‘Telling You The Truth, As Best As I Can’. Selima Hill and Julia Copus in correspondence

Selima Hill: Let me tell you about a recurring nightmare I have: I am at a reading or a party and open my mouth to speak. Something like a soft pink worm wiggles up my throat and across my tongue; before I can close my mouth it unspools itself out into the room, streaked with blood. It’s like spaghetti, it keeps slithering out and I realize with horror it is going to carry on until all my entrails are uncoiled and I’m turned inside out and I die!

SH: You mention ‘cut, cut, cut’. Maybe my word, but I don’t like it. Too negative. I would say first ‘loosen, loosen, loosen’ and then (after the poem has sat on its own in a drawer quietly for a few weeks, or months) ‘tighten, tighten, tighten’. So it’s nice and clean. Maybe one tenth of the original length remains. At the risk of sounding pompous and nonsensical, I suppose I could say I aspire to silence. Silence not as nothing but as everything. Not a retreat but on the contrary, a touch, or a touching. First listening, then touching.

Thinking of silence in the context of autism, it is maybe not irrelevant that I was mute when I was in my twenties, although I didn’t feel it, and continued to write – and to play chess! I suffered what was dramatically called then (the Sixties) ‘catatonia’: i.e. stupor, mutism and posturing. (‘Posturing’ means not moving, and sometimes getting ‘stuck’ in odd positions…)

SH: I write more or less non-stop so I don’t ‘start’ exactly. If I am not writing something I feel bereft, like a teabag without water! Let’s look at my last sequence [‘The Night Nurse’]. My sons were on my mind, more than ever. Then a young man passed my gate (my cabin is on a coastal path) so I used that moment as a sort of magnet to stick all my thoughts about sons onto. The tone of voice is the guiding thing, I think; then the rest follows. Like unreeling a fishing-line. Who was it (Margaret Atwood?) who said ‘autobiography is not true enough’? Anyhow, I invent more about the young man in order to say things safely, in fiction, that I am inhibited from saying out loud, or even thinking. Or maybe I do start with an image. I don’t know. It is all happening at once.

SH: You didn’t misread it, exactly, Julia – you are the world’s most ideal reader – but it was grounded not in a distrust (of other selves) but of warmth and a sense of amused fellowship with the selves of others. Another way of looking at it could be to say that we are all both ourselves and each other, with our shapeless breasts and loving husbands and plastic sandals – all in it together.

SH: Off-limits – yes. My children; anyone who is still alive who would be identifiable; where I live. Partly to protect them, because it isn’t fair. They may feel hurt or misunderstood: I feel very strongly that ‘art’ is not an excuse to hurt people. I can change people’s genders, leave people out. It gives me freedom to make the reality more so. To make it cleaner, simpler. As Bohumil Hrabal says, the book is a book written by a stranger about ‘that great fantasy that is called reality’.

On the subject of ‘I’, let me refer to Iris Murdoch, the philosopher: ‘Love is the difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ (She doesn’t even say ‘someone other than oneself’…). Paul Celan wrote that he was ‘an I clarifying itself in the process of writing’. However, rather like Denise Riley, I think, he sees the poem as existential rather than epistemological. It (the poem) takes the poet ‘into its understanding’ then ‘releases him’ (the poet).I don’t approve of too much autobiography. And how far can we admire the writing but not the writer? Larkin, Lowell, Hughes, for example. But my only subject really is me. What other experiences do I have than my own? That is part of the sorrow of the human condition, that we can never really know each other. (See your own poem ‘Soft Parts’!)

SH: I loathe being visible because I think I look wrong but I don’t know how. So visibility (exposure) is vulnerability, and vulnerability means vigilance.

If we look at visibility in the literal sense, I could add that I like light, as much as possible, but I do not like being something seen, so my cabin is full of mirrors, but all above eye-level so I can’t see myself!

SH: I prefer ‘sensory’ to visual. In fact things like weight, temperature, viscosity, smell, I would say, are also my subjects. I like facts. They are safe and stable.My parents and grandmother were painters (and I married one). How much of [being an artist] is cultural and how much is genetic, who knows? I do know that writing always felt more secret. My notebooks were more private than their sketchbooks. I also often wrote in code. (It makes me chuckle to think of some of my coded notebooks in my archive at Newcastle!)

SH: Don’t get me started on surrealism! I hate the thought of being ‘surreal’ – i.e. whacky, arbitrary, showy-off. I feel like I am the opposite of surreal. However, I can understand how, to other people, things I say might not make sense. Why should they? It’s my own sort of private synaesthesia. Poodles and bluebells, say, just go together, for me, like two notes in music; they fall into place. But why should that mean anything to someone else, with their own personal experiences of poodles and bluebells?

SH: I might refer here to my earlier mention of synaesthesia and sensory processing – and I’d add to that my differences, if not difficulties, re proprioceptivity. I should say that I would rather be a sculptor than a poet. More physical, less pedantic, conceptual, neurotic and exposing.

SH: I agree that the relationship between dream, reality and text is a fascinating one, but I do not feel any kinship with, for example, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Bosch, Swedenborg, Blake, Novalis, E T A Hoffmann, de Chirico and so on in that way. I’m more of a Kafka fan. Or Katherine Mansfield, Sebald, Flannery O’Connor, Calvino, Statovci, Simic, Anna Swir, Ana Blandiana, Michael Longley, Elfriede Jelinek. Elizabeth Bishop even. I object to the idea of ‘bending reality into a different shape’. Different from what? I feel I am not bending but straightening or unfolding.

