Sister Siren's Room

My friend, the very talented musician and singer/songwriter Andrew Docherty asked, no commanded that I put one of my poems on this blog so that he could share it with his links. I’ve decided to not only put up a poem but also do something that I’ve never done with one of my poems before: analyse it to discover its inspiration and how it was made. 

Why would I want to do this?

I often compare how a poem comes into being to alchemy. Yes, I AM consciously twisting the right words into the right place into the right order but there’s more going on than this. Sometimes the mind is so busy writing through the technical nuts and bolts, it doesn’t see what is the poem is doing all by itself, the associations it’s making at the subconscious level. A kind of wood for the trees mode.

It’s only after I’ve finished writing a poem and allowed it to settle for a while that I can see clearly what has gone on. Often, it doesn’t even happen then but only when I perform it in front of an audience and people give me feedback. Sometimes, what they say surprises me because I didn’t consciously - and it’s important to highlight this - put those elements in the poem. 

So this is an interesting exercise - to look at my poem as though it wasn’t written by me. Of course that’s not entirely possible to hide yourself from yourself but I’m game. I’m also intensely interested in process, sometimes much more so than the end product so that’s another reason to break it down and perhaps learn a thing or two. If it means I strip away mystery, so be it. 

The Genesis:

The poem that follows was written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In the kind of genius idea that makes me knuckle my mouth because I wish I had thought of it, the poet Simon Barraclough decided to make something of Norman Bates saying “12 cabins, 12 vacancies” in the film and call it Psycho Poetica.

He gathered 12 poets, including yours truly, divided the film into 12 equal parts of 10 minutes and assigned each section to a poet. We were charged to write a 2 minute poem that concentrated on just our section. The result was a mashed up, kaleidoscopic and poetic version of the film. We performed the poems in the sequence of the film at the British Film Institute, the White Chapel Gallery, Southbank Centre and Latitude Festival. Our performances were accompanied to stirring effect by a four-string quartet, the Bleeding Heart Narrative and still images that contextualised each section of the film lent all the performances a three dimensional quality. The poems have since been published in the Manhattan Review. 

Not bad for a little 2 minute poem. I love performing this poem, it’s juicy and rhythmic in my mouth, I relish rolling the great sounds under and over my tongue but it was a bugger to write! I’ll get into the analysis after you read the poem. 

Please bear with me, for some reason this infernal blog platform won’t let me align the poem into the pleasing stanzas of 4 lines each of the original. 

The $40,000 Pill

Stifling in your apartment Marion,

you can’t hold your own gaze in the mirror.

Sun shines but it’s not for you, even your own shadow

trips before you. 

Thirty plus with a yen for hardware store dealers,

too old to grab for lunchtime gropes on the side. Too sick

to pander to loudmouth high-rollers with nothing to declare

but the flash of cold, hard cash. 

Little league blonde, girl Friday ten years in the making,

ordinary woman, extraordinary temptation. Take one

last gasp to fit the skin of the American Dream before

it jump cuts to black. 

Get the hell out of Dodge, white bird, take flight. 

Go to seed to get hitched in black torpedo bra. Before

you leave Marion, be sure to turn Mama’s eyes 

to the wall. 

Lowery, askance at the crosswalk while the die

casts your face glazed, the twist in your gut knits

the flat planes of your perky mug, and that headache

still woodpeckers away. 

Two days on the lam, in a black ‘56 Ford Mainline, desert

highway yawns cacti and white lines. Check your status

in rear-view, eyes fixed, clench the steering wheel, 

will Sam be pleased to see you?

All that driving, those inner voices clamouring, that bitten

lip and gnawed finger. Violas breathe hard, stringing

and plucking dread over your mind and that wad

of greenbacks stashed in your black handbag. 

From Arizona to California on a wing and not enough 

prayer. We can’t see you or your white picket fence 

in John Law’s aviators. Look! His car’s a raven black hulk

in your rear-view mirror. 

Hurtling from headaches to headlights, U-turns

and headlines, a magpie in car reg. ANL-709. 

You can’t buy off unhappiness with pills, you said. 

Marion, you should have spent the weekend in bed. 

The Anatomy:

First the conscious decisions I made.

