Cheryl Moskowitz has just published her first collection of poems for adults, The Girl is Smiling. She talks here about the virtues of self-publishing, the way a poem finds its form, the differences between writing poetry and prose, and why you might want to look on your poems as guests at a dinner party
PJ: Can you tell us something about Circle Time Press – the process of self-publishing?
CM: It doesn’t feel quite right to call it ‘self’ publishing as there is so little about the process that I would ever be able to do by myself. Circle Time Press was set up in 2009 by Alastair Gavin, my husband. Initially, it was to publish my collection of poetry for children, Can It Be About Me? I’ve been working as a writer in schools for years, with a demand from teachers and children for me to have something I could leave with them. I’d had enthusiastic responses about the poems from three children’s publishers but all said the same thing: they weren’t publishing single author collections. Finally, I was advised by an editor at Walker Books and by the CLPE (Centre for Language in Primary Education), who were also keen on the manuscript, to get it published myself. The book’s been a great success. It was chosen as a recommended title by Children’s Poetry Bookshelf at PBS, and has now been taken on by Janetta Otter-Barry for her children’s poetry list at Frances Lincoln Publishers. It’ll be out in August 2012.
PJ: I see. So you thought you’d go that route with your adult collection. Whose was the editorial eye?
CM: It was becoming increasingly frustrating fending off questions from people at readings asking where they could buy my poetry. Having been through the process once, with Alastair having proved himself an astute editor and excellent book designer, I was excited for him to tackle my adult collection. We could get the book out in less than a quarter of the time other publishers might take. I handed over the first draft of the manuscript to Alastair last September and had a proof copy to look at by November. Final tweaks and edits and all those unavoidable wrangles with the printers were negotiated during December and January and the book was in my hand by the beginning of February 2012, a mere six months (as opposed to the usual two years) from start to finish.
Although he was my main editor, Alastair wasn’t the only one to cast a critical eye. I took many of the poems to my various writing groups: Clink Street, Mimi Khalvati’s Advanced Poetry Workshop and my North London Stanza. Three poet friends in particular have acted as close readers and offered invaluable advice and support throughout the process: Wendy French, Maggie Butt and American poet Leslie McGrath.
PJ: Several of the poems concern your relationship with your father. I notice you chose to thread them through the collection. I enjoyed going in and out of that relationship. Did you ever consider putting them together as a sequence?
CM: I did think about trying to group the father poems together but gave up on that idea quite quickly. A sequence suggests some kind of continuity, something linked up over time and that is not something I’ve ever experienced in relation to my father. My relationship with him is characterised by absence. He left our family when I was 11 and I’ve only spent time with him on a few occasions since. Ironically, most of that time has been since he’s developed Alzheimer’s. There are huge gaps in my knowing of him, who he is, his history. My father does always seem to emerge as a subject in my writing, my fiction as well as my poetry. I’m sure I’m using the writing to deal with that absence but it is like trying to darn a blanket that has too many holes. The job, it seems, will never be done. The poems about my father pervade the collection, just as he has remained a preoccupation throughout my life, but it is important that they be mixed in with a good deal else that is essential and nothing to do with him.
PJ: Your poems range across some difficult material – can you say something about your choice of quite a cheerful title?
CM: I wouldn’t describe it as a cheerful title exactly. The poems’ topics do cover a wide range but what binds them together, I hope, is a combined sense of vulnerability and strength. I wanted the title to embody both. The girl is smiling is a line taken from the last poem in the collection, ‘Snapshot’. The second part of that line is, ‘it is not a lie.’ The title is intended to suggest that there is much to be uncovered beneath that smile.
I wrote ‘Snapshot’ after working with a group of young carers in Westminster on a writing and photography project. The children used cameras to create self-portraits and produced some writing to go with them. Because these were children who had the responsibility of having to look after siblings or parents, parts of themselves remained unseen. I was born with a large and very noticeable purple birthmark on my bottom lip. It was very much part of who I was but I often tried to hide it, especially in photographs where I perfected a way of smiling that disguised, as much as possible, the birthmark. At one point I thought I might call the collection ‘Birthmark’ but that title was already taken several times over: Mick Imlah’s collection Birthmarks,1988, US poet, Jon Pineda’s, Birthmark, 2004 and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark, 1846, to name a few.
PJ: There is a variety of form from sonnets to prose poems. For you, what is that process of a poem finding its form?
