Caroline Bird in Conversation with Maya Catherine Popa

Caroline Bird, author of four Carcanet collections

Caroline Bird is an award-winning poet. She won a major Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was short-listed for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published by Carcanet Press in 2002, when she was just fifteen. She was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010 for her second and third collections, Trouble Came To The Turnip, and Watering Can, and was the youngest writer on the list both times. Watering Can was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

I first had the pleasure of hearing Caroline’s work in early 2012 when she gave a reading at Oxford University. I was drawn by the playfulness of her poems as well as their unmistakable sonic pleasure. My review of Bird’s fourth book, The Hat-Stand Union, appears in the forthcoming issue of PN Review.

The Hat-Stand Union

Can you tell us a bit about the cover design and how it signals the collection’s themes? 

There are many disguises in the book, people pretending to be something they’re not or transforming without meaning to. Identities are shifted. People have become so lonely that they mistake hat-stands for romantic partners. The first half of the collection undertakes these transformations, and the last half tries to tell the truth more plainly. Once you let your speakers lose their own identity, you can go anywhere as a writer. If you feel you have to express yourself, then it limits what you have to say. Voices that didn’t know who they were meant I’d written an extremely personal collection without knowing it.

You're a performer both on the page and on the stage. How did you develop your unique blend of literary theatricality, and does it play a role in your generative process?

The way I speak affects the way I write, (“Dead in the mouth, dead on the page” goes the adage). The writing has to sound right before it’s finished. I’m often mouthing and pointing at the screen.

There are many characters to hide behind in the first half of the book, which lends itself to writing something like dramatic monologues. But it takes me a while to be able to perform the poems—I have to no longer live in them to be able to present them.

I was fascinated by the Camelot sequence. In 'Lancelot's Poetry Reading in Smoky Bar', he seems to summon the rhythms of Ginsberg's 'America':

Camelot, I have given you all and now I am everything.
Camelot, a room full of campaigning women is wetting stamps and
      throwing letters into the lake.

How did you come to reinvent this legend, and how did the Beat tradition infiltrate?

I always wanted to write a version but I never had a reason to do it. I wanted to write about people inside a fairytale that turns out to be a nightmare, about what was really going on behind the scenes in Camelot.

I thought, what if instead of thinking it’s crazy, I go to the heart of the crazy? There are knights talking in chivalrous tones with mutilated boys, a Camelot Estate Agent, an exiled journalist, etc. The poem just got bigger and bigger. In revision, I tried to shrink-wrap its strangeness. Suddenly I was in the middle of a long poem that was getting obscure—it needed plainness and emotion. Ginsberg was a vehicle for that—he provided an emotional context, and I love his use of repeated questions. It shows that pastiche can go full circle in a poem and become serious.

There's skepticism in Camelot: 'Where is the holy grail? / They took it to paint it for a magazine and now it's disappeared.' And elsewhere, poking fun at his kitsch inheritance, a disgruntled Knight remarks: 'The celebrity knights only stay for the fanfare / then make a big show of leaving purposefully --' How did you settle on this tone?

These are alienated voices. There’s a tension between longing to be accepted and the ability to be cynical, cackling. I think that’s often where poems come from. It’s an isolated thing to be doing. It comes from a feeling of not being heard or understood. When you enter a world like Camelot, suddenly you have all of these same things to comment on, but they’re all there to be commented on in a humorous, sad way.

Dead writer you most wish you could meet? Meal you would share? It can be anachronistic if you feel, for instance, that Proust would benefit from being introduced to Jaffa cakes.

Emily Dickinson and pesto pasta.

Maya Catherine Popa

Maya Catherine Popa earned an MFA from NYU, and an MSt from Oxford University under a Clarendon Scholarship. Her poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @MayaCPopa. Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.

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The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.

For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off The Hat-Stand Union by Caroline Bird! All books come with a 10% discount and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim the extra 15%, go to the website (or use the links above) and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!