1. The poems in Speculum cross continents and truly inhabit universal spaces. They also move through time – narrating voices from the past as well as present. Spatially and temporally, Speculum disrupts at every turn of the page. I found this fascinating because it forced and reminded me to read the collection as always being in dialogue with its other composites. Can you tell us more about your approach to the collection as a whole, as well as how you decided on the order of the poems?
Thank you for reading the collection so carefully. Alongside the fun and instinctive act of putting together what just felt right (laying everything out on the floor and seeing what words and images reached out to grab hold of each other) I also spent a lot of time thinking about how both the individual poems and the wider form of the collection could echo and challenge the subjects that it was attempting to engage with. They needed to both speak for themselves and talk to each other in an equal and fruitful way.
In the case of obstetric and gynaecological history, it felt important to resist chronological or medical linearity. Working towards a happy ending would have been too easy and would have felt like a formal parroting of the unstoppable trajectory of ‘scientific progress’ that I wanted the book to question. Of course, I am not against research, innovation, and medical advancement, and I am also acutely aware of my place as a beneficiary of inventions such as the Sims Speculum and my privileged position within a global healthcare system that still threatens the lives of black and indigenous mothers and their children. So much has been forgiven or forgotten in the journey towards ‘progress’ – so many lives and stories have been erased – and by collapsing time, continents and putting different histories in conversation with one another, I wanted to go some way to creating the littered archive that the first poem in the collection describes.
The other thing I noticed as I started to write about my own pregnancies and medical procedures (and as I read memoirs on the topic of pregnancy and motherhood) was the narrative pull of my subject. It seems to me that pregnancy – or rather the literature and representation of pregnancy – has a particular formal momentum. It offers you a template in its ‘idealised’ state. You have your nine/ten chapters or stages. You have a clear beginning, middle and end. You have trials and tribulations but ultimately there is the happy ending. Everything is resolved with the neat exclamation point of birth. Perhaps this is the same with any literature that attempts to capture a body in transition? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want the book to start with the early stages of pregnancy and then work steadily towards birth. I wanted things to feel a bit messy and unresolved. Life and death and loss and ‘expecting’ are never that simple, and the great thing that a poetry collection can do is disrupt that timeline and create a new form.
2. You weave historical fact and archival research alongside personal experience and reflections throughout the collection. In your end notes you mention that during your own pregnancy ‘all the gender theory and archive theory and body theory and disability theory that I’d devoured as an academic tasted different in my mouth.’ Can you elaborate on how your own experience(s) intersected with the archival research you undertook for the collection?
John Whale, who is the managing editor at Stand magazine and one of the best poets I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with, once gave me a great piece of advice, which I promptly ignored. He suggested that adding notes to the end of a poetry collection runs the risk of getting you labelled as an academic-poet, rather than just a poet. His first collection, Waterloo Teeth (Carcanet), which was a big influence on Speculum, weaves together the personal and the historical, but he lets the poems speak for themselves. I not only include a notes section, but a whole personal essay! I sometimes worry that it sounds like I was writing a thesis and not a poetry collection. I hope Speculum works on its own – as poems and images and pieces of language – and not just as a vehicle for something else!
I’ve always turned to archives and critical theory (and poems) as a way of making sense of – or perhaps hiding behind – jumbled ideas and experiences. When I get the impulse (and it’s usually an impulse rather than a conscious decision) to write about something, then the first thing I want to do is turn the other way from my own individual experience and look at something or someone else. This was true with Speculum, but I also knew that I wanted to do the research. It was vital from an ethical and historical standpoint, and it felt like a way of understanding and helping to reclaim the experiences and histories that had shaped our families.
3. I was deeply moved by ‘Polish Aubade’. Can you tell us more about Stanislawa Leszczyńska (to whom the poem is dedicated), and how you encountered her story in your research?
