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Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Interviewed by Kate Clanchy

DÉcoupage

The day of your post mortem
I cleaned the kitchen
to blot out the hour you’d be cut up,

made apple pie, scrubbed the table
again, wondering how
you were getting on. If you were here

you’d be sat there with your pinking shears
thinking in appliqué, stencilling
quilted queens: Branwen, Marie-Antoinette,

long-necked with their net coronets,
sewn into chiffon gowns, sequins pinned into their eyes,
silk lips slit into diamonds, their cheekbones

shown as slashed indigo lines.
I reconstruct your mosaic face
in my head as I wash up, I,

restricted by nine stitches in my back,
itself a collage of red lines and thread,
my deckle-edged tumour out of the picture now.

We were trying to piece you together,
my new tenant explains on the phone,
what you leave behind tells a story, doesn’t it?

This poem started with a card I bought…

…in Norwich. It had a little cloth collage on it – a miniature turquoise jacket, a tiny pink skirt – and it reminded me exactly of making a paper circus with my mother when I was seven, and I thought at last I had found a way to write about my mother, who died 10 years ago now. So I set to in great excitement and wrote many versions of the poem, which was going to be called Circus Card, but none of them was right, all of them seemed mawkish and sentimental, so I put the poem away in a drawer.’

Two years later, I took a phone call…

…from the woman who was renting my house. ‘We’ve been trying to piece you together,’ she said. And then I realised that’s what I was trying to do, piece my mother together. I was suddenly able mentally to go into the rooms of my house, as my tenant was doing – my family house, that is, where I grew up – to go into the kitchen, where the poem starts, and that let me go back into the poem.’

By that time, I'd had a tumour of my own removed,…

…and that gave me another connection with my mother, who died from her tumours. The tumour and the tenant gave me the plot of the poem, and that meant I could write it rapidly and confidently – it was finished in just two days. I do think plots are very important to poems. Something has to happen. The circus disappeared completely.’

My mother was an artist…

…She made a lot of fabric collages, and I especially love the ones she took from the stories of The Maeinogiog, which is a book of Welsh tales from the 11th Century. Branwen was a Welsh princess who was taken to Ireland to be queen. They are violent, vehement stories, as you can see from the poem, and her collages were violent as well as beautiful, which is also important in the poem. My tumour becomes a decoration too – my surgeon described it as having a ridged rim, which I’ve turned into ‘deckle-edged’, like a sequin.’

I was working two long lists:…

…one of words about fabric and cutting, one of sounds I wanted in the poem. I picked out and pieced together the right words and the right sounds. There’s a lot of internal rhyme in the poem, but I didn’t want something as coherent and formal as a sonnet – the poem needs to be a mosaic or a collage, pieces put together. So it’s in stanzas of three lines, and there’s a lot of movement between the stanzas, big visual shifts, again like a mosaic or a collage.’

If I was looking for an exercise …

…to spark off some writing, I’d say start with an object – something like a salt-cellar or an eye-glass – and imagine the person it belonged to, what he was like, how the object got like that. But I’m not suffering from writer’s block at the moment. At the moment, I seem to have a lot of poems in my head and don’t have the time or place to work on them.’

SAMANTHA WYNNE-RHYDDERCH lives in Newquay in Wales. She was born in Aberystwyth and educated at Cardiff and Cambridge. Her first collection was Rock Climbing in Silk (Seren). This poem is from her forthcoming collection Not In These Shoes.

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