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The first in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series.
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Lisa: First, Vasiliki, I love your poem, ‘On hearing the seismologist say there could be an 8.5R earthquake near Athens’. Congratulations. We know each other’s work and it is interesting that both our poems have very long titles. Did you ever toy with a more conventional title? Did you ever get feedback on the title, and someone suggest calling it something like ‘Earthquake’?

Vasiliki: Thanks so much Lisa, I love your poem too, and this is a great question for us both. The poem has been through several edits and I think the initial working title was ‘The opposite of yellow’, or ‘The opposite of time’, which was one of the workshop prompts. As this was a one hour, generative workshop held by Off the Chest, there was no feedback, so I did not have any other title suggestions, but the poem came into frame for me when the title materialised.

Soon after the destructive 7.8R earthquake in Turkey last year, a seismologist predicted that eventually an earthquake of higher magnitude will be taking place in Greece, which triggered traumatic memories of the 1999, 6R earthquake in Athens. This connected me back to the poem (the lines about Sparky were already there) and I wrote into it until it clicked into place. Sometimes the title, even if it comes at a later stage of editing, can contextualise the poem, and in this instance it did for me.

In your Forward Prizes interview you write that ‘I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field’ is a “love poem to what we’re losing and what we’ve lost”. Both our poems are centred around loss, personal and environmental. Grief warps our temporal sense. Which brings me to the question of time. A poem is an attempt to share a precise moment with readers. If the field is the ‘present’ and the donkey ‘the driving force of the future’ they both exist in the here and now of the page. By the end, we are left with thoughts of ‘another life’, bringing to mind the cyclicality of nature, of life and the power of imagination. There is a temporal shift in your poem’s title. Can you speak a little bit about how your poem considers and plays with the question of time?

Lisa: ‘Grief warps our temporal sense’ is a great observation. I don’t believe time is linear. That idea that time is a healer, and you move on in some straight line towards a glimmering horizon is not how I experience life. My feelings about time are that it is ‘wrapped’ in circular movements propelled by memory. Just as a future prediction about an earthquake triggers traumatic memories in your poem, so the past and present swallow each other’s tail, like an Ouroborous. I circle the same walk around a lake, and witness the cycle of the seasons, but am conscious that spaces like this are under threat through climate change and developers. At the same time, we see increased efforts to move ‘back’ to a more sustainable, conscious way of living. My current walk conjures other walks and memories – particularly one I did regularly with my father on Sunday mornings as a child, so he is sometimes a ghost companion, just as other people who I have lost accompany me. The other life, and other lives, are inseparable from the present life. The hyper focus on the articles ‘a’ and ‘the’; and on the tenses in the two different ‘fields of play’ with the donkey at the heart of both was a way of trying to bring some of these ideas together.

I’m always fascinated by how a poet’s ideas evolve, and a poem develops so I’m also interested that you say your poem started from a series of notes from an online workshop. Is this approach the most generative for you? How did the notes move towards the poem?

Vasiliki: I love these thoughts on time and its ‘circular movements propelled by memory’, Lisa. I really feel this in my writing too, and am often inspired from nature walks. So the approaches to writing vary, and I don’t think I have one approach that is the most generative, but when I do take workshops, I mostly free-write, which can be embarrassing if asked to share live. I then leave the notes for a long time and go back to them if I am creatively stuck. I will scour my notebooks and try to find connections between fragments from different dates / workshops. It is the finding of these connections that usually drive the poems.

In this instance, everything is splitting or being split open – the mother, the city, the lettuce, the slug, the earth, the speaker and the afternoon. This is what drove the choice of the images, or the images initially chosen morphed to conform to the theme. But I think most of the work was done subconsciously. When I looked at the poem afterwards, I realised there was a breaking apart like a fault-line running through.

I’m also fascinated by process. The pronouns in your poem are doing something really interesting. They shift from the ‘I’ to the ‘you’ to the ‘they’, becoming more inclusive and collective as the poem goes on. Would you be happy to share how this came about in the writing of the poem?

Lisa: Pronouns in poems are often overlooked but they bring a definite emotional texture to a poem and a subjective response from the reader. There have been a lot of interesting discussions about the use of the anthropocentric ‘I’ in eco-poetry and beyond, and a move towards a more inclusive ‘we’, but ‘we’ makes assumptions about shared life experiences. It felt right to start the poem with ‘I’ and work through the shifting personalities of ‘they’ and who ‘they’ might be, and I was hoping by the end that the ‘you’ embraces the reader.

