Poetry Review Interview | Greta Stoddart

Interview

GRETA STODDART

In conversation with Carol Rumens

Maybe we all have our inner fool – or inner child – what we

might call an unconditioned self who is able (happy, even)

to be in the unknowing, who can play with what they have

and what they are. No one’s watching, no one cares. Greta Stoddart’s

fourth collection Fool looks at ways in which, left to ourselves, we look

for truth and meaning, how we inhabit various states of being and how

it is we can know so much and so little at the same time.

Fool opens with a very moving poem, ‘The Act’, which describes a

performance in which a person does nothing but sit on a bench:

This is how it was:

the girl had not a single word floating inside her

or even a thought that might want to try itself out in words.

For the girl on the bench

there was some resistance to anything happening.

I mean anything at all.

She just sat there in a kind of cosmic indifference.

94 The Poetry ReviewThe girl is transformed when she discovers, rather magically, the power of

collective laughter. The poem has an epigraph from Jacques Lecoq, ‘Trouver

son clown, c’est en quelque sorte se trouver soi-même’ (To find your clown is,

in some ways, to find yourself ).

Years ago I trained as an actor at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

Clowning is a fundamental part of Lecoq’s teaching method; he calls

the red nose ‘the smallest mask in the world’ and, like other masks, it

can reveal as much as it hides. The idea – to put it very briefly – is to

find your clown by tapping into a fundamental part of your nature.

That poem describes ‘my clown’ when I eventually found her: sullen,

impassive, resolutely detached, whose main act consisted of sitting on a

bench while another came on stage to see how they could provoke her.

Audiences found her expressionless face hilarious. I had no idea why

it was funny. The laughter seemed remote and somehow meaningless.

I felt a great emptiness. But not bereft. My choices were suddenly

reduced and existence simpler. Of course, I couldn’t stay sitting on that

bench forever waiting for things to happen but it was a state of mind,

of being – of playing, really – that I remember vividly.

Is the freedom to be a clown linked to the freedom of The Beatles’ ‘Fool on

the hill’?

For me, the freedom to be a clown was, surprisingly, a freedom to be

myself. Maybe McCartney’s fool is a more mystic version of that girl:

‘the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see [ing] the world

spinning round’ form a vision both material and metaphysical. He

reminds me of the Fool in Cecil Collins’s essay ‘The Vision of the Fool’

who represents not ‘a philosophy, but a quality, a consciousness of life,

an endless regard for human identity’.

The psychic freedom of the clown and the fool derive from their

separation from social expectations and constructs. These two

examples also happen to share a stillness. I like how you used the

word ‘moving’ earlier, in response to the static act described in that

opening poem. I’m interested in what moves in the stillness, what

remains still in the movement. There’s a poem ‘Second Nature’ in the

collection that, though it appears to be about memo boards and saints

and menstruation, is essentially about this tension.

‘My life came up to me and said’ is another ‘moving’ poem – in both

senses of the word. I’m struck by the figure you call ‘my life’ and wonder

if writing like this almost approaches the creation of a secular religion.

The word religion has its roots in re-bind or re-read – either way

there’s a sense of doing something again, as if we were relearning

or rediscovering something. I feel that perhaps we did once know

things; we belonged in the world in a way that allowed us to know

it more closely.

There’s a line in another poem (‘The long grass’) that sums up how

I often feel: ‘[it’s] like being in a state of forever losing something […]

the possibility of ever knowing a true thing.’

Poems are where I think. And some of the thinking in this book

seems to circle around belief and truth. I wonder if I might interpret

your ‘creation of a secular religion’ as the creation of a search for

meaning. Because there’s plenty of that in the book! The speakers

are often looking for meaning – truth? – and though it’s doubtful

they find it, the search itself provides at least a sense of purpose.

I read recently that maybe in the future we’d abandon this search.

That in the way we once believed in God, the need for meaning would

gradually wane. It would no longer concern us, we wouldn’t bother

with it anymore. And I couldn’t tell if that would be a great liberation

or the beginning of some kind of barbaric thoughtlessness…

Artists express what it is to be human, and I find it hard to do this

without an apprehension of something other than what my senses

tell me. Longing is too strong a word but there’s a desire to know

beyond what’s there. It’s not enough to sit in a room with a perfect

bowl of pink and white carnations. But what if it could be?

It’s as if there’s this perfect thing and the ways we’re all trying to

approach it are unavoidably imperfect and various. If we were perfect,

poetry wouldn’t exist.

The finding of authenticity is a major theme for you – one that connects to

your exactness of language?

I like the contradiction implied in the insult, ‘You’re a fool’ (ie, for not

doing what’s perceived as the right or sensible thing). The expected

way of doing things sometimes feels at odds with what might be

called authentic.

For example, we sometimes avoid a bereaved person because we’re

paralysed by the idea that we might do or say the wrong thing. We’ve

become so divorced from death – one of the most fundamental things

about all life on earth – that we no longer understand how to behave in

the face of it. How did that happen? And though this avoidance might

be an honest reaction, I can’t believe it’s an authentic one. I imagine

the authentic response became somehow warped into this neurotic

shirking a long time ago.

