Still Life, Refracted Beauty

Richard Scott: Thank you for this extremely generous question and for your kind words, Serge; I’m so happy to be corresponding with you. And I’m just so happy that you liked Soho. This new book grew out of my obsessions – crystals, crystal medicine, still-life paintings, poetry, queer ancestry – and I’ve spent the last seven years researching and writing towards these ideas in various procedural ways. It’s lovely that you mention language as I guess that’s been my focus; I’m trying to investigate the kind of language we might use to write about hurt when we don’t have access to normative language to express ourselves. The speaker in these poems can’t say exactly what’s happened to them as speaking directly might be too painful, and there is no template, so they turn to ekphrastic symbols, the vocabulary of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, the lexicon of geology and crystals, and the queer ancestral influence of Arthur Rimbaud, in order to sing.

RS: I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Peter Gizzi for the Poetry Society which just blew my mind. His ideas on poetry as a ‘profoundly haunted medium’ really struck a chord with and inspired me, and the epigraph quoting him gestures at that. Emily Dickinson, another poetic love of mine, is there too, suggesting that song, this language under pressure, might be born of endurance, hurt, and, potentially, survival. Denise Riley, another beloved influence, helped me understand that I might be able to somehow ‘reply’ to hurt through language once I had found the relevant ‘device’ to do so; this turned out to be Andrew Marvell’s vocabulary from ‘To His Coy Mistress’. A fragment from one of CAConrad’s Somatic Poetry Rituals opens the crystal poems. Conrad was one of the first poets I read who took crystals and crystal medicine seriously and believed in their poetic potential; they also encouraged a permissive, bodily, and immersive way of interacting with these ancient stones. 

My influences haven’t changed exactly but like all poets I read voraciously, and I am always trying to discover new ways forward through language. These poets shepherded and expanded my thinking. Such a large part of ‘writing is reading’, Roberto Bolaño said that, and the nine epigraphs and quotes throughout my book are a glimpse into my reading habits across the last seven years. 

RS: I wrote about the paintings which most stunned or shocked me. I’ve always loved still lifes but I guess writing these poems brought me to a greater understanding of why the genre is so resonant for me and I think it has a lot to do with how a traumatic experience might be frozen, or varnished, in time: hurt can be ambered and constantly, albeit unwillingly, recalled. And that’s what the still-life painting is – a startling preservation. The dying flowers or ‘brutalised’ animals in the paintings – songbirds, rabbits, lobster, etc. – haunt. I’ve come to think of them as ornate and shining ghosts. Ghosts that speak in colour, texture, and subtext. Maybe even queer ghosts, as you say, who’ve borne abuse, violence, and the penetrating and shame-inducing gaze. The still-life genre has always been a radical space – full of subversive political messages – and also a place where marginalised artists could thrive, so somehow it felt like an appropriate creative space in which to perform a queer examination of trauma. 

I became obsessed with paintings by artists like Rachel Ruysch and her vivid, hyper-real, sensuous roses, and Jean Siméon Chardin who managed to imbue everyday objects, like an egg or a pestle and mortar, with such shocking magnetism and density that they disrupt the normative perception of domestic items. I think the ‘ekphrastic symbols’ in a still-life painting are so imbued with meaning (a fly, for instance, might simultaneously mean rot and spoil, encroaching death, sin, corruption, celebration of the smallest elements of creation, artistic mastery, etc.) that it felt possible to not only fall into those deep wells of significance but to dig further and find out what they might symbolise for me. To queer them. 

In writing the poems, I challenged myself to spend as much time in front of these paintings as possible – I went to galleries to see them and tried to enter a trance of looking. What would it be like, I wondered, if I looked at a painting for an hour instead of three minutes, what might I see, what might I feel? I wanted to challenge the safety that one has when one can look away from a dramatic artwork. This immersion, focus, repeatedly opened the lyric wound.

RS: Thank you for generously hearing those things in the work! In writing ‘Coy’, I guess I was leaning into the found-ness of language. It’s so extraordinary to me that every word has been used and reused an inestimable number of times. In using words like ‘coy’, ‘rubies’, and ‘song’, somehow I am linked, via the archive of language, to everyone who has ever used and will ever use them. In this way, language also contains traces of the dead. Found poetry celebrates these complex occurrences. 

Of course, formally, the strongest link in my poem is to Marvell, a poetic ancestor. I have a deep attachment to ‘To His Coy Mistress’; but it’s not always been an easy one – even though he’s parodying a type of seducer within his poem, a subconscious part of me still reacts to its potential darkness and I wanted to investigate why that was. Poetry is a powerful tool to bring you closer to an understanding of something. An illumination device, maybe, or perhaps something like night vision. I was also hunting for a form that might match the idea of the poem, which is to try and show something of the psychological aftermath of being groomed, and the vocabularyclept, where you borrow and then sing through someone else’s language, seemed to speak to how grooming can mean you are forced to inhabit someone else’s language. Living with trauma is also deeply cyclical and the enforced repeating nature of this form also spoke to that. 

