Lucy is a poet, translator and teacher. She has been the recipient of a Poetry School Award (www.poetryschool.com), co-edits Long Poem Magazine (www.longpoemmagazine.org.uk), co-judged Cambridge University’s inaugural Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Competition in 2011 and lives in Cambridge, U.K. Her previous collection, Sonnets for my Mother, published by Hearing Eye (www.hearingeye.org) in 2009, contains poems subsequently translated into Arabic and she has since become the first woman and the first non-Muslim to read her poems, by live satellite link, at the Havana Café (www.havana-cafe.net/?author=1) in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
KH: Welcome Lucy and thanks for making time for this conversation about Stalker, the collection of your prose poems published earlier this year by Shearsman Books. I’ll put my cards on the table straight away and say that I enjoyed it very much and have been looking forward to this chance of talking with you. Your choice of title, for example, poetry collections aren’t famous for having gripping titles, but yours does, so why Stalker?
LH: Thank you Ken, I’m delighted! Well, for a long time ‘Accidents of Life’, the title of the first prose poem I wrote, seemed an adequate umbrella for the hazard and randomness appearing in subsequent poems, but as the book took shape I felt increasingly that it sounded trite, obvious, even complacent. I became aware too that the stalkers of the title sequence and other poems are not the only stalkers. There are benevolent presences, authors, artists, characters from classics like Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Tolstoy’s Resurrection, as well as the twin theme running through the book, most importantly my real-life twin to whom the book is dedicated. She is a recurring presence, both in person and in dreams. Actual stalkers, though, appear in poems such as ‘The Concierge’s Cat’ and ‘Not Jenever/Not Friend’. There are threatening atmospheric and magnetic forces at play, too, in poems such as ‘A Room in Northfield’, and in ‘Reservoir’ the narrator stalks a dead girl in her imagination. Dreams and sleepwalking (in ‘Feet’) are also a kind of stalking and can affect us for days, stay with us for years. ‘Stalker’ is the book’s final section, of course; other section titles include the words ghosts, apparitions, death, intimations, nightmares, daymares, so there is clearly a pervasive stalker theme.
KH: You’ve described the narrator of the poems as being a teen n twenty persona speaking in the Seventies and early Eighties, a role which you didn’t find it difficult to re-inhabit because the events out of which the poems grew remain with you as if they’d happened yesterday and I wondered if you’d like to say more about this aspect, about how events and experiences from time past can be presented as if they’re happening in time present and the importance of these memories to you. It’s fascinating that you feel your sense of the past is dependable and that experience recreated in writing doesn’t become something different as a result.
LH: Well, I was taken aback by your suggestion that Stalker was a reflection on the past. There was certainly no sensation of emotion recollected in tranquility when writing the poems! All the poems are in the present tense and from the perspective of a young woman. As a writer I re-inhabited both the events and the earlier mind. My body even reproduced some of the earlier physical reactions and I needed to write in the present tense for this directness and immediacy. People I’ve asked say that when they read Stalker they believe the narrator is a young woman, albeit a young woman of the 70s, and they read the poems as if the events are happening now. Isn’t this what we do in all our reading? Suspend disbelief. Of course, readers know this isn’t 2012 – there’s a telephone kiosk and no mobile phones, but I hope they don’t read the poems as ‘reflections’. I’m not claiming the poems would be the same if I’d written them when I was seventeen or twenty-five, but I do think that even if we know something was written years after the events it’s addressing, we can still engage with it in the ‘now’ of those events. Perhaps, as Ian Seed suggests in his recent review, Stalker is a kind of ‘anti-memoir’ (www.stridemagazine.co.uk).
Memory, as it emerges in human consciousness, must influence one’s outlook and approach to new experiences, including the experiences of others. Since I’ve always read voraciously, my memories include realities as they are portrayed by great artists. So I don’t think trickery of memory is what it’s about here. Even so, in Stalker I’m not claiming anyone’s truth but my own and I believe Hermann Hesse’s dictum: every truth has its opposite, which is also true.
