How to Write About the Never With Kim Moore
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INTERVIEW
In the first episode of season 2, Helen interviews Cumbrian Poet Kim Moore about her collection All the Men I Never Married. Kim is a Cumbrian Poet who won an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. She was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2015 and has had numerous other prizes and listings.
Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Her first full length collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married was published by Seren in 2021 and her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me will be published by Smith/Doorstop in March 2022.
TRANSCRIPT
Helen: Hi, Kim, welcome to the show.
Kim: Hi.
Helen: Thank you so much for coming in, I’m really looking forward to talking to you about writing about the never inspired by your collection. All the Men I Never Married, which I’ve recently read and absolutely loved. And I think it’s going to be so useful for our listeners to, to kind of hear about your process on that. So just to sort of dive in, before we get to the collection itself, could you tell us a little bit about how you first came to poetry or how it found you?
Kim: Yeah, I always, I’ve always written poetry and short stories and things since I was since I was very small. But I didn’t really show anyone the poems. I used to show my mum and dad the short stories, but the poems felt very personal and private. So, I didn’t, it took me… I moved to Columbia when I was about 22. And I moved here completely on my own, I didn’t know anyone. So, out of desperation, I went for the first time to a poetry group. And that was the first time I’d showed anyone a poem. Although I’d always had kind of poetry in my life. It was like a little secret that I just did by myself. And it was really kind of coming to Cumbria and finding other poets. That’s when it really kind of took off for me, in fact, I think when I was at school, I used to think that all poets were dead. I didn’t realize that… or writers. In fact, I didn’t realize that writers actually existed and were alive. And in the world.
Helen: I know exactly what you mean. It sounds like a real finding your tribe moment for you.
Kim: Yeah, it was, and they were so kind and so supportive. And you know, I’m sure I mean, I remember the first time I took what I’d written like three years before, because I thought, well, if they say it’s rubbish, then at least I’ve written it like years ago, so it doesn’t count. You know, I was kind of worried about not being good at not being good at it. But yeah, they were just really supportive and the whole group, they were really kind and encouraging. And, yes, I think I think you need that at the beginning. Don’t you need Oh, you need it throughout your whole life in life, really, but particularly at the beginning, when you’re first starting out,
Helen: I think lots of listeners will resonate with that feeling about poetry been the secret, and certainly I hold my hands up. But I’ve done my utmost to fly under the radar as much as possible, because it is scary putting your poetry out there. I think anyone who’s written it would say that.
Kim: Yeah, and I think the other moment I had that really kind of changed everything was I went on a residential writing course. And I was teaching full time as a music teacher. And I booked myself onto this residential writing course, again, the encouragement of someone in this writing group that I was going to, they gave me a brochure and said, you should go on this, Kim. It’ll be amazing. So I took myself off there and I met this brilliant tutor called Nigel Jenkins. And he said to me, you need to think of writing in the same way you’ve approached your practice as a musician, because I was, up to that point, I was working as a semi-professional musician, as well. And he said, how many hours a day do you practice your trumpet, and I said, well, three hours every day, don’t know where I found the time now. And he said, Well, you need to read and write everyday as well. And as soon as he said that, something clicked in my head, and I thought, Oh, I don’t even have to be talented, I just have to work really hard. I can do that. That’s easy. So, that kind of opened it up again, because I thought it’s not this mysterious thing that visits you from on high, a lot of it is kind of hard work, or working at something or, you know, engaging with it every day like a daily practice, that made sense for me.
Helen: I love that the illusion was just shattered for you about the Muse visiting from on high at these special points in your life, when anyone who does writing as a sort of job like I do, or like yourself, or you know, people who are sort of been doing it for a long time, know that it’s about just turning to the notebook, or to the library as often as you can. And working on that.
Kim: Yeah, definitely. And I think, I don’t stick to the writing everyday now because I would find it impossible, but I read every day still, I try and read poetry every day, because that’s as important to me as writing. That is part of my writing practice is to read every day.
Helen: I wholeheartedly agree. And I think one of the things that I talk to students about more than ever more than anything else is the importance of doing that reading. And with that in mind, I wondered, sort of thinking about the collection that I’ve just read from you, if there was something you’d read or an activity that you did that particularly sparked this idea of writing about the men, speakers in your poems, never married. I think that’s a really such an interesting idea for a collection. So I’m just wondering if there was a moment of spark for that, or if it was just a kind of process for you.
