The Southeast Review Online

9/08/2008

Interview with Jean Sprackland

by April Freund

Q. In Tilt, you continue to study everyday, familiar objects and juxtapose them against the unexpected. By doing so, you are able to defamiliarize the reader, like in "Mattresses," with familiar objects we hardly notice anymore. This move forces the reader to see these familiar things, to examine them in a new light, and to remember all of the achingly human associations attached to the things we discard. How do you come to notice these discarded things, and why do you create poetry out of them?

A. I can't imagine looking at a discarded mattress without thinking of the people who slept on it—the associations are so rich and so intimate. More generally, I'm fascinated by the ordinary and the everyday: its unnoticed beauty and its miraculous potential. I'm reminded of something the artist Richard Wentworth said: "I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and, fifth, the fact that it works."

Q. Seeing the familiar in a new light is very much like viewing things from a child's perspective. In your poem, "Spilt," you refer to "the weight of childhood." What is the importance for you of childhood and the child's perspective?

A. Well, we were all children once, but I think some of us remember it better than others. For me, it's still crystal clear. Perhaps I'm saying I've never really grown up. I don't set out deliberately to write from the child's perspective, but I still have that same openness to experience, that curiosity and puzzlement which I had at the age of six.

Q. Water is a major theme in your work, and it continues to be in Tilt. Why water?

A. I don't know why I'm obsessed with water, except that it's such beautiful, living and cryptic stuff. I could go on writing about it for the rest of my life.

Q. Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.

A. I'm not really the jealous type, but I take great delight in Charles Simic's poems.

Q. What kind of child were you?

A. Gawky and dreamy. A shy extrovert.

Q. What's your relationship with rejection like?

A. Are we talking writing or personal relationships? One is very much easier to cope with than the other.

Q. What book do you feel you suffered for the most? How?

A. I don't sign up to this myth of the suffering poet. No one is making me write poems—it’s a choice, and I feel very lucky to have stumbled across something I find so absorbing.

Q. What was the greatest surprise for you in writing these recent pages?

A. I was surprised by the recurring environmental themes in this book. I didn't see how pervasive they were until I put the manuscript together. Readers and critics often assume that writers choose their themes, but in my experience it's all mystery and accident.

Q. Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?

A. Of course I can't see my own writerly habits very clearly, but if I knew them I'm sure I'd want to break them. Answers on a postcard, please!

Jean Sprackland is the author of three books of poetry and a collection of short stories. Tattoos for Mothers Day (Spike, 1997) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Hard Water (Cape, 2003) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award for Poetry. Her third collection, Tilt, won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. She was chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004. And Jean's poem, “The Birkdale Nightingale,” recently published in Poetry Review, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2007 (Best Single Poem). She currently lives in Southport, Merseyside, UK.

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