KH: I was interested in what you said about the process of writing not having been at all cathartic because you were so fully engaged in making sense of your own experience through recreating it. A bit puzzled as well, because I’d have thought that what you describe as making sense, achieving greater emotional or spiritual clarity than you’d felt before, pretty much overlaps the notion of catharsis. I certainly felt this about many of the poems when I first read them and, with hindsight, still do. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
LH: I think there’s a distinction between the narrator’s making sense of events at the time of happening, and my attempt to convey this in the poems. In ‘Nigg Bay, Aberdeen’ and ‘Loons & Quines’ I try to suggest the importance of Resurrection for me when I was eighteen. Tolstoy gave me parallels and comparisons against which to measure and assess my own experiences of love, remorse and the brutality towards and neglect of children I believed I was witnessing at the time ― a rich perspective in which to test my thoughts, so that writing the poems was less about making sense of the experiences than about bringing some order to them. Mostly, I wanted to convey how literature and art helped me make sense of experience at the time. This isn’t to deny the transformative process of writing the poems, because true creativity is always transformative, but I don’t know if that makes it cathartic by definition.
KH: Many of the poems are set amid very clear landscapes and make specific cultural references, to other languages than English, regional dialects, authors and composers, texts and music, individual people and places at precise historical moments. There are so many examples of context set with this fine eye for detail, the noticing eye of a novelist almost, that rather than being simply a technique for colouring the poem and displaying knowledge, isn’t it clearly a means of approaching important and complex areas in ways which, among verse forms, maybe only prose poetry makes possible?
LH: You’re right. Poets also have a noticing eye and the beauty of the prose poem is its freedom to cross boundaries, embrace pluralism, allow the mind to make connections. As I’ve said, the poem then called ‘Accidents of Life’ was my first prose poem, but it was originally in verse and stayed unpublished until, finally, I put it into paragraphs and knew immediately that I’d found the right form, one that would allow me also to draw on everything I’d been reading and writing. So, in ‘Clochard’ and ‘Tornado’, there are echoes of my life in Paris and my reading of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Victor Hugo. The poem ‘Absurd Nights’ mentions Ionesco and ‘Der Rote Stern Verlag’ alludes to Brecht, both reflecting my early interest in drama, and the way this must have worked on me. In ‘Dark Matters’ and ‘Aegean Sea’, for example, there’s the drama of the specific instant in time and place. In the former it’s a drama of perception and insight, in the latter of tragic collision within a split second. In both poems the physical movement of agents instigates the drama. ‘Aegean Sea’ also attempts to convey the (fleeting) joy of language, new language: a simple question remembered aurally and used to express that delight. Yes, I’ve no doubt that I couldn’t/wouldn’t have written Stalker in any other form. The prose poem allows limitless imaginative and technical freedom. All the resources you want are at your disposal. Nothing is out of bounds; the process is challenging and liberating.
KH: One final request: if I were to select one piece from your collection that will stay with me forever, it would be ‘Old Man’, which I think is terrific and which I’d quote in full here if it were shorter. Is there one piece you feel the same way about or am I asking the impossible?
LH: ‘Old Man’ is important to me so I’m very glad you like it! There is a short poem I’m rather fond of, which was first published in Poetry Wales:
The World Is a Swaying Lantern
The world is a swaying lantern and I am a spirit lost in the urban wilderness. A muffled bus glides by, the lucky ones inside lit up like spectres staring through peep-holes in the whited-out windows. Cars have been abandoned. Road markings and boundaries have vanished. I have relinquished my bed, dreams and reading but cannot get to teach. If only a droshky or troika would enter the scene! There are no announcements at the station. All is still, silent, gagged. Who is the figure edging beside the train tapping the undercarriage with a metal pole, the bell-sound ringing out in the petrified silence? Who is the cloaked woman pacing the platform near the engine, trembling and distraught?
KH: A good point to end, Lucy, many thanks.
LH: My pleasure, Ken, thank you.
Lucy Hamilton was in conversation with Ken Head. Her new collection, Stalker has been shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Best First Collection Prize. It is available @ www.shearsman.com and on Amazon.