Two by Two: Claire Crowther on Carrie Etter, Carrie Etter on Claire Crowther

We must begin by stating our great bias in favour of one another’s work, as we have been increasingly close friends since we met in May 2002. Since that time we’ve freely shared our writing, books, ideas, homes, food, and wine; once we start talking about poetics, we can hardly stop—more than one conversation has ended simply because our cordless and/or mobile phones’ batteries gave out. We’d like to thank George Ttoouli for giving us this rare opportunity to talk publicly about one another’s poetry, as ethics forbid our doing so in reviews, and to ask questions that arose in the process. It has been a pleasure.

Claire on Carrie’s work

Carrie Etter’s work struck me, from the first poem I read of hers, as beyond the usual definitions of style in British poetry. She builds on traditional metre, a deep understanding of the nature and history of lyric poetry and a love of syntax, with any extra materials the poem needs including prose poetry and hard-hitting social satire. This formal openness partly derives from her American education as a poet. (She grew up in Normal, Illinois and began publishing poetry aged fourteen.) It is also a feature of her commitment to extending not only her own poetry but also the range of poetry. What is most interesting is that, despite every poem in The Tethers having its own structure, Carrie’s voice is unmissable in them all. Take ‘The Sty’: a 32 line sentence makes this long, and long-lined, poem a triumph. When you read the first two stanzas you know you are in for a gloriously funny and fascinating imagined episode of the body errant:

My left eye shucks old shadow from its lid like my mother
shucks corn – no pity for the cob, no love for the husk,
and when that eye drools a lash as though it’s the last paper boat
childhood will sail down the stream

you’d expect me to quake, and truly the right instrument
would have registered significant fault line activity
when I saw the curtains inch towards centre stage to eclipse
the opera’s vermilion and verdant velvets, the soprano’s mole

Though Carrie’s position in each poem is the enquiring examining mind, she is looking (the eye is important) at the body. Mind is in control but not of the body it runs after – mind is in control of the poem. The body is imagined, as it strains out of its bonds, in every sort of language – poetic, idiomatic, onomatopoeic. ‘The Sty’ moves through medical, Chaucerian, Keatsian and everyday language, from “drools” to “verdant” to “foweles” to “cafeteria” carrying the reader along in an excitement that lasts for me far longer than any other one-sentence race-along poems I’ve read. It ends rhapsodically with an exaltation of larks, cunningly split:

Until I slam the door of my empty flat, empty of that husband
whose face even now I muster as the auspicious drop swims
over cornea and sclera with an ease that’s exhilaration, I mean

exhalation – which is to say exaltation, of the eye and the larks it can see.

Carrie is also capable of using the lyric for dramatic social commentary as in ‘Axes for Crutches’ (complete here):

Once, the view from the room cost twenty guineas.
Once, the view discerned the hangman
selling his rope by the inch.

On the Underground, a drugged girl swayed,
palms pressed to hold open the door
between rush-hour carriages.

The remarking crowd refuses an exit.
The train will never stop.

Something is using axes for crutches,
breaking the earth’s crust as it goes.

Such variety means that her poems can be read in far more journals than most poets’ work. Though The Tethers is Carrie’s first full collection, her work is known and admired widely already. I hope she never returns to Normal.

Claire interviews Carrie

I've read and enjoyed many of your poems in a wide variety of journals and wonder how you selected the poems in The Tethers from this larger reservoir.

I first assembled a manuscript in 1997 as part of my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine, but as I entered the PhD in English that autumn – and in the States the PhD’s first three years consist of postgraduate coursework – I had no time to attend to the manuscript or write very much. When I came to England in 2001, I had two years of fellowship time, which I mostly spent working at the British Library. I'd be at my thesis most of the day, with a break in the middle to read and write poetry. 

In September 2002 I attended an advanced poetry week at Arvon, with Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell. Shortly after my arrival, after talking about poetry enthusiastically with some of the other participants, I wrote a poem, ‘Cult of the Eye’. I had a tremendous week, receiving useful advice from both tutors and making some new poet friends that I hope to know the rest of my life; I started a writing spree on my return, drafting a new poem every day for six weeks. I also began forming a new manuscript beginning with ‘Cult of the Eye’ and taking that as the title. 

You're right; I've published many more poems in magazines than I've collected in The Tethers. Some have gone into other, later manuscripts because of the subject matter or style, while some that seemed compatible for this manuscript in terms of style and subject I didn't include because I didn't think they were good enough. I'm hard on myself, I suppose, but I'd rather that than the alternative.

‘Biopsy’ is a poem that catapults the reader right inside an experience without describing the experience. Do you resist anecdote?

Absolutely. I don’t write poetry to share with the reader the particularities of my experience; rather, I want to find a way for her to inhabit it, often by conveying the experience figuratively. ‘Magnum Opus’ for instance, concerns a specific event in my life that would seem fairly banal, I think, if I’d written about it as a personal narrative. Instead, I use the metaphor of the castle to explore the ideas, the feelings behind the experience. I hope this approach allows the reader greater involvement.

