Tara Bergin: The Poet's Notebook

Tara Bergin, author of the acclaimed debut This is Yarrow, published this week by Carcanet

Poets’ diaries – according to Susan Sontag – ‘abound with rules for protecting the poet self; desperate maxims of encouragement; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.’ My diary – which is not a diary, but a notebook – abounds with quotes like that one; things that I’ve been particularly struck by while reading, or listening to the radio, or watching TV etc. Recently, I’ve been gathering some good quotes by John Berryman (on Pound), Lowell (on Frost), C.H. Sisson (on Yeats). I have a variety of others: Donne; Elvis; Anne Sexton; and notes, notes, notes: snippets of sentences, lines from a song, from an ad, weather notes, flower notes, and so on.

Tara Bergin's notebook

The main point is not to censor what gets recorded; the other is simply that I won’t remember any of it unless I write it down. I have a bad memory for these things, and even if I commit something to my notebook, I probably won’t be able to quote it verbatim if I don’t have the notebook in front of me. In fact, the only way I have of really making sure I remember something, is to forget it – not entirely forget it, just slightly – and then try to remember it. Then, I compare my badly remembered version against the correct version and see, as if anew, the reason that the original was so striking in the first place. One recent example: I was trying to remember Ted Hughes’s advice to teachers of written English in Poetry in the Making. He said something like: ‘say what you really feel.’ Then I checked it against the book. What Ted Hughes actually said was: ‘Their words should be not “How to write” but “How to try to say what you really mean.”’

Yes, I thought, that’s much better than how I remembered it, and so much more appropriate. And it lodged in my memory then too – so much so that some weeks later, while answering questions at a conference (I was giving a paper on Hughes’s translations) I was able to quote that sentence verbatim.

It works for writing your own poems too – but in that case, your different version might be a stronger alternative. For example: read a poem, then put it away. Try to remember the first line, or the last line (this won’t work if the line is only one word long; a very easy line, if you know the poem very well, or if you are exceptionally good at remembering). Next, write down what you think it said, then check the original poem. If you have got it right, you gain nothing for yourself. If you lose – if you have made a mistake somewhere – then that’s your own misremembered word or phrase to have for your own poem if you need it, for keeps.

Greetings from my desk today, where I have been writing this, as well as working on an essay about the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. She moved to England in 2002. In 2012 she completed her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky. This is Yarrow is her first collection.

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The Carcanet Blog Sale

This is Yarrow

Every week on the blog, we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors. The book(s) on offer will change each week, so watch this space!

All month long, This is Yarrow by Tara Bergin is in the Carcanet Summer Sale along with several other exciting titles. But we thought we'd throw in Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Elaine Feinstein) as well, just for good measure. Go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive) at the checkout.

Rapeseed

He thought my clothes were my skin.
He thought these soft things,
this lace and these buttons,
were things I belonged in,
but I do not belong in them.
I told him but he didn’t see.

Look, he went on stroking my gloves
and my things,
thinking, what fine skin – Oh
Mister My, My –
I did take thee and thou me.
And after the ceremony?
Quiet, quiet.

We drove past rapeseed.
Fields of it through the window
on the full hot air – oh sweet,
oh stale, oh clinging to the air –
oh shame, oh full, oh cruel.

How we feared its fierceness!
How we worried it would overlook us!
We feared too much,
thinking the world
is reached only in violence.


Copyright © Tara Bergin, from This is Yarrow (Carcanet, 2013)