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| Joan Metelerkamp reading in Grahamstown, July 2014 |
Joan’s eighth collection of poetry, Now the World Takes
These Breaths, was published by Modjaji
Books in 2014. She was interviewed by Alan Finlay.
AF: I said I would do an interview with you for the Dye
Hard Interviews blog. So here are my questions or statements that I hope you
find okay-enough to respond to....
JM: Fine – I woke this morning after horrific dreams (I
don’t think connected with this) but with a whole long essay worked out with my
responses. Now, after doing this and that, mainly house-work and
procrastination of other tasks, I’ve forgotten everything! Can’t even remember
what track I was on. I think this happens in writing of poems all the time –
“it’s okay/ it can go”. Obviously one can’t live with an obsessive anxious
holding on to everything. An “irritable reaching after fact and reason” …But
unless the poem is made it doesn’t exist (obviously); all those unwritten
wonders are NOTHING.
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Well, we had this discussion before. I don't think I
agree entirely. Sometimes I can feel happy that I “wrote” a poem, but I don't
get to write it down. I think that poem exists too. Maybe just for me. It's a
bit like playing piano for yourself – there is a sense of audience, even a
strong sense of imagined audience, but nothing is getting recorded, and no-one
is listening.
For me there really is a distinction between a crafted
object, a work that stands, and the composition in the mind. (Maybe this has to
do with my being a woman and a materialist!
Maybe it feels like this to me because my imaginary audience is so demanding?) And about playing the piano to connect with
yourself – isn’t that more like writing a poem and putting it away? Or writing
versions of poems? Or reading a poem aloud once and destroying it?
It's really the
process that I find reassuring, I think. In a way it reminds me, or re-connects
me: I can do this! But yes, the question of audience – or even the complex or
neurosis of audience. I was thinking of how to describe your writing, and I
thought of a “folding outwards”. You write: “not so much that I've wasted my
life but that it unfolds”. I feel like there is a tension in the emotional
spaces your poems create, of a letting go, but also of a turning back. Like
paper being folded, but outwards. The paper in that sense can go on forever,
the “unreaming” can go on forever, even though it is being folded. I think this
can also be felt in your style of writing, its strong sense of thinking in the
immediate. At the level of narrative, the book is about letting go of your
children, your space as a mother, as it was, and who you are left with when
that happens.
Yes, though I hope that the book is only “about” the most
obvious narrative. Except in the sense of cycle – round and round “about”.
There are narrative elements, but the poems make a formal cycle, as in an old ritualistic
dance-circle; so this would be the in and out, folding unfolding, forward and
back that you pick up. So the “story” is
an old old story! It refers back and forward. The folding, relating to death,
extinction, is also in the rhinoceros
image – “like folded rhinoceros we collapse/ in what’s left of the shade”. Of course, Persephone went
to the kingdom of death and back again…in that myth of cycle, which is a
central referent in my book, there is the hope that Earth continues, will
continue. It’s not just about a journey to individual not being. But this is the central terror – that
everything will disappear into nothing.
Even the sun dies etc.
Would it
have helped knowing it
was all a
story as ancient as ever? I forgot
I didn’t
know. I still had to live it.
I still had
to have it all crushed out.
I still had
to find women to turn to, to laugh about it…..
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I am curious – thinking of Sharon Olds, and her personal
poems about her children or family, and what she said about writing them – how
do others in your family receive your poetry? Because you are not the centre of
everything, of course, and they have their lives too.
Yes, of course! But the lyric poet very often speaks from
her “centre” her own “interior” – her feelings, thoughts are made in poems –
it’s how a poet thinks best, isn’t it? Even a novel, although the
socio-political, character-based construction that it is, often refers to particular people…I’m
thinking much further back than Olds, or before her Plath, but of Virginia
Woolf …and now I’m jumping forward again - do you know the Stevie Smith “story
of a story”?
No, I don't think so. Can you share it?
