Myra Schneider was born in London in 1936 and spent much of her childhood on the Firth of Clyde. She studied English at London University and now teaches severely disabled adults at a day-centre in North London. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Panic Bird, is published by Enitharmon and was reviewed in Magma 15; next year the same publishers are bringing out Insisting on Yellow, her new and selected poems, and also Parents: An Anthology of Poems by Women Writers, which she has co-edited with Dilys Wood. The handbook Writing for Self-Discovery, which she wrote with John Killick, was published by Element Books in 1998.
MM: Have you always written? How did you start to write?
MS: I’ve written since I was about nine. I wanted to be a writer and started writing these dreadful little children’s stories, one about my cat, and then I wrote a lot of poetry during my teens and I thought I was going to be a poet, then. But after college, the poetry scene was very unfriendly, I found the poets very pretentious and pleased with themselves and it put me off a lot. I concentrated on prose for the next twenty years; I wrote very little poetry and I didn’t read much poetry.
MM: At what point did you start writing poetry again?
MS: During that time I wrote a tiny bit of poetry when I was recovering from postnatal depression and then I wrote some while I was writing novels, adult novels which were not very good. I started writing stories for children when my son was about four and these had some success; I also wrote novels for teenagers at this time. It was chance that I started focusing much more on poetry because suddenly the outlet for children’s writing dried up – it was 1979 and Mrs Thatcher got in and the library funding was cut. I went on writing novels but I began to write poetry at the same time. I began to get quite a number of poems published in small magazines and when I’d had about twenty published it occurred to me that I could be thinking of a book. I found a small press run by John Killick, who subsequently became a close friend, and he published my first book of poetry. Somewhere in between my first and second book of poetry it dawned on me that it was my main interest:
I was much better at writing it and could express myself better in poetry. However, I retained an interest in narrative which I use in poetry.
MM: Critics have mentioned your subtle, flexible rhythms. Is rhythm the starting point of a poem for you – or how important do you think it is?
MS: I don’t think it’s the starting point, though there has to be some kind of rhythm in a poem. I have to say that I think a lot of writing that passes as poetry, isn’t. You don’t have to use formal rhythms, although these have been used very well in contemporary writing. I use mainly stress rhythm; I think form is very important. If you don’t get that right, have some feeling for form, then you can’t write a good poem.
MM: I was going to ask you about form. Can you talk about the process of writing, for you, at what point you know what the form is and where the poem’s going, and do you draft and revise?
MS: I tend to make a great many notes – I keep a notebook and although my poems don’t necessarily come from that, some do. When I’m going to start a poem I usually have an amalgam of words and images and messages to myself, in the notebook, or it may even be from some writing exercise. I get them all together, usually on the computer, and a point comes when I feel ready to begin shaping the poem. The form may be obvious but often it isn’t, so I’ll have to spend a long time on the beginning of the poem; I may spend as long on the first couple of verses as
I would on the rest of the poem because I’m finding the form.
MM: Which poets did you read when you were younger and did they influence your writing?
MS: When I was at school and university I was very keen on the Romantics, Keats and Wordsworth especially – they were my first great love apart from Shakespeare. Then I came across Hopkins – I was absolutely stunned by him – TS Eliot, the War Poets, Chaucer – I read a lot of him. I can’t tell exactly how they influenced me.
MM: What about poets writing now? Which contemporary poets excite you or do you admire?
MS: A lot – and a lot I don’t admire at all. A lot of wonderful writing is coming from America at the moment – and has done for some time – I think Elizabeth Bishop is a really important poet.
I like some of Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver; they tend to be much more expansive. There’s a tough fibre and openness about American poetry which others don’t achieve so much, which might explain why Sharon Olds is so popular over here. I think the very great poets writing now are Walcott, Les Murray who has the most extraordinary range of material, Seamus Heaney.
I like David Constantine, Mimi Khalvati, a very subtle writer, wonderful, who is valued but not enough, Anne Stevenson, Gillian Clarke. I don’t like many of the hyped-up poets or if I do like them I don’t think they’re nearly as good as they’re reckoned to be. I think John Burnside is good. There are obviously wonderful world poets who I can’t read in their own language and I find that very frustrating. The only poets I’ve really enjoyed at all in translation are Neruda and Lorca. I’ve not found a translation of Rilke that speaks to me, though I’d like to read his poetry.
MM: Your poetry is very much concerned with women and their experiences – the distinctive voice is very much a woman’s voice and one critic has referred to the ‘openness’ of your subject matter. Could you talk about finding this voice?
MS: The voice probably insisted on being heard. I think I’ve become more and more open; the further I’ve gone the more I’ve opened up. Although as early as Fistful of Yellow Hope I wrote about an experience of post natal depression but that just described it very directly. I think as I’ve gone on I’ve found more and more confidence to write about myself. I’ve also done a lot of therapy, I think that must have had an influence.