The crying clown is a stereotype that contains the truth; often

beneath the most uproarious laughter lies a seam of pain. We could

learn from our feelings of sadness, and yet we’re afraid to say we are

sad because it makes others feel uncomfortable. I’m not talking about

the more clinical and debilitating state of depression but a quality of

wisdom – an awareness of life’s inherent sorrow.

There are many lone figures in this book. Maybe their aloneness,

their removal from society or company, is part of an instinctive

attempt to gauge the true or authentic in themselves, away from the

judgement of others. Any artwork that puts self at the centre is going

to be dealing with questions of truth or authenticity. I don’t mean

necessarily in the confessional sense (the biographical elements of

these poems are tangential, to say the least) but in the way the ‘I’ at

the centre can act as a form of being or even un point fixe (as Lecoq

might say) who tries, through the fug and flow of living, to gain

some sort of purchase on existence.

To touch on your idea of ‘the exactness of language’, I feel so much

of what we say is not honest. We slip through language into all kinds

of emotional deceits. There’s a poem in the book, ‘Once Upon a Time’,

where a word is utterly worn out by its being over- or misused; it’s

shot through with its own destroyed sense of itself as a meaningful

thing, when it comes to realise that the truth it’s been trying to

express all along might only be felt, finally, in the physical, not the

verbal, gesture.

I find this poem clarifies the erosions of meaning which it’s the task of poetry

to oppose. It’s tempting to guess which particular word you had in mind!

Well, I want readers to guess! It’s funny, we think we know a word – we

use it most days maybe – but then we stop to consider it, and the more

we think about it, the less sure we are of its meaning.

When you’re getting a book together there’s a point where you want

to try and get a handle on what the thing’s about. One way of doing

this is to see which words crop up most – and I found that ‘know’ or

‘knowing’ (or variants thereof ) came up a whopping 48 times. So that

led me to question what the word actually meant and pretty soon I got

lost in all the many concepts of ‘knowing’ when the Fool came to me as

a figure who would be able to maintain (or perhaps entertain) a sense

of play and enquiry around the idea.

The book might be called a poetic exploration of epistemology: by

‘poetic’ I think I mean open to doubt and speculation, even error, and,

like a fool, playful, happy to be tripped up.

Levels of knowing are like strata in a rock. There’s stuff we know

from way back, that goes very deep, most of it not even conscious,

then there’s layer upon layer of other kinds of knowing, over time

and through experience, all the way up to the stuff that we’re actually

walking on, experiencing, knowing now.

I have fun thinking about the word ‘no’ nestled in ‘know’. Hearing

it. Is there even a bit of negative capability lurking there? Mark Doty’s

poem ‘No’ seems to me a great expression of different types of knowing

or, we might say, ‘No-ing’.

Children (frequently very good at both knowing and ‘no-ing’) are often a

strong presence. They seem to carry memories of trauma, and the poem

works out ways of onwards growth. It’s as if such experience had been

inscribed into the bedrock of the ‘authentic’.

Perhaps children in my poems act more as vehicles for an unconditioned

way of being. I think of Blake trying to see the world through a child’s

eyes. I want to say (but I’m a bit embarrassed) that it feels as if children

are closer to the life force; they haven’t long been here, they haven’t long

been away from wherever they were before, which allows them – for a

short while anyway – greater freedom.

Sometimes, I feel it’s traumatic simply to be a child. To be thrust into

this place, with all these people, all these things. To have so little choice

or agency. To find you are expected to do things and if you don’t

there are consequences which can, to a greater or lesser degree, be

devastating, depending on the society you happen to be born into. It’s

hard to realistically propose another way of being, to conceive how we

might live differently or better, but children remind us continually of

that possibility.

I wonder if, in my poems, part of the trauma a child suffers is the

attempt by society, or adults who may know no better, to alter that

innate perception or curiosity or love, or whatever you want to call it,

and cause damage.

Occasionally I’m surprised by what my (big) kids tell me. It’s less

what they know than how they know it. Simply the fact of not having

lived a long time can offer them a clearer lens. There are some things

that only the young know – precisely because they are young. We

adults forget this. So easily we forget how it once was for us. How

we felt, and how we felt we just knew certain things, and perhaps

we did. The French have a saying regarding young people’s lack of

appreciation of their youth, that begins: Si les jeunes savaient (if only

the young knew)… well, I think they do – it’s just not what we think

they ought to know!

Finally, how do poems in the more organic or experimental forms come

about?

Essentially it’s how the shape of the poem evokes the physicality of its

emotion. It’s as if the poem’s shape is also part of its reasoning, showing

the peculiar way a mind is coming at a thing. For example, the poem

‘Clay’, with its long thin space or ‘canal’ running down the middle of

the text evokes the location of the poem but also sets out a sense of

duality, of the mind and body being in two places at once – the past

and present – a kind of double mental time zone, helping to fuel the

atmosphere of anxiety. Another poem, ‘Flowers for my ego and a dark

stage’, tries to recreate the physical experience of a recurring dream

I have about being cornered by the universe and the poem evolved in

such a way that, in the end, it was also like the beam of a spotlight

bearing down on a stage.

Thank you for these many illuminations, and congratulation on a wonderful

new collection.