I think it may be in her volume Me Again – but basically
it’s a story about having written a story based on friends who took umbrage; as
far as I remember Stevie Smith said “but this is as true as I can make it even
if you don’t feel flattered”... The people closest to me in this book knew that
I was writing it for them so I think they were ok with it. They know that part
of me, at least, is a poet. Poetry may
seem central in the book, but I think the book is also quite clear that it
isn’t the only thing that matters! They also know that I know “there are things
that are important beyond all this fiddle” (Marianne Moore). In other words, I would hope that the book
opens out as much as it closes in. I would hope that it might speak to other
people, including those close, rather than exposing them.
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Yes, I like this idea. This is something I find difficult
when it comes to publishing. I want to speak to people close to me, but in a
public way. I think your poetry pulls the reader into the personal in such a
vigorous way it makes it necessarily public.
This is a complex question of course that I’ve wrestled
with. This is what “no wonder” deals with – Woolf’s “angel in the house”, the
internal voice that urges her to speak and behave as those around her expect
and whom Woolf advises the woman writer to kill... but it’s not only writers
who deal with this angel’s voice I was saying... We hurt other people even while we are trying
to do what is best for them – everyone does.
We hurt those me most love – but surely it’s the definition of
psychopathy to try to hurt those you supposedly love? (I don’t see suicide as
an aggressive action against anyone, by the way). Also, I don’t believe that old adage “what
you don’t know doesn’t hurt you”…that’s bullshit in my experience. If you have
won the Pulitzer Prize and published many tens of thousands of copies of your
books (as Olds has done) does this make a difference? I don’t know.
I suspect with that kind of “publicity”, at some level
they will have to reject (or kill) the parent-poet...
I’ll give you a concrete example: at the launch of the
book I read the title poem. I was
anxious. The poem as you know is about
an horrific unnatural natural death. Some of the people involved in that
incident were at the launch, but others had
already read the book and given me confidence in their responses. I
hoped it would be received as a tribute, and it was! What do you do about the earth or sea that
swallows those close to you first and then eventually you. Sometimes there is
literally nothing to be done. You can only do everything you can do. Sometimes you literally have to save your own
life. What can a poem do?
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Since your first book you have been negotiating the
burdened or “over-weightiness” of the patriarchal voice in poetry, of deciding
what was okay, which stopped so much from being written in South African
poetry.
Yes. I could go on
at great length about this. There are
many different approaches – I think we’ve covered a few of the issues. But behind this is the figure of the judge
who is also the critic and authority and who says “how could you!” in the voices of the book-club women or
“gossip girls” you live amongst, the contemporary “angel in the house”, instead
of “how could you” as in the real teacher who looks for new ways or at least
ways to break old crippling habits. The negative side; as opposed to the
positive prototype. And it goes back to
the point about hurting others…well. I’m
not an historian nor sociologist nor... jurist nor philosopher nor
psychologist…nor scholar! I’d have to go by way of the poet and talk about my
own experience/ feelings/ intuitions/ thoughts … If you want another example
from the book of wrestling directly with the issue of authority its
“Confession”. Is it the poet/speaker who
has to “hold her eyes open” however hard this is and “give” and “forgive” and
confess” and ask for forgiveness? Or does she say no, the choice (whatever the
choice is) is “for giving”.
Do you paint?
I don’t paint. I
wish I did.
I though at some point you said you did. Maybe you said you
wanted to...
Probably. And this goes back to the first point – you can
do a drawing course and come home all fired up seeing horizontals, verticals,
diagonals, tripping on the curves and moving lines outside, the colours and
planes of the wheat free fields you drive through, experiencing in a new
way…but if you don’t make that drawing, where is it? But I suppose I don’t wish
it enough to have done it! I did wish to
be an actor – but I failed at that – I worked for three years when I was young
but I couldn’t take one of the central aspects of acting at the start of a
career – sitting around in the dressing-room, and doing very small roles. Also I couldn’t take Pretoria and the
performing arts council who employed me, nor,
in the early eighties, the alternative world of Joburg and touting
myself to an agent. The other “medium” or “form” I’ve flirted with but haven’t
cracked at all because I haven’t spent enough time and/or energy on it is the
essay. And this also has to do with
being scared off of that by academe. Another failed career… another story.