CM: I think, as you suggest, it’s the poem that eventually needs to find its form rather than having one imposed on it by the poet at the outset. When I first began writing poetry (in my teens) I was resistant to the idea of established form. Like most young people, I wanted to make my own rules. I still enjoy that aspect of poetry, that each new poem can re-invent or redefine the form it is written in. But as my writing has matured (or maybe I have matured, as a writer) I have become more excited by the challenges of writing in traditional as well as non-traditional forms. ‘One For the Heart’ for example, is a sonnet. It’s a poem about the heart as an organ, and the process of open heart surgery but since the heart has always been symbolically associated with the idea of love the sonnet seemed the perfect form. The six lines of Louise Bourgeois’ text, which I use at the beginning of ‘He Disappeared Into Complete Silence 1947,’ determined this poem’s destiny as a sestina. The lines had an obsessive quality. I was obsessed by them and the artist whose work they were taken from. The sestina with its constant return to the same end words and circling of ideas is an ideal form for obsessing. When a poem finds its form it’s like finally being given a very clear job-description. You now know exactly what you have to do, no matter how hard or how long it might take you, the task is laid out in front of you.
PJ: I notice some daring lineation. For example, the use of short and very long lines within a poem – I’m thinking of ‘Adrift’, ‘Senescence’, ‘Pianissimo.’ Can you say something about that?
CM: I’m surprised that you’ve picked these three – I feel I took much more of a blind leap with the poem ‘Loneliness,’ which has some extremely unconventional lineation, but I’m glad you’re not asking me about that one. It’s a recent poem and I’m not yet sure I can fully explain it! Certainly the process of lineating that poem felt similar to constructing an abstract painting where you keep adding and taking away until it just ‘feels’ right. The poems you mention, ‘Adrift’, ‘Senescence’ and ‘Pianissimo’ were written earlier but at very different times. It was certainly not a case of deciding to write all poems in this particular way, ie with a mixture of short and long lines. The process of choosing how a poem should sit on a page, where the lines should end, etcetera, for me is around one tenth logic and the rest instinct. The short lines in ‘Pianissimo,’ for example, act like little interruptions of thought effecting a slight disorientation. It’s a quiet poem as the title suggests but when I read it, it makes me feel a little dizzy. The long lines together with the short lines do this. They are supposed to. It’s a poem about seeing my grown up father reduced to living the life of a baby.
PJ: I like the way you used the forward slash as punctuation in ‘Lifted.’ I remember seeing an earlier version with short lines. Was that a way to preserve the lineation but at the same time, give you different line endings?
CM: ‘Lifted’ is very much a poem driven by sound, rhythm and insistent repetition. I wanted to find a way to preserve that sense of pace and urgency on the page so it reads the same way I hear it in my head. The forward slash seemed to provide the momentum I was after and turned out to serve the poem on other levels too: as a punctuation mark the forward slash is used to separate alternatives, which is also what I’m doing in the poem’s narrative. Yes, the poem had an earlier incarnation with shorter lines - the forward slash is also a traditional way to indicate the ends of verse lines when printed continuously.
PJ: With prose poems, such as ‘Wednesday,’ there’s terrific compression but I sense a short story or a novel might spin from such material. For you, where does poetry sit in relation to your prose work?
CM: That’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently! I love the idea that there can be the stuff of a story or novel (or even a film) compressed into a poem and I’d like to think that a poem like ‘Wednesday’ could be a seed-bed for a longer work of prose. I have come to realise that I do not work all that differently as a poet than as a prose writer. Even when I’m working on an essay or a novel I find myself sculpting the words in minute detail, sometimes working and reworking a single sentence for days, changing the order of the words until everything is in its right place. This can make for a very painstaking and laborious process and probably explains why, despite how long I’ve been at it, my output of longer prose works remains relatively low.
PJ: Do you ever think of working on another novel or has poetry seduced you away?