SH: Don’t ever go to a film with me: I can’t follow plots! Partly (more pathologising) because I can’t recognise faces. Prosopagnosia. This does not apply, obviously, to the written word. But I can’t follow plots in novels either. Also, I don’t like flickering screens and poetry is shorter and more portable! So, in a word, no, I don’t ‘plot’ sequences. Again to pathologise, I am ‘perseverative’: I just go on and on. Plot, no; patterns, yes. I love crosswords, for example, and codewords, wordsearches, quizzes, Dumb Crambo, Categories, jigsaws, mancala, solitaire, Qwirkle – anything that requires concentration and focus and a kind of purity and pedantry.

Your train image is a good one. It is hard to change tracks. My work is about surprise, exaltation, perplexity, disillusion, disintegration, broken promises. Always the same. Like Bela Tarr says it is ‘always the same film’ that he makes, whether it’s Sátántangó, The Turin Horse, Weikmeister Harmonies. Unlike a film director, however, there is no-one I have to cooperate with. Like a singles tennis player, the writer is on their own. On their own with a ball. They just have to keep it in the air.

SH: That is uncanny. Yes, I read Classics, got fed up with all the men and the wars, and changed to moral sciences, where even more of the tutors and the writers were male, needless to say. (I can still hear myself declaiming, at the Latin Orations my creepy Classics master drove me to Southampton to compete in, ‘Quadrupedante putrem sonuit quatit ungula campum.’¹… and, at another event ‘ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ’²…) I have also learnt, or tried to learn, without much success, Ancient Egyptian, Finnish (Tove Jansson – have you read ‘The Listener’?), Mongolian (both the old script and the new 1941 alphabet with Cyrillic characters), Romanian, British Sign Language, Icelandic… I lived in Iceland for a bit, where they still – being an island, I suppose – talk like the sagas! It’s easy to understand. Also pig Latin, which I enjoy speaking very fast, in order to follow and keep control of both the rhythm and the structure you refer to here. It’s the juggling, isn’t it? Keeping all the balls going without dropping them. Forming a pattern in the air without touching the ground.

SH: Writers writing under totalitarian regimes (Romanians under Ceaucescu, for example) learn to encode their work, as, I suppose, I have done. I don’t follow Auden when he says art is ‘born of humiliation’, or Mark Twain – ‘The purpose of art is to alleviate shame’ – but I would argue it gives us a space to say what we want to say. And, as Genet says about Giacometti (why do I keep quoting male writers?), ‘Each man guards in himself his own particular wound, different in everyone.’ For me, ‘art’ doesn’t exactly ‘alleviate’ anything: it makes it closer.

SH: Writing is real life – even if only a part of it. Writing is real, concepts are real, words are real, readers are real. I like what Jenny Odell says somewhere (or was it Cage?): it’s about looking at reality rather than through it. Or, as I think I said before, writing feels like touching. (I say that as someone who is hyperlexic – I could read fluently when I was three, apparently – but hates being touched, particularly brushed against.) In some ways, writing is more challenging – and that is precisely why I like it. To have the comfort, silence, space to be as accurate as possible. But even words, being conceptual, are a kind of violence (a violence towards silence).

Of course publication is a different thing altogether. Why oh why do I publish? It is true I value the fellowship of my readers – but only if they stay away and remain strange and imaginary. (Except you, of course, Julia!) It’s a bit like someone coming barging into your bedroom, isn’t it? Neil (Astley), I should stress here, treats me with great tact and understanding. He knows just how to handle me. So I am very lucky.

Maybe I can mention here another aspect relating to this: poetry readings and the look of the poem on the page. The carefully balanced line-breaks, the patiently manoeuvred stanza-breaks, the exotic looking caps, the spellings, the precarious punctuation – all that disappears in a reading. The shapes on the page are, for me, no less important than the sounds in my head. (Yes, I know poetry was originally oral.) Furthermore, poetry readings suggest – how can they not? – that the reader we have before us is the first-person protagonist of the poem she is reading. Again, the elaborately crafted fiction is shattered. We are distracted and misled by the physical presence of the poet-reader.

SH: It is my kind of truth, true for me, but why should it be anyone else’s? I am constantly being astonished by how a bucket, for example – my bucket – is understood by someone else and responded to by them as if it was their bucket. As if we understand each other somehow. Weird. My associations and elaborations are all individual, private, personal, intimate – secret, almost. We do not share them; or not all of them, certainly. So I’m always surprised by how readers nevertheless do respond to another person’s work. Maybe it is the passion powering the content that readers connect to, rather than the content itself. A mysterious reciprocity seems to arise.

The reality on the internet, by contrast, is other people’s reality; it’s reality for others, not for ourselves. Our attention is abused, exploited. We are left dissatisfied, dishonoured, anxious – and more, not less, alone.

SH: My images are as exact and as honed as it is possible for me to make them. It is like a note in music: either it is right or it is not. I can’t say why. And nor do I expect other people to understand either. It is just how it is, if I attend to it (whatever it is). If I give something my attention, then I see it is there, and enough, always – the texture, the smell, the endlessness of it.

And a final thing about metaphors: my father was said to have a ‘sweet tooth’. I thought this tooth was an actual sweet, a barley sugar, in fact, that was sharp like a translucent flint and very, very frightening.