Mslexia

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Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Polly Clark

Interviewed by Colette Bryce

BEHEADED

I hear perfectly: the thud
onto linen, the strange gasp
like the cry of a premature baby,
just once and then silence.

And I see perfectly:
how my lashes scratch the light,
a hair glittering in shadow,
the winded hollow

where my lips rest.
I still have all my words.
I move my mouth,
like someone begging for water.

Fingers grab my hair
and I soar high above my sad
old body, slumped and tiny.
Tears of pity for it fill my eyes.

They are tending it,
the blank women in blue.
They are washing it,
as if they loved it.

Look, the people are cheering me,
look, they are glad to see me,
now that I’ve been removed
without a single word of protest.

So many things in my life changed at once.

I moved to the west coast of Scotland, a landscape completely alien to me, and I didn’t have any reason to be there apart from being married. Being married created a huge shift; my husband is very different from me – and quite a bit older – so, suddenly, I was in a new group.

Because I was only there as his wife...

I started to think, ‘Who am I?’ I felt I had vanished, so a lot of the poems are dealing with that. You know, I am physically still here, people can see me, but…

I tried various things...

I mutated into a country wife for a while and was trying to copy what the other country wives would do. I was neat and tidy and smiled at everyone. And then I thought, ‘This is how you turn into a Stepford wife, this is what happens!’ So I stopped doing that. But poets can be like that, they just engage with everything far too much, so whatever I was trying to do, I was going to do it properly. And then, when the baby came, I saw how you can disappear in a different way.

I’d read somewhere that if you have your head cut off...

you remain conscious for several minutes after. That image was so awful, it haunted me for ages. The idea seemed to connect to the act of childbirth, that complete removal, separation, of the self.

The poem articulated perfectly...

what childbirth was like for me; it didn’t matter that it’s not necessarily a visible part of the poem. If people do think it’s about birth, they tend to think it’s the baby talking, which I suppose is less shocking. I didn’t think of it being the baby. In my own mind when I was writing it, it was me: I had been beheaded. It was very profound, the change in that moment.

It’s also about not being young any more.

When you’re younger, there’s a certain amount of role-playing going on, flirting and such. But this role came so suddenly. I would say to my husband, ‘But this is my actual life! You know, we’re sitting here and I’m being a wife in the middle of nowhere, this is my actual life ticking away….It’s real!’ The book is a document of all this. It’s virtually chronological.

Looking back I think...

‘You’ve made this transition: it’s about becoming a woman, an adult. You feel quite sad about your former self, and see her as a separate thing. I don’t feel the same as that person who lived in Oxford. A woman came up to me after a reading and said, ‘Those poems are like epitaphs.’ She was right.

The house we live in needed a lot of work...

and I discovered building. That made me feel a lot better. I’ve built a load of stuff – a carport and a patio. I transformed the space. You don’t realise how symbolic it is.

POLLY CLARK was born in Canada in 1968 but raised in the UK. She has won a string of writing competitions including scooping First Prize in the 2004 and 2005 Mslexia Poetry Competitions. Her second collection, Take Me With You (Bloodaxe, 2005) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her new collection, Farewell My Lovely (Bloodaxe), was published in 2009. She reviews for The Guardian and runs the Fielding Programme for new writers in Scotland.

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