Thank you for picking that one out. Stanislawa Leszczyńska was a Polish midwife who, along with her family, was arrested for forging documents and providing assistance and food to Jews living in Warsaw. She and her daughter were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. Leszczyńska asked that she be allowed to continue as a midwife and was sent to work in the ‘maternity ward’, which was a filthy and disease-ridden barracks where pregnant prisoners were sent to die and babies were automatically labelled as stillborn before being taken outside and drowned. Leszczyńska refused orders to kill newborns, instead doing her best to care for each mother and child. She survived the war and went back to working as a midwife until her retirement. It was only in 1957, when she was asked to write a report on her time in the camp, that her incredible actions – and the awful realities of obstetrics within Auschwitz – began to be better known. In her report, Leszczyńska estimates that she delivered 3000 live babies during her time as a prisoner. Only 30-60 babies survived liberation. The conditions that she and other prisoner-doctors describe are impossible to comprehend. As is the fate of those thousands of children and mothers who passed through her care. But what stands out, and what made me want to write about her, are the small and profound acts of love and care that she gave to those around her, even in the midst of such horror. She and her fellow prisoner-doctors knew that they couldn’t change the fate of the children or their mothers. All they could do was love them and guide them through labour, wash and bless them, and allow mother and baby to stay together until the morning. The word midwife comes from the middle English ‘mid’ (with) and ‘wif’ (woman) and so literally means a woman who is with the woman. It seemed to me that she embodied that idea.
Before I started to focus on creative writing, I did my PhD on English poetry of the Holocaust and the Second World War. At that time, I almost exclusively studied (and therefore wrote) about male war poets and memoirists. Perhaps because of this viewpoint, I encountered very little about pregnancy and labour in the camps. At the time I stupidly didn’t even notice that gap. It was only a few years later, when I started to write about pregnancy and read more literature about pregnancy and birth (which incidentally has lots of crossovers with war writing!) that I began to look again at that period. It was then that I came across Leszczyńska’s 1957 report on her experience as a prisoner and midwife in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After reading her account, the Aubade arrived fully formed. Her translated testimony is available to read online, and I would recommend that anyone who is interested in her story go and seek it out.
4. One of the most important things that Speculum does is to never shy away from any subject matter in relation to women’s bodies, its potentialities and distresses. The poems refuse ‘erasure as a lack| of back story’ (‘Statue’). Reading through the poems, I felt a real commitment to bring forth a sense of reparation, justice and representation for the bodies you are writing about – those that have been betrayed, abused, refused, and discarded. Can you tell us more about how you dealt with this authorial responsibility, and at times, presumably some ethical questions that you encountered?
You’re right that I felt a great deal of responsibility, and I’m not sure I always got it right. In some ways there is an inevitable failure. Who am I to represent? This is one of the main reasons why I include the notes in the back of the book. I felt, given the difficult and ongoing nature of some of the topics I was speaking to, and my own background and position, that it was important not to (again) silence the women in my collection by enacting a kind of ventriloquism without self-reflection or introspection. Then there would just be more erasure. I also try to consider my own violence as a poet and put on display the ways that we’re all continually curating our own and other people’s stories. By making the archive visible in the book, and by grounding poems in research and documents that the reader can also access, I am (hopefully) being transparent about my own interventions and poetic incisions, as well as my own and my family’s relationship to these histories.
5. ‘Juice’ and ‘Hyperemesis Gravidarum’ are very sensory/gustatory poems relating to the tastes, cravings and nausea experienced by the female body. I loved the modern, urban narration that simultaneously felt desperate, concealed, resentful and angry. I feel like concealment is potentially the continuous thread which connects each poem in Speculum – not just the concealment of the unexpected child, for example, but also in regard to the concealment of feminine desire, emotion, female subjectivities, sex, grief…can you elaborate on how concealment is, contradictorily, revealed through your poems?
Gustatory is such a great word! I wanted ‘Hyperemesis Gravidarum’ to enact a grim sensory overload for the reader. Hopefully it goes some small way to showing what the condition tastes like. And that’s such an interesting observation about concealment. I think a lot of my early twenties seemed to revolve around keeping things concealed: grief, real desire and sexuality, emotional and mental turbulence – these were all things to be contained in order to not make anyone too uncomfortable. A common kind of (self) concealment, I know. And then my experiences of pregnancy have all revolved around the desperate need to keep things in – be it food and water or the pregnancy itself. And I often failed on both counts. I could not contain, and I could not conceal. But there’s an odd liberation in that. You spill over the edges of your body again and again until you are not embarrassed anymore, and you realise that the borders are not fixed and so you may as well lay everything out in the open. That idea of spilling over became a driving force behind so many poems, and I hope it’s a metaphor that resonates beyond writing on pregnancy. It’s one of the reasons that sonnets became such an important form to play with. I love how they seem to promise containment and resolution and yet the best ones often exceed the limits of their ‘cell’. The lines might have stopped but the ideas continue to nag. In that way they are fantastic to explore the messiness of grief and sex and desire and self and subjectivity and history.
