Something Has to Shatter

Transcript of episode

Transcript: The Glimpse, Season 2, Episode 1: “Something Has to Shatter”

Host: Seán Hewitt
Guest: Victoria Kennefick

Victoria Kennefick
I could actually feel at certain times my heart closing in situations, and I realized that's what's happening when I have that feeling. It's my heart going “Nope,” or “I don't want that,” or “I'm scared” often.

[Theme music starts]

Seán Hewitt
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.

Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve, won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, among many others. Her second collection, egg/shell, was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month. Victoria Kennefick is our guest today on The Glimpse.

[Music lingers and fades out]

Seán
Victoria Kennefick's poems are brave, exposing, funny, and dark. They take risks, not only in terms of form and language, but in terms of the real and necessary risks of art: to look directly at difficult subject matter, to implicate the poet in a mesh of moral and aesthetic questions. Victoria makes her life into poetry, but not in the way of transforming it into something pretty or excusing it. Instead, she opens up even the darkest parts of experience in order that we might witness and feel less alone ourselves. These are poems full of the body, of visions, of humor and intimate hope, raw but never undeveloped, shocking but never untrue. Victoria's work is exposing and real and generous, and I'm so glad to have her here on The Glimpse with us. Victoria, welcome.


Victoria
Thank you so much, Sean. That was a beautiful introduction.

Seán
You're very welcome. Your new collection, I'd just like to talk a little bit about it first. It's called egg/shell, it came out this year. For those people listening, which is everyone, they won't be able to hear exactly what I'm saying when I say the title, because there's actually a forward slash between “egg” and “shell,” which speaks a bit to the concerns of the book. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Victoria
That was a very obviously intentional move, punctually, or punctuationally, but also, I think, in terms of what I envisaged the collection to be about, because it initially very much started as a book about fertility and particularly secondary infertility, and using the egg rather usefully, and perhaps obviously, as a method to explore that. Particularly as I happen to live near a wetland center, which is this beautiful lake and swans in it. And the swans breed every year, and it becomes an almost obsessive experience for the people around the area to, you know, when are the cygnets going to be born? And so there was something around that energy that spoke to how I was feeling about my body, and how I was feeling about my journey in terms of trying to have a second child. And I suppose so that was very much the initial impetus for the collection, or certainly the poems I was writing that eventually became the collection.

But as time went on and as life develops, things changed for me personally, and my former spouse came out as a trans woman, and that really did put a massive pause on my life for how I thought it was developing and how I thought it was gestating, I suppose. And that kind of moment of pause felt incredibly important to show in the book: this kind of fissure that appears and everything afterwards is different. So that kind of allowed me to, I suppose, process the experience myself, as a person, but also as a writer.

And then I was really delighted to find out in my extensive research—because that's what I do when things happen to me, I research them both academically and otherwise—and I found that when someone doesn't realize they're trans yet, they're referred to as an “egg,” and once they have that epiphany that they are a trans person, their egg cracks. And I just found that to be an enormously helpful way for me to understand what was happening, but also to kind of understand the fact that things do break, but equally, something different, but as beautiful or completely different in form, emerges out of it. So that was very much, I suppose, how the rest of the collection came together, and then how I imagined, over time, the entire book.

Sean
Yeah, it's an incredible kind of consonance of images there, of two very different experiences somehow coalesced around the egg and gestation and birth and rebirth, all of those things. Second collections are funny beasts, in a way, because, you know, when you come out with your first book, you kind of make a statement of sorts, whatever statement that might be. And then the second collection either kind of continues that statement or deepens it, or, in some cases,contradicts it or goes in another direction. And all of those are, you know, come with their various troubles and challenges. How did you approach it? I mean, obviously this is a book that changed as you were writing it. But how did you conceive of this second collection? Was it different to writing the first book? Did it feel different?

Victoria
I really appreciate you asking that question, because I had had, ultimately, my whole life to write my first collection. And though it was slow in terms of how it came together, there was a certain level of, I'm going to say, viciousness around it, because I was just very, very focused on it being a very clean, tight, sharp book with no excess.

But then I found, with this book, I couldn't bring that same harshness to it because of what I was writing about and because of how much I had changed because of the first book. And so I had much more compassion for the words and the images and the people in the poem and the experience of the poem. And I think I would use the term, perhaps, grace. That I was maybe allowing myself a little more grace with mixed results, as, you know, as cleaving your emotions has mixed results. It was uncomfortable, but it felt very necessary.

