Guest week: Angela Topping
"Poetry has been my life’s pursuit"
Angela Topping’s ninth collection of poetry, Earwig Country, was published by Valley Press this past May. I offered a few rhaphsodic paragraphs about it at the time, and they will work here as a brief reintroduction:
Angela brings every ounce of her intellect, passion and experience to this banquet of words. Every other poem has the power to change the way you think about its chosen topic, and every half dozen pages is a piece that will leave you absolutely floored. […] The title poem describes how “hedges held aloft whole tea services of bone china” (the bindweed plant, as featured on the cover), but the narrator discovers “beautiful things have inner horrors I learned to be wary of” (the earwigs). Angela requested that second line be used in the book’s publicity, while I suggested the conclusion of a poem about an heirloom biscuit tin, “Where do they go, those things of little consequence we don’t recall discarding?” I think together, they give you a sense of the collection’s overall preoccupations.
In the beautifully slow-moving world of poetry, six months is practically yesterday; I’ve known poets put on a “launch event” as late as nine months after publication, and just a few days ago, a wonderfully thoughtful review of Earwig Country by DA Prince appeared on the London Grip website.
Today, I’m pleased to bring you an interview with the author, conducted by Teika Marija Smits (a.k.a. Teika Bellamy), who was both the commissioning and copy editor of Angela’s collection – a perfect choice for ‘guest week’ (a concept already approaching the end of its first month!)
The interview ends on such a perfect note that I won’t do my usual ‘outro’, so let me take this opportunity to thank both writers for putting this together, and for their patience whilst waiting for me to read through and post it. They start, as I always like to, at the very beginning…
When and how did poetry come into your life?
It started with nursery rhymes. I loved the sound of them even if I didn’t understand the message. Even before I could read, I used to make up rhymes for my own amusement. My sister used to read poems like ‘The Forsaken Merman’, ‘Meg Merrilies’ and many others to me at bedtime.
In primary school when I was about 7 or 8, we’d be given an anthology and told to pick a poem and learn it by heart. It was probably just to keep us quiet, but I really loved it and would be up every 10 minutes with another one I’d learned. I met and learned poems by Blake, Milton, John Drinkwater, Walter de la Mare and many others this way.
Because I was shy, my mum sent me to elocution lessons. I did three grade exams which included learning poems by heart. Having some poems by heart gives a great internal library which can reside within for your whole life.
When I turned 12, I had access to the adult library, and discovered many more poets I loved. I kept a folder of favourite poems (all handwritten) when the book had to go back to the library. I wrote my first proper poem around that age and was very excited by the buzz it gave me. From then on I used to write out my poems in a special notebook and show them to people.
You have a huge body of work to your name, but can you remember how you felt when you first started writing and submitting poems to magazines? Was it a daunting or joyful experience?
Writing was extremely joyful and addictive. Sending them out anywhere was difficult though. I was commended in a WH Smith Poetry Competition as a teenager, but other than that I had no idea there were poetry magazines. I couldn’t type and had no typewriter. I was published in the school magazine, almost every issue. The editor, a really lovely nun, would always seek me out to ask for a poem.
I did go and do readings once I had done my A-levels, the first being one I did with Matt Simpson and Harold Hikings at Christ’s College (now part of Liverpool Hope University). The first place my poems were published was in a free Arts magazine called Arts Alive Merseyside. It had a large circulation, and the editor had started a poetry page. I had two poems in that, aged 19, but showed them to one of my tutors. She rubbished them (see my poem ‘Missing the Point’) which sent me into a self-imposed apprenticeship, though Matt Simpson had said my poems ‘had something’ and another tutor, Steve Newman, said I had ‘decided talent’ after I showed him a poem I’d been working on for a while, about a Grecian Urn, but really about how any creator of art leaves their thumbprint on it unintentionally.
In the next few years I tried to learn my craft. I was regularly reading poems at the Why Not and the Everyman in Liverpool, at very mixed open mic nights that were informal and edgy. I kept in touch with Matt Simpson. After I graduated I married, then both my parents died two years apart. It was only after I had a baby, having left my office job, that I was able to come back to my poetry. I started sending poems out to magazines. Orbis was one of the first, and I was even paid. I wrote to Matt Simpson with the news. We met up again and he invited me to join his crit group at Runcorn Library.
