Rachel Trezise talks with Caroline Bird, also an award-winning poet. Her new collection, Watering Can (Carcanet), will be published in November.
R: One of the most remarkable things about your work is that your first poetry collection, 'Looking Through Letterboxes,' was published when you were just 15-yrs-old, and your second, 'Trouble Came to the Turnip,' when you were 20. The obvious question is how did you get into writing at such a young age, and how did you manage to become published at 15?
C: It is the obvious question and the real answer is that I'm not sure. I started writing poems when I was about eight years old, which is strange because although my family loved reading, poetry doesn't register high in my memory. Nonetheless, for some mysterious reason, I used to sit on my beanbag in my bedroom and write columns of words in my Beano notebook. My father has a theory that I was trying to work out what a person was. He remembers sitting with me, as a four year old, and answering my endless questions about what was going on in my brain and what was going on in other people's brains. Also, my younger brother had a serious road accident at the age of six, when I was eight, and this affected me very deeply and apparently, in the car hurtling behind the ambulance, I turned to my dad and said 'we're all as fragile as butterflies aren't we daddy? This might sound like a sentimental moment from a Lifetime movie and it's a pretty rubbish line of poetry, but it marked my realization that visual images were the only answer to a feeling of helplessness. Then, when I was thirteen, I won the Foyles Young Poets of the Year Award and the prize was a week-long residential poetry course at the Arvon Foundation. I'd never spend time with other young poets before and it was just this amazing parallel universe where if you wrote poetry, you were cool and if you didn't, you were a bit weird. After that injection of permission, and the encouragement of the tutors, I came home and sent six poems off to the magazine P.N Review. It was the first time I'd ever sent anything. A week later, I got a letter from Michael Schmidt - the founder and M.D of Carcanet Press - saying 'can you please send us all the poems you've ever written?' I hadn't realized that P.N Review was connected to a publishing house - I'd just found the address in the Writers Handbook. Anyway, I sent Michael about a hundred poems and I got a letter back telling me he wanted to publish my book. I had my first collection , 'Looking Through Letterboxes,' published within the year. I've subsequently found out that being chosen for publication in this way never happens, so I feel incredibly lucky.
R: A journalist described me once as 'a girl with a bag full of literary prizes', when in reality I only have one. You, however, have several. Are there any that you are particularly proud of or that stick in your mind for any particular reason? What do you think about literary prizes, are they a poisoned chalice or a way to bring new audiences to your work?
C: Besides the Foyles Young Poet of the Year Award, I was a winner of the Poetry London Competition in 2007, the Peterloo Poetry Competition for three years running (2004, 2003 and 2002) and a major Eric Gregory Award in 2002. I was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008. This is just a regurgitation of my Wikipedia page. Of course, I'm proud of all of these recognitions and I haven't included the dozens of competitions I entered and didn't win so much as a measly commendation. Winning a major Eric Gregory Award of several thousand pounds was extremely nice. It was reassuring to know that people not only liked my writing but believed in my potential as a writer. Also, being nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize did bring me some new readers and some international connections. I think competitions are marvellous just so long as you don't take them too seriously and can tolerate not winning and understand the judging is subjective.
R: What I find most striking about your poetry is the precarious balance between melancholy and optimism that you manage to straddle in a seemingly effortless way. In your poems 'Relationship Dolls,' and 'Virgin,' there is a considerable sense of guilt about being an imperfect woman but it is buttressed by a wonderfully, wry humour. Is it a juxtaposition you create intentionally, or a natural feature?
C: For me, there isn't a juxtaposition between anxiety and humour because you can't examine that anxiety without laughing at yourself. If you didn't ridicule the obsession with your own imperfection, you'd be really self-important. So, yes, it is a natural feature, not an intentionally created device. Also, humour allows me to be intensely personal without being over self-exposing. It slackens the serious stuff of the authorial voice and so hopefully allows the reader to look for themselves within the poems, rather than simply staring at me. I feel very strongly that although the poems start from within my own, sometimes petty, experience and anxiety and awareness of my own flaws, what I really want to write about is the human experience so I consciously craft and work at taking my own experience and putting it forward for trial in the public court.
R: As a person born and brought up in Wales, I am constantly referred to as a 'Welsh writer,' and am expected to examine my country with a magnifying glass. This doesn't seem to be so much the case with English writers. You're allowed to get right down to the human condition, or are you? Do people expect you to write about your experiences growing up in Leeds?
C: No they don't, and it's shocking that there should be expectations that confine a writer to write about the place in which they happen to have been born. Though I do have an affinity with the North of England, I mainly write about individual characters and the differences in their regional identity isn't normally relevant. In relation to this question, I have realized there is a certain type of hypocrisy that is targeted in 'Watering Can,' and in some brand new poems that I think is a London hypocrisy. There are certain people who enjoy embodying the idea of a metropolis. Perhaps it's easier for them to centre their vibrant egos in a capital city. Londoners can adopt a superiority that grants them absolution. This absolution, apparently, isn't so readily available north of Watford.