So I thought I would be much longer than I was writing this second collection, but it felt incredibly urgent. And the poems came very, very intensely. It was a very emotionally intense experience, but I was very, very cognizant of the fact that while I wanted them, obviously, to have that resonance, I wanted them to still be crafted. So then there was something really satisfying about taking that very urgent emotion and then crafting it, which I suppose is what we ultimately do, but in a different way to how I had before, and the trying that out was what was so wonderful and fun in the middle of this very difficult period of my life.

It was the thing that I think really gave me some separation from what I was experiencing and allowed me to have some form of control over it as well: to curate it and create my experience and maybe own it a little bit more, because it is obviously…when something is happening outside of your control, like secondary infertility, or somebody that you know has a very big impact on how your life goes makes a significant change, you do kind of feel helpless and kind of like you're, you're standing in the middle of a storm being kind of bent in every direction.

So I think standing in, in the place of creating a poem, but allowing myself a little bit more, being more gentle with the work and myself—which was really difficult too. I found it hard.

Seán
Yeah, we often think about how poems might change a reader. You know, “This poem changed my life,” or “changed how I saw something.” But I think, for poets, we maybe don't often talk about how much the poems can change us. The idea that when you get to a second collection, you might have been actually changed by the first book. And so that comes with its own complications. You know, you're kind of witnessing the evolution of Victoria as well as Victoria's poems, and I hope you'll write loads and loads of collections, and we'll be able to look back at the evolution of Victoria, alongside the poems.

All right, well, the poem you've chosen for us has to, I think, take the medal for the best title I've read in a long while. It's called “The Ego is Crushed like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto, and is Begrudgingly Divested of its Own Smugness.” Can you tell us a little bit about the title, and then read it for us?

Victoria
One of the things that has struck me as I've grown older and experienced suffering, as we all do in various guises, is how often the ego is involved. And I've become more aware of my ego's whisperings—or roaring sometimes. And of course, it's a necessary part of our human experience, and very useful. Particularly, I think, you know, if you're a creator. It's always useful, but I think when you're creating something, you have to have some sense of an ego that, “Oh, this needs to exist” in some way.

But I was really surprised when a second pregnancy didn't come to pass for me at the time, and certainly when my marriage fell apart and my former spouse came out as a trans woman, I didn't realize that it would impact on my ego. And I think that when all of that happened, I really had to have a reckoning with my ego, and it was a really cathartic and really wonderful experience in letting go a lot of ideas I had around being safe as well. Because I considered, I suppose, being married to be “safe,” or, you know, to have a husband to be “safe,” and those things are not, unfortunately, in many cases, necessarily the case.

So this poem was an attempt, I suppose, to explore that. But it's okay to have those kind of feelings, and it's okay to feel the loss of something that your ego enjoyed holding on to or felt safe having, and that there is going to be a response to that.

Seán
Would you read it for us?

Victoria
I'd be delighted.

The Ego is Crushed like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto, and is Begrudgingly Divested of its Own Smugness

When you slipped out of your skin,
you slip of a thing,
the skin I thought I knew you in, it was dazzling
and terrifying. How I had too had to slough
wifehood off my dry arms, scrub it from my violently
blue-white legs, exfoliate its unmistakable musk.
You were no more my husband than any other woman.
What a thing to miss! And yet, and yet I tried to imagine
clinging to you like a 1980s polyester nighty sparking in the dark
for God’s sake, images of bodies reaching over the mantelpiece
and going up in flames, people chimneys, burned on my child brain.
Maybe I could do it, and clutch all that we made tightly
until my fists shook. Stupid, smug ego snail. Who am I now
without you but what I have always been, a white feather
in the wind. I told you that when we met, and you cupped me
in your hands – loosely, and the wind could blow
at any gale, get knotted, and sure I’d toss a bit, and shiver,
but I could mull that over in the dark, in the dark, in the dark –
did you know? Did you know? They all ask, questions like prodding
fingers. Have they stripped their spouses’ skin clean?
Have they watched something fall away –
a lie, no.
A pretense, no.
A realisation, yes.
An epiphany, definitely.
What a ridiculous question though
when you didn’t know and dressed as best you could
in what you thought you should. We were just playing
I suppose, until it was clear that it was serious as murder.
The end of us, I mean.
The dream of us.
Not your slinky escape from your chrysalis, not
your beautiful fluttering into the light.

"The Ego is Crushed Like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of Its Own Smugness" from Egg/Shell (Carcanet, 2024).

Seán
Thank you, it's such a brilliant poem. I love it. You can't tell where it's going at any given point; it slips just into new territory every time it's about to stop. And, I think, I love the way it just kind of evolves and grows through itself. One thing I'm aware that listeners might not realize from that poem is something about the shape of it. Would you tell us a little bit about the shape?

