Interview with Sue Rose
Jan. 26th, 2012 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughSue Rose's first collection of poems, From the Dark Room was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011 and I reviewed it here. Sue Rose is a professional translator who lives in Herne Bay; she has been widely published in magazines and has won prizes in several competitions.
Hard Skin
She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.
I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.
She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.
On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
SHEENAGH: In my interview with Paul Henry , we talked about the problem of readers assuming that "I" is the poet and that any personal-sounding material is unadorned autobiography. Paul has actually left poems he liked out of his Selected because of this problem, and I react to it by hardly ever using the first person. As a poet who uses "I" a lot, what's your take on this question?
SUE: Interesting question – the first thing I did was go back to the book and check how many first person poems there were – roughly half of the poems are in the first person and quite a few others are written in the second or third person (who is really a thinly disguised first person). Only two of the poems in the book in the first person are dramatic monologues, and one of those is in my father’s voice, so hardly fictional. I think this is because my writing stems from a personal response to the world and to events and it is important for me to put down faithfully what I feel. In a way, writing poetry for me is about ordering experience, making sense of it, and remembering it. And also maybe about transcending painful experience by setting it down, and thereby taking some of the sting out of it. Which is not to say I won’t bend the truth to make a better poem, but the initial drive for a poem is all about getting my thoughts down as honestly as possible and the first person is my default setting. The shaping of it, and where it eventually ends up, can sometimes be far less personal – sometimes it stays with the personal experience and sometimes it heads off into surprising territory ('Globe' may be one example of this)…
I don’t have a problem with readers assuming everything is autobiographical, because the poems often are in this book, and even if they are not, then I have no problem with them thinking they represent the unadulterated truth about my life. I think it does make readers connect with the poems in quite a direct way. I’ve lost track of the times, after a reading, that someone has come up to me and remarked how brave I am for putting my life out there… and they do seem to believe that everything in the poems is true and that is their prerogative. I do like my work to have an emotional charge, just as much as I like it to work formally – and I hate the thought of leaving the reader unmoved. If they then want to assume things about me from my work, that’s fine. So long as the poem is good and does what it sets out to do.
Another factor is that this particular book, being dedicated to my father, and being my first collection, was conceived as an autobiographical project. Or rather, seeing how autobiographical it clearly was, when I put it together, I made the decision to run with that. This meant, unlike Paul Henry, I left out certain poems I liked, such as a first-person dramatic monologue in a male voice, for example, which was definitely not autobiographical, because it just wouldn’t fit anywhere - it skewed the overarching structure of the collection. I also had to axe some poems I liked which were not autobiographical enough – they didn’t fit either. Those are all for the next book, which may have fewer poems in the first person, although I’m not banking on it!
SHEENAGH: I find that quite fascinating, because I've read several writers, both prose and verse, talking about this autobiographical assumption lately and you are literally the only one who doesn't have a problem with it. In fact you see a potential advantage, in that this belief of theirs may heighten the "emotional charge" you want, and that may well be.
What though, if these folk who come up to talk after a reading, believing it's all happened to you, make it clear that their reaction would be different if it hadn't? I have seen readers disappointed to find some event or character came at least partly out of the writer's imagination rather than being "real", and that does worry me; it's as if they can't tell the difference between fiction and mis-mem. Are your fans perhaps more discriminating in this matter?
