A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Episode 90 Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans   Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/90_Letter_to_My_Mother_by_Suzannah_V_Evans.mp3 This poem is from: Under the Blue Available from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK   Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans You, pedalling your armsabove your head in bed,that bad arm suddenlymobile and flexible.You, meeting me at school,feeling something stir, sprinting across the grass . . . the two of us laughing, Mr. Tarpin peeringquizzically from the gate.You, with your bright lipstick.You, with your hands like mine.You, with your floppy hat.You, with your easy laugh.You, with the ellipsesof your emails. Your strongfront crawl. Your assertivegestures as you motionthrough talk. Now, when I swim, the movement of my armsis for you. A high arc,fingertips cleaving bright.Shuddering kick of legs.The sea pool in Seixalis for you. Craggy rocksand my head dipped to blue.Grey crabs line the rocks:I think of the limpets that spot McClure’s paintingwith the reading woman,sun hat, white paper sheaf.Memory of last summer,absorbed in Woolf outside.A sudden rush of windcaused the parasol to liftand your own hat to spin right up from your head – where it hovered longerthan seemed possible, black ribbon flapping. Porto Moniz   Interview transcript Mark: Suzannah, where did this poem come from? Suzannah: So this poem emerged towards the end of my writing process for writing the poems in Under the Blue which is my first poetry collection. And the first two parts of the book… The book is a triptych of sequences, sort of playing with epistolary forms, so postcards and letters. The first two parts of the book are playing quite specifically with the form of the postcard, and the poems are quite private poems, in some ways. And I was interested in using the postcard form because it is a form which is both private and, in a sense, public in that, when you’re writing a postcard, you’re writing it to an individual. But a postie can turn that postcard over and read what’s on the back. Anyone can read what’s on the back. And with this third section in the book, I wanted to directly address some of the earlier figures who had appeared in the first two sections, and I suppose, to address them and to kind of write directly to people. So this poem is written to my mother, and it’s in the form of a letter. And I’d say that the writing of this particular poem, this section of the book, was much more deliberate in some ways than the first two sections, which kind of emerged. And then, once I’d written those sections, I had sort of most of a manuscript, and these letters were really kind of, for me, kind of sealing and sending the manuscript off and kind of finishing it in that sense. Mark: Okay. It’s really interesting to know that, the postcards come first in the book, and they’re all prose poems, aren’t they? Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: So they look like postcards on the page. And then, at the end, you’ve got the sequence of letters, which are kind of long and thin, maybe, to me, suggesting letters are longer than postcards. So, how did you start writing postcards, to begin with? And then we’ll move on to the letters. Suzannah: That’s a good question. So the postcards, I think I’m always looking for formal inspiration in the things around me. So I am a formal poet in the sense that I’ve written sonnets. I’ve written rondels, a lot of rondels. And I’m very interested in traditional form, but I’m also interested in the way that the world can provide forms for the poet. And I was on holiday, visiting my partner’s father, when… So this is the first postcard in the book, although it’s not sort of titled as a postcard. It’s called ‘Under the Blue’. It’s the title poem. And that sort of was drawn from a roughly real-life event, where sort of there was this incident with a kayak. My partner was swept off his feet, and it really just brought back to me an earlier experience of actually witnessing a seizure. And that was an experience which had really, really shocked me, and it had come completely out of the blue, really just out of nowhere. And I don’t know why, but I had wanted to write about it. Maybe that’s a kind of processing thing, or maybe it’s just a way to kind of hold close different things that happen in your life. But I’d known for a while that I’d wanted to write about it, and this was years and years later. But seeing this figure being kind of knocked over and sort of just being sort of buffeted in that way really took me back to that night with the seizure. And I felt like these two events were kind of doubled, and I could kind of see both of them at the same time. So it started off with writing about that. And it was, because I was on holiday, a postcard seemed like an apt way to write about that. And so I suppose, kind of, it really started with that first poem. And it’s quite subtle, I think, the moment with the seizure. It sort of comes towards the end of the poem. You can sort of read it almost without thinking about the seizure too much. But it does. I think, sort of, that event refracts across the collection. So even though there are moments sort of later in the book where the word seizures is used, someone seizes someone else’s wrist in that sort of, a kind of reference back, there’s a lot of falling over in the book, a lot of stumbling. And yeah, so I think the impetus for the postcards, kind of, it came from that first section. And actually, they were literal postcards, because I sent some of them. I kind of printed them off and sent them to friends in the post. Because I love…I’m a big letter writer. I send a lot of postcards. Like, postcards are really a big…it sounds weird to say that postcards are a big part of my life, but they kind of are. Like, I really love postcards. I like to collect them from galleries. And so it’s partly a homage to my love of the postcard. And I think, also, with postcards, you have the art or the image on the postcard as well. And there’s a few kind of ekphrastic moments in the book. So, kind of, all of that is woven in, I think. And the idea of what you can’t say in a postcard, I think that’s what the middle section of the book, for me, kind of turns the form on its head a little bit more to kind of write about things that maybe you actually wouldn’t necessarily write in a postcard. So, to me, I kind of think of them as anti-postcards, almost. Yeah. Mark: So, the form is actually rooted in your life, that you do send postcards. It’s not just a conceit for you. Suzannah: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark: And of course, when a poem is framed as a postcard or a letter, there is a sense of it feels personal. You know, ‘I’ and ‘you’ are always… Quite often, there can be quite a lot of ambiguity about who the I is and who the you is. But if you signal it as a letter, like last month, I did Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which was four verse epistles to Viscount Bolingbroke. And so that puts a different frame on it when you know that he’s addressing, ‘My Lord,’ and we’re kind of overhearing that. Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: There’s a sense that this is a personal communication, that maybe there’s a real relationship underpinning. Suzannah: Yes. And I think that’s something that the whole collection kind of plays with in a way. When I teach poetry, I’m always very adamant, or sort of something that I talk about with students is this idea that you never really can conflate the I of the poem with the poet. Even when there is autobiographical kind of crossover, I think there’s something that happens. When you write a poem, it becomes an art object. It becomes something that is changed. I almost want to say it’s not a photograph, but I think photographs are kind of complex as well in the way that they capture reality. So I think, for me, there is a real distinction between the first and second sections and the third section of the book. But something that I kind of have been thinking about as well is there’s a poem that T.S. Eliot wrote to his wife, and he says something, like, ‘These are private words addressed to you in public.’ And so I think this idea of what is private and what is public is really…it makes it quite hard for me to talk about the book sometimes, I think, but it’s really at the crux of what it is, the sense of sort of letting the reader into some kind of quite private spaces and the importance of doing that as well, how the private is political. Just all of those things are kind of in there. But I think, in particular, the letters are really public declarations of love and trust, and they are very felt poems that are intended to honour particular people. And the collection ends with a letter to my father, who… The father figure is sort of less present in the earlier sections of the book, but it sort of attributes to my dad. That is an autobiographical kind of poem at the end of the book, which is in thanks really for everything that he does to hold up the people who are in earlier parts of the book and to kind of celebrate his role, to celebrate what he does as a carer, but also just to kind of… I think the letters are just…they’re like praise poems really. They’re just intended to celebrate these people. Mark: That’s a nice idea, isn’t it? The praise poem. That should maybe be more prominent, shouldn’t it? Suzannah: Yeah.