Kim: Yeah, I think there was, there was a couple of moments, as I don’t know. With me, this is how my brain works anyway. But there was a few different things that were happening around the same time. So, I finished my first collection, and I was sinking into this kind of pit of existential crisis, that yu’re never I’m never going to write a poem again. And it’s all terrible. And which often happens to me when I finish a big project. And just as a joke to myself, I thought, I’m going to write a poem about all my terrible ex boyfriends. And, you know, maybe one of them had contacted me or something. And so I wrote this list poem, which is now the men I never married number one. And then I also went to a reading. It was a Forward Prize ceremony, I think it was at the Southbank Centre, the year, Claudia Rankin one for her book, Citizen. And in that book, she kind of looks at different moments of microaggression, around racism, class, and gender, but mainly racism, other kind of other stuff as well. And hearing her read those poems, and then she sets those against the kind of more extreme forms of racism, of course, but having read that, extracts in that book completely changed my life. Basically, it made me really, like assess my own complicity in racism, it changed the way I program events that were on workshops, it made me just much more aware of what I was doing, or not doing. And I was just kind of really excited, because I thought if poetry can do that, can have that transformative power, then can I write poems around sexism, which I’ve always kind of been interested in writing about. Can I write something that can also change the way people think about these experiences, which sounds like a very grand idea. Now I say it, but I obviously wasn’t probably articulating it in those terms at the time, I just felt really excited. And so I wanted to write about a microaggression in the same way, and then it just kind of snowballed. So I was kind of crossing over between writing poems about ex boyfriends, which felt like kind of love poems almost to the past. But then there was this crossover between when you’re writing about female desire, sexism kind of is uncovered in the room anyway. So you know, I always make this jokes. And you know, I started writing all the men, I never married poems. And I’m up to number 48. And you know, normally audiences kind of laugh or there’s like a bit of a snigger, because it’s still seen as risky for a woman to admit the potential of being with 48. So I’m kind of playing on that idea of it. But as I started kind of progressing through the book, I started to get a bit kind of, I don’t know, tired, that it was still seen as risky to say something like that, and then I also started this PhD at the same time, which was researching poetry and everyday sexism. And what happens when we write about these moments of everyday sexism, what happens when we put the whitespace of a poem around them? So… I’ve been talking for a long time.
Helen: No. It’s great, I love it. And you’re so right about this weird taboo about female desire. And I think what’s fantastic about this collection, is that you talk about the fact that some of the poems are almost love poems to the past, some of them are about perhaps, more triggering microaggressions. And what the net result of that is, when you finish the collection, is you sort of digest or certainly I did, this was my reaction to it, that it’s so complicated. Just the whole situation is so complicated, you can’t just sit there and draw up these categories about which interaction fits into which box. It’s all part of a very rich tapestry of interaction between the sexes. And I think that’s one that your book really draws out.
Kim: Oh, thank you. That’s, that’s lovely to hear. Because that’s what I was kind of, that’s what I was going for. Yeah. there’s this great quote, and I use it the beginning of the book, not by me by Katherine Angel. She says, How are we to represent in writing the fact that sexual desire lives entangled with sexual violence, how to deal in art with the powerful, destabilizing forces of both violence and desire. And I really love that this idea that we do discover, I think a lot of women do have to discover desire in a landscape of sexual violence or potential sexual violence, the potentiality is always there to be negotiated.
Helen: I absolutely agree. 100%. And I think every single headline that I’ve read recently really reinforces that idea. And you know, there’s a lot of people starting to wake up to this, I think in poetry, that it’s really rich ground to explore the relationships between these things that perhaps we wouldn’t like to put in the same bracket. Perhaps you would not like to put violence and desire in the same bracket. But where else do you explore the relationship between those two? Where we’re not we’re not going to get interrupted, crucially.
Kim: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think also, I was also trying to write about complicity as well, and how, but how do you write about complicity in these things, without victim blaming? I think that’s really complicated, as well. So as you say, like, none of these things are easy. Like, there isn’t like a book full of answers about these things.
