Chewing It Over: Conversation with a Poet

S: I found issues that frequently came up in a psychotherapeutic session such as loss of memory, moments of illness, and falling asleep as a way of escaping from therapy and a way of getting back at the therapist perhaps. Therapy can be quite combative I think. There is something about the word ‘stanza’: a word that refers to a discrete verse in a poem but also means ‘room’ in Italian. You're always in a room with a psychotherapist and you're both examining that room and what's going on in there and at the same time examining yourself and what your underlying feelings and motivations and memories are. I find a nice homology between writing and the form of the poem—at least the more formal kind of poem.

N: You haven't so far as I can tell published a poem that is explicitly about being in analysis.

S: There is one that is as close to explicit as possible and that's the one called ‘Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine.’ It's about the awfulness of when your therapist is late, which you take very personally. I won't say it's about me, but it both is and it isn't.

N: I notice that there are references in this book to Berryman and Lowell and so you are positioning yourself in a confessional place.

S: I was then, right. That first book (Los Alamos Mon Amour) is what you could call a little more confessional and I wanted to write about things that are often stigmatised. I wanted to—not to hide those things but to introduce some humour and some sharing about them. This has

happened at readings: people come up and say, ‘I went through a similar thing and it's really nice to hear you speak about it in such an open or even light hearted way or even satirical way’, and I value that. I don't like to talk of reading or writing poetry as a kind of therapy but I did close off lots of issues in my book about my father's death, for example, and about a breakdown that I had. I really don't want to go and revisit anxiety attacks or relationships, having dealt with some of them in a pleasing and formal way. I certainly take no pleasure in just dumping my inner thoughts on potential readers. It has to be done in a way that will hopefully give readers something of their own. This of course is different from therapy which is intensely about yourself—or it should be.

N: But I've been thinking about The Other because in therapy you're in that room—in that stanza—which I think is a brilliant metaphor—with The Other, who is for you the therapist. But there is also the sense of The Other which is the unknown, the unconscious. I was wondering where the other is when you're writing poetry.

S: That's a good question. I guess, to put it crudely, there are several others out there. The history of literature that you're writing within, that's always around you, helping inform the formal patterns and decisions that you make. There's also the projected audience. Also there are reviewers and there are possibly the people you're writing about. And even though it's very easy to talk about the non-identical nature of the ‘I’ in the poem, other people rarely see it that way and if they can identify themselves or something that ‘really’ happened they'll take that and adhere to it, so it can be quite a dangerous thing. However, there are presences there when you're writing.

N: My fundamental question is: What DOES happen in therapy? And is it at all like what happens in poetry? It's a big question. People come together and one of them talks quite a lot and the other says things that are designed to encourage the other one to talk…

S: … Or doesn't talk at all, which is the thing that I found amazing. I

had massive resistance. In a 55-minute session I would frequently be silent for 50 minutes. I would often fall asleep as well. But then in the last 5 minutes I might unleash some thoughts and associations and so forth and a mini-narrative which felt very fruitful in terms of opening up some kind of floodgate inside myself. We would say, ‘We'll pick up on this next session’ and we didn't always, and it didn't matter that we didn't. I used to go into the sessions full of desire to talk about certain things that were preying on my mind consciously. Then I would clam up. I can't quite explain why that happened and I've had therapy with three or four people over the years, although not for about 10 years now. There were two I was with for a reasonably long time and two I only stayed with briefly because it just wasn't working for whatever reason. One therapist drank water all the time when I was there and I found it invasive and intrusive. I said, ‘Why are you always so thirsty?’ And he was genuinely surprised. ‘Does it bother you?’ ‘Kind of!’ Whether I was right or wrong to object so much I don't know but he seemed very distracted. I'm rambling a bit here. But it's fun to talk about different therapists and different scenarios and the therapist in that poem ‘Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine’ is a mixture of three.

N: Sure. And I think what's so interesting in what you say is that in those sessions of resistance, when you were silent, you were only silent because you were in therapy.

S: Yes. You're still working. You're still doing something. Something's happening between the two of you, and …

N: … and the therapist's presence is who you are being silent to.

S: Yes. Absolutely.

N: So that leads me to wonder: one of the connections I think there may be between poetry and psychoanalysis is that both are trying to use words to approach things that can't be said. Possibly can't even be known. I don't know whether that's true of poetry and whether you'd agree that this is what psychoanalysis is?

