The Taboo of Motherhood

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Liz Berry
She's not afraid of words like “spirit” and “soul” and “love.” And I love that. I was in a poetry workshop years ago, and someone said “You should just never use the word ‘soul’ in a poem. Don't use the word ‘soul’!”

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Hannah Lowe
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Hannah Lowe.

Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country, The Republic of Motherhood, and The Home Child, a novel-in-verse. Liz's work has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Writers’ Prize, and two Forward Prizes. Liz Berry is our guest today on The Glimpse.

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Liz Berry’s poems are lyrical and sensuous, deeply rooted in place and time. Her work sings with the textures of the Black Country in the Midlands of England, carrying its music, histories, and intimacies into the heart and imagination of the reader. There is a fierce tenderness to her work, a willingness to dwell in love, loss, motherhood, and desire. Liz writes the body and the land as intertwined, her language charged but precise, alive to dialect and rhythm. These are poems that feel both ancient and immediate, full of spell, song, and the ache of human connection. Her work is immersive and generous, and I’m so glad to have her here on The Glimpse with us. Liz Berry, welcome.

Liz
Thank you, Hannah, it's so nice to be here.

Hannah
It's so nice to see you. We saw each other not that long ago, when we were teaching a residential course here on the poetry of joy and resistance. I felt that you were more joyful.

Liz
I felt that you were resistant (laughter). No, that was such a beautiful pairing, I thought.

Hannah
It was a fair summation. I think I was bringing the resistance.

Liz
That's what you need to balance the joy, though, I think, or to go alongside it.

Hannah
It was a really interesting week, actually, wasn't it? Because what we realized was that joy was a sort of counterpoint to despair. But I feel that joy—I don't know—in your poems, does it come easily to you? Joy and celebration?

Liz
I teach a lot about joy in poetry and joy in writing, and I think something that I realized quite soon is that when you're talking about joy, actually you're talking about all the feelings. It's almost impossible to find joy in life or in a poem without it being balanced against more difficult, complex feelings—loss, grief, sorrow, sadness, disappointment, anger—and that's what makes a joyful poem so really sweet and beautiful, because often it's balanced with something more difficult.

Hannah
Yeah, and joy maybe is a bit like a strategy in some ways, I think, like deliberately choosing it, I think.




Liz
Yeah, I think that that's why I always teach joy and resistance alongside each other, this idea that you can choose joy, or you can choose to look for things that might be joyful or might help you to sort of find happiness or sort of peace or moments of brightness. Because it's not saying that the world isn't full of really dark, difficult stuff. We know that it is. But it's saying that it's important not to let that crush you, that to be joyful is a form of resistance. It's a form of being human and asserting your own right to be joyful and to have pleasure.

Hannah
Yeah, exactly. We were talking a lot on the course that we taught about the idea of joy in the small, in the small things that you might think are inconsequential, like eating a digestive biscuit, I felt—

Liz
That’s very decadent! Digestive! (Laughter.)

Hannah
Only one!

Liz
Most austere of the biscuits!

Hannah
No chocolate! (They laugh.)

Liz
Well, often we ask people, don't we, just sort of open up when we're teaching, and I often ask them about food that gives them joy or pleasure. Normally, it's a bit more decadent than a digestive biscuit, Hannah. But people love talking about sort of food that feels lovely and pleasurable, sort of, yeah, lush for them.

Hannah
The small things. And, you know, the small things can be plain (they laugh) as in the digestive. Well, let's talk about, well, first of all, we're going to hear you read your poem “The Republic of Motherhood,” which actually is a bit of a counterpoint to the idea of joy, because I was rereading it today, and I was thinking, this is actually quite a political poem. There's a sense of all kinds of emotions in it. But we'd love to hear you read it.


