wrongly I soak an atmosphere up like a sponge, absorbing and developing ideas at a pace, it’s probably the acting gene! A course with Ruth Padel was memorable; the idea that you can mix the senses, reverse the normal association of an image, say the opposite of what is expected, be specific but preposterous at the same time, I suppose that was a turning point of sorts at the time, though not the only one, it’s a cumulative thing with me. A successful outcome to a poem works wonders. I’m by instinct a poet of experience, (it doesn’t have to be true but I have to filter it somehow through experience), this showed me I could play more. Having said that, the Hopper painting spoke of obsession and control straight away. I imagined the scene played by Harold Pinter’s first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, who could use her whole body as well as her mind to portray his work as a precise, sexual, ritualistic game. So we have a poem from a painting using the memory of a performance in a play! Ekphrastic or what?! The story came quickly, what was exciting was finding the right words, and that’s the really terrific thing about poetry, you can make the language speak. The challenge is in making it surprising and fresh.

Some things can be comforting, not only because of the connections, the relationships they evoke but also because of the continuity they represent. And yet one can also be trapped by them. When I was between homes and my possessions were in store I was happy enough with the bare essentials, felt a certain freedom. So what comforts can also shackle. I wonder if it is the same with poetry. I do see the need to break out sometimes, to abandon the familiar, believe that what I’ve written is still a poem – that’s where the young have it easier, they may know less obedience. I’ve just read a poem, “springcuts”, by Carol Watts, where she’s punctuated quite promiscuously – and only if you remove the punctuation does the sense of what she’s saying return. Now why did she choose to do that, it seems so self-consciously different? And yet it did give this reader an awareness of fractured light, so I thought well, well. Was I being fanciful? Would I have done it? No. It wouldn’t have occurred to me any more than ending a line on the word ‘of’. Is that the equivalent of a tidy room?! Is her work and others like her the equivalent of some modern art, there to shock and shake perceived complacency? (Although Tracey Emin’s drawings can be heartbreaking so that’s not all.) I want a poem that resonates, that can’t be date-stamped.

SHEENAGH: You mention Cavafy, who's always been an obsession of mine too, and the sense of loss in him, "the ache that is left". But there's a great sense of celebration in him too, and you also use that word of what you are trying to do in poetry. Celebration and commemoration have always seemed to me to be important roles of poetry, yet to judge by the reaction to some of the present Laureate's efforts in
that direction, it's very hard to do without attracting criticism from people who think poetry isn't being cutting-edge unless it's overtly attacking something. How would you defend celebratory poetry to such folk?

GERALDINE: To me celebration has always been one of the main purposes of poetry. You’re right when you say that Cavafy had a great sense of celebration in him. What I love most is his celebration of the fleeting moment. I find it so moving, it should be celebrated or it is lost, along with the feeling it once engendered, which mattered very much. That’s how I’d defend it – to celebrate is to give a permanence to experience. The celebration of a person, especially those who may never make their mark, or never did, is important to me. I want somehow to value them, to dignify them. Edward Thomas is pretty good at that. He can make the passing moment memorable. He loved names, of people, of places, but also of birds, trees, flowers to hold them in the memory, to commemorate them. Les Murray celebrates more rumbustiously but he can certainly celebrate and all "to the glory of God". I think, how lucky to be so unselfconsciously, so creatively rumbustious!

"How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action"

Ted Hughes wrote that. Interesting. Does that hold us unless we deliberately deny it? Noticing, appreciating, being aware of who we are, ours and others' place in the world. It’s a recognition. And it’s timeless. Attacking things in order to be cutting edge is short-lived surely. Rather like a cartoon it can lose relevance very quickly as time and targets move on. It belongs more to journalism or politics. Compare Shaw to Chekhov. What’s the difference? To me one playwright lectures, the other shows us the human condition. Isn’t that what poetry does? And isn’t celebration part of that?

More poems
HOPPER'S WINDOW

She remembers his words. First: step into the shoes -
black patents, shining. Slip them on. Slowly.
Red toenails touching inner lining of calf.

Left foot, then right, balancing,
swaying, holding on. Fur next, fox
trickling down her neck to where the dead

seals hang,her skin smooth on theirs, stroking them
into life each time she moves. Last, the long gloves
shaded to the colour of jet. Watered silk

flowing. Thre items of clothing,
he'd said. You choose. He's out there
somewhere, staring through binoculars, hidden

by a line of windows. She draws up the chair.
Patches of steamed glass appear, his name
in mirror writing. Noise is disturbing her,

legs scraping across the wooden floor.
Three days she's been here, waiting. The first
day's pose, arranging the flowers. They had

to be centrally placed, white, in a white vase:
lilies, roses and one flag. They had to catch
the morning sun. She'd done that. Surrendering

her body in the bare room, sleeping curled till morning
and no rules broken. The second day was furniture.
The Windsor chair opposite the table. The chest behind

covered with red cloth. Black, red, white.
She'd chosen as he said. Today, the third day,
he would come for her.

THE MAN WHO KNOWS FLOWERS

And Chenga came through the door...
Chenga, of the broad hat and the slow smile,
the man who knows flowers and cares for the old lady
who loves him.

Chenga, who has asthma and wears a mask
while spraying the blooms of the old lady's garden
where the mimosa sways among hibiscus
and blue convolvulus vie with the sky.

Chenga, who for twenty-five years
would rather sow seeds that survive
than learn to read, be a part of the world
that's changing beyond the high wall.

Chenga, tending his guavas, his roses,
his lady who grows old beside him,
who keeps him well with her potions,
whom he loves.

NO-ONE EXPLAINS

There are the lines, silver, dazzling. Danger lines.
There are the spaces between. As deep as me standing,

the depth from the rails to the floor. There are the strangers
picking a path to a place among friends, the people

huddled in blankets,. sleeping in bunks,
the smell of their bodies overflowing the platform.

There are the children packed with the thermos,
the pillow, the belongings in cases. A bag falls

onto the track, someone jumps down and I'm
screaming. No-one explains there are no trains.

Links to more poems and information

Geraldine's page on the PoetryPF site - some poems and biographical information.

Amazon UK's page for The Go-Away Bird

The Basil Bunting Poetry Award - here you can listen to Geraldine's commended poem "The Creek"