EMILY BERRY
Emily Berry is the author of three collections of poetry and outgoing editor of the Poetry Review. Her latest collection Unexhausted Time (2021), which was published this year by Faber, is a fuchsia-coloured book that takes its name and epigraph from Anne Carson’s line that “one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time”, a response to George Eliot’s claim that “attempts at description are stupid”. The poems are resistant to straightforward analysis, and function instead as wary interlocutors providing a slanted, often-deadpan perspective on language, particularly the process of psychoanalytic uncovering and the absurd metaphorical theatre of dreams. Their speaker isn’t always robust (“I am lying in the foetal position on a beach / in the east of England. Give me strength, I / say to myself, absolutely literally”) but she is unexhausted – finding that there is always something more to say.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Sophie Davidson
Nell Whittaker In “Picnic”, published in Granta magazine, in 2014, you wrote: “I like it when I am writing a poem and I know that I am feeling something / To be poised and to invite contact / Or to appear to invite contact.” This feels tongue-in-cheek to me, as the poem as a whole is more ambivalent about the relationship of poetry to transcendence. What forms of feeling does writing poetry – as opposed to reading – facilitate or invite? What is coming into contact?
Emily Berry It was definitely meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I was partly thinking of the way that “apparently personal” poems invite the contact of the reader, which makes it seem as though the poet also invites that contact, on a personal level, and that of course isn’t always the case! The question of what is happening when one is writing a poem is very difficult. I think the line is also being a bit ironic because are you feeling something when writing a poem, or is it a way of removing yourself slightly from a feeling, of becoming an observer? I can never decide if that’s a good or bad thing. Mary Ruefle’s poem “A New Morning” is about observing oneself in pain, in “a place so deep inside me it could be / its own organ if they could find it, / I felt this suffering to be an act – / never unreal, not that – / but performed by another / while I watched”. In writing you activate that watching “other”. On the other hand, I suppose writing for me can create a kind of channel down which a feeling – any kind of feeling – can flow and be given some kind of voice. Maybe it’s a bit like acupuncture, if you think of the pen as a needle coming into contact with some kind of psychic energy that needs to be released.
NW Unexhausted Time contains lots of ellipses, both embedded in the poems and between them as dinkuses. Ellipses feel internet-y, communicative of tone as much as a directive for reading; there’s something suggestive and sideways about them. What are they up to in this collection?
EB I was partly thinking a bit of the three dots that appear in a text box when you’re messaging with someone and they’re typing. There is something there about waiting, and expectation – well, in fact that’s a line in the first poem in the book – “I’m expecting something / and it feels like wearing a silk shirt…”. Expectation is such a particular feeling. It may never be fulfilled... I think they must also be about breath in some way, its continuity. My last book, Stranger, Baby [2017], had a lot of white space between lines, and often lines ended with no punctuation. It felt like a book where there was a lot of breath being held. I’m hoping Unexhausted Time breathes a bit more easily. I was probably influenced by queen of the ellipsis Chelsey Minnis, and Hera Lindsay Bird, who has lots of poems where each line ends with an ellipsis. I really like the effect of that, the way poems seem to trail off rather than finish; there could be more, just not at the moment. That sense of endlessness – I guess then they must also relate to the idea of “unexhausted time”.
NW The therapist as a figure haunts the poems, as a vaguely authoritative character who can also be funny and unpredictable. One’s spotted wearing bad shoes by his patient, triggering anguish: “he felt he would have to tell his therapist, as soon as possible, how embarrassed he was by his shoes, even though it would probably hurt the man’s feelings, otherwise the therapeutic alliance might be compromised.” What were you drawing out from the figure of the therapist in its contemporary iteration?
EB I suppose the therapist helps initiate conversation between multiple selves in a consciousness, and for me, writing poetry is always somehow a dialogue. They are also a kind of confessor, in a similar role perhaps to priest, rabbi or imam, and to write poems is to confess in some way, even if it’s not “confessional”. My relationship to therapy and therapists is a complicated one. I have seen various therapists over the course of my adult life and always, on some level, felt quite ambivalent about the process, yet not felt able to function for long without returning to that space. It seems the experience of being in therapy has a role to play in my writing; in fact, I wrote Unexhausted Time over a five-year period during which I was seeing a psychoanalyst twice a week. I’m not sure if the therapy helped with my personal problems but it did somehow facilitate the writing process. Perhaps it helps one “rehearse” making metaphors out of the thoughts and feelings, which become fuel for poetry.
