Our Love Could Spoil Dinner
We always breakfast with the
biographer.
On day one I showed him my
grapefruit spoon;
it has a serrated edge. My
father gave him
a Mont Blanc fountain pen as a
welcome gift,
but I think he was more
impressed by the spoon.
‘It’s almost like a knife!’ he
said. The biographer
is a coffee nut and I use this
fact to bond with him.
‘Oh, Robusta,’ I say
dramatically when I know
he’s listening. ‘You inferior
bean.’ When we pass
in the hall I fling my arm
back and say things like:
‘Am I strung out or what!’ and
‘Time for another
caffeine fix, methinks!’ I am
not allowed coffee
because of my nerves, but the
biographer doesn’t
know this. Sometimes we sit up
in bed comparing
moans. Mine are always
loudest. The biographer’s
are hampered by his
boarding-school education
and the British flair for
embarrassment. Sometimes
the publishers call. When he
gets on the phone,
he sweats; afterwards the
right side of his face is damp.
I like to monitor these subtle
changes. Last night
my father found us touching
legs. ‘Go to your room!’
he shouted. ‘You shabby
daughter.’ ‘You worthless
excuse for a story,’ the
biographer added. They played
cards to settle a debt. That
day my mouth felt wetter
than usual. I asked the
biographer to check. He used
his tongue. ‘This may affect
the results,’ he said.
[from ‘Dear Boy’]
Everything She Does is
Not Her Fault
The truth is, I didn’t
imagine I would melt this way,
down to my bones and my
milk teeth, this old tin
I kept the things I lost
in. I didn’t imagine
you’d be round to see me
like this, have to listen
to this rattling all
night long. Darling, I don’t know
if you thought about it,
the way the round bone
of my cheek fits the
bowl of your eye-socket exactly,
the slow blink of your
still-lemonade eyes beneath my face,
each eyelash-graze a
tiny sip like a bird drinking.
[from ‘Dear Boy’]
The Tea-party Cats
We’re suspicious of the
tea-party cats;
we don’t know why. They
all turned out so well
today and aired their
charming characters;
they were so smart they
frightened us to death.
We longed to have their
style and easy knack
of fitting in; we feared
our taillessness
would show us up, or our
sickly looking
skin. We tried our best
all afternoon,
but nothing seemed to do
– we spilled our tea
into the saucer, we
couldn’t think of things
to say, we weren’t as
dapper as these cats
whose whiskers nicely
referenced their bowties.
We stood in corners, if
you want to know,
nibbling biscuits though
our mouths were dry.
Some of us slipped away
before the end.
I stayed until the
speeches, when the cats
thanked each other
proudly, proposing
endless toasts; and then
one of them exposed
a weakness, but quickly
covered it up.
[from ‘Dear Boy’]
Sign of the anchor
I stood at the dangerous shore.
Sleeves rolled up to my shoulders.
My fringe lifted in the wind in a long salute
and I pushed it back.
Live your wish, Live your wish, said the sea.
I wanted to be like the shells on the beach,
rubbed smooth and cracked open.
And I held my arms out, tipped my head back,
pictured my protective symbols.
I opened my eyes and saw the sign of the
anchor burning.
I had to go.
I shouted some words but they were lost when
the waves crashed.
And ash rained from the sky.
I was far out, in wet denim, and the shore was
a jolt when I looked back.
[From ‘Stranger, Baby’]
Picnic
If you are not happy,
the sea is not happy
It sulks in and out of
the bay
I lie on the bed or
stand at the window watching the sea
Why must we destroy what
we do
Watching the sea is like
watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole
Imagine trying to pick
up a piece of the sea and show it to a person
I tried to do that
All that year I visited
a man in a room
I polished my feelings
Sometimes I think if the
devil came and offered to swap me into some other body without me knowing what
I’d be getting, I’d say . . . Sure
And, sure, I believe in
the devil
I wanted to love the
world
I thought when all the
anxiety slipped away, I’d watch it go, and I’d know precisely
Every increment of its
departure
The way ‘getting better’
can be an unfolding
The covers pulled back,
the light coming in
*
The mood of the sea is
catching
Your eyes wear out from
all the glitches
I sat there watching it
and I can assure you it is so
Its colour became the colour of my
eyes and the salt made me cry oceans
*
I like curved things
Apples, peaches, the
crest of a wave
We once agreed the apple
was the only iconic fruit
I like it when I am
writing a poem and I know that I am feeling
something
To be poised and to
invite contact
Or to appear to invite
contact
Remember
when we used to imagine
Our correspondence
would make us famous or that
Once we’d become
famous our correspondence would too?
Maybe it still will
I’ll need to make a
lot of cuts first
When did everybody start
wanting to be famous all the time
Or has it always been
this way
This is the rain, the
October rain
I wrote that when it was
still October
It must have been
raining
It will always be
October again
This is sadness: men in
waterproofs dragging the deep lake
The warm American voice
says: There is no lack or limitation,
there is only
error in thought
My thoughts are wrong.