SUE: Perhaps I should have said ‘audiences’ rather than ‘readers’, because I think it is important to differentiate between the effect poems might have at a reading and the way a reader might respond to the poems on the page. For a public reading, I often intersperse less personal poems with autobiographical poems, ones that are perhaps more direct, more emotional, and that will communicate well. So when I read them with conviction, and often with a short intro that underlines the personal nature of an experience, then the audience tends to know when I’m proffering ‘autobiography’ and when I am not. I think, generally speaking, in this era of reality TV, many people want to believe that what they are reading or hearing is genuine, felt, emotion (unless it has a big label on it, saying FICTION!). Whether rightly or wrongly, people seem to think that poetry is more confessional, more personal, in nature. They connect and empathise with the emotion expressed, and perhaps sometimes feel they have been cheated in some way if it’s later revealed that it’s all a construct. Maybe they feel manipulated or misled. I have to say, though, that I don’t really understand why readers have to believe that something really happened, or has really been felt in order to enjoy it. It’s as though for them the emotion aroused is only valid if the impetus were true. But truth of emotion should have nothing to do with factual truth…
The book probably hasn’t been out there long enough for me to get a great deal of feedback on how the poems feel on the page but what I have had is pretty equally divided. Either people pick the more impersonal poems as their favourites, poems in which the personal narrative takes a back seat or disappears, like ‘Caravaggio’s Virgin’, or they favour poems which are more emotional, like ‘Arrival’. It depends on personal taste and, I guess, personal experience…
SHEENAGH: - and following on from that, you often take potentially quite emotional material, like the old age and death of parents, as in 'Making a Gem', where the material could hardly be more personal, but in my view you avoid the great pitfall of such material, which is sentimentality or self-pity. In fact those poems are often quite hard-edged. Does being a translator perhaps help you to maintain a distance from the material, even when it is your own, or have you another method for keeping that distance?
SUE: I’m not sure that the distance I hope I manage to maintain is down to being a translator. I think it has much more to do with the fact that I have a real horror of being perceived as sentimental or self-pitying, so I work very hard to craft the poem in such a way as to avoid that. My first response to something emotionally challenging is to want to get it down as honestly as possible and then examine the feelings aroused. I make use of form a fair bit in poems that are intensely personal, as this allows me to maintain the required distance. Many of the poems I wrote about my father’s death are formal in some way, and this helped me to control them. The act of writing about such experiences also has a distancing effect – the minute I want to shape a painful experience and put it down on paper for the world to see, it stops being a personal event and becomes more of a universal meditation on death or bereavement, say, and not so much a piece of writing about my own personal loss. Which is not to say that they aren’t painful to re-read or to perform at readings, but I want them to work as pieces of good writing, first and foremost, with a definite emotional charge. I don’t want to focus readers’ attention on my own pain, asking them to appreciate how unhappy I am, but I do want readers to be able to connect with the experience and, as a result, feel a sense of kinship or understanding.
SHEENAGH: That's a statement that makes me want to cheer, both as a writer and as a reader! I agree very much that when using such material, we should be looking for the universal in the personal. But I've often found it easier said than done. One of my techniques for depersonalising/universalising experience these days is to write in persona, or in any but the first person. You're more like Paul Henry, I think, in being unwilling to give up the intimacy which lyric first-person can bring. Another technique for universalising the personal is to home in on little details which may be unique to this relationship, but which illustrate something deeper about it, which is true of all relationships, and hope your reader will substitute his particular details when reading. That sounds convoluted, but what I mean is what you do in "Hard Skin", where a mother and daughter tend each other's feet. This won't have happened between every mother and daughter among your readers, but they may well have had some other ritual that expressed the same mutual care and the hope is that reading A will remind them of B. Have you any other techniques that might be helpful for writers wishing to move the reader while avoiding any hint of "poor me"?
SUE: As you say, this is so very hard to do. I think it is important to stay true to the emotional impetus, because that’s what moves a reader and makes them want to read about someone else’s experiences, but then crafting is crucial. The use of formal constraint is a great way of preventing self-indulgence, whether you use an established form, like the sonnet (which I find myself using a great deal), or a particular rhyme scheme, or regular stanza patterning. Anything that prevents you from saying whatever you want, when you want, and makes you use the language as a material, focusing on texture and shape. Also, concrete detail: no ideas but in things. I always find it helpful to focus very closely on imagery and description, ensuring that the language is rich and satisfying, not mundane. By this, I don’t mean reaching for images that are unusual for the sake of being unusual, or which call attention to themselves too much, but ones which earn their place by reason of their ‘unusual rightness’, so to speak. It is important to examine each phrase, each adjective, carefully to ensure that it is right on all levels (which perhaps is where translation process comes in for me) – the act of doing this means that you are less likely to drown the poem in a wash of emotion. Personas too, are a good device, as you say. Although, I, personally, often don’t feel comfortable using the third person to write about something intensely personal. It sort of feels dishonest!
SHEENAGH: I think there's some incredibly helpful advice in there, particularly about using devices that stop you saying whatever you want, when you want! You spoke of the influence of translation; what effects, in fact, would you say your work as a translator has on your original work in general?