I also submitted to Outposts, and wrote in my cover letter that I was ‘daring’ to send him some poems, so yes, I think I was pretty daunted. I had no idea about anything like the Gregory Prize, as far as I was concerned I had to make my own way. I did eventually get into Outposts. A big coup for me was when I got into The London Magazine, under the wonderful Alan Ross: I was paid £20 for my sonnet and shared a page with Joseph Brodsky! Other acceptances at that time included Aireings, Envoi and Stride. Each one built up my confidence. These were the poems that formed part of my first very slim collection, published by Stride.
Your first collection, Dandelions for Mother’s Day, was published in 1988, but many of the themes in that title – family life, loss, nature and motherhood – are still present in your latest collection, Earwig Country. What is it about these themes that fascinate you so much?
I’ve led a very ordinary life, but it’s seen a lot of changes, and I’ve always been very aware of my surroundings. So my work has always been about the ordinary work of being human. My parents were in their early 40s when I was born, so I spent a lot of time with adults, and found it hard to get on with the rough and tumble of being a child.
My dad used to take me out on his bike on Sundays, to give mum a break, and he would tell me about flowers, birds, and animals. We lived in a working-class town, and the flowers we saw were mostly wild ones. The after-effects of the Second World War surrounded us; land where bombed-out houses were demolished, thick with rosebay willow herb, dandelions, buttercups. These are the flowers that seed themselves into my poems. I remember Dad telling me never to eat the berries of Deadly Nightshade, when we saw it once, though more likely it was only Woody Nightshade. To me, plants can be dangerous; witness the title poem of Earwig Country. My dad also taught me about foraging and gardening.
I was Mum’s little shadow and learned many things from her. She was a very motherly person, very loving and full of stories. I was the youngest of four, but really wished I could be a big sister. That could never be, but once my older siblings married and produced babies, I became the fun auntie, the free babysitter. I absolutely loved babies and longed to be a mother myself. Having my two children and being a stay-at-home mum (we’d saved up) was one of the most blest and creative times of my life, even though I didn’t have my mum to help me. This period was when my poems started to come back.
The theme of loss comes from losing my parents so young, in my early twenties. Mum was terminally ill, and often spoke to me about how she’d nursed both her parents through cancer to their early deaths, and Dad’s mum was only 51 when she died, so I’d been surrounded by loss and accepted it as part of life. Mum would talk freely about it and even joke about leaving her eyes to a partially-sighted family friend.
I am still writing about these themes because there are still more poems coming from my first twenty years. I’ve lost more people, including close friends and a brother. I’ve also written about time and the changes it makes (my third collection, The Way We Came, was themed around Time), as well as the body and mental health, with which I have struggled at times. Other themes are women’s experiences, and music.
I’ve mentioned the thematic similarities in some of your collections, but how do you think your writing has changed over the years?
I have become much more confident and emboldened to say what I mean. I’ve learned a lot from the poet John Clare, who showed me never to listen to fashion and stay true to myself; though of course I’d adapted to modern trends like not capitalising the first letter of every line.
I’ve always written in a range of forms but over time I’ve learned which will work best for me. It took me a while to feel confident in my own voice and my methods of writing. Every poem is an experiment, but there have been times when working on a difficult poem that took a while to get right, that I could feel the development happening. Rhythm used to be a problem for me, occasionally, but I learned to apply scansion to my poems to work out what is wrong. One has to have faith in oneself and take a leap in the dark sometimes.
I learned from reading the best poets I could find. Hardy taught me about form, Norman MacCaig observation and wit, Liz Lochhead and Matt Simpson that it was good to mix my own dialect and heritage in with more formal language. When I first started reading my poems at open floors, they were very short and would be followed by a stunned silence, but over time I learned to elaborate and write longer poems, poems that need more than one page, and sequences. I became very fond of sequences. There is one in this collection, ‘Writing in the Body’, which is my side of an interview about writing poetry in free verse form, which I had with Aaron Kent (Broken Sleep Books).
What I particularly admire about your poetry is the way the poem and the form merge so seamlessly that a reader can’t tell what came first: the words or the structure. I’m also in awe of how you breathe life into everyday objects with the use of startling and imaginative language. How do you go about achieving these things in your poems?
My methods of working are quite organic. I let the poem have a say in the form, though sometimes I will run with a form and push its limits, reinvent it to some extent. For example ‘Summer Hedgerow’ is a cinquain chain, and the way I set it out illustrates how hedges interweave and how they look from an aerial view of the landscape.
