Listening to Voices
An interview with Myra Schneider by Jacqueline Gabbitas
Published by Brittle Star magazine in 2005
Myra Schneider was born in London and grew up on the Firth of Clyde. She studied English at London University and now works as a creative writing tutor. She has published nine collections of poetry including Exits, The Panic Bird and her New and Selected Poems: Insisting on Yellow; Her most recent collection, Multiplying The Moon, was published last year by Enitharmon. Exploring ‘the voice’ is central to her new book and Jacqueline Gabbitas met up with Myra to discuss some of the challenges that arose from writing it.
JG: IÕve read in an interview you gave about some of the writers you really enjoy reading and it struck me that these are writers very clearly using voice Š they are actually exploring the voice and what it can do in poetry. You mentioned Eliot and I thought of The Waste Land and obviously A Game of Chess; and you mentioned Chaucer. I then discovered your poem ŌKilling ChaucerÕ, and it seemed not only a defense of Chaucer, but also one of the voice Š the humanity Š of his work. I wanted to know if you see any connection with how these writers used voice or the fact they used voice with your own poetry?
MS: There must be Jacqueline, I hadnÕt thought about it. I mean, I am interested in poets using voice and IÕm very interested in voice altogether. I think the starting
point goes further back. You see I needed to find a voice, to have a voice of my own.
JG: Because you had a very strict childhood?
MS: Yes, not cruel but quite repressive and there were high expectations. There was a lot of Ōyou ought to do thisÕ and Ōyou ought to do thatÕ, Ōyou ought to feel this, you ought to feel thatÕ, you know? Expectations of success in exams; of how I should be as a daughter and with it frequent criticism and I think I was trying to hang on to some sense of identity as I emerged as an adult. Writing, I think, stood for me as a way of identifying myself and being a person. I donÕt think I was aware of it at the time but, looking back, I realised at some point that quite often my earlier work, and even some of my later work, is not only about using another voice but finding my own voice and that seems to be really key.
Then, of course, helping other people find their own voices. This ties up Š I didnÕt see any connection at first but I did later - with the work I did with disabled adults.
JG: Which comes very clearly into this new book.
MS: Which comes into several books, doesnÕt it? I wonder if it is a coincidence or not that I ended up, without planning it, working for 25 years with people who either had no voice because they were deaf, or had very little voice for various other reasons. Helping those people to find a voice somehow relates to me finding a voice.
JG: Do you think that you found your own voice through helping others find theirs?
MS: Yes, I think so because if you help somebody else and see them succeed then you feel more confident about yourself too. But I donÕt know how aware I was about it in the early stages.
JG: Of the writing or of the teaching or both?
MS: Both, probably! In the first place I donÕt think I knew I was writing about finding a voice but it became clear to me, certainly by the time of the Panic Bird, that it was a subject I was dealing with and people had started to ask me about it. But in finding my own voice I became interested in other voices. There is another source to all this in that I was writing narratives. ItÕs a different kind of lead in.
JG: Writing narrative poems or fiction Š you also wrote novels, didnÕt you?
MS: (laughs) I donÕt know where
to begin really. I came out of
college and found this extremely unsympathetic, man-orientated, rather pretentious poetry scene in the early 60s. I retreated from it quite fast and I wrote very little poetry and didnÕt read very much poetry from the age of about 24 until I was coming up to 40. There were few women poets at that time and some were rather unusual eccentric voices, like Stevie Smith which, to be honest with you, I wouldnÕt have related to either. So I turned to prose and wrote novels. Then, when I had a son, and he said Ōtell me a storyÕ, I started writing for children, and using childrenÕs voices. So I very much enjoyed the narrative, and by the time I was writing for children I became much more adventurous because you canÕt keep children hanging around. YouÕve got to get on with the story! (laughs).
JG: And at this time you were already working with disabled people?
MS: I was working with kids who had been thrown out of school and with disabled people; teaching basic education. At this time I realised it was quite valuable to control the vocabulary I used.
JG: Right. The narrative element in Multiplying The Moon, and especially the ŌVoiceboxÕ is very strong, but the language, the syntax, the use of every-day words are its main strengths. What I enjoyed about the disabled boy, WilliamÕs, voice is the way it allowed the reader entry into the experience. I wondered whether that is one of the things voice
does, give us opportunities to own situations that we might not normally experience. I donÕt mean appropriate them, I mean, as readers and writers we can feel comfortable with a situation which isnÕt one we might be able to relate to in our own voice.
MS: ThatÕs right; you get out of your own head into somebody elseÕs head. Of course, if youÕre writing in a voice then you usually have to use everyday language otherwise itÕs not going to be convincing. ThatÕs quite a challenge, isnÕt it? To use the language of speech, but make it work as poetry.
JG: Yes, it opens up language to every possibility thatÕs poetry. We donÕt have to hang on to an idea of ŌpoetryÕ or what Ōpoetic languageÕ is. What
we can say is Ōthere is poetry in this everyday act, there is poetry in this everyday wordÕ and we own that word.
MS: Yes
JG: WeÕve talked about narrative,
but one of the things that interests me when you use voices in your poetry is that the narratives are usually very long.
MS: I think probably because I need the space to establish the characters.
JG: In ŌOrpheus in the UndergroundÕ, you have a long sequence not precisely in different voices but using a lot of dialogue. You also have an omniscient narrator.
MS: Yes, in a sense I was inside
the head of Orpheus and even inside the head of Eurydice some of the time. There are always going to be elements of oneself in the work, but this is a way of extending oneself too.
JG: Do you ever find that you slip out of the voice youÕre using and your own voice slips back in.