It is very kind of you to say my poem has a sort of transcendental quality and I think the same about your poem. It explores traumatic emotional territory, just as an earthquake is a physical trauma of the earth, but what I find profoundly beautiful and surprising is how despite the ruptures suggested by the ‘cracked pane’; the ‘split’ in the family and inadvertently slicing through a slug, the poem has moments of such tenderness and mystical appreciation of the precariousness of life. I feel for your cat Sparky. I am invested in his trembling. I’m reminded of my friend, Dino Mahoney, a fellow poet who I stayed with earlier this year who is involved in a cat charity on the island of Aegina and I enjoyed meeting his extended family of cats and getting to know all their names and characters. How did your love for cats and memory of Sparky drive the emotions in the poem?

Vasiliki: Thank you Lisa! And how wonderful is the work your friend Dino is doing for stray cats in Greece.

In this poem the cats parallel the children. The speaker’s instinct to protect them contrasts the drive of the absent mother who ‘split town’, leaving her family at a precarious moment in time. It is a device, but it is driven by real emotion. There have been several smaller earthquakes since 1999, and my first thoughts are always with the cats (mine and the stray cats I look after), as well as the most vulnerable people. An instinct to look out for those you feel are helpless and in need, I suppose. A close friend’s flat, who lived two streets away from me, partially collapsed during the ‘99 earthquake. I was on my own at the time and went to stay with another family. There is great need for solidarity and togetherness in moments of fracture and disaster and it is this felt experience that drives the emotions in the poem.

In your interview you write “None of what I’ve achieved has been done in isolation.” And I feel this so keenly – that poetry is often collective work – the saying “it takes a village” comes to mind when I look at acknowledgments in books, or even one of my own poems. Personally, few poems come out fully formed, or in isolation, and I think that’s true of many others I meet in peer groups, and courses. We discuss our poems, consider each others’ thoughts. By the time it is published, a poem has been helpfully co-shaped. Then there is the competition culture. For many of us, whether living abroad, or having no physical presence in the poetry world due to health conditions, competitions have been a way of getting published, especially at the beginning. But contests, prizes (and submissions, which are a form of competition where some poems get chosen over others) can be divisive as well as being a way to celebrate individual voices and poetry as a whole. They bring people together in a space where everyone loves poetry. What is your take on companionship and kinship in poetry, and how can we feel more united and accepting of different aesthetics in spite of the competitive nature of publishing?

Lisa: I think it is important to acknowledge your roots. Co-editing the Grassroots issue of Magma, I am aware of how interconnected we all are, whether we know each other physically or in an online space or through reading each other’s work. This idea that poems once upon a time jumped out fully formed and armored like Athena from Zeus’ head is a nonsense. I feel there is much more recognition of diverse voices today within the prize culture and competitions which is healthy, but I never enter a competition expecting to win. A deadline is a great enabler. I am excited by the variety and energy in the poetry scene and love getting to know new work that inspires and feeds my own writing. I try and remember to tell people when I love their work. Sometimes, rejection or feedback is an opportunity to rethink a poem and sometimes it just hasn’t found the right home. It is important to take your time to work out what you want to do with your poetry. There’s no rush to publication and an ‘emerging’ poet can be in their 80s.

Just to say, your ending is inspired with the idea of the gorse dancing, mirroring the ‘balletic’ lavender stems in the vase. In conversation with the Forward Prizes, you say it took months to find the right ending, and it does indeed feel “natural, yet surprising”. But was it a moment of serendipity? Did it come in a dream? Or were you out in nature?

Vasiliki: I love these thoughts, yes deadlines can be helpful, yes also to the Grassroots issue and interconnectedness! Speaking of interconnectedness, the idea for my poem’s ending came when I started thinking about the earthquake as a wave or vibration connecting polar ends of a spectrum – opposites like love and fear, joy and suffering merging into an oscillation of sorts. The afternoon, the gorse, the speaker, everything held in its temporal embrace, could be dancing instead of worrying, “dancing the blues away” as the saying goes. In fact, I think the last line was a slant association from the word ‘blue’, which is the opposite of yellow, or its complementary colour. And this idea of the complementary spectrum, that binary, and its underlying unity drove the ending of the poem.

Of course, earthquakes are dangerous and lethal, so there’s nothing trivial about them, but in the space of this poem, I am thinking about feelings and how opposite poles connect, how the mind can frame experience, how a mother splitting away from the family is painful but at the same time can force one to develop their individuality and autonomy.

Speaking about splitting, ‘The moment had been/ missed’ is a great line break, and what makes line breaks interesting in prose poems is the way they are arbitrary, but can – to a degree – be manipulated through spacing and layout. Was this an intentional break, and can you talk a little bit about your choice of form for this poem?

Lisa: We spend a lot of time as poets worrying about line breaks and the energy they give to a poem. They can help give ‘stage directions’ to a reading with breath and pacing. The line breaks are not intentional in a prose poem, and we’ve all encountered views that the only thing that distinguishes poetry from prose is the line-break. I’m moving more towards how a writer frames their work to suggest how it might be received – just as Marcel Duchamp presented readymade objects as art. If you take a piece of found text and call it a poem, it will alter how the reader perceives it.