As I’ve mentioned, the poem had a difficult birth. I admit that I got caught in the headlights of the calibre of poets I would be performing alongside and that stymied me for a while. I watched Psycho 3 times over before I got an inkling of what I could write. Further, I watched my specific section over and over again to get some clue of a way into the poem. I immersed myself in all things dissecting Hitchcock on the internet until I was blue in the face which was not a good look given that I’m black. Some of what I read spilled unconsciously into the poem but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

After all of that I came up with 4 elements as a framework on which to build the poem:

The title: Just before she decides to steal the money, Marion tells her boss and his obnoxious client whose money it is that she has a headache and is going to spend the weekend in bed. The subtext is that she is sick of being unmarried and wants to find a way to circumvent the financial reasons Sam Loomis has given for being unable to marry her. Ergo, the snap decision to steal the money and run off to her lover so that they can get married. The money was going to be the pill to cure her ills. I seem to remember that I even came up with the title first which is unusual. 

The tone: While I was reading up on Psycho I got to wondering if it could be classed as film noir. Which led me to thinking of Philip Marlowe and channeling that tough-edged, laconic classic detective tone of voice. I wanted it to put the listener in a certain time and place. Hence the decision to use expressions like ‘on the lam’, ‘greenbacks’, ‘get the hell out of Dodge’, ‘high-roller’, ‘girl Friday’ and ‘John Law’. 

The point of view: I knew in my bones that I had to address Marion directly hence the choice of writing in the second person voice. This was going to be a sort of cautionary tale with an unpleasant bite in the narrator’s voice. 

You might notice that the poem recounts, scene by scene, what is actually going on in the film so I had the problem of how to avoid the poem becoming just a straight description. Without the last two lines the poem would have fallen flat. Those last two lines give the poem its punch and tie the whole poem neatly back to the title making it sound the note of caution I set out to convey. There’s also the irony that in the film Marion says “you can’t buy off unhappiness with pills” and fails to heed her own advice. 

There were decisions made line by line too. Some of them not so subtle like the rhymes, near rhymes, internal rhymes, consonance and where I placed the line breaks. Even so, I worked hard to ensure that they didn’t draw undue attention to themselves, that they would read like those were the only words I could use in that particular place of the poem. You can hear me performing the poem on the link below.

The $40,000 Pill 

You’ll notice that the sound and rhythm have a swaying, song-like quality to them. It wasn’t just the poetic devices that led to that way of speaking the poem but the urge to channel that gumshoe detective voice too. Also there are many monosyllabic words with hard-edged consonants like c, k and g to make the voice more cutting. 

More subtly, I took a cliché - ‘on a wing and a prayer’ - and by the simple expedience of adding ‘not enough’ made it suit the purpose which also bled it of the banality of cliché in order not to make the reader cringe. I even chose to call the policeman John Law because it was only two syllables whereas ‘the policeman’ is an unwieldy four syllables that would spoil the rhythm. Plus it felt right to name him. 

Now, on to the unconscious decisions. The bit I call alchemy. The decisions that spilled unconsciously into the poem. The things I couldn’t see until I’d had time to stand back from the poem and look at it more objectively. 

Black and white: The poem is in monochrome, reflecting the black and white of the film. I mention black explicitly 4 times and white 3 times and more subtly in the words ‘headlines’ and ‘crosswalk’, what we call a zebra crossing here in Blighty.

It’s emphasised even further in the play of light and shade ‘headlights’ and ‘Sun shines but it’s not for you, even your own shadow’. It’s there to spooky effect when John Law looks at Marion - his black aviator sunglassed face looming over Marion makes it look like she is looking into the black and white features of a skull. All that monochrome aided my being able to root the poem in a particular time and place and reference film making too. Especially Alfred Hitchcock’s.

Birds: I swear I didn’t know I was doing this at the time of writing but the poem is littered with references to birds. ‘White bird’, ‘flight’, ‘woodpecker’, ‘wing’, ‘raven’, ‘magpie’. Here’s how that happy coincidence worked.

In my section of the brief, there are constant visual and verbal references to Marion’s headache which made it seem like the headache was drilling right into her skull so when it came to saying all of that in a very simple way, I came up with the word ‘woodpecker’. Get’s the idea across with the minimum of fuss. Job done!