The Republic of Motherhood
by Liz Berry

I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.
I handed over my clothes and took its uniform,
its dressing gown and undergarments, a cardigan
soft as a creature, smelling of birth and milk,
and I lay down in Motherhood's bed, the bed I had made
but could not sleep in, for I was called at once to work
in the factory of Motherhood. The owl shift,
the graveyard shift. Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding.
I walked home, heartsore, through pale streets,
the coins of Motherhood singing in my pockets.
Then I soaked my spindled bones
in the chill municipal baths of Motherhood,
watching strands of my hair float from my fingers.
Each day I pushed my pram through freeze and blossom
down the wide boulevards of Motherhood
where poplars bent their branches to stroke my brow.
I stood with my sisters in the queues of Motherhood –
the weighing clinic, the supermarket – waiting
for its bureaucracies to open their doors.
As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.
When darkness fell I pushed my pram home again,
by lamp-light wrote urgent letters of complaint
to the Department of Motherhood but received no response.
I grew sick and was healed in the hospitals of Motherhood
with their long-closed isolation wards
and narrow beds watched over by a fat moon.
The doctors were slender and efficient
and when I was well they gave me my pram again
so I could stare at the daffodils in the parks of Motherhood
while winds pierced my breasts like silver arrows.
In snowfall, I haunted Motherhood's cemeteries,
the sweet fallen beneath my feet –
Our Lady of the Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis.
I wanted to speak to them, tell them I understood,
but the words came out scrambled, so I knelt instead
and prayed in the chapel of Motherhood, prayed
for that whole wild fucking queendom,
its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty,
and all the souls that were in it. I prayed and prayed
until my voice was a nightcry,
sunlight pixelating my face like a kaleidoscope.

From The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry. Published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2018.

Hannah
Thanks so much. Liz, I love that poem so much. And I think—what it makes me think about is of course—you and I were pregnant with our first children right at the same time. I think there's not much, is there, between the dates of the birth of our sons. And like you, I think, after I had my son, I was called, I remember sort of feeding him in one arm and writing about the experience of feeding him, you know, with my free hand.

But I had a sense, you know, back then—and that's 12 years ago now—that, you know, would anyone want to read these poems about motherhood? I think I'd sort of imbibed something that perhaps existed in our culture about whether motherhood is a topic, you know, worth exploring like a value. And I wondered if you'd ever had similar feelings, or if you'd had those feelings, and then decided to, you know, overturn, resist them, I should say.

Liz
I had massive anxieties about it. And in fact, when I was pregnant, and then in the early years, sort of, of Tom being a baby, I found it really hard to write, because all I wanted to write about was sort of what was in my heart, like what was burning, which was this experience. But I felt that it was somehow a bit shameful or embarrassing or trivial.

And I remember going to an award for my first book—oh, you know, I had quite a young baby then—and chatting to another poet who'd just become a dad. And his editor had taken him to one side—and this is a sort of a really prestigious editor—and said to him, “You can write one or two poems about a baby. Any more, and it's just embarrassing.”

Hannah
That's terrible.

Liz
And I was just so haunted by that. I felt like it was just advice for me, "You must not do this." It's embarrassing enough to be a poet, let alone be a poet writing about babies, and I think that was linked with this taboo of at the time certainly, and feeling it was quite taboo to say anything about motherhood other than, "I'm just so happy and I'm feeling really blessed." So I think I had these twin anxieties of being thought of as not only a bad poet, but a bad mom at the same time. So it was, it was difficult for me to get to the point where I did feel that I could write about it.

Hannah
Yeah, write about it in all its complexity. In the poem, I think you said that you “did not know the anthem,” so the song that you were meant to be singing was not the song that was necessarily coming to your lips. And in fact, what I think is in the poem, it was all the complexity, but the work, that's what's really there, is the work—I think you called it “the factories of motherhood.” And then, I love the fact that the speaker then starts complaining. Like, writing letters of complaint (they laugh) that then go unanswered. What is it that you wanted to say about motherhood precisely? Because it seems that you're saying lots of things simultaneously.

Liz
Well, I think when I began the poem, I didn't know what I wanted to say. So I've got the first draft of this poem, and I sort of love to think about that first draft now, because it's just written in the back of my diary, not like my notebook, just my go-to-the-dentist-at nine-o'clock diary. So I know that it was written—just the notes of it came—during a naptime when my eldest son was about 15 months old, and he was asleep, and so it just started pouring out in the back of my diary.