SUE: It is hard to know, really, which feeds into which… I became a translator because I love playing with words and finding the best combination of words and emotion in the target language that replicates the words and emotion in the source language. For both professions, writing and translating, you have to be very pernickety about words and meanings. I like to think that I weigh words very carefully and am very attentive to levels of meaning and word play as a result. But this is probably one of the reasons that I became a translator and why I write poetry – not a result of either pursuit. They are really very similar in terms of practice, since in many ways you are creating a new piece of writing in your own language that is meant to mimic or reproduce the effect and spirit of the original piece, (sometimes using different devices, different puns or jokes, and different cultural references) rather than just finding the literal translations of each word in a sentence. So there is a real need for creative choices to be made at all stages. I also read both my literary translations and my poems out loud at various stages of the drafting process, and this helps me create an internal music or iron out any aural spikes which offend my ear. In the case of a translation, I will often read out the original to see how it sounds and feels on the tongue, before trying to recreate the sound and feel in the target language. The negative effect of working as a translator is one of overkill… when I have spent a long day playing with words to recreate someone else’s fictional world, I have absolutely no desire to work on my own writing… I am completely fed up with words and all I want to do is play tennis or watch bad TV – so my own writing suffers… The nice thing, of course, with translation is that you don’t need to come up with a creative impetus! You have something pre-existing to work with, so there isn’t the onus on you to come up with something exciting and original!
SHEENAGH: Yes, and some poets riff off that; for example Anne Berkeley in her collection The Men from Praga has a whole series of riffs called "Baudelaire's Pipe", which go from straight translation of the poem in question to serious reimagining. And Peter Finch has used the Google translator (or mistranslator) to remake famous poems. Are you tempted by that sort of re-creation? Or would it, for you, be too formal an impetus; would it lack the emotional charge you want?
SUE: I love what Anne Berkeley does with translation and with language – it’s so clever and witty! I have never really attempted that kind of re-creation, and I’m not sure I could do it. Perhaps it’s too close to my day job. I have to be so careful about faithfully translating the spirit of another author’s creative mission, that I think I would find it hard to move away from that in order to create a version that might run counter to what they intended or might have nothing to do with their original concept. Having said that, I would like to do more translation of poetry, and play with versions, but it’s hard enough to find enough time to do my work as a translator and write at the moment. Perhaps in the future… And, as to emotional charge, I would probably choose source works that had some kind of an emotional impetus that appealed to me and which I could somehow hijack!
SHEENAGH: I know you have friendly connections with several other writers; in that sense you're more a writer in a like-minded community than one who works in isolation. Has that always been so, and do you sense influences and cross-currents from the other writers you know well?
SUE: I think that input from other writers is incredibly important, certainly for me… Partly this may be due to the fact that both professions I have chosen are very isolated, so I welcome the sound of other voices. The danger, of course, is that you can be swayed from your original purpose by someone else’s strong opinions, if you’re not careful. I find workshopping with a group of peers I respect and whose work is very different from mine, very helpful indeed. It often enables me to crystallise my own feelings or reservations about a line or word, and helps me to turn up the volume on my own doubts. It is not that different from reading widely, which is also incredibly important. Being in a community of writers enables you to have a wider view about the issues that concern other people and you can draw on a wider range of reading and experience. As a result, I am obviously influenced by these other writers’ concerns, and this can be profitable for my own work. For instance, I have been producing more ekphrastic poems in the last couple of years, and this is probably partly in response to my own need to move away from the personal or domestic vein, and partly in response to the sort of work being done by other members of the workshop I attend.
SHEENAGH: Ooh, are we perchance talking about influence from Tamar Yoseloff's recently published Jackson Pollock poems here? They seem very far from your own concerns and methods, but I know how the most unlikely influences can creep into one's work!
SUE: Tamar Yoseloff’s work over the years has definitely been an influence and not just the Pollock sequence – her appreciation of art has been central to her life and work for years (see her very fruitful collaborations with Linda Karshan) and this is something that has interested me greatly. I like the idea of using external impetuses for poetry – after a while it feels a little boring—too predictable, and too navel-gazing—to keep mining your own childhood and emotional life for subjects. I do find, though, that I approach art, and using art in poetry, in a very emotional way. I find it hard to be ‘disengaged’ in anything I do, so even though a poem may start from a very impersonal impetus, it often ends up quite personal in approach. I also like the idea of bringing other forms of art into my work, such as music, which is a big part of my life. I think that, in general, the more external influences we allow to creep into our work, the richer and more interesting it will be!