Again, in the last stanza I wanted to call Marion a thief but not in a bald way so ‘magpie’ seemed the way to go because magpies are known for stealing shiny objects ie. the money that was going to help build Marion’s shiny new life. I guess I was subconsciously referencing the stuffed birds in Norman Bates’ palour and in a wider context Hitchcock’s film The Birds. 

The gaze: if I was an academic of film theory this is where I’d get into what it means to see and to be looked at and how it works in film. Hitchcock seemed obsessed by the gaze. Mirrors abound in his films and he had a fondness for extreme close-up shots that showed you who is looking/staring at who and what can be seen and can’t be seen. 

In my poem, Marion ‘can’t hold your own gaze in the mirror.’ She needs to ‘be sure to turn Mama’s eyes to the wall’ (very early in the film it’s established that she fears her dead mother’s gaze ie. judgement). She ‘check(s) her status in rear-view’ (the mirror, leaving her past behind, the retrospective nature of her thoughts as she drives). ‘We can’t see you or your white picket fence in John Law’s aviators’ and ‘his car’s a raven black hulk in your rearview mirror’ (two for the price of one! Two mirrors in quick succession). Sunglasses usually reflect the person they are looking at but we can’t see Marion reflected in these sunglasses even though it is an extreme close-up shot. That and the spectre of John Law looming over her spell her doom. Hitchcock is giving us huge clues to what is going to happen but we don’t know this until we watch the film again to see how he does this.   

So what have I learnt by this process?

1. There are more powerful processes at work than I realised when I’m making a poem.

2. Trust my instinctual, subconscious, unknown side. It knows what it’s doing.  

3. It’s okay to give the poem its head. And get out of the way of yourself.  

4. Keep increasing my frame of reference and vocabulary about culture and the world in general. It helps me to become a better thinker and writer without my realising it. 

There’s more that I’ve learnt but that’s quite enough decoding for one night!

Performance Is The Thing - An essay I wrote for Philosophy Now magazine on the nature of performance. Read it.  

When I’m performing on stage, there’s no time for philosophising or contextualising. It’s all forward motion and on the edge emotion to get the thing across, to grab the audience by the scruff of the neck and keep a hold until I’m done.

But…I am a creature of ideas too and some would say I’ve got more than my fair share of an analytic bone. So I like writing for Philosophy Now magazine from time to time. The rigourous brow furrowing it demands in order to anchor what I think (and feel in the bones of me) and deliver it clearly and succinctly in everyday language does give me something of a high. Yeah, I’m a geek like that. 

Reading this article back five years later, I’m relieved to see it doesn’t make me cringe. It’s a bit hit and miss when you read stuff written by your younger self but this piece holds up to the scrutiny of my more discerning older self. Sure, I’d tweak, fine tune some of it now, from this vantage point but what I wrote then holds true. Now more so than ever. 

Most of my performances to date have primarily involved standing behind a microphone and giving recitals of my poetry to audiences. That, in its way, is all fine and dandy. I am grateful and lucky that I have an audience (audiences) who will part with its hard earned moolah just to hear my scribblings. I want to carry on doing that sort of thing for as long as people are prepared to listen to me. 

For quite sometime now though, I’ve been chafing against the constraints of this way of performing. When I am behind a mic, my instinct is to move, to embed the meaning of the words in my body and project that meaning outwards for the audience in gesture, facial expressions, tone of voice. I fear that this can sometimes come across as hammy in this kind of context. How then do I get to satisfy the urge to move while still maintaining integrity to what I am performing without seeming self-indulgent to my audience?

I hit upon a brainwave. Well, it seemed like a brainwave at the time. Since I obviously have a bent towards the theatrical, why not create theatre that uses words as a jump off point? I’m talking about theatre in all the ways there are to create theatre - using elements of text, audio, visual and lighting to tell stories. That in combination with the fact that I seem to be preoccupied with writing about the body made me think that I could make a virtue of using movement as another way of communicating ideas along with all the other elements I’ve mentioned above. 

This notion formed the basis of my application to the Arts Council for a grant towards professional development earlier this year. Thankfully, I got it and I am now working with a mentor director, Leo Kay, to devise a piece of theatre which is sensitive to how words can work dynamically with the body. 

If anything can sum up the kind of work I’d like to create, it’s this video here featuring the famous dancer Bill T Jones. 