My thoughts are wrong
The thought that my
thoughts are wrong is wrong
*
I started to be able to see in the dark
It hurt my eyes
My, yes, salty, wet, ocean-coloured eyes
Albeit that in the dark they were the colour of the dark, and on fire
*
When the rain came after the drought they said it was not good
enough
It would not change things
It was the wrong rain
The rain came out of my eyes and fell on the ground and dried up
Who are you. Who are you. Who are you
Stop, language is crawling all over me
Sometimes if you stay still long enough you can make it go
If a person standing still watched another person minutely moving
would it seem after a while as if they were watching the sea?
I remember just one thing my mother said to me:
Never look at yourself in the mirror when you’re crying
I did not follow her advice
[ From ‘Stranger, Baby’]
Winter
When the new room was
built my mother showed me What To Do In Case Of Fire. There were four metal
rungs embedded in the balcony wall: this was the escape route. She did not show
me (then) the other one.
What happened was, my
mother was very very sad. She was so sad she could not hold up her head, she
could not sit down, she could not lie down, she could not see out of the dark,
my very sad mum.
In the
course of my research I learned a new kind of love. This lesson taught me to
pray. I made a prayer for my mother. By ‘prayer’ I mean a meditation on a want
that can never be answered. A prayer for the dead alive inside the living.
That’s what it is to burn a flame. We were in the darkest days of winter, approaching
the celebration of light.
I watched the white men
in their pastel coats / Roll you up and put you away / They put you inside
their white box / With its clicks and locks / And carried you far away
[ From ‘Stranger, Baby’]
Song
After Luna Miguel
When I became mermaid it
was for this reason.
The girl I love is a
beautiful boy.
So you would not ask
questions.
Because I gave myself up
to the rain
but it was too late; the
rain could not save me.
And when I thought the
line was straight,
I was wrong; I could not
follow the line.
Thus the shore,
infinitely. Thus these rocks.
There was so much to
feel good and sorry about.
And I shut my legs up
tight, I shut my eyes.
So I could see him
better, so I could see her.
[From ‘Stranger, Baby’]
The Forms of Resistance
Is this mountain all rock,
or are there any villages on it?
These are some of the
things I said to her.
We bake because it is a
way of overcoming.
In the journey of zest,
I see myself.
On the news every day
people are standing up screaming
or lying down screaming
while others remain calm.
She pointed out that I
had not made eye contact
with her at all. Then I
cried properly in a short burst.
This is the worst example of any circumstance ever,
noted a journalist in
his notebook.
Let butter and chocolate be a wish not to die!
I implored the
bain-marie. She likened me to a sieve.
I clutch all my poems to
my chest and count them
again and again. I am
kneeling like a small dog.
What’s going on with
this modern world
and the right wife not
even knowing
what the left wife is doing?
Now all you have to do
is cut off the legs.
After an absence, after a hard task,
after the way the hand
turns, like this —
There was so much I
couldn’t contain.
She asked me how I was
feeling in my body
at this moment; I said
tense in my whole trunk area.
A strong smell of white
wine. She said it came from
an impulse that she
often used to have when she first
started practicing. She
said she believed feelings
are held in the body.
She asked me what was going on
with my breath and I
realized I was sort of holding it.
Like the boxes in the
cupboard. “Enough” can get bigger.
How much bigger, though?
When I say
I’ve had enough, how will you know when to stop?
[From ‘Stranger, Baby’]
EMILY BERRY: Generally, I reject that term in relation to poetry, because it doesn’t seem to fit. An autobiography is meant to be an account of a person’s life, and, on the whole, you’re not going to get a poem that is a straight description of a person’s life — it’s usually an essence of that. Say you’re making a cake and you have various different ingredients — you put eggs in it. But the cake is very different from its ingredients; you don’t say that the cake is an account of the eggs. Yet you couldn’t make it without the eggs. Most of my poems are in some way about feelings, but as a cognitive behavioral therapist would say, “Feelings are not facts!” So “autobiography” doesn’t seem like a relevant term. At the same time, some people really want poems — specifically poems written in the first person — to be about someone and something “real,” and they can feel cheated when the poem isn’t. There needs to be a different way of talking about it aside from “autobiography.” I’m interested in how Sharon Olds has spoken about her work as being “apparently personal.” The things of her poems do seem like her “real life,” but she didn’t used to own up to that. But even then — I say “own up” as if I’m accusing her of not admitting something.
Another issue with “autobiography” is its potential untruthfulness — in “Freud’s Beautiful Things,” you quote Freud: “what makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.” Is autobiographical writing any more “honest” than other modes?