One of the things I am often doing in my writing is hunting for wisdom and guidance. Channelling Marvell’s voice – and I do think found poetry, maybe even all writing, is a kind of channelling – taught me a great deal. Not only in terms of syntax, language, musicality, and figurative language but also his carpe diem philosophy helped me to realise that the speaker of my poem has, no matter what hurt has occurred, creative agency: he can repurpose and find himself within Marvell’s language and archaic spellings – ‘ecchoing’, ‘alwaies’, etc. – and, even at his lowest, sing.

RS: The idea to speak back to Rimbaud’s Illuminations, but through the prism of various crystals, came from him: crystals, gemstones, and crystalline light are everywhere in that work; John Ashbery even calls them a ‘crystalline jumble’. I suppose I think of the queer speaking back to, which I perform in my own work as a kind of necromancy: a dialogue with the dead. It allows me to be in direct conversation, or duet, with a queer ancestor, and to ask them for confidence and support. While writing Soho, Paul Verlaine helped me to resee and understand London’s Soho, and in That Broke into Shining Crystals, Rimbaud’s linguistic wildness, visionariness, and queer proto-Surrealism expanded what I had previously thought possible within the lyric space. His guidance prompted me to build this post-trauma, crystalline landscape where the speaker might live and inhabit the shamanic messages and energies of the crystals. 

Queer ancestorial wisdom has always been surprising and unexpected in this way. You’re absolutely right when you say that grief modifies brain structure. I would go so far as to say that trauma reshapes the brain so that there is no simple path back to a pre-trauma world: things are changed, psychologically and biologically. But the crystal shows us that things made, broken, and reformed under enormous pressure can be extraordinarily powerful, beautiful, and offer new refracted perspectives. New eyes, even. Or the ‘unusual shapes’ of healing, as you say. 

I grew up around crystals – my mum was a homeopath – so they’ve always been powerful objects to me. I wanted to transform each poem into an actual crystal, almost, and for it to contain something of the stones’ awesome power and energy. Introducing scientific, geological, and crystal medicine vocabularies into the lyric field made me feel as if I were exposing glittering seams of light and chiselling refracted edges. But I don’t know if I have transformed my own ‘grief’. I suspect, or know, that I still contain it. However, I suppose the crystals and Rimbaud’s wisdom have led me to a greater understanding of myself and the hurt which I gesture towards in the poems. I’m grateful to poetry. It’s robust. It can offer the poet a new place to live – a ‘homeland’, as Paul Celan writes – and carry them towards a greater understanding, via language and lyric, of themselves. 

RS: I am just so grateful for my musical experience and training. I can still remember singing Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and having to inhabit such lush vocabulary like ‘eglantine’ – a type of rose – which is sung across an eleven-note spell-like melisma. Also singing Orpheus in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice which is really a grand metaphor for the alchemical power of music, and language, to open the doors to different dimensions and raise the dead. Learning an opera involves translating, immersing oneself within, memorising, and embodying a text. So I would be sitting with a number of words for months on end, obsessing over them and passing the vowels and syllables through my mind and body – wondering how to access the lyric feeling within them and open them up, musically. In this way there’s some parity with how I work with language now. 

I’ve come to realise that an aria and a poem are incredibly related. They’re both a concise, crystallised artefact filled with language, lyric feeling, echoes, and sounds. Maybe I think of them both as a hotbox of intense emotion brought about by a musicality. Also, that the poet is a singer, not unlike Orpheus or Eurydice, who are trying to alter the fabric of space and time with their words. Song and poems, they demonstrate, can affect change, especially within the mind, via a kind of quantum or alchemical thinking. 

Both singing and poetry put language under pressure but in different ways. When you’re singing you’re drawing the words through your body, vocal chords, and mouth – placing the language and notes under a physiological pressure. When you’re writing you’re putting language, and the line, under the pressure of concision, rapidity, organised sound, and various poetic devices. But an awareness of the different types of pressure possible have been inspiring to me. Pressure feels key to writing, indeed both song and poetry also feel as if they might be the result of internal pressure. And there’s a release there – being able to sing about things that one wouldn’t normally speak about. Both song and poetry are heightened, extreme, excavating. So, I guess the influence of music on my writing has been profound. It has shown me how to sing in language, really.

RS: It feels like such a dark time again, doesn’t it? And sometimes it isn’t easy to be hopeful, but language does provide hope, I think. Whilst it can be used to condemn, legislate, and hate, it can also be used to educate, resist, create, and remember. Can we continue to fill language – a type of living akashic record which remembers us, both the living and the dead – with queerness? Language also confirms that queerness is constant: the earliest poems stretching through to the most recent ones are a part of our records. So, the work is continuation. And perhaps hope is born of continuation – the living resistance of our lives – and the impressing of that onto language itself. Queer language – our coinages, creativity, and reclamations – has always had a very real operative, magical even, power. I also want to say thank you for your incredibly thoughtful and generous questions, Serge; I’ve really loved our conversation.