Well, that fly had been in my brain for a long time. Oddly enough, I was given the Emily Dickinson poem [‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’] by our Prac Crit tutor, Cathy Wheeler, as one of the early exercises we had to do at Cambridge, I think in our first term – and I just went, ‘What?!’ It was as if the world suddenly went faster. I had no idea that poetry could be like that. I knew nothing about Emily Dickinson, and struggled with the poem – I didn’t know what was going on. I return often to it now, and it still puzzles me because… well, what is the plot of it? It’s not obvious.

But the fly had also been buzzing in my head in the sense that I’d fairly recently watched my father on his deathbed. So the idea of the fly not really being a fly in Emily Dickinson’s poem but rather a death rattle presented itself. I don’t know if that’s what you get from the beginning; it took me some time to understand that.

The whole process of writing a poem, which looks so centred on the page but is actually the result of so much destruction – I mean, literally, I was trying to write a poem while I was down in a caravan in west Wales, and the flies were coming in out of the cold. I spent most of the time swatting flies. So I wanted to take a broader look, to include the flies, and they got into the poem.

I’ve got the actual drawing to show you [reaches across desk for sketchbook].

The reason it’s not there in the poem is that you don’t need the drawing to get the drawing – that’s what I realised, that you don’t have to put the drawing in.

It’s a bit naughty, that. I like the contrariness of ‘this is true, but this isn’t true’, which is one of the things that poetry can do, because it’s language under such pressure that it makes impossible things happen. That’s why I love it as an art form. And distraction is not just a matter of your attention being diverted, it’s an emotional state as well: ‘being driven to distraction’, which means not being able to contemplate an experience because it’s too painful. If you can imagine me sitting in my caravan, hearing death rattles at all the windows – well, it becomes a statement about grief, really. You see your loss everywhere.

Perhaps Tennyson did actually have a bluebottle distracting him, which is why it’s in the present.

You’ve read more Tennyson than I have, but it’s entirely consonant. I can’t claim that I know that reference, because I don’t, but I like it very much. I’ve never heard a fly ‘sing,’ though, they always buzz when I’m around, and are much more annoying than Tennyson and Eliot’s insects.

That sounds plausible to me, completely. You hear these overtones in the poem, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you hear a double overtone – but your ear is reaching back further than mine, there.

Well-noticed!

I think this is actually how metaphor does work. I’m not someone who sees nature as something opposed to the human, or to poetry, or to technology. It’s all of a piece to my mind – so why wouldn’t the animal, the human, the technological all be enmeshed together? I think it’s a false division to say ‘this is nature and this is us’ – or ‘this is nature and this is culture’. That doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s not an entirely benign interchange, either – it can be benign – but the main thing is that the job, it seems to me, of the poet is to try to make yourself open enough to feel those interventions when they happen, and to include them. To be surprised by bluebottles, rather than to say, ‘I don’t want to think about that. It’s horrible, it’s frightening.’ You don’t have to terrify yourself – no, you don’t have to paralyse yourself, if you look at things through the corner of your eye in a work of art. In a poem it becomes bearable to look at things that you can’t bear head-on.

I can’t imagine the benign interchange, but I do like the fact that the bumping against the windowpane of the eye is happening from both sides of the windowpane. That seems to me to be right and proper, because you don’t want to say, ‘Ah! I am nothing. I am just waiting for divine inspiration.’ That seems to me to be, you know, straight romanticism. Neither do I want to say it’s all me – that seems to be narcissism. What I’m looking for is a dialogue between the world and the… the resisted.

Gosh, how terrifying!

Well, it’s something that everybody feels in relation to flies, isn’t it? The fear of the eggs laid. I don’t mean the eggs in ‘Principalities, Dominions’ to be entirely forbidding. I was just trying to give a sense of that gorgeous sheen – you know when flesh is very plumped-up and taut? I suppose it is a slightly sinister fecundity, but…

It’s the abdomen, yes. But, you know – I’ve got a taste for the gory. It seems to me a very enjoyable thought to scrutinise. There must be other things more painful than thinking of flies’ eggs. I think that that’s the proper place for it, as a detail. But I do have a gruesome sense of humour, I must admit.