CM: Poetry was where I first began as a published writer in my late teens and early twenties and has become my main focus again these past few years. However, I’m currently finishing off a short story collection and working on a new novella. And, now that the house is empty of children, I’m hoping to find the time, and the resolve, necessary to write another novel. The real difference for me between novel writing and poetry is how connected to other writers I can be in the process. A poem can obviously be written in a much shorter time than a novel (though not always…) so one comes up for air more often. In the poetry world there is a wide community. I feel comfortable sharing my work at its various stages and receiving their help and criticism. For me this has never been so when writing fiction or prose. Perhaps it’s some kind of wrong-footed magical thinking on my part but when writing prose, especially longer fiction, I find it practically impossible to speak about work-in- progress, or to show it to anyone, until it’s more or less finished. This can mean possibly a good few years of not really being able to answer the question ‘So what are you working on now?’ with any kind of clarity. This can have the effect of creating a good deal of emotional distance from family and friends. A scary prospect but a tunnel I know I must crawl back into before too long.
PJ: What are you writing at the moment?
CM: All the above, some poetry for a new children’s collection and a drama project for Under-5’s, not to mention working on the answers to this interview which has turned into a most enjoyable writing exercise in itself!
PJ: Which poets feed you?
CM: Of my seminal influences - those whose poetry got under my skin when I was still quite young and has continued to stay with me - I’m fed by the work of Sylvia Plath, Eleanor Farjeon, Walt Whitman, e e cummings, Edward Lear, T S Eliot and Shakespeare.
More recently discovered and current favourites to go to for inspiration and pure enjoyment are Jane Hirshfield (for her quiet, exquisitely crafted meditations, especially in her most recent collection Come Thief), anything and everything by Charles Bukowski (who everyone else seemed to discover before I did and I dearly wish I could have heard him read while he was still alive) and Philip Larkin (ditto).
The Czech poet Miroslav Holub, whose work I only know in translation but I love his poetry and his essays, and use both in teaching. Swedish poet Tomas Gösta Tranströmer writes astounding poetry that can take my breath away. And my current desert island choice would be the collected works of the great Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz whose writing is so deeply felt and intelligent it’s almost like reading scripture.
PJ: What are you reading at the moment?
CM: I’ve just been given the gorgeous looking Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, a graphic novel by wife and husband team Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot which tells the troubled story of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter. It interweaves some autobiographical episodes from Mary Talbot’s own life and her relationship with her ‘cold mad feary father’ who was a respected Joyce scholar. I’m not very far in but I’m loving it. Graphic novels are a newly discovered delicious delight.
Poetry-wise I recently attended the launch of Notebook in Hand, the posthumously published new and selected works by the extraordinary Hungarian born poet, publisher, self-proclaimed anarchist (and much else besides) John Rety. I remember going to the Torriano Meeting House in the 80’s and hearing John read his own poetry. Notebook in Hand is a beautiful looking collection that contains some of his very best and most moving work. Rety’s inimitable voice is audible on every page.
PJ: What would you say to someone working towards their first collection?
CM: I would warn against the temptation to try to pull together poems that have nothing to say to one another even if they count amongst your favourites. You have to be prepared to murder your darlings or at least to keep some of them corralled in a different pen. Think about the poems in the collection as you might a dinner party. Which guests (poems) would you want to bring together and why. If you made a seating plan, who would you seat next to whom in the hopes that some affinity was found or some interesting sparks might fly?
In March 2012 Cheryl will be doing readings at various venues in the USA - full list here - with poet Anne-Marie Fyfe
Thanks, Will, for that image of Cheryl scribbling ...
Posted by: Pam Johnson | 12 March 2012 at 02:40 PM
The dinner party analogy had me wishing I'd paid more attention at school, it made the point in sublime fashion. I'm fortunate to have caught Cheryl in action at Folk Camp events where, at the end of the week, she can be seen scribbling away furiously to present us all with a reading. This has become one of the highlights of the week, she captures all the little themes, moods and moments of spontaneity that develop during the week and weave them into a tapestry that has us all grinning and nodding in recognition. I don't know much about the mechanics of our language but the rhythms and style are very distinct and natural. We eagerly await this years camp...
Posted by: will riding | 10 March 2012 at 12:01 PM
So true, consistency of voice - you can't get away from it... any book - fiction, poetry, non-fiction - that's what makes it, the voice, confident, sustained...
And, yes, that blanket with too many holes does have a familiar feel ...
Posted by: Pam Johnson | 08 March 2012 at 02:05 PM
Thank you Pam for asking these questions. It's a terrific collection; I love Cheryl's image of trying to darn a blanket with too many holes... that needn't just apply to poems about her father...on this grey day it feels horribly familiar. One of the things that impressed me was the variety of form, content, yet the recognisable voice all the way through.
Posted by: jane | 06 March 2012 at 02:18 PM