Poems
Sample
I'm driving to the hospital
along a skein of water,
your DNA in my pocket-
two hundred million blueprints
motoring round a plastic pot
nested in a woollen sock
the tender blue of thrushes' eggs.
If this rain continues
and the world goes under again-
fields, churches and cities
roofed by a formless sea-
I'll still count as a pair
for the new ark. Bearing you
in my hand, I'd step aboard,
take to bed in the hold.
Scientists would come
to claim you as I lay curled
to keep you living. Supercooled
in liquid nitrogen, you'd be
cloned back to me, child
and husband, when the waters fell
and the dove returned.
This motile spoonful,
fertile as silt,
holds such power.
No more though
than a formula for a man
a cloudy fluid tilting
in its crucible, waiting
to become.
Making a Gem
I will measure out their ash
in the kitchen scales like gritty flour,
combining his and hers, light and dark
perhaps, agitating the urns gently
as the red needle edges to the black line-
exactly two hundred grams-
and pour the mixture into a bag
for the short drive to the post office,
pensioners' queue, special delivery.
Then a hot oven, three hundred centigrade,
relentless as the earth's core, baking
their captured carbon to pure graphite-
unique elements, sealed by steel forgings
in a crucible. Days of pressure will refine
them slowly, forcing change. Matter breaks
under such forces, atoms crystallise
and molecules bond to form stone,
fancy blue or yellow, octahedral, in the rough.
The Wreck of the Alba
after Alfred Wallis
Masts, decks, jetty, hills, dulled to old metal,
sunlessness, the mineral land, squalled wet.
Coal in the holds, iron in the stones, no light
from the lighthouse; the vessel is divided
by salt water churning like chyme.
It's a dirty drowning, thick water filling eyes,
ears, lungs, like off-milk, rancid curds blueing
the periphery. Thing lost flash by, dropping
into the depths. You cannot keep a hold-
they plummet through the water like dark boots.
Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf
Hard Skin
She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.
I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.
She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.
On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
SHEENAGH: In my interview with Paul Henry , we talked about the problem of readers assuming that "I" is the poet and that any personal-sounding material is unadorned autobiography. Paul has actually left poems he liked out of his Selected because of this problem, and I react to it by hardly ever using the first person. As a poet who uses "I" a lot, what's your take on this question?
SUE: Interesting question – the first thing I did was go back to the book and check how many first person poems there were – roughly half of the poems are in the first person and quite a few others are written in the second or third person (who is really a thinly disguised first person). Only two of the poems in the book in the first person are dramatic monologues, and one of those is in my father’s voice, so hardly fictional. I think this is because my writing stems from a personal response to the world and to events and it is important for me to put down faithfully what I feel. In a way, writing poetry for me is about ordering experience, making sense of it, and remembering it. And also maybe about transcending painful experience by setting it down, and thereby taking some of the sting out of it. Which is not to say I won’t bend the truth to make a better poem, but the initial drive for a poem is all about getting my thoughts down as honestly as possible and the first person is my default setting. The shaping of it, and where it eventually ends up, can sometimes be far less personal – sometimes it stays with the personal experience and sometimes it heads off into surprising territory ('Globe' may be one example of this)…
I don’t have a problem with readers assuming everything is autobiographical, because the poems often are in this book, and even if they are not, then I have no problem with them thinking they represent the unadulterated truth about my life. I think it does make readers connect with the poems in quite a direct way. I’ve lost track of the times, after a reading, that someone has come up to me and remarked how brave I am for putting my life out there… and they do seem to believe that everything in the poems is true and that is their prerogative. I do like my work to have an emotional charge, just as much as I like it to work formally – and I hate the thought of leaving the reader unmoved. If they then want to assume things about me from my work, that’s fine. So long as the poem is good and does what it sets out to do.