Helen: No, but the questions are very important to be asking. And, you know, it’s not like there are no answers in your book. But the questions are almost, I would say, as important as the answers, you know, that in this case, if we’re questioning ourselves, regardless of what our gender identity might be, if we’re questioning ourselves and how we’re interacting with other people, that is the starting point of better interactions, I think.
Kim: Yeah. And I mean, sometimes I was writing about something that I didn’t understand really, why I remembered it for so long. Like, why have I remembered this tiny bit of interaction? For so many years, if it was nothing, this idea of a never, if it wasn’t a thing, if it wasn’t important? It hasn’t traumatized me, it hasn’t stopped me leaving the house or made me feel nervous about going anywhere. Why is it still kind of lodged in my brain, and often it took writing the poem, to understand why I didn’t know at the start of the poem into right until I finished, why I’d remembered it, why I was carrying it still.
Helen: And I think that’s something again, that when people read this collection, they will identify with that, that there are things that we carry around with ourselves that we don’t actually understand the meaning of them, until we’ve found a way to process it. And it might be, as you say, something that seemed, on the surface quite small to anybody else, but for some reason, it stayed with us. And the idea about never, I thought was a really intriguing one from the point of view of our writing, and where we could take things because I feel, generally speaking, I spend quite a lot of time talking to my students about going beyond just, you know, necessarily your original lived experience, like taking it a step further, moving beyond that, and I think that the never has got a lot of scope for that kind of imaginary scenario or conceit that you might see in a poem. And just having written a collection like this, what opportunities writing about the never has sort of afforded you and might afford a poet?
Kim: Yeah, I guess I don’t know if I’ve got the same concept of the never, in my mind. So. Yeah, the never for me is the like the nothingness the way we minimize these things. So using this idea of, oh, it was nothing and you don’t even bother talking to or telling somebody about it, because it was so small. And yet, it tells us a lot about kind of interactions, and who has power and who doesn’t. So, I mean, I completely agree about we have to move past our lived experience, we can’t just have a kind of vomiting of our day onto the page, because it probably won’t be interesting to anybody else. But I guess more interesting, there’s a great quote by Maggie Nelson, where she says, the more interesting question is not whether this is true or not, but what new ways does it create of thinking about whatever it is, and I love that idea of new ways of thinking. So, you know, it doesn’t have to be to me, it’s not important, whether it’s true or not, although often poems are drawn from my personal experience, but I don’t want to just write about an experience of sexism. I want to try and create some new way of thinking about power about control or about who has it who doesn’t about complicity.
Helen: So first of all, you said my favorite name Maggie Nelson. Maggie Nelson. But also, I think there’s a few things that are going on there with what you say like the nothingness or the small nature of the never that you’re that you’re kind of drawing from there is so fascinating to me, because it’s sort of that invitation to find something macro in something really micro which is a lot of the time what we’re doing in poetry is we’re looking at something, a micro incident or a micro feeling, and we’re looking at how it relates to the world. The world or the wider experience?
Kim: Yeah, and I think poetry is… Well, I’m biased, although I have started writing creative nonfiction as well. But I still think poetry is kind of the best form for writing about nothingness, right, because we have the white space to put around these things. So I can take a moment. And the other thing that happened as well, when I was writing is I would take these moments that I was calling everyday sexism. And I wrote them in a poem, and I was like, that is an everyday sexism, that’s an assault. And so it was like the framing of the experience, whether I’d framed it that way as a coping mechanism, to minimize it, or what, but as soon as I put that kind of whitespace, of a poem around, it elevates it from being nothing to suddenly being something. And so I think that’s the kind of form of poetry lends itself to that maybe in a way or the other forms, don’t.
Helen: I completely agree. And I think given your experience, or shall I say, your rendering of that experience, and the status it deserves, and as I say, uninterrupted, I often think of the whitespace around a poem as, as like a stage or a platform where you’re placing this work almost on a pedestal is a bit of a strong word, but you’re placing it somewhere prominent, and you’re giving it the status it deserves. And I think there’s also a difference between fact and truth. So perhaps not all of the poems that we write a completely 100% factual, but, for example, your book is absolutely packed full of truths. Whether or not they’re based on fact, is a different matter. So I think that’s something else and I think creative nonfiction that you see, right, that as well, is very concerned with that as well, looking at the small micro and linking it with the big lived experience of other people, the macro. Yeah, I think there’s a link there, but I know what you’re saying about the white space with poetry. And that kind of framing of it.