And I'll be honest, I was a bit frightened of it. I didn't, probably didn't think I'd turn it into a poem. Certainly I didn't think I would publish it. So I sort of was working by instinct rather than any deliberate intention. I think I just wanted to express this feeling I had of that almost without knowing I'd crossed this border into this strange new land, this kind of world of women, of mums, where everything felt different, and my old life was just across a border, unreachable. And it had this new language, it had this new anthem, it had these places to go, these rituals. You were kind of incredibly powerful, but completely powerless at the same time. And there's such a lot of sort of anguish in the poem as well.

Hannah
I had exactly the same feelings. I never read in the book about having a baby. I never read beyond birth. So it was quite a shock when I then had a baby. And I remember it getting to six o'clock in the evening and thinking, “Well, surely my shift is done now.” (They laugh.)

Liz
Your shift is never done. (More laughter.)

Hannah
It's time to have, who's taken over, who's coming in? (She laughs.)

Liz
It reminds me when I was first to teach—because we were both teachers, weren't we, in our old lives—and I remember when I was very first a newly qualified teacher having my first class and doing a couple of lessons and thinking, right, “when's the, when's the real teacher coming to take over?” “When's the real mom coming to sort things out here?”

Hannah
I had exactly the same feeling, and you express it so well in the poem. And also the idea that motherhood, you know, can make you ill, is there, you know—fatigued, of course. But then also, there's the mention of “Our Lady of Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis.” And I certainly felt that these things were hidden in plain sight, before I had a baby, and then all of a sudden, I thought, “How can this experience that, like, so many people are having, how can I not know about it, like fully know about it?” And I thought that's what I think your poem does so beautifully.

Liz
Thanks, Hannah. But I think when I was writing this poem and then sort of thinking about publishing it, it was because I wanted to make the poems that I was desperate for. So in those early months of having a young baby, I was just desperately looking for poems to read that might comfort me or reassure me or make me feel sort of less alone in it.

And there's lots of beautiful poems about breastfeeding and birth and the sweetness of new babies, but there's very little out there about, or there was at the time that I could find, about the trauma, about postnatal depression, about postnatal anxiety. There just wasn't a lot out there.

I remember just finding one amazing Sharon Olds poem, and it's, I can't remember what the title is, but a new mom is pushing a pram around the streets, and she just looks into the window and just sees like a young childless couple just having some great sex in the light in the afternoon, while she's outside with the pram. And that kind of seemed to touch on it, this kind of shock, of like, "Whoa, where went my old life?" But I think I wanted to make poems for that very particular time.

Hannah
Yeah, absolutely. And did you find—I mean, you can always trust Sharon Olds to say it, can't you, that's all, I think. But did you find any predecessors writing earlier than you?

Liz
Like there were little bits here and there. And I felt like I was just scouring—you know, I’m a voracious reader. So I'd be looking at books and looking online, and there were little bits, but, like, but nothing that had, really, I would say, broken through in terms of, like, a poetry collection or group of poems that had broken through. There were the poems about having a baby, thinking about Kate Clanchy's book Newborn.

Liz
But the reception around that book had been so hostile in the UK, I think there was a lot of hostility, still.

Hannah
Yeah, I remember.

Liz
I felt like the poetry world was not at that point open to those kinds of poems.

Hannah
It sounds like poets previously were probably following that editor's advice. You know, you can write a couple, but you can't write a whole sequence or a whole collection.

Liz
But I wonder too, and I think I understand it differently now that my own kids are older, is that I wonder if at the time, you are just so shocked and so tired that you're not really writing very much. And by the time you are kind of together in yourself enough, or the space comes for women to start writing again, like, that heat of it is gone. Like, do you know maybe you've got a few nursery hours, you get a little bit rosier about it, so you can look back. Like, now, I could probably look back and write a sweet poem about breastfeeding, but at the time, I felt like I was on fire. I couldn't have written that poem then.

Hannah
Yeah, that's so true. I wanted to talk a little bit about the image work in your poems, like the image in this poem of “the coins of Motherhood singing in my pockets” and the “cardigan / soft as a creature, smelling of birth and milk.” How do you find your images Liz? Tell me so that I can do the same. (They laugh.)

