JLP: Returning to the transmutational questions, the idea for me which is shared by others, but for a cache of different reasons, is how writing poetry and reading poetry are acts that impact the self/ves, that create change in thought / idea / perception, and that poetry itself has a power to challenge, defy and dissent because it is usually so essentialised. It has technologies too which are magical, to disrupt and undermine inherited forms, grammar, syntax, poems as pictures also that can abstract and mine the form of a page, a recording, an animation . . . the possibilities are beyond end. Why do you think we want to do this, and related to this, how do you think working with content-matter such as adolescent assault, familial abuse-induced PTSD/suicide is empowered by the always unsettled potential of poetic form? Slippage that can still crystallise and articulate.

MB: This is such a detailed and important set of considerations, yes. I think it’s exactly as you say, to me it’s always the unsettled potential of poetic form that allows for that empowerment. It’s important for me to note this is an opinion; I have a deep capacity to sit closely beside listening very attentively and – in pragmatic ways – bear witness. But I haven’t had lived experiences in the realms of content matter like familial abuse, adolescent assault and the ensuing, and the no-doubt myriad traumas unfolding from these. Having said that, the bearing witness and acts of care and closeness we can perform as humans is paramount . . . it’s what keeps us human. So, this phrase you use above, that poetry has the power to “challenge, defy and dissent” is something I see as part of a chorus. I see feminist poetry as a very multi-layered, multivalent, multi-voiced sphere of poetic practice.

And that this is constructed of poetic acts that are a combination of personal accounts – deep, imbued with the strongest disruptive energies – and acts of witness. The holding-to-account comes from the combined strength. But then, as you rightly describe, the magical technologies are at work to bring this strength. I would love to know more about how you work with this; disrupting and undermining inherited forms is something I attempt. Would you say this is in mind for you, as you write?

JLP: I have been thinking about creating a new workshop on ‘How to write a new poem’. I am half-serious about this. But it seems to me that each time I am starting a new piece or perhaps going back to overwrite something already written, I am embedded already in a dedicated fate, how to disrupt, how to do that in form, words, an unexpected, ‘fuck-off,’ but measured (so not histrionic!!!), no, better to say it this way, deliberate and deliberated voice or usually more for my practice, a multiple streaming of voices.

Going back to Cixous, following the “spirits of writing”, what does a poem want to be, listen to it interrupt as you write and of course, edit, finalise. Then in terms of an actual full book the same two-way co-creating also occurs for me, again: book, what do you want to happen here?

these memories require is a very specifically oriented, and ordered collection, following ideas scholarly and metaphysical of ‘haunting’; books haunt; poems haunt; abusive and damaging experiences haunt, keep turning up in the room especially if denied/silenced/persecuted; that would be the volcanic centre of the book.

I usually read another person’s book backwards first, then when up to reaching about where the first third finishes, go to the start of the book. I like to do this because you see where the book was going (for the poet) but also because reading is also a disruptive form, you choose, so these memories require as a collection can of course be read in this way. If writing can be, depending on you, should be destabilising, so will reading it be. While starting to read backwards as a reading instinct only, some years ago, not informed by anything I had read about, I have since learned of other poets who do the same, including Ella Skilbeck-Porter, but we did this without realising the other/others did. I find this fascinating.

I am also writing new poems for my next book, rat run, a punk book. In terms of form, visual work, concrete poetry, including some works honouring Derek Jarman, whom I admire profoundly as artist, writer and person. My plan: while obviously dwelling constantly on what this book might be, also is to have no idea about it or any poem in it until writing.

MB: It will be so interesting to see what unfolds with this next book. I love this workshop idea, ‘How to write a new poem’! Creating new work can be so layered and, of course, should have elements that you can’t or don’t know the shape or content of yet. But it doesn’t mean we know how to proceed, necessarily, when we’re partway into things?! This is why letting the poem interrupt you and entering into a process with it – rather than more prosaic ideas that you’re doing something to it (adding words! ‘re-structuring’!) – is such a productive method. I can see it working extremely well for you, because these memories require holds so much grit and electric charge.