There are two types of art there. First of all, there’s the chalcid wasp as he or she exists – I think it’s a she because of the abdomen having the eggs. And then there’s the drawing of the chalcid wasp, which is my terrible pencil drawing…

No, well, it’s copied. I didn’t find a chalcid wasp – this is a copy of a drawing of a print of a chalcid wasp, so there’s that print in between us as well.

And accessible. Because it’s not flying away from me, and it’s not dead – well, it is sort of dead, but it’s visible. Then the fly is what you can’t see. There’s no detailed, close-up description of the fly, for two reasons. Perhaps it would be too frightening – because a chalcid wasp is actually quite handsome compared to a house fly – but the fly’s moving. I just wanted somehow to enact the things that push you away from a poem, and that’s what I’m hoping that the fly does in the poem.

Yes! He is a Porlock person. Yes, exactly, that’s absolutely right. In fact, worse than a person from Porlock, because you can shut the door on him, whereas these insects are inside the room.

Have you been stung?

That’s experience then, see, not fear.

I was thinking about those illustrations which say ‘actual size’, and how much adrenaline you’d have to inject to counter the sting should you be allergic – it’s terrifying, that. It comes from the memory of a very specific shirt, actually. I once met a sailor whose shirt had a pocket over his heart – as you have there [points to my shirt pocket] – and he had an embroidered wasp on it. I haven’t been able to forget that. I’ve been trying to introduce that shirt into a poem for a while.

It’s an image for heartbreak, really – that’s what it is, but without saying ‘My heart’s broken’ or ‘I miss my father’. I find myself – you know, me, Gwyneth, confessional – deeply boring, so I suppose… you can’t move away from what’s happening to you personally, but there might be more interesting ways of imagining it than saying, ‘I’m missing my father.’

I don’t mind that it’s disappeared. I’m content. The only thing I wanted was a poem that worked. I’m just recalling that wonderful image in Pulp Fiction with the adrenaline needle going into Uma Thurman’s chest after she’s taken an overdose.

No, I wouldn’t. Because that would be just as inhibiting as actively trying to put it out there. I think it’s a question of temperament, of the degree of atmospheric pressure which I need to be under in order to produce a poem. This does change, but at the moment it seems that I can’t do the explicit, confessional poems, and that this is the only way it works for me. So I’m quite happy to skulk behind needles and wasps, in the interest, actually, of… well, it’s the only way I can think to portray my heartbreak more accurately. Doing it any more explicitly, I couldn’t cope – it would be unbearable. This is the only focal distance at which I can bear to think about the subject at the moment.

That’s right, and Emily Dickinson is the great exemplar of this. ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.’ This isn’t a highly formal poem, in the sense that it has an explicit rhyme scheme, but it is formal in its own way.

Well, I’m trying to – I think I’ve got [counts] – yes, the stanzas don’t have the same number of lines, but they’re close. I do think of it as not quite free verse, in the sense that rhyme – it isn’t there as a scheme, but as a shaping principle. It’s very subtle.

Yes, that kind of thing. Or ‘snow’ and ‘apostrophe’ – I mean, that’s indirect.

Sting/missing, and visual rhymes like where/eye: I’m very interested at the moment not in full rhymes, but in how off can I be, how unlyrical, without losing the surface tension that I think you need in order to make each line necessary. I couldn’t tell you how many drafts I did of this. You know, it was very hard earned, and I now feel like I couldn’t move any one part of it without unpicking the whole thread.

That’s too mechanical. I mean it would be like pulling a wing off one of the stanzas.

Many drafts. ‘Poem’ and ‘pain’, I’ve just noticed that, and then there’s an explicit rhyme at the end of the first stanza, which starts with ‘misnamed’: pain/again. The clue is there about it being a poem about pain.

