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Myra Schneider was born in London and grew up on the Firth of Clyde. She studied English at London University and now works as a creative writing tutor. She has published nine collections of poetry including Exits, The Panic Bird and her New and Selected Poems:
Insisting on Yellow; Her most recent collection, Multiplying The Moon, was published last year by Enitharmon. Exploring ‘the voice’ is central to her new book and Jacqueline Gabbitas met up with Myra to discuss some of the challenges that arose from writing it.

JG: I’ve read in an interview you gave about some of the writers you really enjoy reading and it struck me that these are writers very clearly using voice – they are actually exploring the voice and what it can do in poetry. You mentioned Eliot and I thought of The Waste Land and obviously A Game of Chess; and you mentioned Chaucer. I then discovered your poem ‘Killing Chaucer’, and it seemed not only a defense of Chaucer, but also one of the voice – the humanity – of his work. I wanted to know if you see any connection with how these writers used voice or the fact they used voice with your own poetry?

MS: There must be Jacqueline, I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, I am interested in poets using voice and I’m very interested in voice
altogether. I think the starting point goes further back. You see I
needed to find a voice, to have a voice of my own.

JG: Because you had a very strict childhood?

MS: Yes, not cruel but quite repressive and there were high expectations. There was a lot of ‘you ought to do this’ and ‘you
ought to do that’, ‘you ought to feel this, you ought to feel that’, you
know? Expectations of success in exams; of how I should be as a
daughter and with it frequent criticism and I think I was trying to
hang on to some sense of identity as I emerged as an adult. Writing, I think, stood for me as a way of identifying myself and being a
person. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time but, looking back, I realised at some point that quite often my earlier work, and even
some of my later work, is not only about using another voice but
finding my own voice and that seems to be really key. Then, of course, helping other people find their own voices. This ties up – I didn’t see any connection at first but I did later – with the work I did with disabled adults.

JG: Which comes very clearly into this new book.

MS: Which comes into several books, doesn’t it? I wonder if it is a
coincidence or not that I ended up, without planning it, working for 25 years with people who either had no voice because they were deaf, or had very little voice for various other reasons. Helping those people to find a voice somehow relates to me finding a voice.

JG: Do you think that you found your own voice through helping others find theirs?

MS: Yes, I think so because if you help somebody else and see them succeed then you feel more confident about yourself too. But I
don’t know how aware I was about it in the early stages.

JG: Of the writing or of the teaching or both?

MS: Both, probably! In the first place I don’t think I knew I was
writing about finding a voice but it became clear to me, certainly by the time of the Panic Bird, that it was a subject I was dealing with and people had started to ask me about it. But in finding my own voice I became interested in other voices. There is another source to all this in that I was writing narratives. It’s a different kind of lead in.

JG: Writing narrative poems or fiction – you also wrote novels, didn’t you?

MS: (laughs) I don’t know where to begin really. I came out of
college and found this extremely unsympathetic, man-orientated,
rather pretentious poetry scene in the early 60s. I retreated from it
quite fast and I wrote very little poetry and didn’t read very much
poetry from the age of about 24 until I was coming up to 40. There
were few women poets at that time and some were rather unusual
eccentric voices, like Stevie Smith which, to be honest with you, I
wouldn’t have related to either. So I turned to prose and wrote novels. Then, when I had a son, and he said ‘tell me a story’, I started writing for children, and using children’s voices. So I very much enjoyed the narrative, and by the time I was writing for children I became much more adventurous because you can’t keep children hanging around. You’ve got to get on with the story! (laughs).

JG: And at this time you were already working with disabled people?

MS: I was working with kids who had been thrown out of school and with disabled people; teaching basic education. At this time I
realised it was quite valuable to control the vocabulary I used.

JG: Right. The narrative element in Multiplying The Moon, and especially the ‘Voicebox’ is very strong, but the language, the syntax, the use of every-day words are its main strengths. What I enjoyed about the disabled boy, William’s, voice is the way it allowed the reader entry into the experience. I wondered whether
that is one of the things voice does, give us opportunities to own situations that we might not normally experience. I don’t mean appropriate them, I mean, as readers and writers we can feel comfortable with a situation which isn’t one we might be able to elate to in our own voice.

MS: That’s right; you get out of your own head into somebody
else’s head. Of course, if you’re writing in a voice then you usually
have to use everyday language otherwise it’s not going to be convincing. That’s quite a challenge, isn’t it? To use the language of speech, but make it work as poetry.

JG: Yes, it opens up language to every possibility that’s poetry. We don’t have to hang on to an idea of ‘poetry’ or what ‘poetic language’ is. What we can say is ‘there is poetry in this everyday act, there is poetry in this everyday word’and we own that word.

MS: Yes

JG: We’ve talked about narrative, but one of the things that interests
me when you use voices in your poetry is that the narratives are usually very long.

MS: I think probably because I need the space to establish the characters.

JG: In ‘Orpheus in the Underground’, you have a long sequence not
precisely in different voices but using a lot of dialogue. You also have an omniscient narrator.

MS: Yes, in a sense I was inside the head of Orpheus and even
inside the head of Eurydice some of the time. There are always going to be elements of oneself in the work, but this is a way of extending
oneself too.

JG: Do you ever find that you slip out of the voice you’re using and your own voice slips back in.