Victoria
So when I was writing it, it went through many, many different forms, but the one it really ended on, which is, I suppose you would call it, centered. It's almost, yeah, like a tree maybe, or maybe the egg cracking, just that, that sense of it being wider rather than being long. And so that was kind of the sense of it. And I really enjoy playing with form in my own, my own restrictions—not so much when I have other people's placed on me.

Seán
One of the things that came to mind when I was reading this poem was a line from Sharon Olds in “Stag's Leap,” actually the title poem of the book; she has this brilliant moment that always comes back to me. She says, “When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up./ Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” And it seems to me to kind of speak to a lot of the tension in this book, which is, you know, wanting to retain two things that are intimately intermeshed. One person and another person, and the actions of one person affecting another person, but still not wanting to begrudge another person, even though you might be upset and discombobulated, and have your ego crushed, and, you know, all of that turmoil, there's still a sense of celebration, even in the language. You know, you can feel the warmth and tenderness of the language, and your beautiful fluttering into the light. So it feels like a generous poem in the way that it approaches that.

Was that tension between these two quite opposing things, was it in the forefront of your mind when you were writing, trying to get the balance between this tension, I mean?

Victoria
Thank you for saying all of that, because I think that was very much what I was hoping. Because I think my project, in my life maybe and certainly in my work, is self-actualization. That sense of “to thine own self be true.” And that's something my mom always said to me when I was growing up, and something I always found really desperately difficult in some situations and impossible to ignore in others.

And so I think when somebody tells you what they need to do in order to be their true selves, you cannot help but admire that. And you cannot help but just say, “yeah,” like, “if that's what you need to do, that's your step forward into being more yourself,” which is, I think, perhaps our only purpose, if we have any. And so I think that was a huge part of my experience on the best of days and even on the OK days, and then other times, obviously, kind of thinking: “But what am I going to do? What will become of me? How will I gather the wreckage of what I perceive to be a break”— and breaks can be very positive, and breaks, like the cracking of an egg, can have positive outcomes, but still, something has to shatter, and somebody has to maybe clean up, and somebody has to kind of see what's emerging, and somebody else has to maybe clear away the fragments, and so on. So I think, um, I couldn't ever in my work, certainly, escape from the fact that what was happening was a manifestation of someone's true self.

Seán
Yeah, and one thing I think this book does really well—and we sometimes don't see enough of this dynamic—is acknowledging the difficulties of our interdependence on other people. We often, I think, read books or talk about books as though people are atomized, completely insulated, and that “I have the right to my story,” but it's quite hard, you know, when your story is someone else's story, and there's no real delineating line where one stops and the other starts. And, you know, we often think about poems as ways of tracking experience or holding experience, you know, kind of frozen moments in time or looking back in time. But this, this seems, in a way, a poem about having to rewrite experience, or seeing a different version of the past that was not the one you thought you were in. Is that a kind of propulsive force in the book, do you think?

Victoria
Yes. What I did in the work was try and look at how I had to take responsibility myself for where I was when I wrote the book. And I went through all of the maybe more challenging and difficult emotions in that regard, but I think most usefully coming to the realization that there was something around the dynamic that protected me from something in myself that I found challenging, and now was time to meet that part of myself and get another chance to heal that part of me, or allow that part of me to grow, or even just acknowledge it.

And so obviously there is a weird sense of ‘the person that I married doesn't actually exist anymore,” legally or in any paperwork. And the person that is now co-parenting our child with me—we get on exceptionally well, really great person—but is a different person. Very similar in lots of ways, very different in other ways, and not just, I mean, not just physically, of course, but looking back and kind of going, “Well, who was that and who was I?” And I think I found that much more helpful to look at, well, ”How have I changed?” And how would it best benefit me to look at this from a perspective that helps me to grow and helps me to change and helps me to explore in my work, through my writing, ways that we can meet our former selves that acted in ways that maybe we're like, “Maybe we could have done something different there,” but ultimately lead us to where we should be, which is at another point where we can choose, I think, to grow.

Seán
Yeah, you know that the poem is a way of empathizing with various versions of yourself. It's such a great poem, Victoria. And I think, you know, one of the things that is so great about it and all of your poems is even though they come from very specific personal circumstances, I think you have a way of allowing them to be universal. It's quite easy to kind of say, “No, here's a bad thing I did,” or “Here's how I feel about something,” but to say that when it begins to enmesh everything around you, there's real bravery, and I think you've done it beautifully. Yeah.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break now, and when we come back, you're going to tell us about a poem that inspired you, in which a woman puts a heart in a freezer. So we'll take a break and then we'll come back.