To come back to your original question, which is an interesting one, about referring to your elders and betters – well, it’s a risky thing to do. The comparison is not going to do me any favours. But it’s alright to be fearless. Emily Dickinson came into the poem and Emily Dickinson left at times, though she was always there in my mind. I wavered about whether to put her name in and to remind people of a poem that’s much better than this one. My mind changed about that constantly, but in the end I decided to risk it.

She speaks of the death rattle as a fly. I’m convinced that the bluebottle she’s talking about is actually the death rattle. It’s one of those hidden things in the poem, perhaps – she says ‘I heard a fly buzz’ but what she really hears is that [makes the rattling sound of a dying person’s throat]. But she can’t bear to call it that, so the actual fly takes over as a way of leading us through the poem. So it’s not a correction – it’s an appreciation of the importance of what she was talking about.

I did a very interesting exercise this summer with students. I got them to act out the plot of Dickinson’s poem, and that is a fascinating exercise because you start to see how many selves are in that poem, how many different events – how you can read what happens in the poem differently. So I do recommend that as a way of trying to work out a difficult poem.

Which I do – the literals are dismissed at your own peril.

Oh, you horror! [Laughs]

Well, I can tell you the plot of the whole poem if you’d like. If I was to act it out, first of all I’d be sitting at a table copying a drawing. Then I’d be hearing insects – I’d be distracted from time to time hearing insects, thinking, ‘Oh I hate that.’ You know that unique irritation you have? That irritation is good, in a way, because it’s close to being really in the present. It’s very useful for the poet.

That’s right. You’re trying to keep things together, but your real irritation comes out in something that’s just a fly. So then, in the second verse, it’s a close-up of the drawing of the wasp. I’m being a wasp now with my arms up [DG: she is], though I haven’t got enough arms. I’m a holy roller, singing ‘holy, holy, holy’. I’ve got a rounded abdomen and great big lovely sting at the bottom.

Then – well, that doesn’t help me. I’d hoped that paying such close attention to describing the wasp would blot out the flies. But another fly distracts me and it doesn’t work – so it’s a failed evasion.

Yes, the maraca that ‘butts the light’. Now I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, they’re under the eaves of the caravan. There’s so many of them, this can’t be right.’ So it’s come too close for comfort now. I can’t make a distinction between the flies and me. My fear is that the flies have infected me, and that’s why I start hearing the buzzing on the other side of the page – it’s right there in the process of writing.

There is a hinterland to this story, which is that in the same caravan I got a wasps’ nest in the ceiling. I’d been hearing this humming and tried to get it into the poem, but it wouldn’t go. It’s the idea of thinking, ‘That’s a strange humming noise,’ then slowly thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, no, that isn’t normal,’ and discovering what was happening. So the literal wasps’ nest didn’t get in but the important thing for me was the buzzing – and that survived as houseflies.

I don’t make this caravan sound like a very attractive place.

Well, no. [Pause.] Well, you may be right…

I’d be grateful if you could give me the reference because I’ve done that classic thing you should never do – and I don’t usually do this – of copying something out without a reference. It is here somewhere, copied into this drawing book, but I think I’ve lost the source…

It has been, but I’m ashamed of myself as a scholar. It wasn’t taken from that actual book. It was taken from some reference book that has plagiarised that book.

It does come in at angle, but it moves things on – moves the whole situation to the art of the poem. I want to push on the reader to the next poem. Again, it’s addressing the fear of – well, if we look at things like wasps and flies, what are we going to see? I suppose, hopefully, this will be part of a sequence – sort of like a horror movie.

Well. It’s an important question to ask. I know the meaning of the word providence is benign, but you could read it otherwise – I hope the jury’s out on that one. Yes, I would like to be questioning that word. Definitely.

You’re in a better position to answer that than I am, in the sense of how they engage the reader. The first question is ‘Where / Do they hatch from?’ and I think that’s very much a transcription of what was going on in my own mind, which was ‘Where on earth are they coming from?’ It’s an expression of, again, horror. How can they keep going? Because I’ve got rid of a few of them and they’re still coming. It’s like… they keep coming in the same way that the poem keeps coming. Automatically, we poets tend to think that when a poem comes along it’s a good thing. Well, no – not necessarily so. So I beg the question there.

