‘On’
a conversation between Dawn Watson and Tara Bergin
Dawn Watson, Tara Bergin
On Headshots
Tara Bergin: It’s a satisfyingly violent word for something poets are commonly asked for. Do you have any thoughts about the poet’s photo?
Dawn Watson: I overthink them, possibly from years as a journalist being conscious of photo choices for news stories and how they cast the article in a particular light.
TB: I like those action shots: the ceramicist throwing a pot, say…or when the person isn’t clearly in the picture at all – someone’s head behind a large plant. Or a picture of a foot.
DW: A mood.
TB: What would happen if poets didn’t have to use photos of their faces?
DW: I’m not sure we can get away from it. Pictures affect how we read a thing, don’t they. I knew someone whose profile picture was the view from their porch – a haybale in a field. It gave the impression that they were updating everything from a chair by this majestic site. Dipping in from the horizon of the world.
TB: I’ve just been writing a poem about a haybale in a field.
DW: Is it easier to have a weird artist photo if you’re famous?
On Image
TB: My dad became deeply involved in photography. He spent many years attempting to capture the singularity of a thing: a seedhead, say, or a single stone.
DW: I think my headshot could be a stone if I was famous. My dad was into photography, too. He worked in the shipyard but bought a pawn shop camera and took pictures of us with our faces over candles.
TB: The presenting of an image in a photograph – is it the same as poems, do you think?
DW: I suppose the image is never one thing in a poem, it’s always travelling outwards – which seems to me a less fixed idea of image than with photographs stealing a moment.
On Voice
TB: I would say voice is the starting point of a poem. If I have the voice, then the poem comes.
DW: I’ve never really found voice to be an entry point. I feel more focused on the event of the poem, that interaction between the you, the I, and the reader. I wrote a poem recently about separate storms experienced simultaneously in different time zones – how do we convey that slippage through form?
TB: The useful limits of form – limits are so often essential for opening the possibilities of a poem. Whether it’s rhyme, or a single imagined constraint –
DW: Like ekphrasis. Where the poem is limited by the transition, or transaction, between the painting and the self. Even if it’s a simple image, the restriction unlocks more than if someone says: write what you want.
TB: It’s like you put limits on yourself that make you fight to get free of them. Then the fight becomes the poem.
On Wonder
TB: What do you think people want to read in a conversation like this?
DW: Probably the ordinariness of two people talking, maybe things we wonder at or find hard.
TB: Things that that preoccupy us, that might preoccupy them –
DW: Like prose poems, because they’ve always annoyed me. And yet I love so many prose poems. I don’t know why I feel conflicted.
TB: Probably because they are impossible to define. Like…the pressure of a definition… But the more we try to define the prose poem, the more it eludes us.
DW: Yes, the more I talk about it the weirder I feel.
TB: The name itself is so irresistibly contrary, so evasive. It would argue with St. Peter at the gates of heaven, as my granddad used to say to me. It’s like that playground taunt: ‘everything I say is a lie’ –
DW: I wrote a sequence of prose poems recently. I say ‘prose poem’ but every three lines, the line is broken.
TB: So, does that mean every third line the poet in you appears?
On Clarity
TB: Do you remember thinking that anyone who has a book published must finally have achieved a sense of clarity? Then you publish a book and find the opposite is true –
DW: It doesn’t bring what you imagine it will. When I published my book, my son said, Great, how much money have you made? The answer was like, ninety pounds.
On Shelves
TB: I see you’ve got Elizabeth Bishop sitting up there on the top shelf.
DW: People come in for a meeting and think she’s my mother. I notice you’ve got Kierkegaard back there.
TB: Now – there’s a good head of hair –
On Fear and Trembling
TB: The thing you said earlier – that we could talk about what we find hard. Do you mean the times we think everything has failed but it turns out later it was a necessary crisis point? Or do you mean things you look back on and think: that just failed.
DW: I don’t want to be too strict on what we mean by failure… but I suppose something like you say – the necessary crisis –
TB: Too much doubt too soon – that can be damaging. Thomas pushing his hand into Christ’s side. There is a point when everything feels uncertain. But a poem might need you to believe in it for a while, until it can reveal the truth.
DW: I have an unhelpful urge to compress the life out of poems, usually when – I’m suddenly realising – I don’t have the voice. I just squeeze the air out of it until I have a shrunken head. Then I need to start again and throw the net wider. Can I take back what I said earlier about voice?
On Being and Nothingness
TB: Yes I think it needs protecting, especially at the start of a poem or any creative project. My tip would be… don’t look up from it too quickly to check if it’s going to fit somewhere.
DW: The mental and emotional labour is a pressure I resist – the sitting down and giving away brain and heart space. I seem to have invented an internal sort of sardonic voice. Sounds like: “Oh, good one, Dawn. Glad you prioritised that light bulb before writing the poem. Nice work.”
On Teaching
Dawn Watson: We are both lecturers in poetry, and poets – how do you experience that intersection?
Tara Bergin: The right hand fighting the left hand.
DW: I would find it easier to be a poet and run a goat farm.
On Driving
DW: What drives you as a poet?
TB: Words. They’re all I’ve got.
On Inspiration
DW: What made you think you could write a poem?
TB: I would say the thought came more like, ‘I want to write something like this’ and I think the thought came strongest when I started to read poetry in translation. My understanding of what a poem could be expanded.
DW: When I read Leontia Flynn’s ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins’ I thought: oh, you mean poems can be funny about mental illness, gay this and gay that? I wrote her a fan email and she said: this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever read.
On Scraps
TB: The wall above my desk has about a hundred scraps of paper pinned up. One scrap is a short poem by Lady Ki No Washika translated from the Japanese. It’s called ‘No’. Beside it I’ve scrawled a note: ‘Do you want your poems to be published?’ It was a question someone raised in a poetry workshop. The poem goes: ‘If I say no, it’s only / Because I fear that yes / Would bring me nothing in the end,/ But a fiercer loneliness.’ I think the whole experience of having your poems read by others is very hard. Yet it’s what we work for.
DW: It never stops being hard. I moved house last month and have just two things on the wall above my desk: a roe deer skull, and a yellow Post-it Note – it says, ‘whatever it is, you decide’.