S: I certainly agree in the importance of that silent confrontation and the surprising climax of a session that frequently arose. When I was

going twice a week, I had one early morning session at about 7 and one late at night about 10 and those sessions were very, very different. I think that the morning ones were perhaps a bit more fruitful because we did lots of dream work. The best way I found of getting past resistance was if I had a nice juicy dream I could take along. The therapist I was seeing was extremely good at analysing dreams. I found I would relate certain dreams and he would say one or two things that seemed so obvious to me that I hadn't seen in the dream and I had a kind of physical reaction, like goose bumps: a sudden realisation of what that symbol meant; that was when I believed in the validity of that process. But it was only when I had that kind of feeling, a kind of response that bypassed the intellect in a way. I remember having a dream about an old-fashioned lawnmower with the old red blades and a big heavy roller which you manually rolled across the lawn. The analyst said something about what the red blades might mean to a child and it was a devastating insight. I won't say what it was but it was, ‘Gosh yes, of course!’ It seemed blindingly obvious.

N: And is that true of your poetry? Do your poems come from dreams?

S: Some do. I had a dream that my heart was actually a starfish. I could feel it. I had no heart beat but there was this strange rubbery thing going on. It was a very startling dream because it was very physical and I woke up and wrote a short poem—5 or 6 lines which led to a whole series.

N: That was the start of the Heart poems? [in Neptune Blue.]

S: Yes. I'm still writing them. There are about 15 or 16 now. Something about taking an almost random noun and putting it in front of the word ‘heart’ and then thinking about what that might mean as being a great way to explore different dimensions of love and feeling—the kinds of things that sometimes come straight from a dream. Dreams are mentioned in a couple of the poems. ‘Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine’ mentions a dream which was actually a dream. So, yes, I think because I started taking writing poetry seriously again during the first extended—and I would say successful—therapy, that I

had for 18 months. The dream work had some relationship with exploring metaphor and getting writing again. It's not to do with getting better or wanting to put down experiences or break down stigmas, it was just about being able to write again and having a little bit of confidence.

N: You say sometimes the therapy would have an unexpected gain. And perhaps the return of your creativity was one of them?

S: I think it was. That wasn't as unexpected though, because I knew it was an important thing in my life. My wanting to write has been very important to me ever since I was about 14 and that's why I studied literature and I went very enthusiastically down an academic path and further and further away from writing and into the exotic fields of critical theory where I read Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, etc. Oh, it was wonderful stuff but it did take me a long way away from writing for myself. I broke off. I was going to do a PhD and thinking of going into academia but I just stopped because I'd lost all ability with language really. It had become painful to write. I was just imitating theorists. I went to work in a record shop, which was great fun and enabled me to relax a bit and loosen up, which I think is important to the whole writing project. Mustn't be too intense. Mustn't be too serious about it.

N: That explains a post-modern edginess about your poetry particularly in Neptune Blue. I think you've explained where some of that comes from—a recovering post-modern analyst!

S: Maybe, maybe.

N: So what you're doing is using language incredibly playfully but your poems are often quite formal; for example you play with the sonnet form a lot. I was wondering whether there might be a sort of connection there. Although you don't sit down to write formally, you obviously like formal structures. In therapy you can be thinking about one thing but meanwhile something is happening elsewhere. I wondered whether in your writing this is expressed as an interest in formality, rather than just playfulness?

S: Very good question. Forms are a type of play. It's just they've become a bit regimented because they're a part of the formal canon and they're seen as a series of hurdles, and getting over the hurdles is important. You do need to know the tools of your trade and you do need to be able to turn a well-formed sonnet in the way that Chagall was a great draftsman and he went on to do blue donkeys floating above the Eiffel Tower etc. Two things are quite daunting about writing. One is the classic white page. The other is not having a form in which to start to put your thoughts where you can find a nice tie-in that supports the subject matter.

N: I wonder whether there's a tendency as there always is in psychotherapy to slip away from the difficult, the unsayable, the unnameable and slip into something that's easier?

S: Yes. I certainly did feel a little bit bruised—I don't want to exaggerate but after the first book came out I realised just how much of myself I had exposed and how I might have exposed others to a certain extent. But the dangers of the ludic are interesting; I'm aware of them and I've been very playful recently which has been great fun. To put it in very bluntly there's the personal book (Los Alamos Mon Amour), then the playful book (Neptune Blue). The next one will have all the playful structures I've been enjoying in the second book but I want to bring in some more personal, more painful things to balance the two out so that it's neither one nor the other.