Liz
Hannah, I wonder if my answer would probably be the same as yours, and I wonder if lots of poets work this way. I feel I just work on instinct at this point. I'm a really sort of enthusiastic free writer. I've always got a notebook, so I'm always writing free writing. I take loads of notes, spider diagrams. I can't think—kind of this big sort of generation process. And then I just do loads of editing, but honestly, I just kind of work on instinct as to what feels right. And then when I go through the edit process, I sort of ask myself that question, like, “is it sharp enough? Is it fresh enough? Does it work?” Like I do lots and lots of drafts, but yeah, just instinct, although I know that's not very helpful.

Hannah
No, it is helpful. But actually we work quite differently. But I just tend to write the draft of the poem, and the images, I often, they sort of come to me there and then. And like you, I might then change them later, but I don't do all that kind of gathering.

Liz
Yeah, I think it's just a different way in, and for me that always feels really fruitful, because it takes the pressure off, the feeling of, “Oh, God, got to write a poem. It's got to be great.” I feel like I'm just playing, like I'm just gathering all this sort of imagery, writing for pleasure, playing, playing, playing, and then at some point, the kind of play slips into serious poem making.

Hannah
Yeah, so you're avoiding the pressure. You know, with this “The Republic of Motherhood,” it obviously spoke to a lot of people, because it really got people talking, I think. And I know on the Adrian Brinkerhoff poetry films, it's one of the most viewed. So what was the reception, Liz, to this poem? You've talked about, kind of, this feeling of anxiety, maybe being a bit worried or even surprised by what you'd written yourself. What was the reception to the poem?

Liz
Well, I think just before it was published—it was accepted for publication by Granta— Hannah, I felt so nervous about it, I actually cried. I was so frightened that the world, that the Internet would turn upon me and say, “Bad mom, bad mom, bad poet.” And it was only really sort of the advice of another friend, another mom-poet, who said, “Just do it,” that sort of gave me the confidence to.

And actually, the reception was so different than I had feared. I think because there's so few poems about the rawness of that time, it seemed to really touch people. So it went everywhere really quickly, and I just had loads of lovely letters and emails and messages. Even now—like probably on a daily basis—I get those messages from moms saying, “Oh, this was exactly how I felt. Thank you for saying it. That really touched me. It got me through a difficult time,” or “I suffered postnatal depression,” and it just gave me a lot of faith in the fact that you can say it—if you say it well enough, you can say what you need to say.

And then I went on to write more poems about that time and made this little pamphlet, The Republic of Motherhood, which is just this tiny little pamphlet, like it is tiny, like a little passport of 12 poems about—I think it’s 12—about being a new mom. And I don't think I would have had the confidence to do that had it not been for this poem and the kind of faith of my editor that there was an audience out there for those kinds of poems.

Hannah
So the poem really opened a door; having that poem in particular accepted, published by Granta, really opened the door. It's amazing that you still get messages now.

Liz
Yeah!

Hannah
I think at this point, we can now take a break, and so when we come back, we'll talk about Fiona's work and the poem “Childbed.”

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Hannah
Welcome back to The Glimpse. With me today is Liz Berry, and we're going to talk about a poem that Liz has chosen that inspires her. So Liz, do you want to say a few words about this poem, or just go straight into reading it? It's up to you.

Liz
So the poem I've chosen as an inspiration poem is a poem from Fiona Benson's first collection, Bright Travellers, and it's a poem called “Childbed,” which catches a mother and baby in the moment of birth.

Childbed
by Fiona Benson

I looked and saw,
collared in my own dark fur,
your face, blurry with vernix, strange,

like a drawing by the Master
pen and ink over wet chalk
and pricked for transfer

Out you slid, cabled and wet,
delivered, time of birth given;
yet what I keep is that first look

at your pause half-born, sheathed
from the neck down, crowned
in unfamiliar regions of light and air,

your lungs beginning to draw
as you verged on our world
and waited, prescient, rare.

‘Childbed’ from Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson. Published by Jonathan Cape, 2019. Copyright © Fiona Benson. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN

Hannah
Thank you, Liz. So tell us, what inspires you about this poem? Why do you love it?

Liz
The thing I love about this poem—really, I could have chosen any of Fiona's poems about early motherhood—is it's got that beautiful mix of the kind of holy and sacred feelings of birth and early motherhood mixed with a really bodily experience. We’ve got that gorgeous beginning “I looked and saw, / collared in my own dark fur.” So immediately we've got this image of kind of the body of the mom as animal, and just that strange idea of seeing a person half in and half out.

