National Poetry Month

Novelist and creative writing teacher Louise Tondeur explores class and poetry in contemporary Britain and interviews Katrina Naomi, Sarah Barnsley and Valerie Laws about their social and political experiences.

I’m a novelist and I’ve also published a very small amount of poetry in the Rialto, for example, and more recently Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Dyslexic Writing. I write academically about queer theory and the body. My own poetry has always been confessional, compulsively so, especially about everyday things, whereas my fiction isn’t.[i] I got my interest in writing from my working class father – although when asked he describes himself as aristocracy – who wrote poetry about his family himself, and loves to quote lines in from Matthew Arnold and Dylan Thomas. But I became interested in the question of the title after watching my wife’s poetry develop. I’m married to Sarah Barnsley, one of the poets interviewed below. It seemed that her writing became more successful – by that I mean she was happier with it, and it got published – when it became more personal and direct, and when she started to write about her family. Arguably, her poetry didn’t get more queer, it got more working class. It also seemed (for someone who writes academically about American poetry) peculiarly British. Reading it, I wondered whether there was such a thing – and by ‘thing’ I mean a form or a movement, not an origin – as working class British poetry.

But poetry, class, Britishness are not words you can define in relation to writing practice simply by theorizing about them. They are complicated enough to discuss as terminology without adding practice to the mix. Neither is it simply a question of identity, which seems far too slippery to be useful. Hence this article. I decided to ask three poets about working class poetry. Placed side-by-side their voices make an interesting contribution to the discussion without attempting to reduce the question to an answer.

First of all, because I like to contradict myself, here are some quotations that might constitute a kind of definition of working class British poetry. Interestingly, all but one of these describes working class writing of 100, 200 or 300 years ago.

Perhaps it’s particularly political:

The poems […] almost always political and occasionally characterized by ridicule of the oppressor and uncompromising support for the people – included satires, poems honouring a politically correct historical figure, and those praising abstract qualities such as freedom or reason.[ii]

Or perhaps it’s personal, subjective, I-poetry:

Many of the stories and poems here break one of the cardinal rules of ‘good literature’, for they are written in the first person, an assertion of personal involvement which literature often seeks to deny. The proper literary perspective, we are taught, requires detachment, objectivity, the ironic stance.[iii]

Or does ‘working class writing’ mean writing while surrounded by the concerns of everyday life or while living hand-to-mouth?

The penniless young Eden writes his finest work at his sister’s kitchen table surrounded by family bustle and the anxieties of near-poverty […] The prosperous Eden sinks into a depression that saps his will to write[iv]

Does it come ‘out of the clods’?

Asked too many times ‘where he got his poetry from’ John Clare once retorted ‘I kicked it out of the clods’.[v]

Or is ‘working class poetry’ a label we could do without?

Though not all these models of labouring-class poetry have necessarily undermined their independence, one thing these writers have rarely been allowed is simply to be poets.[vi]

One of the best overviews of working class British poetry I read whilst researching this article is the introduction to James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class by John Fordham. He gives a useful précis of writing about working class writing for anyone interested to follow up.[vii]

Three poets

Katrina Naomi comes from Margate and has lived in South London for many years. She won the Templar Poetry Competition in 2008 with Lunch at the Elephant & Castle. Her first collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake, (Templar 2009) was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Bronte Parsonage Museum which resulted in a short collection, published by the Bronte Society, entitled Charlotte Bronte’s Corset. Katrina is currently studying and teaching part-time at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Sarah Barnsley is from Lincolnshire, but now lives in London. ?Sarah’s poems were shortlisted for an Eric Gregory in 2004, and have been published in Envoi, Magma, Mslexia, Raindog, and Obsessed with Pipework. Other work appeared in anthologies by the Cinnamon Press. She was the H.D. Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library, Yale University over Christmas 2007-2008 and has recently completed a book on the American poet Mary Barnard. Sarah is a lecturer and Course Director of the External English Programme at Goldsmiths.

Valerie Laws lives on the North East coast of England. She’s published several books, including two poetry collections from Peterloo Poets, Quantum Sheep (2006) and Moonbathing (2003). She has written many plays for stage and BBC radio and often collaborates with scientific organisations. In October 2008, BBC Radio 3 broadcast her play, Nowt to Look At, the life story of a severed head in a specimen jar. Her newest poetry collection is All That Lives (2011, Red Squirrel). Valerie also writes crime and comic fiction.