The body is an important site of metaphor and metaphysics in The Tethers. An Etter body is differently realised in a poem from, say, an Olds body – can you describe that difference?

As I resist anecdote, often I resist writing literally or directly about events. The Olds body is always very literal, whereas I intend for the body in my poems to work both literally and figuratively.

I am fascinated by and envious of your speed in writing individual poems. I have known you pass me by in the British Library and drop a fully formed perfect lyric onto my desk – do you do what John Burnside advocates, carrying lines in your head until they are done and only then writing them down?

You think more highly of my early drafts than I do. However, I do write poems brick by brick—if I come up with a word or an image that I don’t think effective (i.e. exact or precise and original), I don’t write any farther until I’ve solved that problem. So my ‘first’ drafts aren’t dashed off in one go; I’ll sit and puzzle over the right verb for the third line and try out in my head every word I can think of that approaches what I’m looking for, mentally crossing out one after another until I find what I want. Writing really is revising, which I suppose is similar to Burnside’s method.

Your poems unusually combine highflown, even poetic, language, with down to earth reference, idiom and syntax. This is one of the most striking features of your style. How did you come to write like this and do you have models for it?

I love openly poetic language—I’ve long admired Yeats, but I think given the language we speak now, it is only effective if used sparingly. So the “down to earth” and the “highflown” work in concert—or so I hope.

There are three prose poems in The Tethers. You are well-known as a prose poet. What are the strengths of this form, do you think?

The prose poem allows for a different modus operandi: where the lined poem must progress, must somehow make it from A to B, the prose poem simply wants to inhabit one idea or feeling or mood—it wants only to convey A.

Some who know my work in prose poetry have been surprised by the small number of them in The Tethers, but the next two collections, Divining for Starters and Imagined Sons, contain progressively more.

You have a philosopher’s approach to dialectic in many of your poems. Has philosophy or any particular philosopher influenced your work?

As you well know, I was married once, and to a philosopher; at one time I knew quite a lot about game theory and computer modelling (don’t ask—“at one time” was some years ago now). More directly, as part of my PhD, I studied critical theory and was attracted especially to the work of Derrida and Foucault—Derrida for his early interest in the way language works (or doesn’t work), in particular the idea of différance—that language operates to defer or delay meaning. In regard to Foucault, I found his critiques of social institutions compelling, especially Discipline and Punish, which I’ve read a number of times. Additionally I was interested in materialist feminism, looking at the material foundations of women’s oppression.

In a few poems I can see the influence of this interest directly, for example Foucault in ‘Axes for Crutches’; in others the influence seems more covert or subdued.

I suppose I should mention here that I was once, briefly, Derrida’s student; I took a course with him while I was at UC Irvine. But I wasn’t one of his better students.

Your poems are a celebration of the power of syntax – the sentence, in all its many forms, strides through each poem like a colossus. Is this the same in your experimental work also?

My experimental work focuses on a poetics of consciousness—trying to evoke the way thoughts form, develop, and interact in the mind. Sometimes that involves working with fragments, as is the case with most of the poems of the ‘Divining for Starters’ series, less often with complete sentences. At the moment, though, I’m trying to push my experiments farther and, I think, in admiration of Juliana Spahr’s Response, I’d like to try more work with complete sentences in my experimental writing.

Carrie on Claire’s work

I was excited by Claire Crowther’s first book, Stretch of Closures, for a number of reasons. For one, I felt her poems were more experiential than poetry I had been reading in UK magazines, that there was something about the terseness and the ellipticism of her poems that gave me the sense of inhabiting the speaker’s/poet’s consciousness. This approach has several positive knock-on effects: the poems demand more participation from the reader in making meaning, and the poems resist the uncomplicated revelations that explicitly or implicitly conclude many poems being published in the UK these days (not unlike what was once called ‘the workshop poem’ in the States). Moreover, Claire’s word choice is so precise, and the degree and style of the ellipticism so variable from poem to poem, that the poems are always fresh, always unpredictable. Consider the surreal, enticing opening of “Moods”:

Once I had a motorway of hair,
long, black, stood up to stresses well.
You trafficked it, your fingers heavy, light.
I closed it once or twice against the terrors
you get with hair. One day, a lake of sun
drowned the usual distance between us.

Taking these distinctive qualities into her second book, The Clockwork Gift, Claire focuses on women’s ageing with particular reference to grandmothers; this increases the interaction among the poems, complicating and deepening the issues at hand. Part of its motive is to highlight and undermine stereotypes of older women, and the approach proves impressively multi-dimensional and intelligent. The speakers of ‘Archaeology’, for instance, are grandchildren who imagine with both excitement and horror digging their grandmother from her grave, while the grandmother of ‘Mine, Then’ has become her grandchildren’s parent in the wake of AIDS. Thus, while admitting that some ideas associated with grandmothers have a basis in real experience, Claire invigorates other, less noticed associations to fight simplification.