Yes, it’s an interior voice. And the last one, ‘Do you dare turn over?’ – it’s an explicit challenge, to both the reader and the writer. Do I dare write the next one? Do you dare read it?

It makes me want to write a poem that’s full of questions. I’m just glad to have found an ending that gives me an ending, because these things are so difficult – I find writing so difficult – that I’m not even worried if it’s a question. It wouldn’t even occur to me to worry about it.

That’s it! It’s hard. When is the contraption necessary? I’ve learned to wait and wait and wait.

It’s from one of the Letters of St Paul. What is it? ‘I am convinced that nothing…’ I’ll tell you what it is exactly. [Here Gwyneth leaves the room to find her source. She comes back holding a small, frayed booklet.] It’s Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. I’ve got it here in Welsh, so that won’t do anyone any good.

I’m reading this from a very strange little pamphlet, having found it clearing out my parents’ house. You’ll see this is a very grubby, tiny little pamphlet that’s obviously been in somebody’s pocket. My grandfather was a miner and that smudging looks to me a little like coal dust.

‘Gair o Gysur’ – ‘A Word of Comfort’. This is the quote in Welsh: “ Y mae yn ddiogel gennyf, na all angau, nac einioes, nac angylion, na thywysogaethau, na meddiannau,  na phethau presennol, na phethau i ddyfod, nac uchder, na dyfnder, nac un creadur arall, ein gwahanu ni oddiwrth gariad Duw, yr hwn sydd yng Nghrist Iesu ein Hargwlydd.” I’ll just get the translation. I know my Bible in Welsh rather than English. ‘For I am convinced that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights, or depths, nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus, our Lord.’ Now, I’m reading from the Revised English Bible, and it doesn’t have the older translation, which contains ‘principalities, dominions’. The main thing is that it’s part of a catalogue of powers, and other dimensions.

Yes, though I didn’t have this little pamphlet when I wrote the poem. The relationship is with the words, not the pamphlet.

I had.

Just this morning I picked it up because it seemed the easiest way to find the reference. But your question is approaching a really important thing, which is: what is the difference between making a poem that has a necessary form – that is, something that cannot be otherwise – and how you might make distraction and misdirection, as a subject, in its own way necessary? The reason ‘Principalities, Dominions’ is there is that it connects with the chalcid wasp singing ‘Holy, Holy’. The wasp is being described as an angel – I think in a much earlier draft there was a lot more angelic stuff in there. The reason the title is still there is that, in a way, there’s more comfort in the context of what St Paul’s saying. Even if you’re left alone with flies buzzing at the window and death rattles, there’s comfort in that relationship with the Word of God, if you like. That’s the overall incarnation in the poem. Nothing’s there by accident.

I don’t know if I’d say irony – it’s a questioning, certainly. Maybe it is irony, I don’t know. I’m very suspicious when people say ‘providence good, so-and-so bad’; ‘poetry good…’ You know, I just don’t believe in these binary oppositions. I think things are much more mixed, and interesting, and complex than that.

Hospital Odyssey was a long poem and had a sort of narrative speed about it – although it was fully rhymed throughout, and I discovered such an interesting thing by doing the poem in five-lined stanzas, that rhyme goes at a different pace from narrative. So if you’re writing lyrical poetry – let’s say a lyric that’s fully rhymed – the rhyme words will be pushing you on faster than the story. I quite often used to have a rhyme scheme in place a couple of stanzas forward, even before I knew how I was going to get the narrative to that place. I think that speaks to the relationship between the subconscious and words, because narrative is that bit clunkier.

But I’m also interested in the small effects, so at the moment I’m writing very short poems. If you think about Welsh – well, some Welsh-language poets never write outside the englyn, a three- or four-line stanza. It’s just their form, and you can do everything in that. So I think, again, I don’t have a choice in the matter. I just do whatever is possible – and that’s all I can tell you.