I think that a destabilisation of the reader, as Cixous would have, is necessary in a collection like this. This is the result of knowing that the hauntings, as you say above, are always present; in response, you have carefully and deliberately made way for poetic, alchemical reckonings. To me, that is its volcanic centre, yes; that is its spine, its heart.

JLP: Oh, I realised coming to near the end of our discussion, something that is of the utmost importance to me. In the final years of writing these memories require I made a substantial choice, one that required (thus the title) hours, days and nights of ‘dwelling’ / how to do this. Not to harm anyone in its writing who I know or more accurately to say now, knew, though they harmed, betrayed me so deeply, perpetrator/s and protector/s, for I see no difference in these categories.

This forced me to ‘code’ the poems so you as reader do not know what is my experience or instead what I may have witnessed, a decision that makes the sufferings and oppositions of this book collective, not of the ‘i’. This is profoundly significant to me, because we are m/billions of voices, and I just one raft among them. Yet in this, I am not cautionary.

MB: Stylistically, the poems make use of techniques that disarm, for example, the poem ‘Catalogue’ is starkly, immensely powerful via its presentation of mostly redacted lines. In the following poem ‘untitled (pacing)’ you quote text from a scholarly source, introduced by the line “re-read, notated highlighter neon yellow . . .”. What is the relationship between these stylistic, textual choices, and working with memories?

JLP: Memory, memories are disobedient to linear narrative; they spurt, stop, trace innumerable pathways back to their source, they loiter in the air, lurk in the back corners of caverns; they are both findable and never to be remembered again if at all in many instances. So, to simplify perhaps, these intercutting textual choices and ‘approaches’ (to the poem/s) also create breakage of form (I am very interested in this) and can create the necessary sense of enigma that writing on, about, even against these memories requires. In terms of ‘Catalogue’ the shape of that poem is the shape of an actual email (by whom must remain hidden, to whom also); its shape was retained exactly as is in those lineated blocks. So as with so many others, I am also interested in the constraints of ‘found’ forms.

MB: The final poem in the book ends with the lines:

but from the moment
you began,
you have waited

This seemed to me – at first – a message of hopefulness, but on further readings it feels like coded (compassionate) instruction. Is that the poem’s intention, or something like this? This poem seems extremely important and carries more weight, perhaps, than an idea of a ‘logical’ end to a collection.

JLP: I am so with you on this. Even in writing it, it seemed so simple but in fact the poem as it finally arrived, much editing, for itself (not me) is in flux in continual ways so its meaning difficult to be settled on, or only in precariousness or folly, which is very good for a final poem, or if you read the volume backwards (see a comment far above on this), for a first poem. The first three lines are:

go backwards
with all your hours
take them, who did no wrong

And then a later line being:

be stern with the patience

So, one meaning, regrettably, but only one meaning, is that there is likely to be no justice-retrieval, the first few lines also signalling the factualness, which angered me so much creating this book and continues to anger me, that the victims of so many abuses are police-questioned, or interrogated by other horrific forces (including the corrupt facets of media), as if they are the wrong-doing.

We see this currently in the fascist propaganda around the killings in Minneapolis, but we see it in almost all situations of sexual assault and incest-assault accusations, the sufferers are turned on and hunted even to their death (Virginia Guiffre as a prime example). This is potently and universally true, “that’s how they get u’s” as I am writing in a new current, unfinished poem. But what poetry (and art) does as a deliberate INTERVENTION is to create its own retrievals, rebuttals and even, depending on who is writing and reading, palpable transmutations of trauma to partial or even full empowering in certain ways.

Also, to redress the enormous disrespect of life, time and emotion that doing this battle incurs, so how to take that back . . . can you . . . and is the ‘wood’ in that final poem a tree-limb, magical staff, a truncheon, a child’s make-believe sword, etc.? So, there is also hope even if rupturable in that these memories require’s final poem. Where hope is a defiance, protest’s seed, that matters have not yet been decided, and this is essential in such a project because as we need to often remind each other, all each other’s, it does not end.