‘Cool in my forties’: Kate Clanchy in conversation with Vicki Bertram

Kate Clanchy: I didn’t start writing poetry until I was 27 or 28. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, I wasn’t one of these people who say they always knew they wanted to write. I was a schoolteacher. I think I started writing poetry because I started reading poetry by women. Poetry was always my favourite reading matter, and I read a lot of ‘old’ poets, but I hadn’t found any contemporary poets, and specifically any women poets that I liked, until I found Carol Ann Duffy. It’s because I started reading her that I started writing. And that opened the doors onto all sorts of other poets. I was lucky, I got picked up very quickly. I went on an Arvon course with Carol Ann, just because I admired her poetry, and she gave me a huge amount of encouragement. The next school half-term, I went on an another Arvon course with Simon Armitage. I’d written about 20 poems by then, and he published my book from that! I’d never sent my work to a magazine, I’d never done any of the things you’re supposed to do. So when people say, “How did you get published?” I never tell them that! I was very fortunate. Chatto were publishing a bit more poetry at that time. Slattern really was the first 40 poems I’d ever written.

VB: What would be your advice to a poet starting out today?

KC: Read a lot of contemporary poetry. I’d read a huge amount, partly because I went to Oxford University, where they make you read a lot, and I opted to focus on poetry because it was what I really liked. And partly because I was a teacher. You shouldn’t underestimate what a schoolteacher does; we’re constantly nose-down against a poem, looking at tiny extracts: the opposite from reading in University, where you try to get an aerial view. People despise teachers as intellectuals, but they’re generally reading Shakespeare poems, which is more than can be said for most! If you did the Metaphysicals for ‘A’ Level, you probably remember those poems very intimately, close to the bone. I was right down against poems — the way they were constructed — and I think that was probably an influence as well. In my poetry there’s an element of wanting to be very clear: to explain things and say, “This is what it’s like”. That comes very directly from my teaching experience. And if there’s an imagined audience for Slattern, it’s probably sixth-formers. I wanted to write poems that were clear enough for them. I became fed up with reading Sylvia Plath in school: however much you explain it, or look up the references, it still doesn’t break down into sense, as Glyn Maxwell would say. Her poems don’t; they’re modernist, they’re just sounds. That made my students fed up, and I realised it made me rather fed up. I wanted to be clearer than that.

VB: So would you say that when Slattern was published, you were quite an innocent in the poetry world?

KC: Total innocent. I’d no idea about anything; I’d just written some poems! I was very close friends with the poet Colette Bryce, who I met on that first Arvon course with Carol Ann, and Carol Ann said we must be friends, so we were! We didn’t have a huge amount in common then, except we liked poetry. We used to meet every week and show each other books and poems. We worked on everything together, and we still do. We still send things to each other, and speak to each other every week, and that’s many years on now. It’s a very close association. We help each other a lot in ways that are not visible to anybody. Our writing isn’t similar, except we’re both very interested in sound.

I didn’t have high expectations of the book. I was happy to have written and published it, and I was very happy to be working three days a week, and the school teaching seemed like an ideal arrangement. Slattern did much better than I expected. It had a confusing reception. I think it was celebrated for things which I’m now rather embarrassed about.

VB: Like what?

KC: Well, it’s a flirty book, really! It’s got a lot of dramatised voices in it, and I think it’s doing a certain amount of male display. It’s saying, “Here I am, and I’m tremendously sexy!”. I wasn’t really like that at all. I didn’t have boyfriends, not for a long while. I just lived in my little flat in Spitalfields and taught most of the time. I hope the poems that are more about school and young people will last. And there are some nice love poems. You can see the influences. Carol Ann! I’m unabashed about that. I always say to people who are writing, “Don’t worry about being influenced, just be influenced. Why should you worry? Just keep writing, it doesn’t matter”. Otherwise you wouldn’t write anything. Artists copy pictures in a gallery: it’s a way of learning technique. I’d also discovered Sharon Olds; she was a revelation, and her influence is there in Slattern as well: that willingness to talk about yourself.

VB: Why do you think the monologue form was attractive to you at that time?

KC: Well, partly it was trendy. It’s trendy now. It is the form of our time. A lot of that book is about being an observer and looking in, and in a way, the monologues are just taking that a step further. There’s a line of thought that says the monologue is disruptive of the lyric ‘I’, and therefore radical ... I don’t think I was trying to do that.

VB: How was Samarkand different?