I should also add that ‘Juice’ was terrifying to write. It was like nothing I’d done before, but it was also hugely cathartic. I often start readings with it, precisely because it scares me and because I hope it gives permission to readers and listeners to talk openly about abortion and grief.
6. ‘Lost Boys’ is a deeply moving poem which articulates Hylda Baker’s ectopic pregnancies in first person. The final verse opens with the lines, ‘And I lost a child once, and then I lost another’ before ending with ‘Once is a mistake | Twice is careless | By the end of it you could hear a pin drop in my heart.’ This poem made me think deeply about how notions of maternal failure and personal culpability are potentially overlooked or misunderstood factors in cases where biological mishaps occur and the terrible psychic damage and distrust of the body that this must cause…
I’m so glad you liked this poem. It’s one that I’m particularly attached too, partly because of what you describe.
I wanted to write this poem about (or to) Hylda Baker partly because she is so fabulous and sad. I can imagine some awful sitcom set in the Brinsworth Home for Retired Performers – I bet they put on an excellent Christmas Panto. And yet her many losses – of her memory, her health, her money, her lovers, and of course her two pregnancies – tell a story so far from the bawdy comedy that she is usually associated with. You mention that I chose to do the poem in the first person, much like Haworth 1855 and Pup. I love dramatic monologues and the way they can reach through time and space, particularly when you have some common ground to stand together on. I hope they are always respectful and ‘true’ to their subject. So much of the time they allow me into a topic that I don’t yet have the ability or strength to face head on. Through Hylda Baker I wanted to address this notion of physical, mental and maternal loss as a kind of carelessness. The rhetoric of productivity and failure when it comes to the body is something that fascinates and appals me, and I hope that it’s a theme that pervades in different ways throughout the collection. In some ways it is a companion piece to ‘Games’ and ‘Denim’, but I had to write it first before I could use the ‘I’ in a different way. I remember being startled by the rhetoric of blame and responsibility that seemed to surround me when I lost two pregnancies in quick succession. Everyone seemed so desperate to find a cause, and often they looked to my body and my actions for answers. Hormone production had a moral and cultural dimension, and I had failed in both respects. There is a fantastic poem by the American poet Dorothea Lasky that speaks to this culpability. In ‘The Miscarriage’ she repeatedly includes the directive to ‘Work Harder!’, and in doing so identifies how maternal health is bound up in Capitalist notions of (re)productivity. Sandeep Parmer also writes beautifully about this subject in her Poetry Review essay ‘An Uncommon Language’, where she describes the poetry of miscarriage as the ‘minor note in the canon of women’s writing’. It’s a topic that I don’t feel I’ve fully ‘finished with’ or resolved even now, perhaps because it’s something that carries on and exceeds the publication date of the collection. But I wonder whether I need to think about my own failed (re)production in prose… But how do you approach returning to a topic that you’ve supposedly already ‘finished’?
7. The word ‘speculum’ traces its etymology from the Latin ‘specere’ (to look), reminding me of the construction of the female body as ‘public’ and the male as ‘private’. In Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado writes that, ‘The West has designed a tube with two orifices: a mouth that emits public signs and an impenetrable anus around which it winds a male, heterosexual subjectivity, which acquires the status of a socially privileged body.’ The vagina, he argues, is constructed as a ‘public orifice’, due to its function as ‘a reproductive receptacle’. The tension between the public and private female body is on display in Speculum, particularly in the poems that discuss and evidence the practices of James Marion Sims – the ‘so-called’ ‘Father of Modern Gynaecology’. Can you elaborate on this suite of poems?