N: That's a really good point I think because I'm trying to find the similarities between poetry and psychoanalysis, but what you've pointed up is one of the differences. I think you're suggesting that there's a difference between the language-play that is psychotherapy, which is essentially about yourself, and poetry, which has to be public. You don't want to write poems like Emily Dickinson that stay in a drawer until you're dead.

S: Yes I think so, definitely. One of the things I like most about poetry is, when you do a reading and you meet people afterwards in the bar or in the café. You've written something that's enabled you to meet other people, which I find is really enjoyable. I do have poems that I haven't published and probably never will. Not everything has to go public. It's like a Moebius strip. Sometimes I'm intensely embarrassed that I've published anything at all and then at other times I'm really proud that I have, so it's a strange process.

N: Do you yourself have a notion of the unconscious?

S: I don't think I have a coherent one, no. I used to be a great reader and follower of Freud and Lacan, which I still find fascinating, but the older I get, the more I think, ‘Is it anything more than conjecture or the accidental usefulness of some of these stabs in the dark to understand the hidden, the invisible, the mysterious?’ I don't know. There is a part of us that we're not totally in control of and you often surprise yourself when you're writing poetry. Where on earth did that image come from? Which part of me managed to write down that 6 line thing so well the first time? Sometimes you get something right first time and sometimes it takes years. There's a poem in Neptune that took 11 years to finish off and some that took 10 minutes. That's an indication that there are some unconscious processes going on there. Often you don't even feel you can entirely take responsibility for something. You just got lucky in a way, but the more you practise, the luckier you get—a trope from golf! I look forward to dreaming and if that's an extension of the unconscious, then yes I believe in it. I'm disappointed if I haven't had a decent dream. They're fun, although they can be terrifying at times, and they can gift you something to write about, although

not very often, actually. If you were to write a book making a poem out of every single dream you had for a year, it would be interesting, but I suspect very hard to do and it would soon get tedious.

N: That's an interesting idea…

S: A notion of the unconscious… do you mean like a metaphor for it?

N: Well, it's quite a Lacanian answer. You're talking about something unknown that reveals itself quite frequently through words. You can say some words or write some words and you don't know where they came from. When we spoke on the phone, you said that you didn't quite know where the title of your book came from. And of course that sentence is predicated on a place—there is ‘somewhere’.

S: Often your mind automatically throws out a phrase you haven't been thinking about at all and there's no effort. There are electrical impulses going on, some weird accident in the brain that language gets hold of somehow. I find it very fascinating, mysterious, the self-generating nature of it. Sometimes you get something so good you think I have to work on this now. You more consciously develop something from it.

N: You're interested in the planets—I wondered what that's all about?

S: Yes, so do I. There's a ‘going back to being a child’ thing, in a joyous kind of connection. I learned about the planets as a little boy and I remember pestering my parents for a telescope so that I could look at the moon and the stars in more detail. I really wanted to be an astronomer but I had no idea that you could become one. I think I can be a kind of astronomer through poetry. Poetry enables you to do lots of things that maybe you don't have the expertise or the investment, or the time or the support to do. I loved Holst's when I was little. Now I can do my own I can do it with words. I can make those words musical and playful, and give pleasure to myself and others. A little dark, they've got some dark notes, obviously some minor key stuff, for me anyway.

S: Did you pass the statue of Peter Pan? There's a poem about it. It's funny that I should want to meet here, where there's something I've written about. It's an Easter poem, and we're coming up to Easter. It's like a Freudian slip in a way, a slip of location. It's called ‘Hyde Park Easter Saturday’. The poem is about this strange day—Easter Saturday. What is that day? It always troubled me as a child. What happens between Good Friday and its traumatic events and the triumphant Sunday? What's going on? There are all sorts of stories, you know, about the harrowing of hell … it's a weird day. I guess it's about a liminal state. You really could psychoanalyse any poem—it's about childhood and adulthood, and apocalyptic threat. And that's just a side track.

N: We're coming to the end; obviously you can psychoanalyse a poem, and that's …

S: It's great fun doing it…

N: It is great fun and that's what people have done a great deal. The literary critics have ransacked psychoanalysis to apply it to poems. But it seems to me much more difficult to go the other way round.

S: To poeticise analysis?

N: Yes—what we've been skirting around in various different ways, is what do you understand of psychoanalysis as a poet? That's what we've been talking about.

S: I've probably only given you holes in my understanding. As a writer it's just another thing I can use up, get my teeth into, turn into something. Because we will use anything. But this whole thing about the other, and the silence… what prompts material to come to the surface… I think that's quite a fruitful area.