Outside The Box

Clare Pollard: Let’s begin with dead women.

Helen Bowell: When did you first get into dead women, Clare?

CP: My first great poetic loves were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who were famously dead women. What about you?

HB: Because I went to a girls’ school, I didn’t really see the need for feminism until university. Then when we studied the Romantic poets, after three lectures on Byron, three on Keats or whatever, we had one lecture covering three female poets, who were hugely popular in their time! That was partly what sparked Dead [Women] Poets Society. Well, it was Jasmine Simms’s idea – I knew her from the Writing Squad and university – and an opportunity to put on an event via the Squad.

CP: I was similar. At university, I did English Literature and we were taught very few female poets. There was a party-line that women hadn’t just not written poetry because they’d been having children; they were also illiterate and it was a shame. Then there’s Virginia Woolf’s argument that Shakespeare’s sister would have just killed herself if she’d existed. What radicalised me was when I started to realise that history’s actually full of female writers, they’ve just been forgotten, neglected, and ignored. It’s really interesting, that process of canon-making: who’s praised, anthologised and taken seriously? Who will we remember from now? Anyway, I love your Dead [Women] Poets Society séances.

HB: Thanks. I guess the appeal is that it’s kitsch and self-aware, playing with the occult but also obviously thinking about it as a ‘haunting’. We invite two living women or non-binary poet-necromancers to ‘resurrect’ and respond creatively to a dead woman poet. It’s not academic, it’s meant to be entertaining, especially since so many of their lives ended in tragedy. We don’t want that to be all they’re famous for. We have to keep it light somehow.

CP: It’s always been dangerous to be a female poet.

HB: A female anything.

CP: Well, yeah. But female poets particularly, you’re putting your head above the parapet. You’re going to be called a whore for putting yourself out there in the public sphere. When I was editing Modern Poetry in Translation, you and Jasmine worked with me on a Dead [Women] Poets issue. Translation is another way in which female voices are erased, because people just repeatedly resurrect Rilke and ignore these amazing female poets. Who did you discover in that process?

HB: So many. That Jessica Wood translation of Enheduanna, the first known poet in history, called ‘The Origins of the Fire Emoji’, which was so playful. And Zoë Brigley’s translations of the medieval Welsh poet, Gwerful Mechain, stick in the mind.

CP: I was going to say those! I’d already published ‘Ode to a Cunt’ in a previous issue – was yours the one about watching a friend piss? And she’s a British poet, and I’d never heard of her…

HB: Well, she’s a triple threat, in that she’s a woman, writing in Welsh, and about pissing. Of course they erased her.

CP: In my latest collection The Lives of the Female Poets, I dig into researching these forgotten poets. The BBC approached me to do a documentary about Anne Locke who wrote the first sonnet sequence in English – it’s incredible we did so much on the sonnet at university and she’d been erased from that history.

HB: And there’s Charlotte Turner Smith, who revived the sonnet. We wouldn’t be writing sonnets without women. Damn those men!

CP: Well, some gatekeepers particularly. I mean, Emily Brontë thought she was a failed writer. She died really young with all these really bad reviews in her drawer. There’s a poem in this book where I vent my anger about a reviewer of Brontë- I made him a composite of all the bad-faith male gatekeepers women in that period came up against.

HB: You’ve said elsewhere this book is partly about the trauma of being a writer. In ‘The Craving’ you write: ‘I like to be rejected very privately […] I’m really absolutely fine.’ But lots of people would say you’re one of the most confident writers – female writers – they know. So it’s perhaps surprising to read that and know you suffer like the rest of us.

CP: Of course. Being a writer is constant rejection!

HB: Even now?

CP: Yeah. For example, between my last two novels, I wrote another novel that was rejected. You think you’ve made it, and then you’ve not. There’s a difference between knowing you’re good and thinking anyone will notice. I think we both, by the skin of our teeth, make a living in literature. But it’s hard. We’re quite unusual.

HB: How do you do it?

CP: It’s always been hand-to-mouth, and you never know what the next year’s going to bring. I’ve had part-time jobs, from ushering and bar work in my twenties, to teaching or editing MPT, but they’ve never brought in more than half my income. I just try to think six months ahead only and always have a project on the go. How about your living?

