Alan Corkish

Alan: Hy Tracey and welcome to erbacce congratulations on being
selected as featured poet for the journal. Can I begin by confessing to
all our readers that I found it truly difficult to type-set some of your
poetry? Even though I LOVE it and I am not exactly conventional
myselfwhen being creative poetry-wise. Can you begin by telling me
how layout/form fits into your personal poetics? It is an area which
intrigues me greatly... maybe show us some examples of how your
poetics and form and poetry slot one into the other is that's possible.
Tracey: Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Imagine how much easier it would be ifl wrote poems on prescription
blanks! I remember being fascinated by William Carlos Williams'
This Is Just to Say. At the time, I was trying to do a full-time job
as a teacher and bring up two small children. I was attracted to the
idea of fitting poetry around my life and so I wrote short poems. Life
affecting form - never mind about content.
It was only when I started an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester
Metropolitan University with Michael Symmons Roberts as my
tutor that I seriously began to think about layout and form being
fundamental to the way I write. Michael introduced me to J. H.
Prynne. I did not want to like Prynne. Poems looked inaccessible and
difficult. However, I took the plunge. Ponne was a revelation. I was
excited by his range of form and by his choice of diction.
Alan: A prolific writer of chap-books as well as being experimental.
Tracey: Yes, indeed and at the time, I was writing a chap-book length
collection of poems Gunnerside based around the lead mining industry
in Swaledale. I love the way in which the stark landscape is reclaiming
the damage created by industry. I experimented with writing lines in
layers like seams in rock. In one poem, Earth Speech, I tried to reflect
the geology of the landscape in the layout of the poem:

spine
shifts
shafts

settle
vertebrae

into place



A rib scattered in a mass of spar.

4
It was the beginning of thinking more experimentally about how
content could define form and form define content. Michael Symmons
Roberts gave me Creeley to think about and I did. Creeley said;
'Content is never more than an extension of form and form is never
more than an extension of content. They sort of go together is the
absolute point. It's really hard to think of one without the other; in
fact, I don't think it's possible.'
My life changed suddenly when my son became ill. Poetry became a
way of working through pain and anger. Having a form as a scaffold
to hang the words on helped me write about subjects that otherwise I
would find unbearable.
Alan: Oh I like that; the idea of a scaffold appeals to me having spent
the early part of my life as a stone-mason. Scaffolding is essential in
construction be it stone-work or words.
Tracey: Yes, and I think just as a stone wall can be a defence, form
can support or protect the poet. I started to impose a form before
crafting the words.
Alan: I think my favourite poem of yours is possible Mermute... again
it's personal, I come from a seafaring family... it is a poem I found
difficult to typeset because of the structure... can you tell me how it
came about?
Tracey: Mermute took a couple of years to write. I was walking along a pristine beach and the
tide had left tiny pieces of plastic and a pink plastic dog toy. At the
time, I thought the dog toy was a sex toy. When a friend told me,
it was a dog toy, I left the reference in. Let the obscenity stay. It is
obscene what we are doing to our environment.
I was furious about the state of the beach. I needed to write a poem
that captured the beauty of the sea and set it in contrast to our lack of
care for the environment. Before I started, I knew that the form of the
lines on the right must be flowing like the patterns that the sea leaves
on the sand. The left side is human. I wanted it to feel repetitive and
fractured. In the first part of the poem. the lines of the sea match the
human lines in number but there is no connection in content. In the
child section, I wanted there to be some connection and so I matched
the playful tone of the child with the sea. Sea connects briefly with
the child; it tickles toes.
Sometimes the process of typing gives me an idea. I wanted to capture
the sing song innocence of childhood but when I formatted it, I couldn't
fit the words on the line. Cutting the words short felt unnatural and
strange. I loved it as a contrast to the sea's rhythm and flow.
In the next section of the poem, I wanted the content to echo across
lines. I used combative diction for the sea whilst Awd Man wails,
inactive, by oiled pools. Later in the poem, sea is reduced to single
words and finally to a babble of sound.
Originally, the poem finished with a sonnet: a final swan song, the
culmination of human artistic endeavour. The sonnet felt trite and I
needed something that spoke of the peak of human artistic endeavour.
I created a poem to finish my poem from the brilliant and beautiful
work of poets I admire.
I have hope that once we have finished with the planet, the sea will
remain and so the sea has the last word.
Alan: Beautifully detailed commentary, thanks for that.
Tracey: During the first lockdown, I wrote a short collection The Way
of Stones inspired by Pliny's Natural History. I went back to geology.
Limestone was written after I thought about what stone Medusa
would turn men into. If she had the choice, it wouldn't be alabaster. I
loved Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, but I thought about how
interesting it would be to imagine meeting Medusa. Through all that
has been written and painted about her, Duffy had been the writer to
give her a voice. I wanted to reflect the fact that she didn't have a
voice until Duffy. I didn't want to give her another voice but to think
about how we interpret voices through works of art.