I tend to think about my body these days as another tool for communication along with text, visuals and audio. Yes, I do think about it as a female body but I think about it more as one of the ways I’d like people to experience the work that I create. It has become a kind of divining rod to help me locate the provenance of what moves me to create stories, poetry, expression, art. I believe that the body is how we experience the world and how the world impacts on us. I often think about how it would feel to transcend the body and be in the world, experience fully without the means of a body? Maybe there’s a poem in there somewhere!

There’s certainly a poem in this Ted Talks lecture from the woman who wrote the Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler. Wow! She so eloquently talks about a lot of things I have unconsciously thought about regarding the body and how it interacts with the world. She is so deep into how she experiences the world through her body. The thing I most love about this lecture is how she extends the individual into the universal and in so doing, gets this little body here, mine, to think more deeply about what it is to be a female body and how I interact with the world. And oh my, does she write poetically and searingly honestly.  

I have many favourite bits that I could quote from her lecture but one of them (and the most succinct, in a way) she quotes from another writer:

 In his new and visionary book, “New Self, New World” the writer Philip Shepherd says,“If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world,which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong.”   

Love it. Stirring stuff! When I grow up into my body, I want to write like her. 

In view of the riots that have swept through London and other parts of England in the last week, I couldn’t have come across this at a more timely moment. Thanks for the heads up Naomi Woddis!

People who don’t write and people who aspire to write often ask the questions: where do your ideas come from? What is the source of your inspiration? 

I always thought that last question was kind of obtuse. Inspiration is of course everywhere. 

A couple of weeks ago 3 poets - Karen McCarthy (who recently came runner-up in the very prestigious Cardiff International Poetry Competition), Cath Drake and I - decided to go to see the Dirt exhibition at the Wellcome Trust. I say we went to see the exhibition but what we really did was sit in front of various exhibits for timed freewrites. Lots of ideas flying around when we read back what we had written to each other. 

This video exhibit inspired me to write a suite of poems under the heading of Dirt. 

Love, love, love the Wellcome Trust. They put on cracking exhibitions.

HYGIEIA from David Bickerstaff on Vimeo.

That’s me in the photograph, trying to make a flapping in the wind noise like the sails of a slave ship. I think the photographer, Richard Kaby, captured visually what I was trying to do with my body and costume. The performance was part of the BBC’s Africa Beyond Translations project in 2008. I wrote and performed a 30 minute monologue built around how African mythology had travelled away from its homeland and found new expressions in the West. I channelled the spirit of the trickster god from Vodun, Legba. His colours are black and red. He rules the crossroads, drums, language and communication.

Kind of appropriate for a writer, right? He’s become something of a touchstone. This is his veve/sygil:

If you were to meet him at the crossroads at midnight he might say something like this to you:

Omnipresence

Now that you know I am here, anywhere and everywhere

knock loudly on the door that is not there.

On the mountain up above, in the chasm down below

between heaven and hell I hum in limbo.

In the stirring of dust you will see my footprints

fluid, I turn on a whim, I’m the fly in the ointment.

I even out the odds, my mother-father’s seventh son 

throw me in the mix to keep things moving on.

Where lightning strikes twice, hear my thunderous laughter

a portal, ghost in the machine, I tinker with data.

I play hide and seek with mirrors, an old god with new tricks

I ride along the seam, the answer to the riddle of the sphinx.

I am the morning and the evening, a star like Venus

I get bladdered on rum, just like Bacchus.

In credit and in debit, in the red and in the black

I’ll toy with you before you make that blood pact.

I know semen and placenta, a gender-bender, shape-shifter

I’m the shock of a woman who needs the loo and comes out with a nipper.

My nature rises in santeria, sankofa, St Peter and Hermes the messenger.

In Brer Rabbit, Loki, Puck, Anansi and the signifying monkey.

From alpha to omega I know all the Greek, and unravel the babble

I am Legba, the grand translator and a wordy mother-fucker.

It’s in my nature to write over the gaps in all the guff,

the final measure of destiny, Fa beats in my blood.

It was during this project that I realised that I was interested in presenting spoken word and live literature in ways that didn’t rely wholly on the text. I was trying to use my body and costume as additional means of communication. When I’m on stage reciting a poem behind a mic for instance, I feel an almost overwhelming urge to move and I’m looking forward to exploring this in deeper detail.