The questions

1. Tell me a bit about your work.

KN: I’ve been writing poetry for about 13-14 years. I came to it late and came to it by mistake. I’d hated poetry at school (hated school for that matter). I couldn’t see the point of poetry at school, none of it seemed to relate to my life at all (I sound a bit like a Smiths song there)! I began writing really awful short stories – boy meets girl, girl murders boy – then went to a short story workshop and was asked to write about something that ‘came from the heart’. I wrote about my biological father and the tutor told me I’d written a poem. I was really surprised. I mean what was the use of poetry? I didn’t know anything about it so how could I have written a poem? Poetry didn’t seem to be anything to do with my sort of background: I was really taken aback and just slightly horrified. Shortly after that someone read me Sharon Olds’ ‘I Go Back to May 1937’ and something clicked. I’ve been making up for my lack of reading ever since. I constantly feel that I’m trying to catch up, never having read or understood the canon (and a lot of it’s still way over my head).

I find it hard to describe my work. I’d rather leave that to other people. What I can say is that poetry has rather taken over my life, it’s something I’d never have foreseen – it seems so far removed from my earlier life but then as I’m coming to realise my earlier life is often the subject of my poems; what I call the ‘Margate poems’. So there’s the Margate theme (poems from where I grew up, things to do with my family and people I knew there), that’s really important to me. Linked with this are poems to do with violence. I began to see a through-line when I was putting my first full collection together The Girl with the Cactus Handshake and I put some of the darkest poems at the end of the book. Now I’m working towards a second full collection, I think these darker, more violent poems, will probably come at the front! So that’s a definite theme and it’s what I’m studying at Goldsmiths. I write quite a bit about women’s lives – whether my own life or the lives of women I’ve known.

SB: I’m a poet and lecturer based in London. I have published widely in UK magazines, including most recently The Frogmore Papers and The Shuffle Anthology. I teach at Goldsmiths, where my research interests include American literature, poetry and poetics, modernism, gender and queer theory. I have published essays on American poetry and poetics, and am currently working on a group biography of a network of late modernist poets based in New York. I am also involved in an artistic-academic-activist collaborative project called ‘Queer, The Space’ (www.queerthespace.org), where I am ‘queering’ my poems by re-orientating them towards found verbal objects at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in King’s Cross.

VL: I’m currently touring giving readings from my new ‘CSI Poetry’ collection, All That Lives (Red Squirrel Press), and doing Waterstone’s signings for my crime novel, The Rotting Spot, which is also now on Kindle. I have several residencies at scientific institutes and a pathology museum, learning about the science of dying and the way the brain works, dementia and so on. This has all fed into my poetry and fiction. I write plays for stage and radio as well, often about working class people from my native north east. I also create new forms of visual poetry in sci-art installations for exhibitions or site-specific commissions. I also have a new comic novel, currently with my agent. I’ve had ten books published so far.

2. Is it important that your life experience is reflected in your poetry (and why/why not?)

KN: This really sets me thinking. I suppose yes, it is, whether I like it or not. And in a lot of ways I’d far rather I was the sort of poet who didn’t write about her own life – it sounds so pretentious, as though I feel I’ve got a lot to say. But then once I left Margate, I realised that I’d had quite different experiences to a lot of people and I’m still finding that out, and that yes, it is important to me that my experiences are reflected in my work. I go through stages of trying to write about other things – and sometimes this is successful. Some of my favourite poems are nothing to do with me (but then I look at them again and realise that buried there somewhere is something that I can’t quite erase from myself). And my tutor – Stephen Knight at Goldsmiths – is encouraging me to continue to write these ‘Margate poems’. Sometimes I don’t value them as they sometimes come too easily, so I discount them and don’t think they’re any good. But Stephen’s encouraging me to keep going with them. Going back to the question, I wonder if one of the reasons I write as I do is because I do want to represent something of the lives of ordinary women, women from more ordinary backgrounds, so that someone who maybe doesn’t think they like poetry might recognise something of themselves or their own background in some of what I write. But then maybe I’m also writing for the younger me who never ‘got’ poetry?

SB: Yes – although not directly. For a long time I resisted drawing on personal life experience (childhood, family experiences, experiences of mental health, spirituality and so on) in favour of very selective ‘aesthetic’ experiences (a response to a painting, an intertext with a modernist poet, a de-personalised imaging of a landscape). This was all very well, and certainly afforded me the kind of seeming objectivity I admired in poets like Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore, but there was always some kind of falseness about my poems. It took me a long time to realise this; I received rejection after rejection and it wasn’t until I started meeting other poets that I began to find a way forward;  of particular significance was realising that these neglected experiences were a rich fund of material;  there are only so many times you can take yourself to the top of a mountain, or go round the Tate, and so on to write something ‘aesthetic’.  More surprising was realising that the uniqueness of my experiences – particularly of growing up in a family blighted by mental health problems – enabled me to cultivate a more ‘unique’ voice.  It sounds so obvious looking back now, but unlike other poets I had met who had struggled to find forms to accommodate experiences, I had always struggled to find experiences to accommodate the forms I was excited about in my head.  I never had a problem with creating images;  but those publishers who rejected me were right – ‘very nice images, but what is this about?’  I am very grateful to the editor who said that.

