Kate Moss is said to live by some advice: ‘Never complain. Never explain’.

The other day a poster was circling online from a Catholic church, which said: ‘There is only one priest today: please keep your confession brief and to the point. You don’t need to say why you did it.’

Both of these instructions horrify me. Imagine not being able to explain! To elaborate! I added the Nelson quote to the poem later, when it was largely finished (I’d just read The Argonauts). My friends know me as someone more prone to disclosing the grubbier thoughts I have (‘ashamed, but undaunted’). I will share the petty and insecure ideas that occur to me. More often than not these thoughts are directed towards myself, rather than others. (I wish I could identify it as Plathian candour instead!) I lack the necessary pride to contain these shameful thoughts. My container is leaky. But it is also selective about what it can bear to leak and what it cannot. And this is perhaps where I feel the gendered nature of shame most powerfully, because my shame is strongest in relation to my body, sex and romance. From the earliest time women are calibrating – am I too ample, too scant / too bloody, too dry / too lustful, too neutral / too loud, too quiet? What am I supposed to minimize, conceal, emphasize or fake?

For me, rage is both the producer and the product of shame. I’ve never learned how to rage effectively – everyone else’s anger being somehow more successful than my own – and I have always been very afraid of people who are angry. I will often leave rooms and public places where people are even raising their voices. My own response may be on the extreme end of the scale, but I, like most women, have been schooled that anger is not an attractive behaviour – like you say, it’s forbidden. Male anger is often seen as passion and strength. I’ve often been told my own anger is ‘hysterical’ and the behaviour of a ‘prima donna’. So as you’ve written – we attempt to hold down our rage, it turns into shame and we become newly enraged.

Why write poems anyway? I am very unsure. It occurs to me I am performing my own rage and shame, my own attempts at forgiveness of others and myself in poetry, and perhaps that’s also not an OK thing to do, and is something I ‘should’ also be ashamed of. In my recent writing I am thinking much more about the effect of society’s demands on girls and women and the bewilderment and damage that can cause. It is not uncommon for women to be punished for male violence against them. I found myself asking what, if anything, can be forgiven and who holds the power to forgive?

Serena has been on my mind too. I wonder, did you hear the recording of her reading Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’? It is such a beautiful riposte to all she has to endure.

I started out the poem in the hope I could corral and contain some thoughts and existing fragments. I wanted to bring order to them. But I was aware of how when trying to express our shame, or to explain behaviour borne out of shamefulness, our order often breaks down. Some pockets of thought are inaccessible, sewn-up. Others are full of junk. So we trail off, turn back, pick up pace. The switch from numbering to using tildes to separate the fragments was a nod to to this: it at once a trailing off, a giving up (slump) and a liberation from keeping the argument rational and linear (whoosh!). That disorder interests me and allowing the conflict to remain intact and unresolved. I am reminded of Mary Ruefle’s essay ‘On Fear’ where she says ‘fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelganger’ and the order (absolution through forgiveness?) and disorder (rage and shame?) are working for me in the same way in this poem, I think?

I love your expression ‘masquerade of disorder’ and it occurs to me it might also apply to your own poem we are discussing in another thread.

When I first started to write poems I tried hard to have a go at traditional forms, but there is something in my brain that couldn’t knit the rules & ideas together. I remember I once even sketched out a poem ‘pattern’ so I could visually see what I was supposed to be doing. As soon as I had to follow a set of instructions I couldn’t get anywhere. So I felt like I abandoned a sense of form early on; I didn’t get this joy other people did from working within constraints, puzzling the lines and rhythms out. What I hadn’t thought about then was that my poems were doing things formally anyway: this shape, this line length, lists, anaphora etc. I was even writing acrostics! But I perceived myself to not be ‘doing form’. I guess I was way more concerned with order than I let on.

It was risky for me – this poem. I realise some people might take against it – for many reasons, but principally might feel the construction too arbitrary and reject it as phony: like, oh come on you can’t just string all these snippets together into one thing! I guess my argument for doing it is to do with trying to reflect natural thought progression, the tolerance you have to develop for things being unresolved. Like maybe in this poem, the little runs ahead and turns back and differing feels of each segment are an attempt at expansiveness within an argument. Rather than seeking to confuse I’m trying to keep some channels open: a sort of commotion within the poem, a circular disruption to arrive at the right destination.

Yes! I am interested in phoniness (it seems to have cropped up in poems of mine before), acknowledging artifice and how it can both be a shield from and a way of focusing attention. The diverging tracks of thought and feeling in the poem are I guess a kind of ‘inside / outside’ trope maybe. And since you said it I realise I do that a lot! My thoughts and feelings are often not in accord, and bringing them both into a poem might be a means of giving texture to the argument (the nascent researcher in me is inclined to provide different sources of evidence), but also communicating wooziness and uncertainty. I enjoy doubtfulness.

The ‘is it finished’ question always keeps me alert. I was writing this poem last summer, as I was reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson and, I suppose, because I was so in love with that book and its form was so compelling to me, I had in mind I would write a really long poem-essay on forgiveness (which is unusual for me as I don’t often start out with a plan). It obviously didn’t turn out that way. I get angry at myself a lot when writing about lacking fluency, which is what I feel is required to have done that. The construction was much more juddery, more awkward (and maybe a little painful?). (Another reason the section numbering broke down I guess!) We have a mutual friend in Roddy Lumsden and when I was in his workshop group he would very quickly be able to decide if a poem shared was finished or not – some were ‘you need to put this in a drawer for a few months’ (code for: maybe you should abandon this) and some were ‘you just need to tighten the thread’ (micro adjustments). Because I didn’t meet my original ambition for the poem I found it harder than usual to know whether it was ‘done’. I knew I had come to the end of my breath with it, but I didn’t know whether that made it any ‘good’ or not. I felt nervous about it and chose to interpret my doubtfulness as a kind of growing pain, that with this poem I was (am) growing into a different poetics.

This is the second part of Amy and Kathleen’s conversation: you can read the first part here.