KC: It was a lot less fun! I was much more concerned about it, more self-conscious, and I didn’t enjoy writing it nearly so much. There was a loss of ‘vim’.

VB: I think there’s less of you in it, which is almost paradoxical. Even the dramatic monologues in Slattern are you — not in a narrow way, but they’re identifiably your tone, your humour.

KC: I was much more concerned to produce a book of poetry like other people’s. I felt a lot of pressure to produce a book, and there was the disruption of changing editors. I found the idea that I was a writer rather muddling. There are some very good poems in Samarkand. I think the monologue sequence at the end is good: that’s more me getting on to my own territory. And ‘War Poetry’ is good — looking back to the school poems in Slattern. I can see why people didn’t like the book, though I think it could have been any kind of book, and there would have been a reaction against it.

VB: You’d done so well with Slattern.

KC: I’d done pretty well, yes. People don’t want you to do too well, especially if you’re a woman! So that was Samarkand — agony, really. It doesn’t especially suit me to be out of life, as a writer, and I was when I was writing Samarkand. I never wanted that. I was also tired. Being immersed in the school-teaching was great, but teaching is very exhausting. But being in life like that suits me. I don’t want to have huge amounts of time in my study really. I like being with people, not away from them. I miss school teaching. I’ll go back to it, I think, it has such vitality — all those teenagers!

VB: How many days a week do you have for your writing now?

KC: Well, it depends on the children. I do get quite a lot of time, but it’s vulnerable to various pressures. There’s still a house to run. The children get ill, and when they’re ill, they need me. I have childcare every day, 9-3pm, so I do get most days. I’ve been writing prose and done various things: a lesbian detective verse novel, for radio; my first children’s story. And I’ve just published a biography, What Is She Doing Here? A Refugee’s Story (Picador, 2008).

VB: Is prose something you write while you’re waiting for more poems?

KC: I don’t know. I suppose it’s something I do to make money, and pay the mortgage.

VB: But does it also refresh you?

KC: Yes. I had too much time to write Samarkand, and I spent too much time on it, and it’s not as good as it should have been, whereas I wrote Newborn in corners when I was doing other things, and it’s a much better book.

VB: Do you have an agent?

KC: No. I’ve been offered various literary agents, but they want you to do other things like write novels, and I really haven’t felt any urge to write a novel. If I could think of a novel, I would no doubt write one: it’s not that I’m snobbish about novels. But it’s not my form; it’s too long. This biography is the longest thing I’ve tackled. And for some time after Newborn I didn’t write any poems.

VB: Maybe your poetic water butt needs to refill.

KC: Yes, I expect it does. I’m not actually very worried about it. I’d rather be Michael Longley and write another good collection after 12 years. And there is something refreshing about the prose world. The money is different; it’s not such a nasty world, not so full of neurosis.

VB: Tell me about the process you go through when you’re writing a poem.

KC: I can’t work out what balance of privacy and noise I need. I think of ideas, and I start hearing voices in my head when I’m isolated, when I’m observing. I used to think of things when I was intensely bored during lessons, invigilating, or when I was on the train. There’s something about trains. There’s a lot of that kind of space in child-rearing, or there was when there was only one baby: being somewhere, but being isolated, especially in terms of language. You’re physically involved and — to some extent — mentally involved, but your language bit is in your head on its own, and you can say more sophisticated things than the people around you. That’s also true when you’re teaching. You’re the person who can say the words for people, and that ‘wording thing’ starts up. I think that’s where most of my poems start: that position of isolation, and then I hear a line. And I always experience it as hearing a line, and having a nebulous shape in my head of what it will be like: whether it’s going to be a square one, or a long one. I very often have a feeling about its last line. Then I put lots of things down, and I just muck about with them. Sometimes they take a long time, and sometimes they take a short time, but most of them take a long time. Not in the sense of working on them every day, but I keep coming back to them. I certainly never let anything out of the house that hasn’t been around for at least six months, because when I let things out too early I get very upset that I can’t change them. I’m a meticulous drafter, I change the poems a lot.

VB: Do you work on several at the same time?