VL: It is important to me that it enters my work but doesn’t consume it. I write as much about surreal or imagined situations, in voices other than my own, though sometimes this too is sparked by personal experience. Witnessing my parents’ deaths in a short time sparked my search to know more about the science of dying, which has brought me rich experience of scientific knowledge, dissection classes, human specimens, and much more.

3. Is there such a thing as working class poetry and is it important?

KN: I find this really hard to answer. There’s certainly a hell of a lot of upper and middle class poetry around, stuff that I sometimes find impenetrable. But then there’s horses for courses, and one of my favourite poets, Peter Redgrove, came from a reasonably well to do background and I love his work.

SB: I have no idea.  But I do know that most poets I meet are middle class, and that is depressing. I have lost count of the number of readings I have been to where the audience is almost entirely white, middle-class, middle-aged, red wine drinking, polite and well-behaved.   I don’t feel part of that at all, and I’m not sure how working-classness can be taken critically and creatively in the settings that seem to be available. I remember one reading where a well-knownish poet read a poem about a working-class couple in the North east.  In the magazine that the reading was launching, I had read this poem eagerly – it seemed so well-observed, and funny too.  And then this guy read it and it was clear from his accent and demeanour that he was totally and utterly taking the piss out of people who don’t have much and try act as if they are sophisticated.  It was awful. Everyone had a good laugh to that, except me. That made me want to write more about my own experiences, and give voice to the same people this guy was dismissing as stupid and uneducated. My mother might be uneducated, but she’s as sharp as a razor – a cook for many years, her response to getting an NVQ worker in the kitchen was that it stood for ‘Not Very Quick’. Which was mean, for sure, but also a clever use of language which just trilled off her tongue.

VL: The term as such doesn’t really have resonance for me, though my background is very much working class and poor. There are working class poets, and poets of all classes write about working class themes. As an analogy, I’m disabled, but what is ‘disabled British poetry’? Poetry by disabled poets, but does it have to be about disability? These terms can be straitjackets for writers who should be free to write about their culture, or condition, but also free to write about totally different subjects.

4. Is it politically important to you that working class themes are present in your poetry?

KN: This is a really difficult one too. It’s hard to say what ‘working class themes’ might be. There’d be different themes I think depending on your gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality etc. And especially where you grew up, that might be the most important of the lot. But I do think class is really important and I’m proud of my background and I suppose what I’ve achieved. (I was told at school that I’d be lucky to get a job on a checkout at Tesco – how insulting is that for checkout workers?) And yes, politics are really important to me, so I suppose quite a bit of that comes through in my poetry (though I come from a very Conservative background, my step-father was incredibly right-wing, a lot of people were where I come from). I think my interest in violence and my interest in women’s rights comes from some of the life experiences I’ve had, and quite a few of these are linked to my gender and class. On the other hand, I think if you’ve grown up, say around pubs and drink as I have, then you’ll enjoy writing about that; whereas if you’ve grown up around polo and garden parties, then those would be natural themes for you – sometimes it’s not even something that we think about, it’s just that those themes are there. Still, I’ve always wanted my poetry to be accessible – it doesn’t have to be really simple, but understandable. And then the other day I’d written something with a reference to Borges in it and this really worried me, though I liked the poem. I mentioned this to my tutor: I wondered if I shouldn’t take the reference out as it sounded a bit too fancy to my ears. He said there was nothing wrong with learning – and it’s taken me a long time to understand that. I’d always worried that the more I studied and read the further it would take me from my roots, or ‘getting above my station’ as my Nan would put it.

SB: I’m not sure there are ‘working-class themes’ as such – but there is working-class language and idiom, and I guess some experiences that this class is more likely to have – for instance, going to Bejam’s to get the Sunday roast (not Sainsbury’s, too posh), or getting your school uniform (and your schoolbag and your trainers) off the market rather than through a department store – well, this was my experience anyhow.

 

VL: It’s socially and personally important to me. I feel a particularly strong connection with those who went before me, especially the women, whose endurance and strength enabled me to have a more choice-rich life. I feel a strong need to speak for them and celebrate them as poorer people were not given a voice in history. I wouldn’t write about working class themes if it was just that I thought I ‘should’ – I believe poetry needs an imperative and should be something that needs saying, but not from a sense of obligation or political rightness.