I like the ballad form and the sonnet. Both come naturally to me. The ballad form is close to my heart because I am an enthusiast of folk music. Ballads often have a question and answer structure, use a persona and strike something deep in the psyche.
My structure often veers from the merely chronological: I prefer to structure for impact, and to get the best last line. Often the conclusion of the poem is a surprise to me. The poem has led me to make a discovery, such as in ‘Patching the Cashmere’, where the last two lines made me realise that poem is not about mending clothing but mending the mind. As Robert Frost wrote: ‘no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader’. I never ever start writing with an ‘idea for a poem’, as I hear some people say. Poems tend to ambush me or waylay me, and insist I write them. I can’t ignore them. Sometimes if I need to write, I can take myself into the zone by reading poetry. Form and structure cannot be taken away from what the poem is saying, they are not separate things. The how and the what of a poem have to work together.
As for breathing life into everyday objects, well, to me they already have life. Each object is given life by those who use it and handle it. A favourite mug, used daily for years, has a kind of glow about it, which fades when it is neglected. So many of the things I own have memories. I can remember where I bought most of my pieces of jewellery, for example. Much of the art in the house was made by friends, so speaks to me of them. I also feel the mark of the maker in a tangible object.
How do you know when a poem – or a collection for that matter – is finished? What is your editing process like?
I will tinker away with poems for hours, then suddenly they feel ‘right’ with every word in its proper place. I always read aloud when I edit, because I need to ‘hear’ the poem. I’ve been writing long enough to understand my weaknesses, and it’s a good idea to keep a list written down of things one knows is a fault that pops up a lot in editing. Mine includes tautology, unnecessary words, clunky lines that are better removed. A lot of my editing is cutting because my first drafts can be too wordy. I once wrote a three-page poem; by the time I was finished editing, it was half that length.
You’ve worked with a number of small, independent presses over the years. Can you tell us something of the experience of working with a number of different editors and publishers?
I would have loved to have stayed with the same publisher all my writing life, but that was never to be over such a long writing career; unless perhaps I’d ever been lucky enough to be taken on by one of the big presses, and even then it might not have been possible. Independent presses come and go, and that’s part of the nature of them, because they are largely owned by people who do it for the love of poetry. It’s very important to support these publishers, especially if you would like to be published by them. Buy and review their books, for example. I’ve always had extremely positive relationships with my publishers, and some have remained friends long after the book was all sold out. You are one example of that, Teika, after taking a chance on me with your Mother’s Milk Books imprint. I have never struggled to find a publisher and I remain eternally grateful to every press that has ever brought out a book of my poems.
I like working with an editor, but I will stick up for my poems and sometimes that can mean a compromise. I once had a spat with an editor of a competition anthology who thought my grammar was incorrect. It wasn’t, of course, but then there was a concern that their readers might think it was wrong. I stood my ground and offered to withdraw the poem, but in the end I suggested I add a footnote, which was accepted, but wiped my stanza breaks.
I never turn in a manuscript with errors, because I am meticulous. However, I will always listen to an editor and explain why I can or can’t make the changes they suggest. I once punctuated a poem at an editor’s behest and lived to regret it. I preferred the original unpunctuated version, because the line breaks were all that were necessary.
The reason I never need much editing is that I had the benefit of showing my poems to Matt Simpson, in the early days, and he was a pretty fierce critic, as I became too, because he would let me loose on his poems and said I could always put my finger on where things were not right. Since he died, I edit my own work as fiercely. However, editors have been great at helping me select which poems to include to make the strongest collection that hangs together well. I am so much more prolific these days from when I was teaching that I often have too many poems for a given book, and it can be hard to cull. I have a lot of respect for editors, and have edited a poetry magazine in the past as part of a small team, and have also edited a few anthologies myself. It is a very skilled job.
Do you have a typical writing day or do you take a more fluid approach to writing poetry?
I am very fluid. I write when I feel the need. I can lose hours working on a poem, so if I wrote every day I would have no time to do anything else. But I am always alert to a poem coming along, which, perversely, they often do when I am not ‘plumping up the cushions’ in the hope of one coming along.
