Poetry in Aldeburgh Residency: Ben Rogers interviews… Jacqueline Saphra

The poems were written before the illustrations were created. Mark is a responsive and talented artist – actually something of a visionary – and he entered the world of the poems and enlarged it. He chose to counterpoint or expand the poems rather than attempt to simply illustrate them. His approach gave the book an extra dimension beside the words, or perhaps I should say beyond the words. I am proud of the book and I’m always able to say, without sounding in the least self-centred, that it is a beautiful artefact. That’s because the beauty is a result of the artist’s vision and the editor’s design.

Not sure if I can do that without being a bit rude. A number of poets, including myself, were let loose on busking spots at Tube stations by Saatchi (yes, the advertisers) for a nominal fee, to write and deliver poems to communicate some particular messages that were being peddled at the time. I stood at the bottom of escalator at Canary Wharf for four hours a day with my mini microphone and amp trying to get the attention of busy commuters. I wrote mostly in form; a couple of sonnets, some rhyming poems, and some performance pieces because I thought that would encourage people to listen. Most did not. One man said to me “Why don’t you do some Wordsworth instead of that other stuff?” But I met some lovely TFL staff who offered to broadcast my poems on their state-of-the-art loudspeaker – a big thrill – although I don’t think any of the commuters even noticed. On tube adverts you might have seen Saatchi’s copywriters’ own attempts at cautionary verse. Those were nothing to do with the real poets-in-residence. I will say no more.

Oh yes. Mostly formal, rhyming and much of it in blank verse that I absorbed aurally, through its music. My earliest poetic influences were Mother Goose, AA Milne, and the Oxford book of children’s poetry, which introduced me to William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, the amazing and versatile Anon. and many other English greats. Early in my life I experienced the power of metre and rhyme. Now it’s in my blood.

Poetry is often written in the first person and frequently has a huge emotional undertow. It is frequently delivered out loud by the person who wrote it, so people often identify the voice of the poem with the experience of the poet. Obviously, the better the poem is, the more people are likely to believe it is true, which is a tribute to the writer. I regularly teach a session called ‘Truth and Lies’ (although perhaps it should be called ‘Truth and Imagination’ but I like to be a bit sensationalist!), because students often ask if it’s alright to ‘lie’ in a poem, or sometimes say, as if to justify the contents of a poem: ‘but it really happened’. If we poets wanted to aspire to literal truth in our writing (as if there is such a thing!) we would all become writers of ‘how to’ manuals, consider careers as journalists or write memoirs. But in any case we all know how unreliable and subjective memory can be. It’s my firm belief that the poet should be at the service of the poem. The emotional centre needs to spin centrifugally, and everything else – the facts and the unfacts, if you like, need to be caught in its vortex. Say whatever you want, invent what you like, use your imagination – that’s what writers do, for god’s sake – if it strengthens the poem.

I describe myself as a ‘poetry activist’ and the great thing about site-specific poetry is that it takes it out of small rooms in pubs and basements, out of cultural institutions and into the world where non-poets or non-literary audiences might go. I want to reach out to readers. I can’t tell you the number of times people have told me they’re afraid of poetry and it makes them feel stupid. Putting poetry in a different setting reframes the poem, makes it more accessible and gives it new life. It also allows audiences and performers look at the space from a new perspective.

I think I had been editing Magma at the time and the theme was ’Profane and Sacred’. That seemed to encourage men to send in their (often atrociously bad) cock poems, which sometimes felt like a kind of assault.  But that was in a very particular context. As I’ve developed my own writing and reading practice and expanded my horizons I’ve come to I believe that anything (unless racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted) is acceptable in a poem if you do it well. I don’t believe in lists of banned words or any rules of ‘The Poetry Police’, that imaginary regulatory body that patrols the pages of our poems. A couple of current of Poetry Police cautions that are trotted out regularly in workshops are ‘don’t repeat the same word, find a synonym’ (why?) and the other is ‘avoid adjectives and adverbs’. I can see where those warnings come from, but a strategically wielded adjective (or even many!) or the repeated use of a particular word in poetry can be very powerful and effective. It’s just that the poet has to know what they’re doing and the effect they’re creating and really mean it. But getting back to your original question, down with The Poetry Police! I’m certainly not one of them. I can’t think of a single word that, used in the right place in a poem, couldn’t surprise, disturb or delight me. And all of those are good.