5. Does working class poetry have to bear witness to life or use an I-narrator?

KN: No I don’t think it does. You might come from a poorer background but write about all sorts of things from your imagination – you don’t have to have been to The Dorchester to write about it. My poetry tends to be a mixture of what you’ve termed ‘witness to life’ and pure imagination, and I’m glad about that – it allows me to continue with the day dreaming I’ve always done, imagining how my life would turn out as a young girl. I didn’t know what I wanted, but knew I didn’t want what was around me: getting married really young and having kids. I also don’t think that you need to use an I narrator, though I generally do. It’s just how it comes with me. I’ve tried disguising it – I like writing as other characters, especially as men – but the ‘I’ keeps coming through, so I’m beginning to accept this voice and to go with it.

SB: I don’t think it has to do anything but be written by a genuine working-class voice.    More working-class people should be encouraged to write, network and publish. No one encouraged me – my mum thought it was ‘silly’ – and it wasn’t until I got to university that these opportunities were ready-made. Still, though, I think my university experience and subsequent career choices make me a less credible working-class voice these days.

VL: If this means ‘poetry by working class writers’, then it’s entirely up to them what they write about, as individuals. I’ve been told by certain disabled writers that we should only write about our disability and access etc. I strongly disagree with this. I disagree with any form of ‘have to’ about subjects for writers. I don’t see any reason to inflict limitations on poets about viewpoints, and in any case an I-narrator could be in any voice invented by the writer. Of course it’s desirable that in all the body of work being produced, the voices of working class people are heard and their life experience is written about, just as in the case of ‘black poets’, ‘female poets’, and so on, but individuals may well choose to write about many other things. I use many viewpoints and voices in my work.

6. In your opinion, do poetry circuit regulars/readers/audiences assume that poetry is middle class unless proven otherwise?

KN: Yes, I’d say so. To be honest, I tend to assume the same myself unless I know the poet or have heard them read. I know there was a fashion for ‘mockney’ accents a while back but I do like hearing people’s voices, perhaps I’m as guilty as the next person for judging someone based on their class. But I can’t pretend I don’t feel a little whoop inside me when I hear another poet at a reading who has a working class accent. That sounds really judgmental doesn’t it? I know that none of us can help our background, but I’m being honest – yes, it’s good to hear working class accents at poetry readings. It’s refreshing and I do tend to perk up when I catch a certain vowel sound or way of speaking.

VL: Not really, because many spoken word and slam poets make a point of being vocally ‘working class’, and their poetry often contains rants about the ‘middle class’ (even though some of them are arguably middle class themselves), while the more famous poets tend to be thought of as middle class. There is a bit of a definition and geographical divide here – where I live, in the North East, ‘middle class’ might mean a white collar Tynesider, or one who had higher education, but the same person meeting London members of the ‘middle class’ will sometimes find themselves among people who are more like ‘upper class’ or ‘upper middle class’ in accent, education and social connections.

7. Is poetry a form of protest? A way of staking a claim? A way of disrupting the status quo?

KN: Yes – at least I hope it can be! But then it doesn’t have to be – poetry should be able to do all sorts of things and not be tied to any one idea. Still, I can’t remember who said that ‘just writing is an act of disruption’ but there’s definitely something in that for me. But constant protest and claim-staking in poetry can be pretty boring, like constantly grabbing your crotch – there’s too much ‘look at me’ about it. Let’s say that yes, some poetry is a form of protest, a form of speaking up but when people do this all the time with their work, I get bored. We’ve all got lots of different voices inside us and our imagination needs to be given full reign. I think that unless we really allow our imaginations to come to the fore in our writing then our poems are at risk of sounding like so much noise. I’d hope that some of my poems might be quieter, that they might get a message through subtly for those who are prepared to listen. And then there’s loads of poems that I write that aren’t any form of protest at all, they’re just poems that want to be written – and that’s just fine.

SB: Poetry is, and should always be, these things. It’s about saying something that’s not been said before, and making people take notice of it – whether that’s a political protest, or simply the sheer ingenuity of the verbal gesture, it should always be  something that – as Dickinson said – blows your head off.

VL: It can be all those things, and all those things are important, but it can be many other things too, a celebration, a new way of looking at the world, a narrative.

8. How can readers find out more about your work?

KN: Probably best to come to a reading or get hold of a book. I’ve got a website that I try to update pretty regularly: www.katrinanaomi.co.uk It’s got an events page for readings and workshops I’m running, and a publications page, which lists my books etc.

SB: You can find out more about my work on the following websites:

www.gold.ac.uk/ecl/staff/s-barnsley/

www.poetrypf.co.uk/sarahbarnsleypage.shtml

www.queerthespace.org

VL: My website is www.valerielaws.co.uk . My most recent books are via www.redsquirrelpress.com and my book on ageing, with input from many older people of working class backgrounds, is on www.ncl.ac.uk/iah/ageing/publications.htm You can also find references online to my infamous ‘Quantum Sheep’ project, when I wrote quantum haiku on live sheep!