So along with all this kind of very, you know, bodily stuff, the really practical stuff, you know, the “time of birth given,” the baby's “cabled,” we've got the vernix. Then we go to this amazing imagery, which feels really courtly to me. The baby's “sheathed” and “crowned,” there’s—sort of elegant about that. And she imagines the scene not just as what it is, quite an intense, sort of bodily, graphic scene, but as sort of a work by an Old Master, sort of an early sketch. So I love that mix.

And the ending too. The moment I read this poem, that little section at the end just caught me in a way that I can't quite explain and that often happens with poems I love. There's just this sort of line of electricity that I feel charging through me, and it's that little section that goes, “yet what I keep is that first look.” So no matter what goes before it or after it, there's the preservation of that single moment.

And then the last line, when the baby's just waiting and “prescient.” And I think when I first read it, I probably didn't know what the word “prescient” meant, so I had to look it up afterwards. It means kind of foretelling the future, of knowing what's to come, and something a bit visionary about it.

And then the word “rare” as well, that seems to hold something both kind of “unusual” and “uncommon,” and then also “rare” like “rare meat,” the kind of, the rawness of a new person. And I think with all of Fiona's poems of early motherhood, there's this sort of longing or wanting to tell an experience as it is, to tell the truth about something, to kind of speak through taboos about sort of bodies and childbearing, child-rearing, but also acknowledging the kind of lush, holy ecstasy that goes alongside the sort of, the kneeling and the shit and the breastfeeding. And I find that such an intoxicating mix.

Hannah
It's so interesting, isn't it, because, in a way, the poem enacts what the line that you read, “what I keep is that first look,” the whole poem seems to like freeze that liminal moment of the baby being both in the mother's body and in our world, you know, the kind of, the world, the human world, the world outside of the womb. It's all about sort of, yeah, that rare moment that when it was imagined. Also when I see this poem, or like, I see it in my mind's eye, I don't see, like, the modern labor ward, I see something like a painting from Vermeer. It's obviously the reference to the Old Master.

Liz
But I think that comes across in lots of Fiona's early motherhood poems. She's a beautiful poem about breastfeeding that ends with this image of “a long line of women / sitting and kneeling, / out of their skins / with love and exhaustion.” So I feel that often she's sort of linking contemporary motherhood back to sort of generations of mothers before her, or it's just got this feeling, perhaps, of something now, in the moment the baby's caught, but also something older, maybe even something ancient at times.

Hannah
Yeah, that lineage. And it's so funny you read those lines, because I'd written those lines down. I was flicking back and forth through the other poems in this sequence, and I thought in some ways, those lines, “a long line of women / sitting and kneeling, / out of their skins / with love and exhaustion,” it felt like a leaping-off point for your poem, “The Republic of Motherhood.”

Liz
Well, I first discovered Fiona's poems when I was, I think, perhaps pregnant, and she has an amazing poem, I think it's called “Soundings,” and it's about, it's about being pregnant, and about looking at a leveret, a baby hare, in a field, and the possibility of miscarriage. I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, what an amazing poem.” And then reading Bright Travellers at a time when I was a new mom, and as you spoke about before, I was really wrestling with this question of how to be a mom and a poet. Can I be a mom and a poet? Can I be a mom and anything creative? So to see a poet who I really admired, like such a fine lyric poet, writing these amazing poems about motherhood was so inspiring. Because the thing I was frightened of, “Can I do it? What if I can't do it?” I was like, “There she is. Fiona Benson is doing it. She's doing it. So I can do it too.” I just, I think of her as, like a lodestar poet. I just have to sort of follow that and just keep my faith. And then I read a beautiful interview that Fi gave when she was talking about this poem, “Childbed.” And she said, “I often feel that I'm breaching terrible taboos. I'm quite a private person, so the explicit poem about childbirth in the book, for example, well, I can hardly believe I put it out there.” And I love hearing that she, too, had this sort of reticence or resistance or anxiety about it but did it anyway. And that's what I love, this, “doing it anyway.”

