Like writing a Line in a Poem
An interview with Sharon Morris by Jacqueline Gabbitas
Published by Brittle Star magazine in 2007
Sharon Morris was born in Wales and lives in London. Her first collection of poetry, False Spring, will be published by Enitharmon Press as part of their new voices series. She is a visual artist and teaches at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Jacqueline Gabbitas met up with her to talk about her writing process and putting together her first collection.
JG: How long had you been writing before you put your collection together?
SM: About twelve years. I first went to Mimi KhalvatiÕs poetry class in Õ95.
JG: Is that when you first started writing poetry or were you writing before that?
SM: Yes, it is. What I was writing before would be better described as prose poems, which went with my artworks. At a certain point people started calling them poems. I just thought ŌI donÕt really know what poetry isÕ and so I found a writing class in Goldsmiths that Mimi ran. It was two years before The Poetry School was established.
JG: From when you first started writing poetry, how long did it take you before you felt that you were ready to have a collection?
SM: I think probably five or six years. I had written a cycle of forty two sonnets, and I had written other things, but I had a vision of these three journeys that would go into this book. This was about 2001. None of my previous poetry is in this book because the vision for it is very different from the earlier work.
JG: One of the things that interests me is the time it takes a writer to feel fully confident in their work and able to publish a full collection. Part of this is building up a body of work and finding your own place in poetry. You had some success early on and published in anthologies and magazines.
SM: Well, yes. I was published in the anthology Tying The Song which was very good because that marked a culmination in my writing. I had the sequence of sonnets and nowhere to put them as a whole and at least a quarter of those were put into the anthology. This allowed me to move on to the next point. I think some peopleÕs first collection is perhaps a gathering together of their best work over a long period of time, from maybe even when they first started writing. I knew that I didnÕt want to do a book like that. False Spring has its own time and momentum and aim, which is not quite the same as most first collections.
JG: What is the process a writer would go through in order to build up a reputation; to get an understanding of the poetry world; to get a feel for poetry?
SM: I think the most important thing is reading. Reading as much poetry as possible and reading from different traditions. I think itÕs really important to find out where one is in relation to historical traditions and try to grasp what is happening in the contemporary scene so that youÕre not actually writing in isolation.
JG: How did you go about this, for yourself? Who were the poets you were reading? Was it all poetry?
SM: I think it was all poetry, actually, because I felt I knew nothing about it. IÕd dropped English in school quite early on and therefore had huge holes in my education. I donÕt think I had a sense of what poetry is. I started reading a lot of American and UK poets and I think joining MimiÕs class was a key decision. I kept on with her workshops and then joined the Versification course at The Poetry School the first year it started. That had the biggest impact on my writing because it allowed me to see what the differences are between forms of poetry and prose and where they, in the end, converge. Versification trains your ear and gives you a sense of musicality. I learnt a lot about what constitutes a poem. And the way the course is taught, by making one write those kinds of form, means itÕs about the practice of making poems.
JG: Do you think itÕs important to be challenging your writing through the practice as well as the reading?
SM: Yes, all the time. I suppose I stress reading because I think people leave it out.
JG: I agree, itÕs odd the amount of people I come across who donÕt read poetry because they write it, as if you have to do one or the other.
SM: Actually the most helpful advice has been when people said Ōgo and read so-and-soÕ because my work reminded them of it. If youÕre trying to do something and someone else has done it in some extraordinary way then you should know about it. ItÕs as simple as that. So Mimi was very good like that and my friend David Miller was very good like that too Š he would continually be shocked by what I hadnÕt read! And luckily I could just use the college library.
JG: So you didnÕt find that reading otherÕs work had an adverse affect on your poetry.
SM: Absolutely not, I think thatÕs a myth.
JG: Good! You said you were reading a lot of American poetry, such as who?
SM: Simultaneously I started a PhD and within that I wrote about HD. It made me focus on Imagism and Modernism. This led me on to a chain from HD, Amy Lowell to Pound Š but backwards and forwards in time because I was also interested in schools and movements in poetry. Although they can be artificially constructed either at the time or afterwards, they are interesting because there is usually a zeitgeist and a development of group interests and I think thatÕs always quite fascinating.
I think coming from a visual arts background itÕs easy to make the step of thinking of a poem as evoking or evolving around image. ItÕs a concretization around some-thing, which may be visual but it also brings in other sensory data. And it does not exclude thought; it becomes a vehicle for putting forward a proposition rather than a statement. So those poems seem to me to be formed by the collision of images from which one can possibly draw a conclusion but theyÕre not organized necessarily according to a narrative structure or hypothesis.
JG: This coming together of different images and ideas is very present in your poetry. The reader is taken on a journey and at the end she/he often comes across something incredibly surprising Š an image, idea or sound Š and because it cuts into the journey, because youÕve not taken it to the most natural seeming conclusion, its resonance is vast. I love coming to the end and thinking ŌWow, how did I get here?Õ
SM: I like that. (Laughs) I like it if it happens in the process of writing. I was very interested in Denise Levertov who writes about the dangers of freeverse and how sheÕs interested in what she calls loosely organic form. This can be a nightmare to argue one way or another, but it seems her intention is somehow to grasp an organic musicality that is different from freeverse, which then falls into prose. ItÕs very hard to know when a poemÕs music is working and when itÕs not, and what people feel is musical and what is not. You still find in 2007 that if thereÕs a concert featuring both Ligeti and Mozart there are two entirely different audiences and they donÕt listen to each other. (Laughs) The Mozart audience coughs all the way through the Ligeti and vice versa. So what rhythms, what musicality, is acceptable? ThatÕs interesting. I donÕt want to have the poem led by a conscious development of an idea and a contemplation through to a conclusion, and then have the intention of making it surprising. I think a reader can always feel when a poem is like that and it is contrived.
