Talking Poetics #12 : Lydia Unsworth

How A Poem Gets Made

The germ is a phrase, let’s say ‘twenty-six miles across the sea,’ that comes within a fog of recent associations, a background noise that only requires tuning-in to. I don’t think as much as focus on the words that murmur through me, an ongoing narrative, like a baby chattering itself to sleep. It’s a making-sense, a structuring, a reforming and a stretching. Like how dough rises and you can pull it into nameless shapes. I’ll slam it against a wall. What I see is a deckchair, the stripes on that deckchair: Why stripes? What has been done to me? It’s not my image, it’s a postcard from somewhere, but that’s what I can see, and I’m seeing my country floating off across the water, festival music twirling alongside on the wind. I’m seeing leaves of trees behind a faint shudder of heat rising. A fata morgana. Tarmac. There is nearly always tarmac; it lines my dreams. Whatever book I first read the word-phrase fata morgana in. It doesn’t matter if what I remember is accurate, only that it leads on to other things, all that chaff can be stamped out in the aftermath. An oasis. The way we don’t always look up what words mean, allowing place names, band names, surnames to slide on and off our relaxing bodies on the beach. I start with a figure in a landscape, there is nearly always a figure melting into the tarmac on the beach. I tug their arm, pull on whatever article they happen to be reading, slap the face awake, twist its history into my own stranded interpretation. Words like chains, both links and restrictions, until I’m ground to a halt in what I hope is a worthy place. If not, plow on. Sand over boots, inside shoes, cast them off, the burning grains under the softest most unknown part of us. I won’t get my toes out in the middle of a board game. Who lies on a blanket in the middle of an inner-city carpark anyway? Can’t we take back our surfaces? Once, in Norfolk, the hot road, new and mallable, like an origin story. Volcanoes of motorway. And then I’m full of enough raw lava. I stick my hand in to the warm rocks, ignore the tourists striding past my crumpled melodrama. I like it down here where the theoretical leaves are, rinsed with Beckett, Perec, Kafka, and with all the preferably women I’m currently gagging in. I’m down here in my class and my past trying to rake it all pageward. You want form? You want skill? I can only polish up what the turned-over stones are revealing. I’ve got termites. I’ve got small tiny things. Ferns, etc. and every time I’ve ever walked past them. I’ve got the first tomato I chopped in order to feed myself at aged seventeen. Like a scene from Ghost. Words that as an adult have lost their importance. I’m finding them in the grips of my trainers, bringing them into the house. Piles and piles of discarded incidents, which I’m stirring up into a thick soup. Like I used to do with shampoos and gels in some ancient lived-through bathroom that in my remembered architecture now sits where the kitchen should have been. 

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (KFS, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Winner, 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks: My Body in a Country (Ghost City Press, 2019) and I Have Not Led a Serious Life (above / ground press, 2019). Her latest chapbook, Throw the Towel In, will be released by KFS Press in 2020. Recent work can be found in Ambit, para.text, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Blackbox Manifold and others. Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter: @lydiowanie   

On Writing #162 : Lydia Unsworth

On Writing and the Self

Lydia Unsworth

past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud

SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is

As with walking, there is only one place from which to begin, that being wherever your feet happen to be. I rise from the folds of my interior, a consciousness that began as a seed and expanded into this. Into hands that tap on a computer screen, attached to a torso that belongs to its environment, a head that is habitual and formed by how it is received.

My command, if I have command, comes out of this body, my ability (thus far) to persist. This body lives with me and I with it. You get used to each other. You familiarise yourself with your set of limitations, real, imagined, affected, believed in, and wriggle a little inside your veil of skin.

I am one hundred cats inside a soundproof cube with a hairline leak. Those cats disagree, fight, both with themselves and with each other, change their minds, howl, die, come back to life. I can’t see outside these walls, not with any clarity, not with all this noise in here.

The exterior feeds in, becomes the surrounding fields. A whine overhead, a newspaper headline, advertisements, words of wisdom, the glass shattering in a car window and the sirens that geyser from the scene. Imagine an already damp cloth sprawled out across the table, lapping up the spreading sea.

I’m a venus-fly-trap munching on my own leaf. From the lockjaw of iteration comes a kind of release. An ability to make certain movements, to walk a person through the rooms of one’s house and illume the debris.

Curtains of static and association filter the impressions coming in. You tune the station, fiddle with the channels. Catch a breath of pure oxygen, a swift in flight past an old barn beam.

Walls of tiny metal beads, like ball bearings, rain down in all directions. Each bead carries a small image, a sentence remembered, a name from the deep. And your body charges past, heading for the glimmer of light flickering off some stranger’s watch face as their feet scuff the threshold of the door as they leave. Beads in disarray, metal fragments reverberate like hail, the birdsong of disruption falling back into place. A nearly, a helix of just-missed steam.

Everything detours this way, for a second, a year, a day. And, as with walking, you grab whatever is within reach. Pick up a pebble on the beach. Pass it from one hand to another, admire its curvature, estimate its weight. Do you need it? Can you put it on a shelf? How long should that shelf be?

You juxtapose one thing with another, like a bower bird lining a nest. You select, compare, reconsider, throw away. You turn a thing over, pick at it, chisel. A slab of intensity, finessed, is left to harden. Complete, you step outside, and dance your ridiculous dance in front of the resultant array.

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize winner). She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2019 from above / ground press and Ghost City Press. Recent work can be found in Ambit, Litro, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Ink Sweat and Tears, and others. Based in Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter@lydiowanie