Lorraine Mariner on Jessica Elton
Jessica Elton, who forms the backbone of my first full-length collection Furniture, came into existence because of a review of my Rialto pamphlet Bye For Now which said I was “overly reliant on the first person” giving an impression “of near-constant self-reflection”. I had been conscious in my poetry that I mainly wrote in the first person singular and this comment also tapped into a fear I have that I’m self-obsessed. In an attempt to combat this I booked myself on to a workshop at the 2006 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, run by the poet Finuala Dowling, called “Eavesdropping” where we would use the words of other people to generate new poems.
I read an essay recently by Leontia Flynn where she writes that “To say that it is one’s job to write poems” is “like saying it is one’s job to have mood swings” (The Watchful Heart : a New Generation of Irish Poets : Poems and Essays, edited by Joan McBreen, Salmon Poetry, 2009). I think this is why I have taken so many poetry classes. Booking on to a poetry course I felt I was taking some kind of action in the face of something which often seems to depend on inaction. I remember one particular poem starting to write itself in my head while I lay in bed mulling things over one Saturday morning. How are you supposed to build a career in something which requires you to be perplexed and half-asleep?
I was having a great time in the “Eavesdropping” workshop but unfortunately the poems it was generating were still in the first person, until the final exercise where Finuala gave us extracts from newspaper articles. Mine was about a Ms Elsom and her colleagues who were trying to answer the Cambridge University entrance interview question “What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?” The poem I wrote in response to this quote came out pretty fully-formed and I liked it, but at that stage I didn’t expect to do anything with it. However, when I got home from the Aldeburgh Festival and typed the poem on to my computer, I started to write another one. For a while this kept happening; I would be working on one Jessica Elton poem and begin another. Later, I did also adapt other poems I’d written into poems for her, including one about an incident involving my car that I was too ashamed to have in the first person. So, although I think of her as being very no-nonsense I suspect my nonsense has got the better of her.
I’ve now read four reviews of Furniture and I’ve not been handling them very well. At one point I decided I would still write but I would never publish again. It is therefore somewhat appropriate that one reviewer has compared me to Emily Dickinson (though another has compared me to Ogden Nash). At the moment I’m just trying to focus on the aim I originally formulated when I first started writing poetry, which was to try and write one fantastic poem that will make someone feel the way I felt when I heard e. e. cummings’ “somewhere i have never travelled” quoted in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, or when I read Carol Ann Duffy’s “Words, Wide Night” as a Poem on the Underground as a teenager, or when I came across Les Murray’s “Rock Music” in an anthology (which only happened a few weeks ago). I’m also intending to stop reading reviews as they seem to have the ability to tap into every doubt I’ve ever had about my writing and myself.
Jessica Elton would probably tell me I worry too much what other people think of me (and now I worry what other people think of her as well). Just before Furniture was published I told a poet friend how scared I was about the book coming out because of the negative reception it might receive, and she told me that if I thought of my book as a child I could think that it might come across unfriendliness, but that it would survive this, it would be ok. And returning to the subject of the “I”, aren’t reviews really about reviewers anyway?
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magazine list
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