JG: Could you walk us through your writing process?
SM: IÕve fallen into a certain way of working, IÕm not sure... I think any way of working has positives and negatives and the process I have, which seems to suit me, is to keep a notebook with me all the time. A small notebook into which I write whenever I feel like it. At the moment I write when IÕm walking about. So the notebook has a mixture of direct observation and fleeting associative thought. I transcribe all those notes, even ones whose language appears to be rather dead or peculiar or clichˇd. Often I start with clichˇ (laughs), and puns!
JG: Now that surprises me.
SM: They can be quite problematic and they get worked through and are usually dropped, but they can often provide the clue for some other level of meaning thatÕs in the work.
JG: That does surprise me. On reading your poems I would never think, oh yes, this poem has started with a pun. ThatÕs exciting because it shows us that thereÕs so much we write down that we only use in order to get to the meat of the poem.
SM: Yes.
JG: How did you go about getting published? How did you choose a publisher? How did you choose the poems? How was the collection shaped?
SM: I knew there were these three sets of poems and the scale of their development meant that they would have to be a book or a series of pamphlets.
JG: Were you working on them simultaneously?
SM: Yes. The great advantage of working on a set is that you can move parts around within it: you can suddenly realize that one part of the poem youÕre working on belongs somewhere totally different; that the image youÕre working with is actually in another poem and when you take it out it improves the poem you took it out from (laughs).
JG: ThatÕs interesting because itÕs improving the one poem, but hopefully will also improve the poem that you extracted it from in the first place?
SM: Yes, and often that is the case; it creates threads that interweave across the poems and play off one another. Mimi used to laugh at me in those early workshops because she would say something and I would draw a great big loop around it and an arrow and drag it over to somewhere else in the poem. And not be particularly bothered about that, you know? It seemed fair enough.
JG: ThereÕs no straight chronology in writing the sets and theyÕre not sequential at all?
SM: No, theyÕre not thought of as a sequence, theyÕre a set. I think Lorca uses the term constellation of poems and I like that, it suggests that there is a centre and the poems radiate out like the spokes of a wheel. As a set evolves there seems to be a final poem that either closes or opens out and that seems the natural place for that poem to rest. But the actual arrangement has kept on shifting right up to the final moment of handing the manuscript over to the publisher.
I think finding an order is quite hard. If you read the book from beginning to end, and I know some people pick up a book of poetry and dip into it, and thatÕs fine, but if you do there will be differences in meaning and emotional levels depending on where certain poems are placed. So it is actually quite crucial to think of the readers who are going to read it from beginning to end to get that right. Also to think of what one wants from that reading and to make conscious decisions about it.
JG: Do you think that a poem affects the poem immediately after it and the one immediately before it?
SM: Yes, I do. It could be an image used in an entirely different way in one poem and probably makes the reader revise the previous poem; or because one can be left in an emotional condition at the end of a poem, it will carry through to the beginning of the next one. I want to be sensitive to that.
JG: Are you sensitive to that when reading?
SM: Yes, I usually organize a reading to do something, to leave one in a particular place. I once made a mistake where I had an opportunity to read two twenty minute sets and I thought, right IÕm going to gear it up very, very slowly to build to an emotional climax. But I did it too slowly and I think people got bored because it was too slow. And so I donÕt do that anymore. (Laughs).
JG: You donÕt give in to the Ōgot to leave them laughingÕ school of thought?
SM: Absolutely, not. No, I donÕt. I donÕt read poetry to laugh. ItÕs great if there is a poem that makes me laugh, but I donÕt read it to laugh.
JG: Why do you read poetry?
SM: I think itÕs about seeking companionship in emotional conditions which are difficult to express, difficult to know, difficult to share, and Š I think you used the word resonance earlier Š to feel a kind of resonance in relation to how that is expressed and formed, which is extraordinary and can capitulate one into a new condition.
JG: Is this why you chose to send to Enitharmon Press?
SM: I think that in looking at the presses itÕs a matter of finding where you think you might belong in terms of the voices that are present. And probably by a process of elimination. I like the Enitharmon list. I like the poets theyÕve published in the past including HD, Vernon Watkins, Kathleen Raine. That seems important and also that they keep people like David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg in print. I was drawn to Enitharmon.
JG: How long has it taken from you sending out the manuscript to you getting the book in your hands?
SM: Two and a half years. ItÕs a long time because I spent a year revising the manuscript before re-submitting. It was not accepted originally. Interest was expressed and I went away and re-worked it, and I really value the fact that I had that extra time. I started writing it in 2001 and I tried to submit it in 2004 and I think it was probably a bit fast. It was really good to have another year to write it.
JG: And then what happened with the poems? Did it just end there?
SM: Eventually it was accepted. Then there was a long fallow period and then further dialogue with Stephen Stuart Smith and Adam OÕRiordan at Enitharmon to give the book more shape and to weed out the weaker poems. IÕve taken out a lot of poems and strengthened it.
JG: Was that very difficult to do working with two editors? How did it challenge you, if at all?
SM: It was a really good experience working with two editors. Previously I went to Christopher ReidÕs course at The Poetry School on putting together a collection, which was also very helpful. Adam OÕRiordan said to me that putting a poem in a book is like writing a line in a poem and itÕs as crucial to get the right line in a poem as the right poem in a book. Coming from a visual arts background IÕd seen it more like an exhibition; you would have a set of paintings and see how they could hang in order to work best together. Adam putting it like that changed my perception of the book. It was a very insightful comment. It shifted my sense of the form of the book, it tightened it.
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