Hannah
Yeah, there's a real kind of courage there, Isn't there. And also the idea that her poem gave you permission. And it's so different from “The Republic of Motherhood.” In a way, “The Republic of Motherhood” is a sprawling poem, isn't it? Whereas this one is really working, it feels like it's working, under great compression.

It made me wonder if you ever have that experience that I have, which is that I have a poem in my head, and I can almost see it on the page—like I know if it's going to be long or if it's going to be broken up. I can almost see it, but then the work is to sort of capture it. And I wonder if Fiona has the same thing, that she knew this poem would be quite a compressed poem, just five stanzas, three lines each.

Liz
I wonder if it's because it does that little magic trick that you spoke about, Hannah, of catching just an instant. It's there in the line, isn't it, that you said before, “yet what I keep is that first look.” So you've got all the other stuff around it, but what it's aiming to catch is just a single, deeply strange moment of sort of being in between two worlds.

Hannah
It was really interesting as well, is—those lines that are in italics, which I was looking up earlier to see if they were a quotation. But I find it really interesting—and I couldn't find anything—but the reference to the Masters, which I presume, or the Master, I presume that's a reference to, like, the old kind of European master painters, et cetera. I love that, because she's basically comparing her own, sort of the kind of domestic and often characterized as “small” work of women with these great male artists. Do you know where those lines come from? Or have you ever spoken to her?

Liz
No I don't, and I always imagine them to be, do you know, like on the back of a painting or a piece of work, sometimes it's like just a little note about what it is, you know, like "early sketch for so-and-so.” So I just took it to be that. But I love what you said about it's equating, kind of, the very intimate, domestic work of women with kind of this, with fine art, this sort of artistic, this high moment. And I think throughout the poem and Fiona's other poems about motherhood, often this really beautiful, like elevated language. I'm thinking of, like, she's not afraid of words like “spirit” and “soul” and “love.” And I love that. I was in a poetry workshop years ago, and someone said “You should just never use the word ‘soul’ in a poem. Don't use the word ‘soul.’” And then I think, “oh, but Fiona Benson does, so maybe I can too.” (She laughs.)

Hannah
It's that question, “What would Fiona do?” It was funny, wasn't it? Back then, there was a whole list of words that were on a “banned list,” including, I remember, “shards,” that was one (Liz laughs), you couldn’t say anything, don't put a “shard of light” and, but also, I remember the word “mango.” (They laugh.)

Liz
Oh, wow. (More laughter.)

Hannah
There must have been, like, a glut of poems about mangoes at the time. But definitely “soul,” “spirit,” “ghost,” they were all…

Liz
“Grief,” “love,” get ‘em out.

Hannah
Yeah, get them all out. And I wanted to also ask you about, you know, yourself and Fiona, like you're quite good, you're good friends, and you've been friends for a long time. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about bit about the role of friendship in your writing life, because I know when I look through my phone like half the names in there are poets, basically, and I wondered how important that was to you, and also what those friendships involve, that maybe is different from other friendships.

Liz
Well, I became friends with Fiona, really, after I'd started reading her poems, and our first books, Bright Travellers and my first book, Black Country, were up for an award at the same time, and that's how I met her, and so we just had a chat. But really, I just became so admiring of her work and the poems that she was writing for her next book, I think I just wrote to her. And sometimes, Hannah, there's a poet that's so brilliant that I feel my admiration for them could tip over into a terrible jealousy, and so to stop it from becoming a harmful feeling in which I think, “Oh, that's so brilliant, I'll just give up now,” like, I think “maybe, maybe I can learn from you.”

So I think we probably just started chatting and talking about poems, and I remember the first time she said to me, “Would you look at one of my poems?” And I honestly felt honored, I felt luminous. (They laugh.)
Hannah
“Me?”

Liz
“Me, little me?” But it was a way to turn that feeling of intense admiration, rather than becoming this envy that we can sometimes feel, of like, “Oh, they're so good, I'm just going to give up.” And that can feel really destructive. But turning it into a feeling that's really kind of inspiring. So rather than thinking, “they're amazing,” on the start, be like “They're amazing, what can I do? How can I push myself to be better? What can I learn? What kind of, what can I take from that?” And poetry and friendships, honestly, it's one of my great joys.