KC: Yeah, usually. I’ve got several on the go at the same time, and then it takes a long time for them to find their place, and sometimes they take a very long time, sometimes I’ll have bits floating around for years. That’s the usual process, but it differs. With Newborn I was writing some things as I went along, but then I realised what kind of book I was writing — that I was writing a sequence — and I realised it had a big hole in the middle, around the birth. I remembered all those experiences, and wrote those poems very, very quickly. I wrote ‘Driving Home’, and ‘Driving to the Hospital’, and ‘Love’, and ‘When You Cried’: all those poems in the space of about three weeks. Less, actually. I wrote ‘Driving Home’ one day, and I wrote ‘Driving to the Hospital’ the next day: a long time after I’d had the experiences. That was because the poems were leading on from each other, creating spaces for each other, and I was remembering the experiences in a rush. But that’s unusual.

VB: Let’s talk about Newborn. Were you aware of writing about things that had not been written about?

KC: Well, it’s not that they’ve not been written about, exactly. Sylvia Plath had written some beautiful poems, though they are dark. Then I had the poems of Sharon Olds, and they were really important. Another person who writes really well about children is C.K. Williams. Some of them are about babies, but mostly about children, and about family life. So I had those, but there wasn’t a lot. There’s not a lot.

VB: I’m interested in the brevity of the couple of poems about birth itself. In the titles — ‘What can I say?’ and ‘I had my eyes shut the whole time’ — you’ve almost acknowledged that words can’t approach the extreme physicality of birth.

KC: Well, I think words probably can go there. I don’t know. I think birth’s got a bit of a sticky history because there are quite a lot of poems about birth, and most of them aren’t very good. There’s Sharon Olds’ terrific poem, ‘The Language of the Brag’. I think that’s fantastic. I knew I couldn’t do as well as that. I think that’s part of the reason there isn’t a big birth poem. I hadn’t got anything better than that. At readings, I read ‘Driving to Hospital’ and ‘Driving Home’. I actually wanted there to be simply a gap — a blank page — between the two.

VB: In ‘Plain Work’ and ‘Not Art’ you’re acknowledging something about the invisible and endless nature of women’s work during that early time in a child’s life.

KC: I wrote those at the same time, and they’re not retrospective. They were written when the child was eighteen months. It does take a long time to realise that’s what you are supposed to do with the baby. You’re supposed to sit with another woman and do something until the baby gets a bit older. Yeah, I think they’re good poems. They’ve had a lot of attacks. They’re singled out for nasty remarks, as being ‘seventies feminism. I don’t want to say that I work as hard as someone in the Third World, but I do think women work very hard, and ‘Not Art’ is called ‘Not Art’ because I think that child-rearing is a bit of craft really, and the craft is what we call ‘women’s work’.

VB: But you’ve made a poem out of it, of course, so it is art; it’s recording and acknowledging something that is usually invisible and considered insignificant.

KC: Well, child-rearing is invisible. You need to have solidarity with other women: that’s one thing you discover if you’re a mother, if you haven’t had or known it before. I’ve always had a lot of solidarity with other women. There’s a lot of women thinking, “How did we end up like this?” Somehow we thought that we were going to miss out on it. We weren’t taught to be very good housewives. We’re pretty much slatterns, the lot of us, we really are, and it’s a steep learning curve.

VB: If you want to have a writing life, there’s not time to be a good housewife as well, is there?

KC: No. But we nevertheless feel the obligation to do it. I don’t know how we thought we were going to get out of it really, or what our mothers thought was going to happen with child-rearing, or how we thought it was going to happen. This part of our life wasn’t seen as important. I think it has to be important for everybody; child-rearing has to be a really important job.

VB: Newborn makes it important.

KC: Well, that’s the idea of it. At the time, I was doing journalism and taking care of the baby. And, very occasionally, I was writing these poems. I decided to go for an Arts Council grant, and I said I was doing a sequence about motherhood. I only had 15 poems, and they were all over the place so I put them in order, and then I got the money, and then I thought, “Oh well, maybe I’d better do that, then!” But at that point I realised, “Yes, this is my real subject matter, this is what I really want to do”. When I started writing the sequence, it seemed an important thing to do. As I was writing it, the people at Picador were getting excited, and I thought, “Oh, I’m going to get shat on. This is terrible. This is the end of my career. If I publish this book, I’m going to lose male approval. I won’t be taken seriously ever again.” Then I thought, “Well, I’ll publish it anyway”. I had a very important conversation with Carol Ann. She just said, ‘It’s a completely sexist world. They’re never going to accept you. You’ve got to go the other way. You’ve just got to think about your readers. There’s a lot of people that actually read poetry, and they’re women, and you should just do your project and ignore the rest, because you’re never going to get on in that world’.