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Do you feel South African poets could bring more of other
disciplines into their poetry? So poets are busy with poets and words – and
someone like Willem Boshoff pulls the carpet from under our feet, because
no-one who is a “poet” is looking at concrete or visual poetry – at least not
at that level. Why not? Is the idea of being a poet in this country too narrow?
Sometimes it feels that the problem lies in poetry as the starting point. Start
with another art, and lead into poetry to make poetry alive. I am thinking of a
couple of things here, but also a comment Robert [Berold] made about Kobus Moolman's latest book, that he has introduced dramatic elements into it.
I think it probably depends on temperament, and changes
of life, don’t you think? I think there
are many and varied kinds of poem in South Africa. I don’t know if it’s a matter of where you
start, but at some point you have to keep going, practicing poems. If you don’t
develop as a poet you may as well stop – and I think that’s more of the
issue. What’s the incentive to keep
going?
In the last part of the book, I felt a sense of boredom,
of you expressing boredom with your poetic project. It might be exhaustion. I
am thinking of moments like: “all my lack of clarity. irritability./depressiveness./forgetfulness/what the fuck/ we're ok”. Perhaps
this is resignation? To loss, to life. I am thinking here of your mother's
suicide too. Of how difficult it must be for someone to leave.
I don’t understand the last part of this comment.
Difficult for who to leave? (Are you saying it must be difficult for my
daughter to leave because my mother committed suicide? – but then my mother’s
mother did too…)
Sorry, Joan. Here I am reading into your work I think...
Well, I think you’re maybe intuiting something important,
and anyway we always read from our own lives. But maybe you could spell out
exactly what you mean – what specifically in the poem/s are referring to? I think your suggestion is that the very
fierce holding of the mother, seen from the daughter’s perspective, could be
crippling. Very difficult to leave
because of that feeling of responsibility to the mother? Of being the mother’s
emotional centre and so it’s scary in case the mother falls apart – ultimately
kills herself? I think that’s the shadow
of your question, and it is really that shadow that I hope the poem is taking
on squarely. That is part of the
Demeter/ Persephone myth. In fact it’s
the centre of the myth, and of every mother/daughter relationship. But I do think the poem is taking on these
issues and coming through to acceptance – (also boredom and exhaustion). The poem “Daughter” maybe clarifies:
Now
that I see
how in her own life
she is, in immanence, not about
to
be,
in being
on the
other side of the earth
she is
married to her own life
as only she can be
my
daughter –
how
could I have loved her
too closely –
how
could I ever have loved
my mother too closely.
I’m not saying the poem makes one statement: there is
ambiguity about statement and question in the last lines. (The reader will know from, or find out
from “No wonder” that the speaker’s
mother and grandmother “took the gun …put in their hands and fired it”). That’s if you have to limit the speaker. But there’s ambiguity about who the speaker
is – is she daughter or mother? Perhaps both.
The poem, like all the others in the sequence/cycle is a sonnet – one of
the effects is to set up an expectation of some “conclusion’ to each poem,
which is subverted. Now you have it,
now you don’t. Of course sons have to leave too, as the Ur poems remind us, and
as the poem that follows “Daughter” in my book acknowledges. I mean “Son”. As for exhaustion and boredom –
I think they’re fairly typical sensations or feelings for
late-fifty-somethings. In my case it certainly does have to do with that
eternal question which can’t be separated from a depressive syndrome: what for?
In “Burnt Offering” I had to remind myself that isn’t the question, the only
real question is “how”. But I think this part of the poem is saying too that
what I’m exhausted with is self-admonishment and caring about lack of
perfection. It’s boring. So yes I’m depressive forgetful irritable – so what?
(– “but now/ even the things that irritate me/I have begun to forget” – for me
the poem is also a bit playful and light! )