Kim: Yeah, there’s an academic called Jonathan Culler, whose calls it the lyric convention of significance. I love… I hated academic writing. When I first started doing my PhD, I felt really like locked out of it, because my background is very working class. And I just felt like I didn’t understand it. And then I find, you know, when I found academic writers like Jonathan Culler, Sara Ahmed, and Catherine Angel, who write so beautifully and poetically, and I realized it can be a song as well, like academic writing can be really poetical. And I love that phrase and lyrics convention of significance. So this idea that when we put something into poetry, or put it into the form of a poem, we enter this agreement with a reader that is significant. So that’s why we can get poems like William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow. I’m going to misquote it now, you know, the…
Helen: So much depends upon… Yes. It’s so it’s such a useful poem to pull out, isn’t it? Because it just it’s so small, and yet it says so much?
Kim: Yeah. And he kind of, uh, you know, his use of whitespace suddenly elevates that moment into an epiphany. But if you type it out as prose, it’s, it feels really trite. And… I probably shouldn’t say that.
Helen: I think you’re allowed an opinion, personally, I know exactly what you mean. And it’s all to do, obviously, with the form that we’re working with. So I mean, that’s such a fascinating exploration of that. Thank you so much. I’m just wondering, so we tend to offer our listeners a prompt every month that we do the podcast. So I was wondering if thinking about the never maybe something that you used on one of the poems in your book, but perhaps you could offer our listeners a prompt to do with the never that they could try it at home, something fairly straightforward.
Kim: Yeah, so I guess going back to this idea of writing about a moment that you don’t know why you remember it. So exploring that idea. Virginia Woolf called these moments, moments of being which I think is quite nice that they’re they’re kind of moments that are essential to our sense of self, but we don’t exactly understand why. You’re going to have to write the poem or the piece of writing to find that and then there’s another writer called David James Duncan, who calls them river teeth. These are autobiographical images river teeth so the, this idea of knots of dense wood that remain in a river years after a tree disintegrates. He says the metaphor for how memory we keep these memories, so it could be just you know, like an exchange of looks over a dinner table with someone and you don’t know why you remember the way they looked at you or… I’m struggling for an example now, but the one in my book is being on a on a fairground ride as a as a teenager, and something happening on the fairground ride that seemed seemingly innocuous, but I kind of remembered it forever. So not forever, you know, I’ve remembered it for…
Helen: Some time… and I remember the poem vividly that you’re talking about.
Kim: Yeah, still be banging on about it when I’m eighty. So the exercise is to write one of those moments and just see where it see where it takes you and see if you can discover why you’ve remembered it. So, it could be a kind of something that’s a happy image. And I guess it would start with the image as well, like, you will have like a picture in your mind at this moment. And it will just be a moment. And then how do you open out from that, and work out why it is you’re carrying it with you.
Helen: Wonderful, what a great prompt and I’ll definitely be trying that one myself. So, thank you for that. And to finish, I’d really love it if you would, if you can pick one, if you would be willing to read us a poem from your collection, so people can get a taste of the book, I have no doubt they will rush to buy once they’ve listened to you talk about it today.
Kim: Oh, thank you. Well, if I do that poem that I’ve just mentioned with, so that’s All the Men I Never Married Number Seven. And I guess with this poem, as well, I was also playing around with this idea of address, like, who are we talking to? Bringing in Jonathan Culler, he talks about how a lot of lyric poetry doesn’t directly address the reader we address often we’re talking to like, God, or an object or an unseen other a muse figure. And he says, there’s very few lyric poems that address the reader directly. And I thought that I’m going to have a go at that. Because I’ve got another poem that addresses the reader directly in the middle of the poem, and I got heckled, and I came to the conclusion, we don’t address the reader directly, because we don’t actually want the reader or the audience to talk back to us. That was my conclusion. But anyway, so this is All the Men I Never Married Number Seven.