I took that to heart, and with that in mind, I arranged for Newborn to be published the way it was published — which is published on Mother’s Day, published with that slightly soft-focus cover, and the Emma Thompson quotation on the back. There was a tougher cover image, with an Ann Geddes photo on it — a fantastic image of the baby’s head held in two hands, but it was like a cannonball. She wouldn’t let us use it, which was a real disappointment. I just thought, “I know I’m going to get shat on, and I know I’m going to get foul criticism, and I know I won’t be on any prize lists, so what’s it matter?” That’s why it’s the way it is. It doesn’t apply to the quality of the writing. I stand by every single poem. I didn’t dumb down in any sense. They’re all lyrics. Lyric seemed to me the most radical and interesting and fascinating territory. What more could I want than to write about this experience that’s so fresh and so new? It seemed to me my real subject matter, it seemed to me the magical thing to do. People talk about the dramatic monologue being radical. I’m not so sure. I think that to speak about this is probably more radical.

VB: There’s a distilled, condensed, pared down quality to them. Re-reading your three poetry books, in Samarkand there are a lot of words on each page.

KC: Samarkand is trying to be considerable, whereas with Newborn, there’s no attempt; it doesn’t need to be. The form is much freer in Newborn, more internalised.

VB: And there’s a confidence in your deployment of form; it seems quite un-self-conscious.

KC: I was reading a lot more American poets, and I think that comes over. I’m not worried about a poem being a column, for example! I think there’s not even a sonnet in that book, though I’m very fond of sonnets. I like it as a sequence, I think it’s a shapely sequence, and exact. It’s a very dark book. It hasn’t had many literary reviews, but where it has been reviewed, people have been stressing the cuddly aspect, which is fine, I suppose, because I wanted it to sell and all that, but it does seem strange to me that people find it jolly. I know it’s affirmative, but there’s a lot of dark. The word ‘dark’ occurs about every second page.

VB: What I get from it is that inexorable sense of time moving on.

KC: Yeah. That’s supposed to be there, the child gets older. People say it’s a book about a baby. It’s barely about a baby at all! There’s a lot about the speaking child. And those poems at the end are very dark.

VB: I don’t see them as dark, I see them as … how it is. You are witnessing the child growing up, growing away, growing into the world of loss. And facing the knowledge that there’s ‘no such thing / as the right route or a clear passage’, as ‘Aneurysm’ puts it; no way of keeping your child safe.

KC: I wasn’t surprised at the negative reactions, though the completeness of it took me aback. In a way, the reactions confirmed that it was a radical book, that it could make people so annoyed. Some were simply ridiculously misogynist. I found it more upsetting to have the book read and reviewed as if it were coercive. A woman reviewer in The Independent said the book was ‘reactionary’ — quite a harsh word, really — because I didn’t give enough ‘choice’ to women without children. But I’m not in a position to give ‘choice’ to anyone — I’m just a writer, trying to be true to my own experience. I’m not trying to say that all women feel this, or all women should do this.

A couple of reviewers said that I shouldn’t quote Shakespeare, because it was inappropriate. They seemed to be saying that I shouldn’t connect Shakespeare with this experience. I really profoundly disagree. When Falstaff babbles of green fields when he dies, it’s a woman that says that of his death: that he babbled about green fields as he died. He was a very wordy person, but his words are returned to a woman who reports it, and it’s about being a baby, about the green fields. I think that when women are apparently doing nothing in the common places — in the fields and in the parks — what they’re doing is laying down the unremembered bedrock of people’s consciousness: how they’re going to be for the rest of their lives, and it’s very, very important. ‘Commonplace’ is trying to celebrate that, and saying, ‘This is the best bit of your life.’

VB: This is a problem, isn’t it: women come down very hard on each other for writing out of their own experience.

KC: Yeah, for being what they are. The book is only coercive if one accepts what you were saying in your book, Gendering Poetry (Pandora, 2005): that women readers feel ‘spoken for’ by women writers. What was it John Berger wrote? ‘Men watch women. Women watch themselves being watched.’ Women watch each other. They say, ‘Am I like her?’, ‘Am I like her?’, ‘Am I like her?’, ‘Where do I fit?’ We’ll only liberate ourselves if we stop thinking that way, and allow each other to be different. We can’t coerce each other into being one way.

VB: Well, it does seem that it’s still seen as a limitation, or a weakness, or a self-indulgence, for a woman to write about her own experience.

KC: Well, why should she be writing about other experience? I don’t understand it!