Limestone

Forgive my manners.
I can't look you in the eye.
she smiles
An interesting choice. Why not alabaster?
she picks a scab
I hold my breath. Forever scarred?
she sucks her finger All those men.
Rifled or raped?
she shakes her head
The hissing hurts. For their faults?
she laughs
their flesh hollows and dissolves.
Yes, she knew a thing or two about stone.

Alan: Love the attention to detail and the almost colloquial to-and-fro.
of the text... two other poems I selected to include are Milks/ones and
Pearl... oh three actually (so many of your poems to choose from and
all quite exceptional) I wouldn't leave out Pumice. But first tell me
about Milkstones, it would be referred to as a prose-poem I guess...
Tracey: Yes, probably, but maybe more than that as Milkstones was
written in the form of an advert. I went on some American wellness
sites. The rubbish they sell to women is comic but there is also the
exploitation of the workers who mine the gemstones used in many of
the products.
Alan: Yes, there is a humour there also, lines like 'Our experienced
astronomers calculate... ' The rhythm and content remind me of Auden,
in The Unknown Citizen he uses similar phraseology to mock what he
perceived to be a 'corrupt' and false System; (from memory) ' ...all the
reports on his conduct agree' and ‘his Union reports that he paid all
his dues.'
Tracey: Yes! Exactly! Auden is one of my favourite poets. In Praise
of Limestone is a poem which resonates deeply with me. I spent time in Naples and never visited Ischia. It was always full of German tourists.

Pearl came about after I read about the tests for virginity happening
to young girls. The voice of the father is written in rhyming couplets
- traditional verse. I wanted it to sound archaic and false. The girl's
voice is in prose for the most part, but I switched to short, heavily
punctuated quatrains for the examination. It was partly based on
personal experience of being abused by a doctor many years ago
before I realised doctors could abuse.
Alan: Something I know a little about again through life-experience
as a psychologist in the NHS; predominantly these 'tests' (none of
which establish anything do they?) were part of Bangladesh, Pakistan,
India culture?
Tracey: They certainly don't establish anything. The story that I
based the poem around was about an American woman I read about
in the paper. I was talking with an Italian friend, and she knows a
woman whose parents had forced her to take a virginity test after
going out for a coffee with an older boy. Her parents had nailed the
results to the door of the church. The practice is dying out, but it is in
living memory.
I drew on Pliny's descriptions of stones and fell in love with him a
little. In Pumice I imagined how Pliny would view what we have
made of the world. I think of the words I would say to him as he lay
dying on the beach at Stabiae and the words I couldn't say.
In short, layout and form are integral to my writing and often come
before the content.
Alan: That's as thorough an explanation as I've read for a while. Let's
move on, or actually perhaps return to something you said. I'm not
surprised Auden is one of your favourite poets, mine too, but who else
has influenced you? Who else do you admire in the poetry world...
and why?
Tracey: I remember first being aware of poetry when we studied the
First World War poets at school. Growing up on a council estate in
Hull I didn't come across poetry. University introduced me to writers
I'd heard of but never read. I remember cramming Plath, Rossetti,
Shelley, Keats and countless others in an effort to catch up with a
culture I knew little about. At that age, having come across few female
poets, I was a Plath fanatic, and I wrote with a thesaurus next to me.
Early influences were wide ranging: I was heavily influenced by the
earthiness in Heaney. In poems like Digging, I found an engagement
with the landscape and working life to which I could relate. The
richness and perfection of sound in, 'the squelch and slap of soggy
peat’ appealed to me.
A powerful influence on the mechanics of writing has been Marianne
Moore. Her experiments with syllabic lines and format excited me.
'whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.'
I drew comfort from her constant revisions. It gave me confidence to
experiment and revise.
Alan: Indeed; constant revisions... as with Moore; nice example that.
Blake too; spent months re-writing and revising.
Tracey: Another of my influences; I just love poets who show me
the divine in the ordinary — the power of an arrangement of words to
create magic be it through the visual pattern or the sound in my mouth
and the energy created when you read a crab described as a lily.
Alan: makes me smile that; the art of poetry is to make us see things
differently perhaps... and/or close observation of the everyday.
Tracey: I admire observational detail and mystery in writing. Emily
Dickinson's poems exemplify this also. She grounds us with the
every day and soars with exuberance within a few lines. Her poems are
beguilingly simple, but she deals with the inexplicable in ways that
make meaning. When she writes about the ocean in, I started Early
— Took my Dog 656, she achieves a magical reverence for the ocean. It
makes me think of ancient gods — of forces we don't understand. But
it's about the simple act of getting her shoes wet:
'And He — He followed — close behind —
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle — then my Shoes
Would overflow with pearl.'