This is such a fantastic quote. Here’s where I admit that I haven’t yet read Testo Junkie. Clearly I need to. Preciado’s tube reminds me a little of Susan Bordo’s discussion of bodily subjectivity in Unbearable Weight. She writes of how our subjectivity can be stripped from us in ‘states of emergency’. The body is no longer a privileged (or private) territory. In the case of pregnancy, overnight the body changes from ‘hallowed ground’ to a mere ‘fetal container’; a public box in which to grow the ‘super subject’ of the fetus. And of course, this shift is even more pronounced when it intersects with existing racial, social, cultural and economic inequalities. Unbearable Weight was published in the early nineties, so there are parts of it that feel dated, but its chapter on pregnancy feels horribly relevant given the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The suite of poems that you describe – those relating to Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the other unnamed enslaved women at the hospital and the experiments that would lead to the invention of the Sims Speculum and the treatment for fistula – are a small attempt to look at this particular moment in medical history through the lens of their lives and subjectivity rather than through the instrument that they helped create. Even before they became pregnant, they had already had their agency and subjectivity denied to them because of their status as enslaved women, and James Marion Sims continued and exacerbated that denial in his medical work. He went on to be hailed as the father of gynaecology, and indeed his inventions have helped millions. However, it is only relatively recently that the women who he effectively bought (or rather borrowed) and spent years experimenting on have been more widely acknowledged. There is now a huge monument to them in Montgomery, USA, created by the artist Michelle Browder. It’s less than a mile from the statue of James Marion Sims and is called ‘The Mothers of Gynaecology’. I would also recommend everyone go and read Deirdre Cooper Owens’s fantastic book ‘Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynaecology’.
8. Where there any particular poets from whom you drew inspiration whilst writing Speculum?
So many! The collection took shape over many years of reading and listening so it’s hard to pin down all the poems and poets that sparked something, but there are a few that stand out.
Two contemporary poets who write incredibly well about and within history are John Whale and Jeffrey Wainwright. John in particular has been hugely important as a mentor too. His first book, Waterloo Teeth, is a masterclass in embodying different stories with care and feeling. But both do extraordinary things with historical subjects. And in their writing you can see the influence of Geoffrey Hill, who is one of my all-time favourite writers, and also to a lesser extent Tony Harrison, another great. Jon Glover is another vital influence on the book, both as a poet and as a mentor. In fact, I wouldn’t be writing poetry at all if it wasn’t for John and Jon.
Rebecca Goss’s ‘Her Birth’ (Carcanet) has been hugely important as a source of inspiration. I was an MA student when I first saw Rebecca read from her brilliant second collection and it took my breath away. At that time, I was just starting to think seriously about writing, but most of my immediate influences were (white) men. It was the first contemporary collection I read that gave me permission to write deeply personal, intimate poems about the body, motherhood and grief. I often return to it. Likewise, there are poems and collections from Deryn Rees-Jones, Shivanee Ramlochan, Tiphanie Yanique, Liz Berry, Helen Mort, Hannah Sullivan, Vahni Anthony Ezekial Capildeo, Alice Oswald and Alice Notley and Anne Carson that I return to again and again and which shaped how I approached ‘Speculum’ in terms of its style, voice and language.
In terms of writers doing amazing things with archives, the biggest influences for Speculum were Jay Bernard and Kimberley Campanello. Surge is a masterpiece, and I love the way Bernard considers their own position within the archive. Campanello’s MotherBabyHome came out when I was in the middle of yet another redraft of the manuscript and it led me to think in new ways about form, and how the poem exists as another piece of historical documentation. Roy McFarlane’s The Healing Next Time (Nine Arches Press) is another collection that uses poetic form and the page itself as a vehicle for witness and activism. His sonnets about deaths in custody are so important. I also love David Dabydeen’s Turner (Peepal Tree Press) for the way it engages with art and history and creates as it rewrites.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of my favourite poets (although everyone I’ve mentioned also features on that list) and there are also some brilliant collections that I’ve read after finishing Speculum that I know would have inspired it. Holly Pester’s long poem ‘Comic Timing’, for instance, is fantastic. Three collections that I’ve recently enjoyed are Anita Pati’s Hiding to Nothing (Pavilion Poetry), Caitlin Stobie’s Thin Slices (Verve) and Joanna Ingham’s Ovarium (Emma Press). All think about the body, abortion, fertility, pregnancy and pregnancy loss and use their poems to consider how poetic form can echo and speak to these issues.
9. What’s next for you, Hannah, poetry/literature-wise?
Next is something quite different – a book-length poetic sequence about birds, fathers and daughters, extinction, migration, love, etymology, and personal and ecological grief! I began it years ago, and thought it was finished when some of the poems were published as a long sequence. But even before Speculum had come out, more and more lines had started to creep into my phone notes. Poems kept adding themselves to the sequence and the weird voice of the poem kept intruding when I was trying to write other things.