Another factor is that this particular book, being dedicated to my father, and being my first collection, was conceived as an autobiographical project. Or rather, seeing how autobiographical it clearly was, when I put it together, I made the decision to run with that. This meant, unlike Paul Henry, I left out certain poems I liked, such as a first-person dramatic monologue in a male voice, for example, which was definitely not autobiographical, because it just wouldn’t fit anywhere - it skewed the overarching structure of the collection. I also had to axe some poems I liked which were not autobiographical enough – they didn’t fit either. Those are all for the next book, which may have fewer poems in the first person, although I’m not banking on it!
SHEENAGH: I find that quite fascinating, because I've read several writers, both prose and verse, talking about this autobiographical assumption lately and you are literally the only one who doesn't have a problem with it. In fact you see a potential advantage, in that this belief of theirs may heighten the "emotional charge" you want, and that may well be.
What though, if these folk who come up to talk after a reading, believing it's all happened to you, make it clear that their reaction would be different if it hadn't? I have seen readers disappointed to find some event or character came at least partly out of the writer's imagination rather than being "real", and that does worry me; it's as if they can't tell the difference between fiction and mis-mem. Are your fans perhaps more discriminating in this matter?
SUE: Perhaps I should have said ‘audiences’ rather than ‘readers’, because I think it is important to differentiate between the effect poems might have at a reading and the way a reader might respond to the poems on the page. For a public reading, I often intersperse less personal poems with autobiographical poems, ones that are perhaps more direct, more emotional, and that will communicate well. So when I read them with conviction, and often with a short intro that underlines the personal nature of an experience, then the audience tends to know when I’m proffering ‘autobiography’ and when I am not. I think, generally speaking, in this era of reality TV, many people want to believe that what they are reading or hearing is genuine, felt, emotion (unless it has a big label on it, saying FICTION!). Whether rightly or wrongly, people seem to think that poetry is more confessional, more personal, in nature. They connect and empathise with the emotion expressed, and perhaps sometimes feel they have been cheated in some way if it’s later revealed that it’s all a construct. Maybe they feel manipulated or misled. I have to say, though, that I don’t really understand why readers have to believe that something really happened, or has really been felt in order to enjoy it. It’s as though for them the emotion aroused is only valid if the impetus were true. But truth of emotion should have nothing to do with factual truth…
The book probably hasn’t been out there long enough for me to get a great deal of feedback on how the poems feel on the page but what I have had is pretty equally divided. Either people pick the more impersonal poems as their favourites, poems in which the personal narrative takes a back seat or disappears, like ‘Caravaggio’s Virgin’, or they favour poems which are more emotional, like ‘Arrival’. It depends on personal taste and, I guess, personal experience…
SHEENAGH: - and following on from that, you often take potentially quite emotional material, like the old age and death of parents, as in 'Making a Gem', where the material could hardly be more personal, but in my view you avoid the great pitfall of such material, which is sentimentality or self-pity. In fact those poems are often quite hard-edged. Does being a translator perhaps help you to maintain a distance from the material, even when it is your own, or have you another method for keeping that distance?
SUE: I’m not sure that the distance I hope I manage to maintain is down to being a translator. I think it has much more to do with the fact that I have a real horror of being perceived as sentimental or self-pitying, so I work very hard to craft the poem in such a way as to avoid that. My first response to something emotionally challenging is to want to get it down as honestly as possible and then examine the feelings aroused. I make use of form a fair bit in poems that are intensely personal, as this allows me to maintain the required distance. Many of the poems I wrote about my father’s death are formal in some way, and this helped me to control them. The act of writing about such experiences also has a distancing effect – the minute I want to shape a painful experience and put it down on paper for the world to see, it stops being a personal event and becomes more of a universal meditation on death or bereavement, say, and not so much a piece of writing about my own personal loss. Which is not to say that they aren’t painful to re-read or to perform at readings, but I want them to work as pieces of good writing, first and foremost, with a definite emotional charge. I don’t want to focus readers’ attention on my own pain, asking them to appreciate how unhappy I am, but I do want readers to be able to connect with the experience and, as a result, feel a sense of kinship or understanding.