HB: Well, I’ve mostly had longer-term jobs. I had a lucky first job at The Poetry Society, then I freelanced part-time at the Poetry Translation Centre. Last year I really was in the freelance wilderness for the first time. Having nothing was very difficult – all of my time was spent writing applications, not poems.

CP: There’s nothing worse than writing applications for tiny bits of money.

HB: And two hundred people will apply for a £1,000 job. All the human hours wasted.

CP: And ordinary things like reviewing, doing a reading – the rates haven’t gone up since I started. The standard reading fee of £150 – I remember being offered that when I was twenty.

HB: And inflation’s so high.

CP: I did a review recently for £70. I like doing it, but it’s really hard to get income together from scraps like that. Especially when each one involves its own invoicing, relationship management, pitching and chasing. But there’s never been money in poetry, right? Which is why the poets led terrible lives.

HB: Actually, Byron was paid the equivalent of £230,000 for the first two cantos of Don Juan. And Charlotte Turner Smith wrote a book of poems to get her and her husband out of jail. So poetry sold at some point. Why do you still do it, then?

CP: Because when I’m writing, it’s the best thing in the world. You say I seem very confident, but for me, it’s a sort of manic-depressive cycle. When I’m into it, I always think: ‘this is the best book anyone’s ever written.’ It’s a buzz, a real joy. I’m totally absorbed, I’m in my dressing gown at three o’clock when I’m supposed to be ready for school pick-up. I’m just all in.

HB: It’s that flow state, right? I’m not sure I’d describe that personally as ‘joy’, but it’s satisfying and occupying in a way that other work isn’t. You open your document and see what’s next, edit a bit, move things around, research. It’s a different way of completing something.

CP: The depression comes with publication. It’s generally quite disappointing. Every writer I know thinks they’re overlooked. Prize lists come and go, and you’re not on them. You’re not stocked in the bookshops. And you’re making yourself vulnerable to criticism too, it’s exposing. But I have to lean into that feeling of joy now, when I’m writing. I have to realise that’s a good enough reason. Talking of joy, your pamphlet The Barman feels like it was fun to write. You did a talk at Winchester Poetry Festival about Luke Kennard’s poem ‘The Murderer’ and I wondered if that was an influence?

HB: Yes, one hundred per cent. When I was a teenager, I entered the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, and Luke was one of the judges. He came along to a reading we organised at the Poetry Café and was so nice. He read ‘The Murderer’. And it was so different. It’s funny, it’s sarcastic, not the kind of thing we read at school. And then I started to get weirder with my writing.

CP: So who is the barman?

HB: He’s over there! (laughs) I guess he’s just a generic middle-class white guy.

CP: And the speaker and the barman are housemates? Because there’s this kind of dance between them, I wasn’t quite sure if there was attraction or friendship or if he was just really annoying.

HB: Yeah, they’re in a relationship. It starts with the end of the relationship and it goes backwards. I wasn’t intending this when I started writing, but it came to be about: how do you navigate a relationship with an individual, in the context of the climate crisis, racism, sexism, homophobia? How do those things play out when you’re aware (or not) of the social structures causing them? So, yeah, he’s a white guy, basically. But he doesn’t mean any harm.

CP: White privilege is definitely a theme in my work. My whole adult life, I’ve lived in London in Brick Lane, Dalston, Peckham. If I want to write about my community, that has to include people of colour. But sometimes in a poem, I’ve mentioned someone’s black or that there’s boys hanging outside a chicken shop and people have asked if it’s racist. I’m literally just describing the neighbourhood! That’s my son’s friends. But I think a lot of white poets never mention race, because that’s the safe thing to do.

HB: It’s eerie. Like how in so many eighteenth-century novels slavery’s not mentioned. Especially after George Floyd’s murder, more people have wanted to write about racism. But it’s so easy to end up with these inward-looking, self-flagellating poems where the writers are not so much looking at racism, but their own failing or their own goodness. So how does a white person do this sensitively?

CP: My main regret is that I used to assume I had a white audience when I was young. I was trying to get through to the people I grew up with in Bolton. But then I’d be surprised when a writer of colour said they liked my work or something. It makes you recalibrate and think, actually, who is my reader? I shouldn’t make assumptions. Hopefully I’m wiser now.