Victoria
That was so lovely. Thank you so much.

[BREAK]

Cathy and Peter Halstead
We hope you’re enjoying this second season of The Glimpse. It’s just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We’re the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead.

Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you’re on. Thank you so much for listening.

Seán
Welcome back to The Glimpse. Victoria Kennefick, you've chosen a poem by Carolyn Kizer. It's called “Heart’s Limbo.” Do you want to tell us a little bit about it before you read it for us?

Victoria
So I think if I were to characterize 2024 for myself, there have been many interesting moments, but overall, I think my general focus for the year was keeping my heart open. And I hadn't realized at all how often I closed my heart. And as someone who would have considered themselves previously to be an open-hearted person or to be an open person, I realized that in many ways that wasn't the case at all, and that really fascinated me, because I could actually feel at certain times my heart closing in situations, and I realized that's what's happening when I have that feeling. It's my heart going “nope,” or “I don't want that,” or “I'm scared,” often. And so when I came across this poem, it actually really moved me. And I suppose in many ways it has a levity to it, when it's dealing with something that is, I think, one of the bravest things that you can do in your life. And so when I read this poem, I cried, I laughed, and I gasped at how brilliantly Kizer talks about the heart and what we do to it.

Seán
Would you read it for us?

Victoria
I’d be delighted to.


HEART’S LIMBO

By Carolyn Kizer

I thrust my heart, in danger of decay
through lack of use,
into the freezer-compartment, deep
among the ice-cubes, rolls ready to brown ‘n’ serve,
the concentrated juice.

I had to remember not to diet on it.
It wasn’t raspberry yoghurt.
I had to remember not to feed it to the cat
when I ran out of tuna.
I had to remember not to thaw and fry it.
The liver it resembled
lay on another shelf.

It rested there in its crystal sheath, not breathing,
preserved for posterity.

Suddenly, I needed my heart in a hurry.
I offered it to you, cold and dripping,
incompletely thawed.
You didn’t even wash its blood from your fingertips.
As it numbed them, you asked me to kiss your hands.
You were not even visibly frightened
when it began to throb with love.

"Heart's Limbo" by Carolyn Kizer (Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems, 1960–2000, Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Seán
It's such a great poem, and in some ways, it reminded me of some of your poems in Eat or We Both Starve. They're really bodily and intense and almost a sort of body horror comes through them. Is that something also that kind of pulled you into this poem? You know, the lack of fear about things bleeding and throbbing and going in the freezer and being thawed. [He laughs]

Victoria
It's such a great way of, I think, describing the internal workings of our emotional bodies, because it's really difficult to describe that experience especially, I think—I don't know, obviously, how other people feel, or how they experience feelings in their bodies. Somebody said recently, “Your issues are in the tissues,” which I thought was an amazing line, and how, I suppose, as we get older, we move our bodies less, and, you know, we expect them to be able to hold all of these experiences that are, you know—emotion is “e-motion.” So they get stuck, and they freeze up, and they get rusty.

And I was really struck by how banal it is as well. That, you know, she's just plopping her heart there in the freezer, next to the liver, which is also there—and that's another poem probably about something—but also next to the rolls and the concentrated juice and like, “Oh, don't, don't feed it to the cat.” You know, “Don't do that.” I loved that it was integrated into a very domestic scene, and that, in giving this other person her heart, it wasn't, like you say, stylized. It wasn't, you know, she didn't take time to thaw it out and maybe, like, I don't know, give it a rubdown, or slap it around or tenderize it. She's like, “Oh, here it is!”

Seán
Yeah. I mean, even the act of receiving that heart, you know, the other person is there. And it seems for the speaker such a terrifying idea to give the heart. You know, the expectation seems to be repulsion, kind of wanting to throw it away or give it back. And there's something quite moving about the surprise of the poem at not being rejected. You know, in that way, that's a lovely thing about the ending.

One of the words that really stands out to me is, “As it numbed them, you asked me to kiss your hands. / You were not even visibly frightened / when it began to throb with love.” It's the “visibly” there which I think puts a sort of doubt, still, in the poem. It's almost wanting to believe that the person isn't frightened. But “visibly frightened” seems to me to leave a doubt that the person might still be internally frightened. So I can kind of see two “frightens,” you know—well, it's a scary thing.

Victoria
It's terrifying.

Seán
And you know, sometimes I think we don't appreciate the responsibility that we're putting on other people as well. You know, we make demands of people. And I think this poem does both of those things. It kind of reminded me of a quote that has been doing a round from, I think, it was Hilary Mantel's interview with the Paris Review where she says, “The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage?” And I wonder if that feels kind of closer to your experience of this poem. Does it give you courage?