Truth is something different — something can be factually untrue but emotionally true. It’s like Rita Ann Higgins said, “To get at the poetic truth it is not always necessary to tell the what–actually–happened truth; these times I lie.”
You also quote and reference object-relations theorist Donald Winnicott — where did you first come across his writing?
A friend of mine said I’d enjoy his writing because “he’s quite gentle” (unlike a lot of psychoanalysts!). And then through Adam Phillips, who has written about him a lot. There’s also a graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel, which I loved, which looks at her relationship with her mother through a psychoanalytic lens. Each section opens with a dream she had, and Winnicott appears a lot in the book. The quote of his that I used in Stranger, Baby — “I have already said that the baby appreciates, perhaps from the very beginning, the aliveness of the mother” — I had this one-line poem, and I was looking for the right title, and that quote was perfect.
Where did the one-line poem responding to that title come from? It reads, “We all have to die sometime, Your Majesty.”
That was taken from my mother’s writing — she was an academic but also wrote novels. I have several unpublished manuscripts of hers — and somehow I ended up putting some of her words into the poems. So she gets a bit of a voice. That line felt like a fitting response to the Winnicott quote. Maybe it’s a way in which the mother-daughter relationship gets to continue across the life/death divide. I actually found out later that Freud talks in one paper about “his Majesty the Baby” as a way of describing the interaction between a baby and its parents.
Quotations from other sources — from major writers to academic case studies into grief — are scattered throughout the collection. What was the process behind gathering and collaging in these quotes — did they stem from your PhD research?
Yes, that’s how I came across most of them. In most cases I didn’t pick them out with the intention of putting them into poems, they just resonated with me. But they enabled me to say things I couldn’t say in my own words, maybe because I hadn’t even been able to think them; for that reason, the subject started to seem very suited to the collage technique. In The New Black, Darian Leader talks about a Holocaust survivor who was unable to articulate her experiences until she heard other people talking about their trauma — then she was able to tell her own story by telling theirs. Leader called this a “dialogue of mourning.” For me, Stranger, Baby is in conversation with many other voices — it seems like a monologue but it’s actually a dialogue.
All of this language, all of these voices, seem at times oppressive rather than expressive: in “Picnic” you write, “Stop, language is crawling all over me.” Given the excess of information and language we are constantly bombarded with — Twitter, 24-hour news media, et cetera — do you think the role of the contemporary poet is, in part, to be a curator of language?
It definitely seems as though we have a lot more “readymade” language at our disposal than was once the case. I think that line in “Picnic” was about struggling with the tension between wanting to stay silent and wanting to speak. These poems emerged from a place that had been completely mute for a long time, and that was (and is) very overwhelming. Winnicott said, “artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide,” which makes a lot of sense to me.
Spectacular Endlessly:
An Interview with Emily Berry. Ralf Webb
interviews Emily Berry.
Los Angeles Review ofBooks , March 7, 2017.
This acknowledgment of the
limitations of imagery represents the flipside of Berry’s engagement with
Freud. Although she mines his language and shares his fascination with dreams,
allowing her poems to wander in and out of their shadow territory, she resists
his pitilessness and determinism, and recognises that his theories can only
carry her so far. The collection’s glancing references to therapy are largely
negative. “Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a
person,” she says in “Picnic”, the discursive, image‑rich second poem. “I
tried to do that / All that year I visited a man in a room / I polished my
feelings …” She’s aware of the irony; the accusation of inauthenticity that she
levels at the therapeutic process is applicable to poetry too, and it’s an
accusation she considers directly when she observes that “there was a feeling /
but I wrote it down and it ceased to be a feeling, / became art”. But
ultimately, it seems, poetry represents for her a means not of sanitising or
decoupling from her feelings, but an attempt to gain necessary control over
them. These poems, with the carefully curated metaphorical vocabulary and taut
adherence to form, are a way of managing the chaos of loss; of offering it back
to herself in a fashion that becomes acceptable. For her readers, they’re more
than simply acceptable – they are highly intelligent, deeply moving poems that
provide a new lens through which to consider grief.
Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry review
– deeply moving study of loss. By Sarah Crown. The Guardian March 10, 2017.
Dramatic, honest,
unstable and beautiful, what unites these poems is Berry's understanding that
absence is to love as wind is to fire: it may extinguish the small, but it
kindles the great.
Dear Boy by Emily Berry –
review. By Ben Wilkinson. The Guardian ,
March 22, 2013.
Emily Berry speaks to
Spanish poet, editor and journalist Luna Miguel - via a translation by Electric
Cereal editor Luis Silva - about the personal significance of mermaids and
tattoos, life, death, community, why inspiration is like orgasm, and guts of
both the metaphorical and literal sorts.
The Body Poetic: An Interview With
Luna Miguel. The Quietus , May 24, 2015.
‘Pain is the spine of life. It holds you
up.’
A Short Guide to Corseting
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