R: You had a play, 'A Special Boy,' performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, and you're a member of The Royal Court Young Writer's Programme. How much of your time is occupied by drama? Is it something you'd like to pursue in greater depth? And do you ever feel an urge to cross over to the dark side and work with prose? A collection of short stories, or a novel?
C: I write plays because I love drama and, more specifically, I love arguing with myself. I love staging a dialogue between different misguided voices and knowing that the truth is somewhere in between, like pressing the sides of a bubble. I want to write a lot more plays. However, much as I revere and admire novelists - for example, Dickens is one of my favourite artists in the whole world - I don't have the stamina and I don't have the prolonged narrative imagination to write a novel myself. Not yet anyway. Your short stories, to me, are like extended prose poems in their brutal imagery and their act of wrenching a moment from a life and laying it out on a page, but I can't do this either. Perhaps it's because I don't have your brilliant eye for narrative details. I sweep and stab at pictures, rather than dust them for fingerprints. At the moment, plays and predominately poetry seem to satisfy the stories I want to tell.
R: Your new poetry collection, Watering Can, is published in November this year. Can you tell me a little about the themes? Does it deviate in any way from your previous collections? Do you find your writing, or the purpose of it, is changing as you get older?
C: Watering Can was written over three years. Most of this time was divided between studying English at Oxford and building my life as a poet. My academic studies have inspired a few poems in this collection. For example, 'Perspectives' is a loose version of the Old English Lyric 'Deor.' My version is about young drug-addicts. Additionally, there is my first ever sonnet, 'Bright Winter Mornings in Oxford Town,' which also happens to be one of my rudest poems to date. However, though I deal with the complexities of feelings about being in an institution like Oxford, there is a change in tone, I think, from the internal rebel of my last collection, 'Trouble Came To the Turnip.' 'Watering Can' shows what I do believe in, as well as what I'm fighting against. Essentially, it's a collection about 'trying to be happy.' So, in a way, it's the saddest book I've ever written. It's about watching my friends, and myself, turn into adults. It's about the gap between who you are and who you want to be. Many of the poems are characterized by 'The Spirit of the Stairwell' - this is a translation from the French expression describing that feeling you get when, minutes after walking away from a conversation, you think 'damn, that's what I should have said!' In other words, many of the poems are personal messages to people that I didn't necessarily have the knowledge, or the courage, to give at the time. In terms of visual imagery, I find the more I know about reality the more unreal my imagery becomes. So, of course, there are 'saints with erections playing netball with elephants.' Because of all the above, I've found my sense of humour expressing itself mainly in an ironic way rather than a broadly comic sense (excepting 'University Poetry Society,' which is 100% insult.) Since the poems are looking at questions rather than conclusions, it's difficult to summarise. All I can say is that I knew, from the very beginning, that I needed to have a bright yellow front cover.
R: You've recently been working in rural Rajasthan with young people cured of cataract blindness, encouraging them to write poetry about the way they see the world around them. Can you tell me about how this programme came about, how it worked, and what you gained from the experience? I read somewhere that you are an 'enthusiastic leader' of poetry workshops, and I noticed that one of your brilliant new poems, 'Women in Progress,' is about the lives of some of the girls you've encountered in your workshops. How can poetry help people in disadvantaged situations?
C: "…Everyone is happy, seeing the watch.
The hands move all day long,
not for themselves, but for the people."
…from 'the Watch' by Azaz (13 years old)
Azaz was unnecessarily blind until he was twelve. His father - a watch-repairer - hadn't realized that he was blind and simply put his behaviour down to laziness and lack of concentration. I visited Azaz at his home and after talking to him, through an interpreter, a little bit about the poetry we can find in our everyday lives, he sat down and wrote this incredible poem. He then read out loud to all the elders in his village who had gathered on the roof. Azaz's father realized that his son was far from stupid.
In the Autumn of 2008, as an artistic and educational experiment I was invited by the Second Sight Project to visit different young people in Rajasthani rural villages. The idea was to help them express, explore and describe this new-found sense of sight and their reaction to being sighted.
"In the eye-hospital for birds,
a parrot wakes to find
his wings are green... "
from 'A Parrot Called Mitto' by Neehar (5 years old)
This little girl had suffered from traumatic cataracts and been cured five months previously. Dr Lucy Mathan, the indefatigable founder of the Second Sight Project, had the idea that a poet working with newly-sighted young people, would be a valuable experience. For me, that few weeks' experience was beyond price. When a doctor cures the eyes he/she is not just giving them the power of sight, they also gain the potential for visual imagination.
In England, I've worked with lots of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and while the arts can't solve many financial situations, art makes people happier. When someone realizes their power to be expressive, their self-esteem rises.
R: You're currently studying English at Oxford University. Do you have any plans following graduation? I mean, the possibilities are limitless, surely?
C: I want to write and continue my teaching. I want to become an ambassador, in some form, for the importance of poetry in all situations and in the future I would ideally like to set up my own poetry school. And of course, banging on about the intricacies of my own fascinating psychology in interviews such as this will always be essential to my hat-size.
Previously: Fflur Dafydd talks with Rachel Trezise