Imagine you’re me, you’re fifteen, the summer of ’95,
and you’re following your sister onto the log flume,
where you’ll sit between the legs of a stranger.
At the bottom of the drop when you’ve screamed
and been splashed by the water, when you’re about
to stand up, clamber out, the man behind
reaches forward, and with the back of his knuckle
brushes a drop of water from your thigh.
To be touched like that, for the first time.
And you are not innocent. You’re fifteen,
something in you likes that you were chosen.
It feels like power, though you were only
the one who was touched, who was acted upon.
To realize that someone can touch you
without asking, without speaking, without knowing
your name. Without anybody seeing.
You pretend that nothing has happened.
You turn it to nothing. You learn that nothing
is necessary armor you must carry with you,
it was nothing, you must have imagined it.
To be touched – and your parents waiting at the exit
and smiling as you come out of the dark
and the moment being hardly worth telling.
What am I saying? You’re fifreen and he is a man.
Imagine being him on that rare day of summer,
the bulge of car keys makes it difficult to sit
so he gives them to a bored attendant
who chucks them in a box marked PROPERTY.
A girl balanced in the boat with hair to her waist
and he’s close enough to smell the cream
lifting in waves from her skin, her legs stretched out,
and why should he tell himself no, hold himself back?
He reaches forward, brushes her thigh with a knuckle,
then gets up to go, rocking the boat as he leaves.
You don’t remember his face or his clothes,
just the drop of water, perfectly formed on your thigh,
before it’s lifted up and away by his finger.
You remember this lesson your whole life,
that sliver/shiver of time, that moment in the sun.
What am I saying? Nothing. Nothing happened.
Kim: Good grief. I’m sure anyone listening can understand why I vividly remember reading that poem. For the first time in the collection. There is so much packed in there. And I think even this time listening to you read that, you know in your own voice. There were things that I noticed I probably didn’t on the first time round, which is the parallel between that property box. And the speaker in the poem.
Kim: Hmm, yeah. Yeah.
Helen: So I’m just going to show where the kind of activity you’ve set for listeners, you know, can take you once you start exploring that.
Kim: Yeah, I want it. Because that that, I mean, this is this poem is very drawn from personal experience. And that image of the water, the drop of water, is the only thing really, I can remember about it. So that’s where it you know, I started writing about that, like, Why do I remember that moment of him kind of reaching forward. And interestingly, when I, or interesting for me anyway, but when I published the poem, or my twin sister who’s also in the mentioned in the poem, when she read the poem, she said, I saw what happened. And I didn’t know. So um, you know, this happened when I was 15. And I’m 40. Now, and we’ve only just talked about it. And she said, I saw it, and I thought nobody saw. And she said. And she said, I didn’t say anything. So I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. So we both just pretended it hadn’t happened.
Helen: Which is the issue, isn’t it when you don’t know what to say? You often do or say nothing. Because what else can you do when you don’t know what to say? Or do? And it just goes to show how you know these things, perhaps they’re being talked about more now. But they certainly weren’t, I’m roughly the same age as you. And I certainly wouldn’t have known what to say or do in the same scenario. And I think, you know, going back, those things just weren’t really discussed.
Kim: Yes. And I think the other thing is, like, when I was remembering it, I genuinely couldn’t work out why I’d remembered it as well. And then it was writing it down. I thought that was really disturbing, like, a grown man would do that to a young girl. And but I also remember feeling really flattered, because like, when I was a young girl like that, that kind of currency of attention was really important. So again, that kind of mix of desire. And this, this is a violence to be kind of intruded on in that way. And it’s, it’s complicated, what I was trying to what I’m trying to do, so juggling it.
Helen: And you didn’t really fantastically because I think those emotions of that, the one being chosen, the attention is on you, are there. And in fact, we are taught or were taught at a young age, to want that kind of attention, or certainly understood it to be something that, as you say, had currency. And that is, of course, conflicting with all those feelings of, is that allowed is that everyone’s okay with this. It doesn’t seem like everyone should be okay with this. I think that’s just captured so wonderfully. And thank you so much for your time and wonderful reading of that poem. We really appreciate it. I will be putting links to Kim’s book in the show notes so you can all rush out and buy a copy. But for now, I’m going to say thank you so much for your time, Kim.
Kim: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me to take part.