SHEENAGH: That's a statement that makes me want to cheer, both as a writer and as a reader! I agree very much that when using such material, we should be looking for the universal in the personal. But I've often found it easier said than done. One of my techniques for depersonalising/universalising experience these days is to write in persona, or in any but the first person. You're more like Paul Henry, I think, in being unwilling to give up the intimacy which lyric first-person can bring. Another technique for universalising the personal is to home in on little details which may be unique to this relationship, but which illustrate something deeper about it, which is true of all relationships, and hope your reader will substitute his particular details when reading. That sounds convoluted, but what I mean is what you do in "Hard Skin", where a mother and daughter tend each other's feet. This won't have happened between every mother and daughter among your readers, but they may well have had some other ritual that expressed the same mutual care and the hope is that reading A will remind them of B. Have you any other techniques that might be helpful for writers wishing to move the reader while avoiding any hint of "poor me"?
SUE: As you say, this is so very hard to do. I think it is important to stay true to the emotional impetus, because that’s what moves a reader and makes them want to read about someone else’s experiences, but then crafting is crucial. The use of formal constraint is a great way of preventing self-indulgence, whether you use an established form, like the sonnet (which I find myself using a great deal), or a particular rhyme scheme, or regular stanza patterning. Anything that prevents you from saying whatever you want, when you want, and makes you use the language as a material, focusing on texture and shape. Also, concrete detail: no ideas but in things. I always find it helpful to focus very closely on imagery and description, ensuring that the language is rich and satisfying, not mundane. By this, I don’t mean reaching for images that are unusual for the sake of being unusual, or which call attention to themselves too much, but ones which earn their place by reason of their ‘unusual rightness’, so to speak. It is important to examine each phrase, each adjective, carefully to ensure that it is right on all levels (which perhaps is where translation process comes in for me) – the act of doing this means that you are less likely to drown the poem in a wash of emotion. Personas too, are a good device, as you say. Although, I, personally, often don’t feel comfortable using the third person to write about something intensely personal. It sort of feels dishonest!
SHEENAGH: I think there's some incredibly helpful advice in there, particularly about using devices that stop you saying whatever you want, when you want! You spoke of the influence of translation; what effects, in fact, would you say your work as a translator has on your original work in general?
SUE: It is hard to know, really, which feeds into which… I became a translator because I love playing with words and finding the best combination of words and emotion in the target language that replicates the words and emotion in the source language. For both professions, writing and translating, you have to be very pernickety about words and meanings. I like to think that I weigh words very carefully and am very attentive to levels of meaning and word play as a result. But this is probably one of the reasons that I became a translator and why I write poetry – not a result of either pursuit. They are really very similar in terms of practice, since in many ways you are creating a new piece of writing in your own language that is meant to mimic or reproduce the effect and spirit of the original piece, (sometimes using different devices, different puns or jokes, and different cultural references) rather than just finding the literal translations of each word in a sentence. So there is a real need for creative choices to be made at all stages. I also read both my literary translations and my poems out loud at various stages of the drafting process, and this helps me create an internal music or iron out any aural spikes which offend my ear. In the case of a translation, I will often read out the original to see how it sounds and feels on the tongue, before trying to recreate the sound and feel in the target language. The negative effect of working as a translator is one of overkill… when I have spent a long day playing with words to recreate someone else’s fictional world, I have absolutely no desire to work on my own writing… I am completely fed up with words and all I want to do is play tennis or watch bad TV – so my own writing suffers… The nice thing, of course, with translation is that you don’t need to come up with a creative impetus! You have something pre-existing to work with, so there isn’t the onus on you to come up with something exciting and original!
SHEENAGH: Yes, and some poets riff off that; for example Anne Berkeley in her collection The Men from Praga has a whole series of riffs called "Baudelaire's Pipe", which go from straight translation of the poem in question to serious reimagining. And Peter Finch has used the Google translator (or mistranslator) to remake famous poems. Are you tempted by that sort of re-creation? Or would it, for you, be too formal an impetus; would it lack the emotional charge you want?
SUE: I love what Anne Berkeley does with translation and with language – it’s so clever and witty! I have never really attempted that kind of re-creation, and I’m not sure I could do it. Perhaps it’s too close to my day job. I have to be so careful about faithfully translating the spirit of another author’s creative mission, that I think I would find it hard to move away from that in order to create a version that might run counter to what they intended or might have nothing to do with their original concept. Having said that, I would like to do more translation of poetry, and play with versions, but it’s hard enough to find enough time to do my work as a translator and write at the moment. Perhaps in the future… And, as to emotional charge, I would probably choose source works that had some kind of an emotional impetus that appealed to me and which I could somehow hijack!