1. The poems in Speculum cross continents and truly inhabit universal spaces. They also move through time – narrating voices from the past as well as present. Spatially and temporally, Speculum disrupts at every turn of the page. I found this fascinating because it forced and reminded me to read the collection as always being in dialogue with its other composites. Can you tell us more about your approach to the collection as a whole, as well as how you decided on the order of the poems?
Thank you for reading the collection so carefully. Alongside the fun and instinctive act of putting together what just felt right (laying everything out on the floor and seeing what words and images reached out to grab hold of each other) I also spent a lot of time thinking about how both the individual poems and the wider form of the collection could echo and challenge the subjects that it was attempting to engage with. They needed to both speak for themselves and talk to each other in an equal and fruitful way.
In the case of obstetric and gynaecological history, it felt important to resist chronological or medical linearity. Working towards a happy ending would have been too easy and would have felt like a formal parroting of the unstoppable trajectory of ‘scientific progress’ that I wanted the book to question. Of course, I am not against research, innovation, and medical advancement, and I am also acutely aware of my place as a beneficiary of inventions such as the Sims Speculum and my privileged position within a global healthcare system that still threatens the lives of black and indigenous mothers and their children. So much has been forgiven or forgotten in the journey towards ‘progress’ – so many lives and stories have been erased – and by collapsing time, continents and putting different histories in conversation with one another, I wanted to go some way to creating the littered archive that the first poem in the collection describes.
The other thing I noticed as I started to write about my own pregnancies and medical procedures (and as I read memoirs on the topic of pregnancy and motherhood) was the narrative pull of my subject. It seems to me that pregnancy – or rather the literature and representation of pregnancy – has a particular formal momentum. It offers you a template in its ‘idealised’ state. You have your nine/ten chapters or stages. You have a clear beginning, middle and end. You have trials and tribulations but ultimately there is the happy ending. Everything is resolved with the neat exclamation point of birth. Perhaps this is the same with any literature that attempts to capture a body in transition? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want the book to start with the early stages of pregnancy and then work steadily towards birth. I wanted things to feel a bit messy and unresolved. Life and death and loss and ‘expecting’ are never that simple, and the great thing that a poetry collection can do is disrupt that timeline and create a new form.
2. You weave historical fact and archival research alongside personal experience and reflections throughout the collection. In your end notes you mention that during your own pregnancy ‘all the gender theory and archive theory and body theory and disability theory that I’d devoured as an academic tasted different in my mouth.’ Can you elaborate on how your own experience(s) intersected with the archival research you undertook for the collection?
John Whale, who is the managing editor at Stand magazine and one of the best poets I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with, once gave me a great piece of advice, which I promptly ignored. He suggested that adding notes to the end of a poetry collection runs the risk of getting you labelled as an academic-poet, rather than just a poet. His first collection, Waterloo Teeth (Carcanet), which was a big influence on Speculum, weaves together the personal and the historical, but he lets the poems speak for themselves. I not only include a notes section, but a whole personal essay! I sometimes worry that it sounds like I was writing a thesis and not a poetry collection. I hope Speculum works on its own – as poems and images and pieces of language – and not just as a vehicle for something else!
I’ve always turned to archives and critical theory (and poems) as a way of making sense of – or perhaps hiding behind – jumbled ideas and experiences. When I get the impulse (and it’s usually an impulse rather than a conscious decision) to write about something, then the first thing I want to do is turn the other way from my own individual experience and look at something or someone else. This was true with Speculum, but I also knew that I wanted to do the research. It was vital from an ethical and historical standpoint, and it felt like a way of understanding and helping to reclaim the experiences and histories that had shaped our families.
3. I was deeply moved by ‘Polish Aubade’. Can you tell us more about Stanislawa Leszczyńska (to whom the poem is dedicated), and how you encountered her story in your research?