NW The poems also replicate the therapeutic process, turning over dormant knowledge; many of the poems too are about dreams or dreaming. In “Holes”, the city is being eternally worked on because, “this was a necessary / precursor to growth, and change was intrinsic / to growth.” How does the collection negotiate with therapeutic work and the concept of psychic integration?
EB I am very uncertain as to whether writing has a therapeutic function – for me, at least – and perhaps this comes across in the book. Both therapy and writing assist with meaning-making, but the meaning always remains somewhere out of reach and the psychic integration very much “in progress”. But yes – dormant knowledge! I do think poems sometimes “know” things in advance, the way dreams can. Maybe they come from a part of the mind that exists outside linear time. I intermittently keep a dream journal and I have occasionally looked back and found dreams that appear to predict events that subsequently happened to me or people I know – albeit in a symbolic way, not a way you could make use of at the time! The book wants to make these forms of knowledge as important as other kinds. [Psychiatrist] Bessel van der Kolk writes about the importance of allowing yourself to “know what you know” in The Body Keeps the Score [2015], his book about the treatment of trauma. It’s very, very hard to know some things, and maybe the book is partly thinking about that type of knowing, and trying to find ways to approach it.
NW Elsewhere, you quote the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil [1983] on the “unbearable vanity / of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being / over non-being, what is spoken to what is unsaid”. What is the value in the unspoken, the un-interfered with?
EB The book is struggling with this question throughout – not wanting to name things. I have the line: “A feeling was named and I was sorry then / to have lost its magic unknownness.” I always want to preserve some of that unknownness somehow. There’s a Rilke poem, “Ich fürchte mich so vor de Menschen Wort”, which begins: “I am so afraid of the words of men. / They pronounce everything so distinctly. / […] I shall always warn and ward off: Don’t come near.” I am similarly ambivalent about things like categories, signifiers and diagnoses. Generally, we need them, but what do we lose when we commit to them? When a painful state or expression is unnameable, its lack of a name can worsen the pain, but naming it can make it terrifyingly tangible. But a beautiful state or experience, how can that be named without being diminished in some way?
NW In “(I felt I was born in a time)”, the line, “most feelings are very old, they have / been under the earth and then up / to the surface again, they have been / in the vapour of clouds”, uses the water cycle to express the idea that things recurring can be the same but different, which also describes metaphor. Elsewhere you write: “A metaphor is a spell cast / to keep us away from the source. But we go on / lowering the bucket into the well.” What do metaphors do? Why do we want them?
EB Maybe metaphors are a way of naming things without naming them. We get something to hold on to, but a little bit still gets away, and there’s something comforting about that. Anne Carson has said something similar, talking about untranslatable words, in her essay, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent”: “In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.”
Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time, Faber, 2021
NW You have just published your final issue of the Poetry Review as editor. What has it been like to have edited the journal for the last six years, during times of quite significant disruption?
EB Having the magazine to work on during the pandemic was very stabilising. We were lucky that we were able to continue in our work and didn’t face any major issues in terms of production or funding. In most ways, my job continued exactly as before, except that it was remote, but I had worked remotely quite a lot previously anyway. The only difference was that I was suddenly receiving a lot of “pandemic poems” in the submissions, which – to be honest – is not a type of poem I found myself to have a huge appetite for. I sometimes worried that the magazine would seem to “not be addressing the issues” or something, that maybe I ought to take a more overtly political editorial stance, but really, I wanted it to be a space primarily for escapism or at least a space that digests or processes things in an indirect way, like dreaming.
NW There are these moving lines close to the end of the collection: “it is something to see a heron in sunlight, / or the way a duckling stands and stretches itself / tall. There is no other life, but there are so / many lives. I felt certain you could rescue me / and so I never asked. If we can dream another / time, then we can find a way to live in it.” How does a poem recognise other lives, and how can it dream a different time, different possible worlds?
EB Those lines allude to a beautiful poem by Jane Hirshfield, “A Cottony Fate”: “Long ago, someone / told me: avoid or. // It troubles the mind / as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog. // Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life.” We probably all want to make some kind of change in our lives and / or in the world, big or small, and it may seem completely unachievable; when I was writing the book, I felt, on a personal level, very stuck, and I knew a lot of other people in a similar position. Of course, this sense of stuckness, that feels so individual, is probably bigger than us. I sometimes like to think that a poem can be a sort of repository for a wish, like a message in a bottle. I believe in the power of wishing, more than I believe in its outcome, if that makes sense – maybe that goes back to the first question, and the idea of expectation. In this case, the poem wants to bear witness to the hope that change is possible, and in doing so it becomes a kind of prayer. ◉