Victoria
I think so. I think when you're wondering how to self-actualize and to maybe be your true self as much as is possible, given the world that we're living in and so on, but it seems like quite a rebellious thing to do, or quite a radical thing to do. But what it really means is trusting yourself to be open, because the opposite of love is fear, and the fear can often be about your own inability to cope with being hurt, or your own perceived inability to cope with being hurt. And in resisting that hurt, we obviously resist all of the things that bring us joy. So even though the hurt is not, you know, table-ready, and is dripping on this person's hands, this person accepts it because that is ultimately what love is. It's acceptance.

Seán
Right, you know, you've let go of your own responsibility for your own ego, and you've entrusted it to another person. You know, I think, really, you're probably one of these people now, which might be a courage-giver to other people or other poets through your poems. But I wonder who your courage-givers, or permission-givers, have have been poetically.

Victoria
I would love the idea of being a permission-giver. That sounds amazing. I've had so many, and I'm always searching for more, and it's just interesting, the idea of permission, because we have it already.

Certainly, I think very early on, Yeats, I think, gave me permission to be passionate, and maybe a little bit nerdy and embarrassing in my passions. Kavanagh gave me permission to be grumpy and cantankerous and made it okay for me to maybe see that I mightn’t necessarily feel like I fit in—but I don't know. Does anyone? And then, of course, for the dramatic two very different writers: Sylvia Plath, obviously, who felt like coming home when I read her, and Flannery O'Connor. I think both of them, for the drama [laughs], the drama and the religion, and I think particularly with Plath, taboos that I would have thought were in place for me around things I could or could not write about. And I think with Flannery O'Connor, the sense of her being, you know, problematically in many different ways now, looking at her from this perspective—and indeed then. You know, a Southern woman, you know, conservative background, Catholic, and writing these incredibly violent stories. I think, too, Sally Rooney. I'm just really interested in how she writes about relationships and about the heart and about interdependence. And in a sense, watching, reading Normal People, and certainly watching the show at a very particular time in lockdown and in the kind of beginning of this disintegration of things at home. That sense of wanting interdependence, actually craving it, and realizing it's something that, rather than keeping your heart in the freezer, it's far better served, and you are in your life, by allowing it to be passed around—maybe not willy-nilly, per se, but certainly taking a risk and allowing yourself to be—shock, horror—loved—

Seán
Yeah, yeah.

Victoria
—for who you truly are, the whole messy, gooey lot.

Seán
Yeah, and it's often not as scary to other people as we imagine it might be.

Victoria
I hope not. [Laughs]

Seán
I’m just nearing the end of Intermezzo now, and I'm really enjoying it. So big thumbs up for Sally Rooney.

Okay, so before we leave, I’d just like to ask you, what's next? If you can tell us, are you working on anything? Are you having a break? You know, what's going on? Everything is okay.

Victoria
I don't do breaks, Sean. [They laugh.] I really mean to, and yeah, I'm working on maybe doing more breaks. I'm working on essays at the moment.

Seán
Wow.

Victoria
I've had a few published, one in The Stinging Fly. Olivia Fitzsimons commissioned me to write about being a writer with ADHD, and that was an extremely interesting thing to do. And there are a few things, I suppose, that I'm really interested in exploring in essay form that don't seem to be packaged in poem in my head—they're just not poems. So I've been working on some of those, dabbling a little bit with maybe longer fiction, which I find really daunting, and it's like starting again, and procrastination, which is part of the ADHD rainbow of symptoms, and I'm sure everyone has to some degree experienced it—It's quite profound. And I'm really interested in observing that in myself, and maybe using that, maybe later, to explore that kind of experience in poetry.

Seán
Yeah, so essays, maybe a novel…

Victoria
Maybe, just three or five books all at the same time.

Seán
Well, thank you so much for taking time out of a very busy life to talk to us. Victoria Kennefick, thank you very much.

Victoria
Thank you, Seán, it's been wonderful.

Seán:
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt

Victoria’s poem "The Ego is Crushed Like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of Its Own Smugness" is from her collection egg/shell published in 2024 and aired with permission from Carcanet.

"Heart's Limbo" by Carolyn Kizer comes from Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems, 1960–2000 published in 2002. It was used with permission from Copper Canyon Press.

Coming up next week, poet Mícheál McCann on the challenges of writing about queer domesticity, Mark Doty’s impact, and the power of a firefly in the right hands.

Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast.
We’d also love to hear from you; drop us an email at
theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.

The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.

Thanks for listening.