Greta Stoddart has been a powerhouse of poetry production since her first collection At Home in the Dark (Anvil, 2001) which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second book, Salvation Jane (Anvil) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award 2008. Prior to publishing her poetry, she was co-founder of the theatre company Brouhaha where she co-wrote and performed in three shows touring the UK, Europe and Mexico.

In 2012, her poem ‘Deep Sea Diver’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Individual poem. The poem was later included in her third book, Alive Alive O (Bloodaxe, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2016. Her latest work, a radio poem ‘Who’s There?’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The poem was a BBC ‘Pick of the Week’ and shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s 2017 Ted Hughes Award.

She now lives in Devon and teaches at the Poetry School in Exeter, Axminster and Bridport. Her fourth book, Fool, will be published by Bloodaxe later this month. The Poetry Society spoke to Greta about her most recent collection, her thoughts on poetry and performance and her advice to entrants of this year’s National Poetry Competition. 

The Poetry Society: What poetry have you been reading at the moment that has caught your attention?

Greta Stoddart: I’m not reading poems at the moment. I think it’s partly having just finished a book … I want a break. So I’m dipping in and out of things – John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Plainwater by Anne Carson, Ross Gay’s Book of Delights …

I also think I want a good clean run-up to the thousands of poems I’ll be reading for the National Poetry Competition this winter. I like the idea that by then I’ll be so starved of poetry that I’ll devour them all at an astonishing rate …

TPS: You originally trained in drama at Manchester and the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. To what extent has this experience of performance affected your writing practice as a poet?

Greta: Perhaps acting and writing are simply different kinds of performance – if you feel performance to be a sort of a bodying forth. Writing is just the more internal kind. Either way it comes out of you and becomes this other ‘thing’. Either way you’re both being and not being yourself.

Sometimes I think the most significant thing I learned from Lecoq was silence. He’d talk about creating – paying attention to – ‘the silence out of which come words’. What is that silence, that space, and why and when does it need to be broken by words?

One way we’d experience this silence (or stillness which you could say is the embodied equivalent of silence) was through ‘the neutral mask’. A mask that had no expression; its job was to cover your face. And, wearing it, you’d walk on stage and have to just stand there – without moving or speaking. And without your face, your body – without you even realising it – would express itself in all sorts of ways: a quizzical tilt of the head, downcast shoulders, bunched fists… The mask was a pedagogic tool that revealed you – through all your unique physical neuroses that were symptoms of your personality. You needed to become aware of them. You needed to get back to a cleaner slate of self in order to play other selves with greater freedom. It was incredibly hard but when you achieved it you felt like you’d somehow regained the presence – even the grace – you’d lost many years ago when you became a self-conscious being.

I think of this experience as being similar to T.S. Eliot’s idea of poetry being ‘an escape from emotion … an escape from personality.’

One thing I prefer about writing to acting is that there isn’t an audience. I mean, the most important part of it happens without an audience. Or only some other part of you as some kind of empty, psychic auditorium …

TPS: Your new book Fool is coming out this month with Bloodaxe which deals with different types of knowledge and knowing. What were the inspirations and motivations behind this book?

Greta: I don’t have ideas or themes for a book when I start out. I just write what my mind seems to be drawn to at the time. But there comes a point you get a sense of what the poems might be saying – alone and to each other.

We take what we know for granted. But we don’t always realise there’s a context for – or around – what we know. So we know what we know because we’ve always known it – maybe that comes from the particular culture we happen to be born into. But also we know what we know simply because we want to know it, to believe it.  And, essentially, we can only know as much as our mental and sensory equipment is capable of letting us know. And sometimes we come to know that we don’t know very much at all.

So many of the poems were playing around this idea of knowing and not knowing – and all this before I even learned there was a word for it: epistemology. But I didn’t want to get lost down a philosophical rabbit hole so the Fool came to me as a way of guiding me through – encouraging me to proceed with a sense of play, an openness to failing, to being tripped up …

TPS: You have a lot of experience as a teacher. What’s the most important thing would you say that you have learnt about writing?

Greta: I think when Joan Didion was asked a similar question she replied: ‘Remember what it is to be me – that is always the point.’

The best poems are maybe the ones where we are most true to … I want to say to ourselves, but how thorny a thing that is … Maybe a kind of fearlessness then, knowing that only you can write what you are and what you know and how you see the world. And if you’re somehow able – instinctively, no doubt – to find a tone (style, voice – whatever you want to call it) that is somehow intrinsic to that way of seeing the world, that is it in a sense, well, then I think you’re away.

TPS: Your BBC radio piece ‘Who’s There?’, an interweave of word, sound and music, which addressed the topic of dementia was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award in 2017. What interests you most about interdisciplinary work?

Greta: I have this notion that a great teacher or mentor can impart some kind of knowledge which appears on the surface to be about the particular art form you’re working with, but as you get older you realise it’s a truth about all art. I feel this is one of the things W.S. Graham is getting at in his poem Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons, and it’s certainly what I feel about Lecoq. So I relish the opportunity of putting that into practice. To see how and when two art forms connect and also how they do their unique thing. I’ve started dancing again and am feeling ways in which poetry and dance are such natural partners. Out of the silence comes the gesture …

TPS: What advice would you give to any poets looking at a blank page?

Greta: Why would you sit down with a page if it looks blank to you? That blankness is just a reflection. It needs to be broken.

Go out – do something else. Go for a walk. Watch a film. Write only when you feel the pressure of the words build up.

Or (because I like writing poems and so think happily in paradoxes and contradictions) I’d also say this: try writing a little something every day – no matter what. Let the mind wander, follow the stray thought, the sudden line that emerges … simply putting pen to paper can do it for some. It did for Hardy.

12th of September 2022