MM: I’d like to go on to ask you how you use autobiographical experience in your poetry.
MS: I use it both directly and indirectly. Writing about an experience that’s central is a kind of self-discovery. I’ve wanted to pinpoint the central experience, for example the postnatal depression, but to go deeper than that, to find myself. I think finding a voice is the key thing in my writing. I was very lacking in confidence as I had a very repressive upbringing and I think poetry helped me to find a voice in my personal life. In all sorts of ways, perhaps without being aware of it, I’ve written about that. Working with disabled people who don’t have a voice and writing about them finding language is another way of affirming my own voice. Caedmon, in Cathedral of Birds, is also about finding a voice, although I had no idea that that was what I was doing at the time – also the Tongue sequence in Crossing Point. It’s a subject that runs right through my work. Because of my own difficulties I feel a lot of empathy with women and women being heard and finding themselves.
MM: You seem to celebrate a woman’s domestic life in many poems, the material details of a life as a way of getting at more universal or abstract ideas.
MS: That’s been very important to me. I think men’s poetry has ignored that side of life; until quite recently there was a kind of mystique that poetry’s about mountains or thinking out philosophical ideas. One of my messages is that poetry is where we are now, in the houses and streets in which we live, and that’s just as relevant to poetry as being on top of a mountain or having a philosophical idea. You can reach these universalities through washing out the sink. I think that’s so much part of my agenda I don’t even think about it any more.
MM: Do you think men still dominate the poetry that’s being written now?
MS: I think they still dominate certain areas, some magazines, the key anthologies, though this is beginning to shift a bit.
MM: Could I ask you about the long narrative poem, The Waving Woman, at the heart of The Panic Bird? How would you reply if asked why you chose to write this narrative in verse rather than prose?
MS: I conceived it as a poem. I think the difference between that and a novel would be that I picked key moments to focus on. It has imagery that runs through it and is much more condensed than a novel. It focuses on the inner lives of the characters. We were talking about rhythm before; I had an immense job to find the right one – at first I had each part in different stressed lines, which made it too bulky, somehow. One of the things I wanted to do was to make it readable, as readable as a novel, but not a novel.
MM: I was struck by the tightness of the plot and the interweaving of the characters’ lives, and the way in which you managed to convey a lot of quite factual information through the verse without making it indigestible or prosaic.
MS: I worked very hard at compressing it, and it’s that compression that makes it a poem. While a novel is dependent on a lot of detail I focused on very particular detail in the poem like Rebecca cutting her finger on the glass in the scene with her daughter. I think inspiration comes in fits and starts, but all real writing is a lot of perspiration.
MM: Are there certain kinds of experience that you find are likely to trigger off poems?
MS: There is key subject matter one comes back to and back to, but each time I would hope to treat it differently. I’m a very visual writer, strongly affected by landscape and plants, and these are quite often a starting point for me.
MM: Do you keep quite close to your own experience or do you adapt it?
MS: In The Waving Woman I adapted it, but when I’m writing really autobiographically, as in The Photograph or Leavetaking the poems are accurate. Obviously we all fictionalise to some extent because it’s our own interpretation, but I don’t deliberately change the facts.
MM: Are you aware of the future reader when you write? How do you see your relationship with the reader?
MS: I do feel it’s very important to communicate, and that may have something to do with why I write in an accessible way, or it may be that I have to write like that anyway. I’m very keen to reach the reader but when I’m writing the poem I’m focusing on making the poem work, immersed in the poem.
MM: You teach for the Poetry School in London. What is your approach to teaching writing, what do you offer a group, and what do you yourself gain from the experience?
MS: I prefer to teach in a workshop situation, to work in depth with people’s poems. I ask everyone to write their comments on the poem under discussion. I think that’s very important because it forces everybody to draw their conclusions about the poem and this learning to give a critique of a poem makes one much more aware of what’s wrong with one’s own work. I see people getting better at offering feedback which means they’re better at offering themselves feedback. I like teaching: I enjoy seeing people’s work move on, I enjoy sharing poetry with people. It doesn’t really feed my writing; it might do if we were doing workshop exercises but this would be more because of the exercise than because I was working with other people.
MM: What are you working on at the moment? Which direction do you see your poetry taking now?
MS: My new New and Selected Poems are coming out next year. After I’d finished the The Panic Bird I started to write a sequence of poems about the body; this was because I wrote the The Body chapter in Writing for Self Discovery. I thought it would be interesting to do a series of poems which used the body as a starting point but focused in very different ways. It’s not a formal sequence but they all appear together in my new book. I did several poems which had a connection with water.
I knew I wanted to go on writing long narrative poems and I’ve started another one; it’s different from The Waving Woman in some ways in that the characters are much more fictionalised and the events are more distant from what has happened in my life. Most of the poems are written in the voices of the characters, including the disabled person who can’t speak and his poems are what he writes on the computer or what he dreams. I’ve been working on it since June and may well take most of next year over it.