Thank you for picking that one out. Stanislawa Leszczyńska was a Polish midwife who, along with her family, was arrested for forging documents and providing assistance and food to Jews living in Warsaw. She and her daughter were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. Leszczyńska asked that she be allowed to continue as a midwife and was sent to work in the ‘maternity ward’, which was a filthy and disease-ridden barracks where pregnant prisoners were sent to die and babies were automatically labelled as stillborn before being taken outside and drowned. Leszczyńska refused orders to kill newborns, instead doing her best to care for each mother and child. and allow survived the war and went back to working as a midwife until her retirement. It was only in 1957, when she was asked to write a report on her time in the camp, that her incredible actions – and the awful realities of obstetrics within Auschwitz – began to be better known. In her report, Leszczyńska estimates that she delivered 3000 live babies during her time as a prisoner. Only 30-60 babies survived liberation. The conditions that she and other prisoner-doctors describe are impossible to comprehend. As is the fate of those thousands of children and mothers who passed through her care. But what stands out, and what made me want to write about her, are the small and profound acts of love and care that she gave to those around her, even in the midst of such horror. She and her fellow prisoner-doctors knew that they couldn’t change the fate of the children or their mothers. All they could do was love them and guide them through labour, wash and bless them, and allow mother and baby to stay together until the morning. The word midwife comes from the middle English ‘mid’ (with) and ‘wif’ (woman) and so literally means a woman who is with the woman. It seemed to me that she embodied that idea.
Before I started to focus on creative writing, I did my PhD on English poetry of the Holocaust and the Second World War. At that time, I almost exclusively studied (and therefore wrote) about male war poets and memoirists. Perhaps because of this viewpoint, I encountered very little about pregnancy and labour in the camps. At the time I stupidly didn’t even notice that gap. It was only a few years later, when I started to write about pregnancy and read more literature about pregnancy and birth (which incidentally has lots of crossovers with war writing!) that I began to look again at that period. It was then that I came across Leszczyńska’s 1957 report on her experience as a prisoner and midwife in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After reading her account, the Aubade arrived fully formed. Her translated testimony is available to read online, and I would recommend that anyone who is interested in her story go and seek it out.
4. One of the most important things that Speculum does is to never shy away from any subject matter in relation to women’s bodies, its potentialities and distresses. The poems refuse ‘erasure as a lack| of back story’ (‘Statue’). Reading through the poems, I felt a real commitment to bring forth a sense of reparation, justice and representation for the bodies you are writing about – those that have been betrayed, abused, refused, and discarded. Can you tell us more about how you dealt with this authorial responsibility, and at times, presumably some ethical questions that you encountered?
You’re right that I felt a great deal of responsibility, and I’m not sure I always got it right. In some ways there is an inevitable failure. Who am I to represent? This is one of the main reasons why I include the notes in the back of the book. I felt, given the difficult and ongoing nature of some of the topics I was speaking to, and my own background and position, that it was important not to (again) silence the women in my collection by enacting a kind of ventriloquism without self-reflection or introspection. Then there would just be more erasure. I also try to consider my own violence as a poet and put on display the ways that we’re all continually curating our own and other people’s stories. By making the archive visible in the book, and by grounding poems in research and documents that the reader can also access, I am (hopefully) being transparent about my own interventions and poetic incisions, as well as my own and my family’s relationship to these histories.
5. ‘Juice’ and ‘Hyperemesis Gravidarum’ are very sensory/gustatory poems relating to the tastes, cravings and nausea experienced by the female body. I loved the modern, urban narration that simultaneously felt desperate, concealed, resentful and angry. I feel like concealment is potentially the continuous thread which connects each poem in Speculum – not just the concealment of the unexpected child, for example, but also in regard to the concealment of feminine desire, emotion, female subjectivities, sex, grief…can you elaborate on how concealment is, contradictorily, revealed through your poems?
Gustatory is such a great word! I wanted ‘Hyperemesis Gravidarum’ to enact a grim sensory overload for the reader. Hopefully it goes some small way to showing what the condition tastes like. And that’s such an interesting observation about concealment. I think a lot of my early twenties seemed to revolve around keeping things concealed: grief, real desire and sexuality, emotional and mental turbulence – these were all things to be contained in order to not make anyone too uncomfortable. A common kind of (self) concealment, I know. And then my experiences of pregnancy have all revolved around the desperate need to keep things in – be it food and water or the pregnancy itself. And I often failed on both counts. I could not contain, and I could not conceal. But there’s an odd liberation in that. You spill over the edges of your body again and again until you are not embarrassed anymore, and you realise that the borders are not fixed and so you may as well lay everything out in the open. That idea of spilling over became a driving force behind so many poems, and I hope it’s a metaphor that resonates beyond writing on pregnancy. It’s one of the reasons that sonnets became such an important form to play with. I love how they seem to promise containment and resolution and yet the best ones often exceed the limits of their ‘cell’. The lines might have stopped but the ideas continue to nag. In that way they are fantastic to explore the messiness of grief and sex and desire and self and subjectivity and history.