Alan: I can feel your enthusiasm; so many poets influenced you
then?
Tracey: Indeed, but some poets I feel found me if that makes sense.
Amy Clampitt found me at precisely the right time. I admire Clampitt
and her influence on me is profound. Sometimes, I place her Collected
Poems on the desk when I am writing as a reminder that I must
write. Beach Glass is one of my favourite poems of hers. There's
fine observational detail, conversational tone and then she drops in a
philosophical idea. It felt like the hand of fate was guiding me when I
realised Clampitt had stayed in Yorkshire and written At Muker, Upper
Swaledale. Tightly packed stanzas tumble and rush in pure enjoyment
of the landscape. There's humorous detail 'Git in, git in, git in, ye
huggers.' I can feel, see and smell Muker when I read,
'a fine rain falling,
burnishing with wet the wind-
nipped roof slates. '
Alan: ha ha ha; my smile has turned into genuine laughter; your
responses are poetic in themselves you know; I love 'Tightly packed
stanzas tumble and rush in pure enjoyment... '
Tracey: Thanks for that, I might salt that line away and use it later...
The single poem I admire most at this moment is Scaffolding by Seamus
Heaney. It speaks to me about where I am in my life. It comes back to
what we were talking about earlier: building walls and scaffolding. I
came across the poem because I was looking for Digging. Sometimes
poems appear in just the right moment. There's magic in that. Like
many I've struggled through the pandemic but I'm feeling a sense of
hope. I look around me and whilst responding to your question, I've
built a wall of poetry books.
Alan: Yes indeed, full circle. I feel as if we are dancing, I'm genuinely
drawn to your responses, they seem so honest and heartfelt and they
give me much food for thought; thank you.
We are getting close to the end of this interview now Tracey and I'd
love to hear from you about how the current situation with lockdowns
and such has affected your output? And also, if you could tell me where
you feel poetry 'sits' in the 21st Century?
Tracey:
Alan: Sounds great... but I'd guess all that is just a memory now?
Tracey: Yes... and lockdown has been difficult, I've missed the
festivals and so much more, but it has given me the gift of time. When
lockdown was at its most severe, I set myself tasks to do. I wrote
a short collection of poetry and began another. I also worked on a
children's novel. Like many, I struggle with the isolation but reading
and writing is an escape.
Paradoxically, access to culture through poetry has boomed during
the pandemic. It 'sits' at the centre of the human crisis that is the
21st Century. Whether it is the pandemic, environmental disaster,
or Black Lives Matter, poetry is a means of expression. poets are
publishing and performing online. Social media has given access to a
wide audience through platforms like Instagram. Events such as Dead
Poets Live with Juliet Stevenson reading Stevie Smith is accessible
to all. I am excited to be living and writing in such culturally rich
times.
Alan: So, despite covid and lockdown you feel poetry is thriving...
an interesting notion... in fact your enthusiasm, your perspective,
your willingness to share has been stimulating Tracey... it is truly
appreciated.
Tracey: It has been wonderful talking with you. Your questions have given me
the space to reflect on my writing and to revisit poets I've not read in
a while. Thank you for that space.
Alan: Truly... my pleasure... and now to more of your highly original poetry.