SHEENAGH: I know you have friendly connections with several other writers; in that sense you're more a writer in a like-minded community than one who works in isolation. Has that always been so, and do you sense influences and cross-currents from the other writers you know well?
SUE: I think that input from other writers is incredibly important, certainly for me… Partly this may be due to the fact that both professions I have chosen are very isolated, so I welcome the sound of other voices. The danger, of course, is that you can be swayed from your original purpose by someone else’s strong opinions, if you’re not careful. I find workshopping with a group of peers I respect and whose work is very different from mine, very helpful indeed. It often enables me to crystallise my own feelings or reservations about a line or word, and helps me to turn up the volume on my own doubts. It is not that different from reading widely, which is also incredibly important. Being in a community of writers enables you to have a wider view about the issues that concern other people and you can draw on a wider range of reading and experience. As a result, I am obviously influenced by these other writers’ concerns, and this can be profitable for my own work. For instance, I have been producing more ekphrastic poems in the last couple of years, and this is probably partly in response to my own need to move away from the personal or domestic vein, and partly in response to the sort of work being done by other members of the workshop I attend.
SHEENAGH: Ooh, are we perchance talking about influence from Tamar Yoseloff's recently published Jackson Pollock poems here? They seem very far from your own concerns and methods, but I know how the most unlikely influences can creep into one's work!
SUE: Tamar Yoseloff’s work over the years has definitely been an influence and not just the Pollock sequence – her appreciation of art has been central to her life and work for years (see her very fruitful collaborations with Linda Karshan) and this is something that has interested me greatly. I like the idea of using external impetuses for poetry – after a while it feels a little boring—too predictable, and too navel-gazing—to keep mining your own childhood and emotional life for subjects. I do find, though, that I approach art, and using art in poetry, in a very emotional way. I find it hard to be ‘disengaged’ in anything I do, so even though a poem may start from a very impersonal impetus, it often ends up quite personal in approach. I also like the idea of bringing other forms of art into my work, such as music, which is a big part of my life. I think that, in general, the more external influences we allow to creep into our work, the richer and more interesting it will be!
Poems
Sample
I'm driving to the hospital
along a skein of water,
your DNA in my pocket-
two hundred million blueprints
motoring round a plastic pot
nested in a woollen sock
the tender blue of thrushes' eggs.
If this rain continues
and the world goes under again-
fields, churches and cities
roofed by a formless sea-
I'll still count as a pair
for the new ark. Bearing you
in my hand, I'd step aboard,
take to bed in the hold.
Scientists would come
to claim you as I lay curled
to keep you living. Supercooled
in liquid nitrogen, you'd be
cloned back to me, child
and husband, when the waters fell
and the dove returned.
This motile spoonful,
fertile as silt,
holds such power.
No more though
than a formula for a man
a cloudy fluid tilting
in its crucible, waiting
to become.
Making a Gem
I will measure out their ash
in the kitchen scales like gritty flour,
combining his and hers, light and dark
perhaps, agitating the urns gently
as the red needle edges to the black line-
exactly two hundred grams-
and pour the mixture into a bag
for the short drive to the post office,
pensioners' queue, special delivery.
Then a hot oven, three hundred centigrade,
relentless as the earth's core, baking
their captured carbon to pure graphite-
unique elements, sealed by steel forgings
in a crucible. Days of pressure will refine
them slowly, forcing change. Matter breaks
under such forces, atoms crystallise
and molecules bond to form stone,
fancy blue or yellow, octahedral, in the rough.
The Wreck of the Alba
after Alfred Wallis
Masts, decks, jetty, hills, dulled to old metal,
sunlessness, the mineral land, squalled wet.
Coal in the holds, iron in the stones, no light
from the lighthouse; the vessel is divided
by salt water churning like chyme.
It's a dirty drowning, thick water filling eyes,
ears, lungs, like off-milk, rancid curds blueing
the periphery. Thing lost flash by, dropping
into the depths. You cannot keep a hold-
they plummet through the water like dark boots.
Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Wow
Date: 2012-02-24 10:39 am (UTC)