MS: Yes, my own poetic voice and then I have to correct it. Those Milly poems in the Voicebox – people who were looking at it as I wrote it would tell me “you’ve slipped out of her voice here”. Or there’s a temptation to panic, and think this doesn’t sound poetic enough and try, automatically, to raise the level of the writing to be ‘poetry’. I have to address that in revising.

JG: Not all of your poems are in different voices.

MS: No, they’re not. I often write about personal experience and a
number of the poems in Multiplying The Moon arise directly from my experience of cancer and its aftermath. I also explore my inner
self and my relationship with the outer world. Some of these poems
are intense and I very much enjoy the counterbalance of stepping
outside myself. I think, generally, that people could make more use of voice in writing poetry. I’ve just written an essay about Louise
Gluck and her use of voice in the ‘Wild Iris’, ‘Meadowland’ and ‘Vita Nova’. Rarely do people use voice as inventively as she does. There’s very skilful juxtaposition and although she gives her voices
individual characteristics she is, in the main, using the characters to
put forward often, in argument, a range of viewpoints. It’s quite subtle. Some are well-known personalities but she’s done something really different with them. What I want to say is that if you are going to deal with well-known characters then you need to bring in a new angle. I have taken Orpheus, I mean if ever there is a character who has often been written about, it’s Orpheus, and Eurydice too, but what excited me was the idea of setting their story in the London Underground. If somebody had said to me ‘write a story about buskers and the London Underground’, I’d have replied, ‘Well I couldn’t possibly do that, I don’t know anything about them’. But the background, the structure of that myth and making an equivalence with it in the narrative of the poem gave me the confidence to. I would never have dared do it without the backbone of that story.

JG: So when you write these narratives, do you have the understanding first of the narrative before you start writing the poetry?

MS: You have to, if it’s a long poem, you have to have an understanding of the narrative.

JG: So it’s not that you’ve got the character first in your head?

MS: It’s both! You need to have some understanding of both the
character and the narrative.

JG: And then work them through?

MS: Yes, even if you haven’t worked everything out in full detail. To some extent there is a similarity between planning that kind of writing and planning a novel but it has to work as poetry. If it doesn’t you should be writing a novel! (laughs)

JG: (laughs) When you’re writing in different voices how does your own personal experience come into the work? What advice could you give to someone trying to explore their own voice or different voices in their work?

MS: Well I draw on personal experience but I’m doing something
‘other’ with it. I would say to anyone interested in voices, don’t
overwrite, don’t try writing in the voice of well-known literary or
even historical character. Don’t go writing in the voice of Charles II or Lady Macbeth because it’s difficult to produce something new. Go for voice or a point of view you think you could enter into – something that is not too far outside or connects in some way with your experience; you do have to know something about your subject, eg. William in ‘Voicebox’ is a composite of people I’ve worked with but I’ve added something extra to the character. I felt confident about this because of my work. It wouldn’t be wise to write about a disabled person unless you’d had some real contact with someone disabled. Another voice doesn’t even have to be a person. Sylvia Plath wrote a poem from the point of view of a mirror, and it’s a common workshop exercise to write in the voice of an inanimate object.

JG: Do you find that very successful or satisfying poetry, writing from the point of view of inanimate objects?

MS: Of course it’s difficult to do but it can work very well. Recently I read a poem by Denise Levertov in which she writes in the voice of a tree that heard Orpheus play. You see, you could write in the voice of a tree hearing the traffic going past all the time, rather than writing a diatribe on modern traffic. You could be the tree being polluted. It’s a very crude example but it would immediately take the poem into a different area. You would also have a different angle if your narrator is something like a small insect or an object.

JG: Like the Ant and a Grasshopper in your poem?

MS: Yes, that was great fun to do. I was putting forward a discussion, not at a very deep level, but definitely putting points of view from two very different characters. It would be very boring if you just said in a poem ‘Well there are these people who are busy all the time and can’t think of anything except practical matters and there are also airy-fairy people!’

JG: I liked the fact that this poem is a good answer to those who say ‘what is the point of poetry in the world?’As if it has to serve a purpose other than enriching your life.

MS: Yes, and even though the thought was at the back of my mind, it’s not until we come to talk about it that I realise how much I articulated this in the writing. The story is taken from an Aesop fable. It’s a La Fontaine fable too: two insects having an argument, but again the voices meant I could write it from a different slant; it’s not presented as an argument in the fables.

JG: It also means because it’s a conversation you can just put these
characters, and the reader, straight in the middle of a situation, you don’t have to give all of the background at all. It’s another kind of permission to the writer to look at the work differently.

MS: Yes, because the dialogue indicates what the characters are
and where they’re going to go.

JG: Do you think this use of voice gives the writer an opportunity to be able to talk about things in a way that she/he might not have thought about?

MS: Yes, take that short poem, ‘The Beanstalk and Jack’. This is told within a narrative but from the point of view of the beanstalk. One can be very adventurous and it can be a release to get right outside one’s own head and not write directly about personal experience. I wrote that poem because I was so angry about genetically modified food and I suddenly had a vision of the beanstalk growing so quickly, that its existence causes havoc to other plants and wildlife. That’s why I wrote it. It was a fun way of
dealing with something I felt very strongly about. I mean, there’s no
point in writing a rant about genetically modified food because
you might as well write a piece of prose or a piece of journalism.
Writing in these voices allowed me a spontaneity, a tone I wouldn’t
have been able to give myself in my own voice.