VB: Because, somehow, there’s a way in which men can write about their experience, and it not be seen that they are writing about their experience.

KC: Just writing about universal experience, yes. You can see the difference between Kathleen Jamie’s Jizzen, which has got wonderful poems about motherhood in it, and the reception that got, which wasn’t very good, and The Tree House.

VB: The female ‘I’ is still not big enough. But I think there’s a positive side to women readers identifying with the ‘I’, which is about one of the roles poets fulfil: the poet as guide, the one with insight and eloquence; the one who records, commemorates, preserves those experiences.

KC: Oh, that’s right, I do agree. There’s an element of that in the way Newborn works. When I read it in public, at a reading, all the women who have had children cry, and then they come and buy lots of copies of the book. They come up with two, three, four… seven was the record … and they say, ‘That was just like when I had my baby’, and that seems fine to me. I think that’s wonderful. But the critical response is also crucial, and it’s the critical response that determines how we are historicized and how we are anthologised and how we are remembered: how we’re put into literary history.

VB: But it seems to me that one of the reasons women read like that is precisely because a female sense of self is so fragile that it needs bolstering up; it needs to see itself in words, to feel that it’s validated.

KC: Yes. Well, that takes me back to what I was saying about why I had to read female poets in order to start writing, just to be able to imagine that could happen. My sense of self can’t have been strong enough. However much I loved literature, however much I loved poetry, I never had the idea that I could write it until I saw other women doing it. It’s very important to bolster each other.

VB: What about a magazine like Myslexia: does it do that?

KC: Certainly it has an important role to play. But it’s not catering primarily for women who write professionally. There’s no outlet where women are on the same footing with men. The London Review of Books comes into this house every week, and my husband writes in it, and I do find interesting things in it, but I think of it as ‘what the men think’. It comes in, and it’s called, What the Men Think, and the TLS, well, the TLS has got multi-functions: it’s a university mag., and it has lots of very interesting stuff, especially about history, but when it comes to literature — that’s what the men think as well. I need to be able to pick up the TLS and find a poem by a woman that I can admire.

VB: Returning to Newborn: I love your gentle mockery of the way a mother worships her child — not adoration, so much as literally on your knees to it. And alongside that, the amazed wonder. You do it with a nice touch of irony.

KC: I think ‘Storm’ is a very funny poem! That’s why Carol Ann Duffy is formidable: she’s so scary because she’s so funny.

VB: Can you say anything about performing your work?

KC: In the early days, I used to enjoy reading those sexy poems as a kind of come-on. Being a school-teacher is not a glamorous profession. I spent a lot of time being not glamorous, and in the poetry world, then, I was quite glamorous, partly because nobody’s glamorous; poets are terrible looking, they really are! Sick-stained trousers and no teeth! More recently, performing is different; it’s a bit of a balancing act, especially when I read poems from Newborn. When I started reading them, they felt very raw, and I found myself getting upset and tearful, which is very unlike me. I think that was partly because I was so tired. After I had the twins, I went through a period when I found it very difficult to get out the house. I really was getting quite agoraphobic. I couldn’t find my book, I couldn’t find my pen; I found it very difficult to speak at all, and be seen. But I enjoy performing and I’m usually very competent about it. I think it goes back to being a teacher. I find speaking to adults very easy, because they’re not going to throw chewing gum at you. I don’t have to be in charge of them. They’ve paid to be there. I’ve never really seen what’s difficult about that. As a teacher I’ve been through such purgatories of embarrassment … I’ve taught sex education to savage second years in Penicuik! Anyone who’s done that is never going to be embarrassed again! And there is an element of the teacher in my performance. I think I’ve got quite a good sense of helping people hear a poem, and giving them enough to listen to in a poem, but not too much. I’m quite good at that, because it’s something I spent ten years doing. I don’t think about it as a performance, so much as I think about it as explaining something to the audience. I suppose that sounds very patronising, but it’s not meant like that. I’m trying to explain, and trying to gauge it right.

VB: I was remembering a phrase that Adrienne Rich used in her essay, ‘When we dead awaken’, when she described the conflict — as she saw it — between a traditional female role and the occupation of poet. She said the energy of creation and the energy of relation are at odds; there’s a tension between them.