HB: There’s a line in Look, Clare, Look where you write about the US’s ‘secret war’ with Laos: if ‘we’ had known about it, you say, ‘It’s generous, to guess we would have cared’.

CP: That’s true. Writers, especially white writers, need to use that ‘we’ with care.

HB: I also don’t have the experience of being black. The biggest microaggression I get is being mistaken, constantly lately, for other East Asian poets. Just this week, at the Eliots, it happened twice. I’m working on an essay about it. But in terms of anti-black racism, I guess I also only write obliquely. You don’t want to centre your own experience, but you don’t want to say only black people can write about it. It’s a question I think about a lot: how can you write about other people’s injustices ethically?

CP: You can only really bear witness to your own lived experience. Once you start guessing about other people’s experiences, you’re in a dangerous space. What happens to me is, and I’m not saying it’s the right way, those things just creep in. Through imagery; through atmosphere. Say you’re writing a poem about feeding a baby, but all those things you’ve doomscrolled past press in. Because it’s not happening in a vacuum. Especially now, when we all get news constantly, it colours how we move through the world.

HB: Definitely. How can you write a poem about anything in nature now without thinking about climate change?

CP: Exactly, it creeps in. Same as in The Barman.

HB: Do you feel like you ‘should’ be writing about X or Y topic?

CP: I do feel a great obligation to truth, because I think we live in such an age of disinformation. But the stories I write take me towards different truths. The Modern Fairies, my novel about fairytale salons at the time of Louis XIV, is in many ways about Trump: Versailles is sort of Mar-a-Lago. Sometimes I think it’s better to approach things slant. Over twenty years ago, I wrote a climate-change play called The Weather. The fucking Weather, Helen. Couldn’t have been more on the nose. But it was amazing how the critics fell over themselves not to say it was a play about climate change – the weather was a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and the daughter, or whatever. They didn’t want to see.

HB: Cassandra…

CP: Don’t get me started on Cassandra! Although an interest in myth is something we both share. Let’s talk about your new work in progress.

HB: So I’m working on a sequence that’s in three parts, told from three different female voices in Arthurian legends. The first is Queen Guinevere and I’m queering her: instead of cheating on Arthur with Lancelot, she gets off with – spoiler alert! – Morgan le Fay. There’s an early version of it in The Book of Bad Betties. The second section is the Lady of the Lake, which I’m writing in Terrance Hayes’s form of ‘a gram of &s’ where your end-words are anagrams made from the title. I’ve cheated, because each poem should have eleven lines, and the end-words should be at least four letters…

CP: It’s a complicated form, isn’t it? I’ve never tried it.

HB: There’s something really meditative about it. And like all forms it’s a puzzle, and that’s the fun.

CP: Every book, I try a couple of forms I haven’t done before. This time I included my first sestina, which is addressed to Elizabeth Bishop, the queen of sestinas.

HB: What’s your favourite form?

CP: Ballads? Because they’re working class, and have narrative. But I do love a dramatic monologue. I translated Ovid’s Heroides which is the OG book of dramatic monologues, retelling Greek myths from the women’s perspectives. Your Arthurian book is a series of dramatic monologues, really, isn’t it?

HB: I suppose, though I’d never really thought of it. Have you always been into myth?

CP: Yes, but my first three books don’t have any myth in them. When I started, there was a bit of a backlash against what Larkin called the ‘myth-kitty’: a sense it was overused.

HB: It goes in cycles, doesn’t it?

CP: But then by Changeling I got bored of writing about myself. And around the same time, I discovered ballads and thought, well, they’re not overused – all those amazing English folk tales have been forgotten. And I had this whole new dressing-up box.

HB: Yes, writers know a lot of the Greek myths, but the British ones are not always as well-known.

CP: I like to think the craze for Greek and Roman myths is sort of my fault because I translated Ovid’s Heroides, which retells them from women’s perspectives. I opened Pandora’s box. Now you go into a bookshop and can’t move for retellings.

HB: And that’s the nice thing: even if your work doesn’t survive a hundred years from now, you’re part of the conversation, and you have no idea who you’re influencing.

CP: Sure, we all do some of that shaping of the canon. The Heroides was neglected before, but that’s changing. I hope I’ve helped put it back into the conversation.