Hannah
It's like there's a shared language, you know, or it's like a secret language, actually, because there aren't that many of us, you know. And so it feels like there's a kind of getting of each other on a different level. And I think lots of people imagine that poets are tortured souls that spend all their time, you know, scribbling in their notebooks, in their bedrooms or in dark corners. And actually there's like the most amazing camaraderie between us.

Liz
Yeah. And I think it's a deeply communal art as well, because even from when you're a very new poet, you spend so much of your time in workshops, being mentored, collaborating, working with other poets, doing readings together. You spend so much time together, I think it's kind of the opposite of a solitary art. So maybe the writing bit is a quiet bit, but then actually the rest of the time I feel you're in company and part of a community.

Hannah
Yeah, absolutely, and some of the most pleasant writing experiences I've had have actually not been on my own. They've been in workshops or even like in formal settings, writing side by side with others. And so somehow the atmosphere in that space gets infused by the magic of poetry. So you might then produce something that you wouldn't normally if you just sat at your kitchen table.

Even though poetry is, you know, it's not like memoir, as in, we're not necessarily as readers meant to believe that the poems are true. And yet, so many poems I read, I do read, they must be linked to real experience. And so I spend a lot of my time sort of in a position of, like, empathy or really just sort of thinking what it is to be in someone else's shoes, to be in their mind and in their heart. And that's like a really lovely place to be, you know, out of my own and in someone else's…

Liz
I love that. And I think I love what you say there, about the poem is the place where you kind of might find a poet's true self. I certainly feel like that for my work, I feel like there's something of myself that’s in my poems that maybe isn't in the me that goes on the school run or teaches or, you know, looks after my mom, that sort of a different self or another aspect of myself, maybe a greater complexity can come through in the work. Do you feel that too?

Hannah
I do, and I feel that in, yeah, like I don't have that in lots of aspects of my life, but I do get it from mentoring. I always feel that when I mentor someone, even though it's a work thing and is a kind of exchange, I always feel, like, that I've got to know someone a little bit better and differently than I would if I'd encountered them in another way. So I know you do lots of mentoring as well, so you probably have the same experiences.

Liz
Yeah, and I think to see into sort of a student's heart like that through their work is sort of a real privilege, and sometimes even if you meet someone at a really early stage of their writing, so maybe perhaps the craft is still a bit clumsy, or they're feeling around, actually, to kind of see what they're thinking or their thought patterns, or their feelings, or kind of their, you know, their sort of deep work that comes out through those early drafts. That always feels like such an honor. I feel like I learn an enormous amount about humans and what it means to be human by teaching poetry to people.

Hannah
Yeah, definitely. And also, I think I always admire the courage of people, because, as you said, you know, being a poet is embarrassing. (They laugh.) I mean, it's not embarrassing, it's wonderful. But I've definitely had that feeling, and even now, sometimes I might be reticent to say that I'm a poet, that I write poetry, but I always think of other people.

And just the idea of, yeah, just being creative is a brave thing to do, I think. Well, Liz, that probably brings us to the end of our time. But I wanted to say how grateful I am for joining us today on The Glimpse. And before we go, I'd love to ask you about what you are working on at the moment.

Liz
Oh, at the moment, I'm working on a curious book, Hannah. I don't really know what it's going to be yet, because it's sort of a hybrid, in that it's caught somewhere between prose and poems, but it is about motherhood and about that strange, feral energy of midlife, of your 40s, and also about the possibility of angels and angelic visitations (she laughs)—just what you've been waiting for.

Hannah
I can't wait to read. It sounds absolutely amazing.

Liz
(More laughter.) Thanks, Hannah.

Hannah
Thanks, Liz, for joining us on The Glimpse.

(Outro music)

Hannah
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Hannah Lowe.

Liz’s poem “The Republic of Motherhood” is from The Republic of Motherhood. It was published by Vintage, reprinted and used by permission of The Random House Group Limited, copyright 2018.

Fiona Benson’s poem "Childbed" is from Vertigo & Ghost. It was published by Jonathan Cape in 2019. Copyright Fiona Benson. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.

Coming up next week, Arji Manuelpillai talks about writing for royalty, the pressures of a commission, and the power of vulnerability in a poem.

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The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host Hannah Lowe. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our Technical Director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.

Thanks for listening.