I should also add that ‘Juice’ was terrifying to write. It was like nothing I’d done before, but it was also hugely cathartic. I often start readings with it, precisely because it scares me and because I hope it gives permission to readers and listeners to talk openly about abortion and grief.
6. ‘Lost Boys’ is a deeply moving poem which articulates Hylda Baker’s ectopic pregnancies in first person. The final verse opens with the lines, ‘And I lost a child once, and then I lost another’ before ending with ‘Once is a mistake | Twice is careless | By the end of it you could hear a pin drop in my heart.’ This poem made me think deeply about how notions of maternal failure and personal culpability are potentially overlooked or misunderstood factors in cases where biological mishaps occur and the terrible psychic damage and distrust of the body that this must cause…
I’m so glad you liked this poem. It’s one that I’m particularly attached too, partly because of what you describe.
I wanted to write this poem about (or to) Hylda Baker partly because she is so fabulous and sad. I can imagine some awful sitcom set in the Brinsworth Home for Retired Performers – I bet they put on an excellent Christmas Panto. And yet her many losses – of her memory, her health, her money, her lovers, and of course her two pregnancies – tell a story so far from the bawdy comedy that she is usually associated with. You mention that I chose to do the poem in the first person, much like Haworth 1855 and Pup. I love dramatic monologues and the way they can reach through time and space, particularly when you have some common ground to stand together on. I hope they are always respectful and ‘true’ to their subject. So much of the time they allow me into a topic that I don’t yet have the ability or strength to face head on. Through Hylda Baker I wanted to address this notion of physical, mental and maternal loss as a kind of carelessness. The rhetoric of productivity and failure when it comes to the body is something that fascinates and appals me, and I hope that it’s a theme that pervades in different ways throughout the collection. In some ways it is a companion piece to ‘Games’ and ‘Denim’, but I had to write it first before I could use the ‘I’ in a different way. I remember being startled by the rhetoric of blame and responsibility that seemed to surround me when I lost two pregnancies in quick succession. Everyone seemed so desperate to find a cause, and often they looked to my body and my actions for answers. Hormone production had a moral and cultural dimension, and I had failed in both respects. There is a fantastic poem by the American poet Dorothea Lasky that speaks to this culpability. In ‘The Miscarriage’ she repeatedly includes the directive to ‘Work Harder!’, and in doing so identifies how maternal health is bound up in Capitalist notions of (re)productivity. Sandeep Parmer also writes beautifully about this subject in her Poetry Review essay ‘An Uncommon Language’, where she describes the poetry of miscarriage as the ‘minor note in the canon of women’s writing’. It’s a topic that I don’t feel I’ve fully ‘finished with’ or resolved even now, perhaps because it’s something that carries on and exceeds the publication date of the collection. But I wonder whether I need to think about my own failed (re)production in prose… But how do you approach returning to a topic that you’ve supposedly already ‘finished’?
7. The word ‘speculum’ traces its etymology from the Latin ‘specere’ (to look), reminding me of the construction of the female body as ‘public’ and the male as ‘private’. In Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado writes that, ‘The West has designed a tube with two orifices: a mouth that emits public signs and an impenetrable anus around which it winds a male, heterosexual subjectivity, which acquires the status of a socially privileged body.’ The vagina, he argues, is constructed as a ‘public orifice’, due to its function as ‘a reproductive receptacle’. The tension between the public and private female body is on display in Speculum, particularly in the poems that discuss and evidence the practices of James Marion Sims – the ‘so-called’ ‘Father of Modern Gynaecology’. Can you elaborate on this suite of poems?