KC: I don’t think they are. You know that thing about the pram in the hall and all that stuff? I think that’s misogynist, actually. There’s too much made of that. I mean, obviously I do have my own room, but I’ve got all these relations all the time: all these people around me, and I don’t think it stops me being creative, I think it helps me. I do have great longings to be alone, too, but I think all mothers probably feel like that. That idea — ‘Right, you can make children, but we can make art!’ — is just a construct. I don’t think that the way out of it is to lead lives like men, and to say you have to be on your own. It’s partly why Elizabeth Bishop is such an acceptable poet, because she never wrote about being a woman. But I’m not going to live like a man, I’m going to live like a woman, and … I do. I need to formalise that more. Of course there’s too much work, but so? The men should do some of it. They’re not used to doing that.

VB: Can I ask you a bit about the role of poets today?

KC: What are we for? Nobody cares about us, I think. I think probably we’re for what we’ve always been for: recording intimate experience and speaking for people. It’s not about public utterance, I don’t think. When was poetry about that? People say Dryden and Pope. Maybe.

VB: Maybe in pre-literate societies?

KC: Yes, it was more about stories and remembering. It’s still about remembering, I suppose. It should be a good time for poetry, it should be a good time for the short unit. But we should just get on and write, and then people can tell us what we’ve done later. I’m not at war with poetry, any more than I’m at war with poetic thought. I think it’s about the common law. We’ve inherited it, and I don’t see it as my job to stand outside the law and write outlaw poems, I want to be inside the law and change it by increments. I’m not at war with iambic pentameter; I like it. And as for the idea that there’s a great many over-promoted poets, I’ve never met them myself. Poets — even Simon Armitage and Carol Ann — they barely make a living.

VB: So who are the poets you really admire and re-read, and are interested by?

KC: A big mixture. I do read quite a lot of poets from the past, and I do love The Metaphysicals; I read them quite a lot, and you can see that in my work. And I love Larkin, and I do love Stevie Smith. I’ve been exploring American poetry and reading Sharon Olds. I did this anthology of birth poetry and for that, I read a lot of earlier women poets. There’s a huge silence around birth; there’s nothing, only elegies. Most of the elegies are poems of dead babies, and those early poems about pregnancy are all about praying not to die. I’ve read E.J. Scovell and Anne Ridler, Frances Cornford, Charlotte Mew, Ruth Pitter. There’s something very restricted and ‘sat upon’ about some of them. There’s something almost pious about both Anne Ridler and E.J. Scovell, which is slightly repulsive. That is the other difficulty about feminist retrieval. I have dutifully read a lot of these feminist retrieval texts. And you want to admire them, you desperately want to admire them, but you don’t necessarily. Maybe the voices telling them to shut up are too strong.

But then there are the very powerful voices. Emily Dickinson’s a fantastically powerful voice. She’s one of the very first poets I ever really loved. When I was 15, I had a copy of her Collected Poems and I had Larkin, and I had Stevie Smith. Those were my precious books. I never saw the contradiction between them at the time. They actually seemed to go rather well together! Maybe they do. I always loved teaching Larkin. He’s a very powerful poet when you’re teaching working-class children. That’s something people really ignore about him. Larkin writes about working people. Okay, people say he’s snobbish — maybe, yeah, there is a bit — but also he just records people’s lives in a way that these kids still find recognisable. When he writes about ambulances, or he writes about women who have pushed aside their own lives, and pets coming home, and about advertising: those poems, even though they are about 50 years old, they’re still very recognisably about these children’s lives in a way that very few poets are, because they’re about working class people’s lives. I found him very helpful in Romford! Larkin can speak universal religion whether you’re an avant-gardist or a woman. He’s such a huge influence. Look at Sean O’Brien! There’s a very strong line between Carol Ann Duffy and Larkin as well. I read a lot of my male contemporaries too. I don’t not appreciate blokey poems, and I don’t think that men should ever stop writing like men, it’s not that at all.

VB: We’re not looking to a post-gender future.

KC: No, absolutely not! I love Simon Armitage’s work. It’s very blokey, and I don’t think it should be less blokey, for a minute! I don’t think he should change his agenda, it’s just that I think my agenda should be valued too. My gender/agenda. I’m very good friends with Paul Farley, and our conversation is whether people are more anti-working class or more anti-women, and I think they’re more anti-women.

VB: Working class has perhaps always been cool, more so than being female.

KC: Well, you can be cool and female. Actually, I think Slattern was cool. Me in my 40s is not so cool, but I feel much more cool! I think Newborn is a much cooler book, really. But, oh dear, I do feel a bit bruised at the end of it!