HB: And that’s a way that the female poet survives. You know, maybe we wouldn’t have the sonnet in English without Anne Locke and Charlotte Turner Smith. And is there something masculine about wanting to be named, anyway? There are eight billion people on Earth. You can’t remember all of them. But we’re all doing this human endeavour together, writing and influencing each other. And isn’t that the interesting thing?

CP: The Modern Fairies is a bit about that. Charles Perrault’s fairytales wouldn’t have existed without the women who ran the salon, and all the working-class women who originally told those stories, like his nanny.

HB: True, it’s wrong to remember only the men. I enjoyed how in both your book The Untameables and my project we’ve made Merlin the bad guy, which he canonically is! I have him as this letch, who’s trying to have sex with the Lady of the Lake. But that’s taken from Mallory – who himself wrote the Morte D’Arthur in prison, after having beat up someone, and raped a woman.

CP: I have to say about your Arthurian book, it’s quite romantasy, isn’t it?

HB: What do you mean? I’ve never even heard the word before!

CP: It’s a massive genre at the moment. Women are buying these sexy fantasy novels with sexy elves, sexy wizards.

HB: That’s great because I like sexy witches.

CP: And talking about sexuality…Tell me about Bi+ Lines.

HB: I got Arts Council England funding a couple of years ago, to run some writing workshops and put together what seems to be the first anthology of bi+ poets. I did it because I couldn’t name many contemporary bisexual poets. But it was amazingly wanted: the workshops sold out immediately, we had 2,800 submissions and sold loads of copies. It was really a community project: it was lots of people’s first time being in a space exclusively with others from that subsection of the acronym. The project’s theme was ‘in-betweenness’, and how people can make you feel it’s an in-between identity because you’re not straight, you’re not gay.

CP: I’m bi, but I met my husband very young at university. Certainly for my generation, there was a sense that, ‘Oh, you’ve decided then’. I always told my friends I was bi but it’s hard to keep that flame in you alive.

HB: And it must feel like you’re being put into a box that doesn’t quite contain all of you.

CP: On the other hand, I haven’t really experienced homophobia.

HB: But that’s a classic bisexual spiel: ‘But I have bi privilege!’ When actually, you also have to live with this feeling of…not being fully honest, somehow, because it’s not visible unless you announce it.

CP: I thought it was a really interesting project for that reason. Did it make you want to edit more?

HB: So fourteen poems (who published the Bi+ Lines anthology) has asked me and Troy Cabida to be editors of their magazine and their pamphlet series. We’re picking which pamphlets to publish now, and I know I’m going to get really invested and spend too much time on it, but it’s fun. I don’t think I’d want to be an editor full-time though – always trying to improve other people’s work, not having time for your own. You said that you didn’t write a single poem when you were at MPT?

CP: Yeah. I read so many poems that it puts you off! I really try not to write one now unless I have something important to say. I’m certainly not sitting at a desk in the morning thinking: the world needs another poem by Clare Pollard.

HB: I do sometimes sit down to force something out, not because the world needs it but I need it in some sense. I’ve been going through a tricky writing period for years now, which is also why I’ve been so stop-start with this Arthurian project. I’ve lost my confidence. I’ve tried everything: writing every day, morning pages. I’m starting to realise I need to wake up and get straight into it for a few hours – I can’t look at my messages or the news first otherwise I can’t concentrate. So what makes you write a poem?

CP: Two things have to come together. Usually it starts with a metaphor: something I want to communicate, and an image to express it. Also, usually I know the ending.

HB: I think that’s unusual for a poet.

CP: I love a big ending. I love twists and reveals and big emotional landings. Often, with a novel, I’ll have the ending but I don’t know how I’ll get there. I’ve already imagined the ending of the children’s trilogy I’m writing, and it made me cry. If I cry, it’s a good sign. For poems, I’m not sure it’s good advice, but I always end big. I can’t resist rhyming couplets. I like Shakespeare, endings that snap shut. Clever payoffs.

HB: But it’s never as neat as the form makes it seem.

CP: I’ve always enjoyed those big last lines: ‘we must love one another or die’. Lots of workshops tell you not to spell it out, but I like assertions that make you ask, ‘Can that be true?’

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