MS: Yes, my own poetic voice and then I have to correct it. Those Milly poems in the Voicebox Š people who were looking at it as I wrote it would tell me ŅyouÕve slipped out of her voice hereÓ. Or thereÕs a temptation to panic, and think this doesnÕt sound poetic enough and try, automatically, to raise the level of the writing to be ŌpoetryÕ. I have to address that in revising.
JG: Not all of your poems are in different voices.
MS: No, theyÕre not. I often write about personal experience and a number of the poems in Multiplying The Moon arise directly from my experience of cancer and its aftermath. I also explore my inner self and my relationship with the outer world. Some of these poems are intense and I very much enjoy the counterbalance of stepping outside myself. I think, generally, that people could make more use of voice in writing poetry. IÕve just written an essay about Louise Gluck and her use of voice in the ŌWild IrisÕ, ŌMeadowlandÕ and ŌVita NovaÕ. Rarely do people use voice as inventively as she does. ThereÕs very skilful juxtaposition and although she gives her voices individual characteristics she is, in the main, using the characters to put forward often, in argument, a range of viewpoints. ItÕs quite subtle.
Some are well-known personalities but sheÕs done something really different with them. What I want to say is that if you are going to deal with well-known characters then you need to bring in a new angle. I have taken Orpheus, I mean if ever there is a character who has often been written about, itÕs Orpheus, and Eurydice too, but what excited me was the idea of setting their story in the London Underground. If somebody had said to me Ōwrite a story about buskers and the London UndergroundÕ, IÕd have replied, ŌWell I couldnÕt possibly do that, I donÕt know anything about themÕ. But the background, the structure
of that myth and making an equivalence with it in the narrative of the poem gave me the confidence to. I would never have dared do it without the backbone of that story.
JG: So when you write these narratives, do you have the understanding first of the narrative before you start writing the poetry?
MS: You have to, if itÕs a long poem, you have to have an understanding of the narrative.
JG: So itÕs not that youÕve got the character first in your head?
MS: ItÕs both! You need to have some understanding of both the character and the narrative.
JG: And then work them through?
MS: Yes, even if you havenÕt worked everything out in full detail. To some extent there is a similarity between planning that kind of writing and planning a novel but it has to work as poetry.
If it doesnÕt you should be writing
a novel! (laughs).
JG: (laughs) When youÕre writing in different voices how does your own personal experience come into the work? What advice could you give to someone trying to explore their own voice or different voices in their work?
MS: Well I draw on personal experience but IÕm doing something ŌotherÕ with it. I would say to anyone interested in voices, donÕt overwrite, donÕt try writing in the voice of well-known literary or even historical character. DonÕt go writing in the voice of Charles II or Lady Macbeth because itÕs difficult to produce something new. Go for voice or a point of view you think you could enter into Š something that is not too far outside or connects in some way with your experience; you do have to know something about your subject, eg. William in ŌVoiceboxÕ is a composite of people IÕve worked with but IÕve added something extra to the character. I felt confident about this because of my work. It wouldnÕt be wise to write about a disabled person unless youÕd had some real contact with someone disabled.
Another voice doesnÕt even have
to be a person. Sylvia Plath wrote "a poem from the point of view
of a mirror, and itÕs a common workshop exercise to write in the voice of an inanimate object".
JG: Do you find that very successful or satisfying poetry, writing from the point of view of inanimate objects?
MS: Of course itÕs difficult to do but it can work very well. Recently I read a poem by Denise Levertov in which she writes in the voice of a tree that heard Orpheus play. You see, you could write in the voice of a tree hearing the traffic going past all the time, rather than writing a diatribe on modern traffic. You could be the tree being polluted. ItÕs a very crude example but it would immediately take the poem into a different area. You would also have a different angle if your narrator is something like a small insect or an object.
JG: Like the Ant and a Grasshopper in your poem?
MS: Yes, that was great fun to do. I was putting forward a discussion, not at a very deep level, but definitely putting points of view from two very different characters. It would be very boring if you just said in a poem ŌWell there are these people who are busy all the time and canÕt think of anything except practical matters and there are also airy-fairy people!Õ
JG: I liked the fact that this poem is a good answer to these who say Ōwhat is the point of poetry in the world?Õ As if it has to serve a purpose other than enriching your life.
MS: Yes, and even though the thought was at the back of my mind, itÕs not until we come to talk about it that I realise how much
I articulated this in the writing.
The story is taken from an Aesop fable. ItÕs a La Fontaine fable too: two insects having an argument, but again the voices meant I could write it from a different slant;
itÕs not presented as an argument
in the fables.
JG: It also means because itÕs a conversation you can just put these characters, and the reader, straight in the middle of a situation, you donÕt have to give all of the background at all. ItÕs another kind of permission to the writer to look at the work differently.
MS: Yes, because the dialogue indicates what the characters are and where theyÕre going to go.
JG: Do you think this use of voice gives the writer an opportunity to be able to talk about things in a way that she/he might not have thought about?
MS: Yes, take that short poem, ŌThe Beanstalk and JackÕ. This is told within a narrative but from the point of view of the beanstalk. One can be very adventurous and it can be a release to get right outside oneÕs own head and not write directly about personal experience. I wrote that poem because I was so angry about genetically modified food and I suddenly had a vision of the beanstalk growing so quickly, that its existence causes havoc to other plants and wildlife. ThatÕs why I wrote it. It was a fun way of dealing with something I felt very strongly about. I mean, thereÕs no point in writing a rant about genetically modified food because you might as well write a piece of prose or a piece of journalism. Writing in these voices allowed me a spontaneity, a tone I wouldnÕt have been able to give myself in my own voice.
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