It’s too easy to be always doing something and trying too hard. For me, poems can happen when I’m waiting for a train and my mind wanders, or in the bath, or when my hands are busy but my mind is just zoning out. The poem ‘Earwig Country’ started to come to me when I was waiting for a delayed train. I was all alone on the platform, pacing up and down, when I noticed the high hedges of bindweed trapped in the wild land between the platform and the ramp, and I remembered the horrors of earwigs inside them from my childhood. If I have a commissioned poem or I’m writing to a theme for an anthology, I circle round and round until I can focus on something that arouses an emotion. However, I always have a notebook with me, because like most poets, I live in hope of a poem arriving.
What particularly excites you about the poetry scene today? Which poets should we all be reading?
Those are two separate questions. Classic poets and dialect poets have a richness to offer. We can learn a lot from the past. There is a wide range of poets from the past I love and have learned from. Contemporary poets I admire intensely can form a very long queue to be read, and it’s hard to single out a few. So many people are writing now, which is wonderful to me. I wish there were more people reading poetry, but that’s a whole other question.
Poets who have given me a thrill of delight include Liz Berry, Helen Ivory, Martin Figura, Pascale Petit, Moniza Alvi, Carol Ann Duffy (we are of an age), Gillian Clarke, Rita Dove. I very much enjoy attending a poetry reading of a poet I admire, and have some wonderful memories of hearing stars like Imtiaz Dharker, Wendy Cope, Norman MacCaig, Miroslav Holub and Douglas Dunne. There are so many people writing now, it’s hard to keep track of them all, but I look for recommendations from places like Deborah Alma’s Poetry Pharmacy and the Poetry Book Society.
Lastly, what advice would you give to someone just starting to write and submit poetry?
I can only advise from my own perspective. Never expect anyone to give you a ‘leg-up’, nor court famous poets for favours. There are no shortcuts. Take your craft seriously. Support poets you admire by attending their readings and buying their books. Read as much good poetry as you can get your hands on. Use libraries. Librarians can advise and suggest. If you don’t know which poets you admire, buy a good anthology and devour it. I discovered many poets I love that way.
Be humble and learn from everyone you can. Go to workshops for inspiration. Accept critique gratefully: you don’t have to follow it, but thoughtful critique is a great gift at any stage of your writing. Don’t think of writing poetry as a career, though careers like teaching and lecturing can grow from it. Try out different forms and styles until you find ones you feel comfortable with, then challenge yourself out of that comfort zone. Don’t fill your head with social media nonsense: the brain needs rest to produce poems. Things that keep your hands busy so the mind can freewheel often help poems find their way out from the subconscious. Every poem is a gift to yourself. Be thankful.
As for submitting, read your poems at open mic nights until you know they stand up and you feel confident in them. Read poetry magazines, you can peruse them for free at a poetry library (London, Manchester, Edinburgh, The Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle) to find ones you like. There are many online too. These can usually be read for free. Ink Sweat and Tears is a good example.
It’s very important that you read the submission guidelines carefully as they are all slightly different. Keep a record of what you have sent where, and when, whether it was published or rejected. I’ve seen poets advocate all sorts of fancy methods but there is no need for complications. I use a small A6 notebook. Each submission gets a single page. I note the poems I’ve sent and the date a reply can be expected from. It can take a while. When I hear back, I put a line through the entry so I can see it’s no longer ‘live’, and make a clear note of which poem if any is accepted. Keep a document on the PC of the ones you have had accepted, and where, because you will need this information for any book acknowledgments.
All of the above also applies to certain anthologies and competition entries. Submitting to competitions is slightly different to magazine entries because you won’t get a rejection letter. Instead you will need to check the list of winners when published. Sometimes, if rejection emails bother you, it’s less painful not to get one. But writing poetry is a tough game. So it’s best to develop a good attitude towards not getting into a particular magazine. Often it doesn’t mean your work wasn’t good but that it didn’t fit the issue or wasn’t what they were looking for. One of my most loved children’s poems was not accepted for the anthology it was written for, but it went on to achieve great success later. It wasn’t right for that particular book, that’s all.
If your work is rejected, it’s not personal. If you can’t get into a particular magazine, try a few times, and if still no success, leave it. There are plenty of others. Eventually, you may have established a good track record with individual poems and want to put a manuscript together. Best advice is to start with a pamphlet because they are cheaper and easier to sell. Once accepted, it doesn’t stop there. You will need to do lots of readings to promote your book and support the publisher. It’s the same with each book. Nothing is guaranteed. But it’s so worth it when a reader tells you what your work has meant to them. So never be discouraged. Poetry has been my life’s pursuit and it has brought me so many friends. Fame and fortune may never come your way, but joy and friendship may.