If there’s an improvement in Claire’s skill from the first book to the second, it lies in her ability to achieve the poems’ experiential sensibility, their sense of a lived consciousness, with greater fluency. This is to say, in Stretch of Closures the ellipticism often entails the use of shorter sentences and fragments in a way that not unpleasantly jars; the passage above gives some sense of this. The Clockwork Gift, however, maintains the sensibility even with the use of more complete and longer sentences (not to the exclusion of short sentences and fragments, however—that is still a crucial part of Claire’s style), which increases not only the poems’ fluency but also their musicality, their lyricism. This development is most evident in Claire’s longer poems, as in this beautiful passage from ‘The Herebefore’:

                        A heron looks up: someone
has ground a stone against wet grass. Then he ducks
again and his neck coils into black and white
before straightening, rising slowly, the long
bottle-stopper beak pointing west
as the lost woman arrives, her lover lifting

an empty crash of raw silk, a gorgeous
light mass but she is aged by the sun
far into rut and root.

I feel fortunate to work with such a talented, original poet.

Carrie Interviews Claire

It seems that the move from first to second collection entailed predominantly longer poems. How and why do you suppose this move has come about?

For two reasons. I had turned away to some extent from that well of short lyrics that can bubble over when you first start writing, and I had given myself time (by doing a Creative Writing PhD at Kingston University) to research my theme very thoroughly. And I did have a theme for the second collection unlike the first – the ageing woman in society. The long poems in The Clockwork Gift are about complex aspects of that theme and they are cut from far longer poems! I should mention there is one long poem in Stretch of Closures and, as writing that was exciting, I knew I would find longer narrative or reflective poetry satisfying to write.

Continuing on with regard to form, I found the poems in Stretch of Closures vary their forms well to accommodate the subject matter and the tone. I’m thinking of ‘Pollen’, with its one-word lines mingling among longer ones, to the mix of prose and lines in ‘Warrener’, to couplets in numerous poems. Did the work of particular poets inspire this variety? How did you know when you’d found a poem’s right form?

Finding a poem’s best form is the single biggest challenge to the success of a poem. I try not to force poems into a preset mould. I initially see form as separate from the set of words I am using and try many sorts of form. This leads me to create a form for some poems. There is usually a convergence, through the many versions of a poem I make, between form and such factors as word choice or syntax. I am led strongly by the sound the lines make – if there is a prosy sound, I might cast the lines as prose. If there is a constrained tight sound, couplets might work best. Layout on the page also contributes to formal decisions because it must reflect the meaning or cerebral movement of a poem. Three stepped lines, for example, help show a gradual unfolding of feeling which might then be reined back in by a left-justified fourth line. At last, form so closely relates to the rest of a poem that it becomes unchangeable and the poem works.

Some poems in Stretch of Closures suggest an interest in architecture, perhaps specifically the way architecture influences human behaviour, e.g. ‘Reconstructive Fortressing’ and ‘Cheval de Frise’. Do you regard these poems as observing that relationship or observing and critiquing it?

I am continually struck by the vast hard structures that small soft creatures create round themselves. Of course, humans are not soft in practice and it’s this apparently mismatched match that fascinates me and from which I make poems. It’s the process of building, rather than the rather grander idea of a finished architecture, that I observe and use as social critique. Building is both a team effort and demonstrative of individual craft – I’ve spent many hours watching roofers and tilers practise their skilled and dangerous job. I also use architecture in symbolic ways as in ‘Martha’s New Extension’ where the process of building symbolises gender relationships or ‘Open Plan’ (in The Clockwork Gift) where an oppressive state is symbolised by the compulsory removal of house walls.

This is a sweeping generalisation, but in part the move from Stretch of Closures to The Clockwork Gift seems a change in focus from urban to more rural environments. Knowing that you’re researching the sun for your next book, I wonder how you see this progression and what you make of its significance.

A This is a hard progression to pin down because the rural environments I mostly describe in The Clockwork Gift are, in fact, urban rural spaces. You might call it suburban – parks and gardens, for example. I would be happy to be the poet of suburbia, one of the strangest environments we have made, eerily empty while most (paid) workers are elsewhere, highly gendered space and often with centres or community hubs that are sited in a hidden or broken way (not to the community of course, but to the suburban tourist).

For my third collection, I am writing a series of poems about a rural space, ‘Low Village’, in the context of a broad theme, the sun. While not autobiographical poems, I needed to examine some of my formative experiences; my mother grew up in a very small village in County Limerick and I spent twenty-two years living in a Surrey village. Despite this I am almost as ignorant as any town dweller of much rural data, but not quite. If you live somewhere, and if you then commute out of it to work, you interact with its norms and mores as a privileged guest. I am interested in the feeling of voluntary imprisonment this brings. The new poems I’m writing are about the damage such imprisonment can do and how language can reflect an experience of environmental discomfort and confusion. The poems are often symbolic; the village might represent a time or a life-stage or a mood. The sun is a powerful force, unifying city, suburb and village and offering energy for our perilous future, and the poems celebrate it. I’m lucky that my husband is a solar physicist so I can make sure I get the science right!