This is such a fantastic quote. Here’s where I admit that I haven’t yet read Testo Junkie. Clearly I need to. Preciado’s tube reminds me a little of Susan Bordo’s discussion of bodily subjectivity in Unbearable Weight. She writes of how our subjectivity can be stripped from us in ‘states of emergency’. The body is no longer a privileged (or private) territory. In the case of pregnancy, overnight the body changes from ‘hallowed ground’ to a mere ‘fetal container’; a public box in which to grow the ‘super subject’ of the fetus. And of course, this shift is even more pronounced when it intersects with existing racial, social, cultural and economic inequalities. Unbearable Weight was published in the early nineties, so there are parts of it that feel dated, but its chapter on pregnancy feels horribly relevant given the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The suite of poems that you describe – those relating to Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the other unnamed enslaved women at the hospital and the experiments that would lead to the invention of the Sims Speculum and the treatment for fistula – are a small attempt to look at this particular moment in medical history through the lens of their lives and subjectivity rather than through the instrument that they helped create. Even before they became pregnant, they had already had their agency and subjectivity denied to them because of their status as enslaved women, and James Marion Sims continued and exacerbated that denial in his medical work. He went on to be hailed as the father of gynaecology, and indeed his inventions have helped millions. However, it is only relatively recently that the women who he effectively bought (or rather borrowed) and spent years experimenting on have been more widely acknowledged. There is now a huge monument to them in Montgomery, USA, created by the artist Michelle Browder. It’s less than a mile from the statue of James Marion Sims and is called ‘The Mothers of Gynaecology’. I would also recommend everyone go and read Deirdre Cooper Owens’s fantastic book ‘Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynaecology’.
8. Where there any particular poets from whom you drew inspiration whilst writing Speculum?
So many! The collection took shape over many years of reading and listening so it’s hard to pin down all the poems and poets that sparked something, but there are a few that stand out.
Two contemporary poets who write incredibly well about and within history are John Whale and Jeffrey Wainwright. John in particular has been hugely important as a mentor too. His first book, Waterloo Teeth, is a masterclass in embodying different stories with care and feeling. But both do extraordinary things with historical subjects. And in their writing you can see the influence of Geoffrey Hill, who is one of my all-time favourite writers, and also to a lesser extent Tony Harrison, another great. Jon Glover is another vital influence on the book, both as a poet and as a mentor. In fact, I wouldn’t be writing poetry at all if it wasn’t for John and Jon.
Rebecca Goss’s ‘Her Birth’ (Carcanet) has been hugely important as a source of inspiration. I was an MA student when I first saw Rebecca read from her brilliant second collection and it took my breath away. At that time, I was just starting to think seriously about writing, but most of my immediate influences were (white) men. It was the first contemporary collection I read that gave me permission to write deeply personal, intimate poems about the body, motherhood and grief. I often return to it. Likewise, there are poems and collections from Deryn Rees-Jones, Shivanee Ramlochan, Tiphanie Yanique, Liz Berry, Helen Mort, Hannah Sullivan, Vahni Anthony Ezekial Capildeo, Alice Oswald and Alice Notley and Anne Carson that I return to again and again and which shaped how I approached ‘Speculum’ in terms of its style, voice and language.
In terms of writers doing amazing things with archives, the biggest influences for Speculum were Jay Bernard and Kimberley Campanello. Surge is a masterpiece, and I love the way Bernard considers their own position within the archive. Campanello’s MotherBabyHome came out when I was in the middle of yet another redraft of the manuscript and it led me to think in new ways about form, and how the poem exists as another piece of historical documentation. Roy McFarlane’s The Healing Next Time (Nine Arches Press) is another collection that uses poetic form and the page itself as a vehicle for witness and activism. His sonnets about deaths in custody are so important. I also love David Dabydeen’s Turner (Peepal Tree Press) for the way it engages with art and history and creates as it rewrites.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of my favourite poets (although everyone I’ve mentioned also features on that list) and there are also some brilliant collections that I’ve read after finishing Speculum that I know would have inspired it. Holly Pester’s long poem ‘Comic Timing’, for instance, is fantastic. Three collections that I’ve recently enjoyed are Anita Pati’s Hiding to Nothing (Pavilion Poetry), Caitlin Stobie’s Thin Slices (Verve) and Joanna Ingham’s Ovarium (Emma Press). All think about the body, abortion, fertility, pregnancy and pregnancy loss and use their poems to consider how poetic form can echo and speak to these issues.
9. What’s next for you, Hannah, poetry/literature-wise?
Next is something quite different – a book-length poetic sequence about birds, fathers and daughters, extinction, migration, love, etymology, and personal and ecological grief! I began it years ago, and thought it was finished when some of the poems were published as a long sequence. But even before Speculum had come out, more and more lines had started to creep into my phone notes. Poems kept adding themselves to the sequence and the weird voice of the poem kept intruding when I was trying to write other things.