Lit From Within — The Understory Conversation

Peter Kenny chats with Charlotte about his poems in the new Mariscat Sampler One, as together they probe ‘memory street’.

Charlotte Gann: Hi Peter, I’m excited to be embarking on this conversation with you… Your beautiful Mariscat Sampler One poems – which are just out, in the excellent company of poems by Helen Evans and Marilyn Ricci – make such an enthralling group. They feel raw to me, and tender, and excitingly exploratory: as though the reader gets to embark on this real journey back, with you.

We’ve decided to open with one of the nine poems in the group. ‘Forgiveness: A Guided Meditation’. Fourteen lines, ten syllables per line, a perfectly contained box of a poem (sonnet):

Forgiveness: A Guided Meditation

Then who am I, if the past is a hoax?
The voice coaxes me down memory street
(first left on ninety per cent fiction lane)
to delve in long-lost daddy’s rubbish bin.
What’s inside? Me – maybe – five, bleary eyed,
white as a bean root. The sobbing isn’t
relief, my inner child seems revolted
by these groping arms. So I slam the lid,
and dither at the gate of my dad’s house.
I confabulate his ever-closed door
absorbing details of its furniture:
letter flap, flat unobtrusive knocker,
the tiny coffin of a black doorbell,
the black electric flex that’s feeding in.

Peter Kenny, from ‘Chrononaut’, Mariscat Sampler One, Mariscat Press, 2024.

So… that first line is intriguing and – I think – for you, key?

Then who am I, if the past is a hoax?

I love this as a way in, and the whole idea of ‘memory street’ and ‘ninety per cent fiction lane’. There’s nothing lulling, for me, about the poem that follows, though. And I’m curious about that ‘voice’ that ‘coaxes’…

Can you, perhaps, start by saying more about your first line?

Peter Kenny: Thanks Charlotte, I’m looking forward to it too.

That first line emerges from my preoccupation with the unreliability of memory.

It seems to me, so much of our identity is based on what we can remember of our own past – especially memories of our childhoods. These feed into the stories we tell ourselves (and other people) about who we are.

But what we can remember is, at best, unclear and often false. Surely then our identity, and who we think we are, is built on shifting sands. We are not quite who we think we are. (And the idea of the past being a hoax is everywhere too. Everything from moon landings to election results is all fake news. It seems to me that the idea of a reality most of us can agree on is evaporating.)

This poem’s title, ‘Forgiveness: A Guided Meditation’, is actually quite literal. For a year or so I attended a meditation group in the back of a shop in London. It was a new-age atmosphere, with exotic aromas and people om-ing. I most enjoyed the sitting in silence – and it was a good antidote to the day job. Sometimes we did ‘a guided meditation’. With closed eyes we’d listen to a recording of a voice telling you to focus on your breath, relaxing your body and so on.

One guided meditation, however, was designed to send love to your ‘inner child’. And in a way this is ‘the voice’ of the poem. Like everyone else in the room, in an almost hypnotised state, I recalled a very early stage in my life. It hadn’t been a happy time, and it also brought up memories of my father who I’ve not seen since that time.

CG: Oh, I see – so, yes, a literal ‘voice’ coaxing you back. And yes, the unreliability of memories: I know your sequence opens with that wonderful poem ‘The House With Blue Curtains’. A whole happy memory of a grandfather swooping back and forth a four-year old you; before the whole thing’s refuted by your mother’s account: how ‘he never / lived a day in the house with blue curtains.’

Yet, don’t your poems also explore the paradoxical reliability, if you like, of memory?

I mean, how the memories we have, or feel ourselves to have, do tell us something – something important. And they won’t let us go until or unless we explore the truth in the kernel of them?

Writing poems is one way, perhaps, into this?

(I’m reminded of two questions that came up for me, in writing The Girl Who Cried: ‘How can I wake at fifty / with the same pain I woke with aged five?’ and ‘Do we carry the babies we were / inside us our whole lives?’)

PK: I often think that memories do have a message, whether they are true or not. The brain has obviously decided there is something significant about an event to have stored it or perhaps retold it in a different way.

There are some memories that I hope will just go away, and many do of course get sloughed off.

But I’ve begun to wonder if I can sift out more of what’s real from what’s imagined. It’s a project that is doomed to failure, but I’m finding it tremendously interesting. What got me started on this is that I am writing about a time in my life when I was three and four where I ‘remember’ experiencing quite profound neglect. In brief I was given to my paternal grandmother to look after while my mum went off to work, and I ‘remember’ being locked into the back garden every day and fed on the step.

Whether this really happened or not is unknowable. Maybe I made it all up. It does seem a bit of an odd thing to pull out of mid air though, or maybe it did happen just once. Or maybe it is as I remember it, as a something that happened every day. This isn’t a ‘poor me’ exercise, I turned out fine. But it is a useful personal example, a kind of case study. I have found it very interesting to grasp the nettle and write about it. I couldn’t face doing that earlier in my life for some reason.

The idea that we are mysterious to ourselves is really magnetic to me. One of the many reasons I loved your collection The Girl Who Cried, was precisely this questioning of what is solid in us. And the line ‘The house with no door looks welcoming’. I love that line. It speaks to me about what I can’t remember. But it’s there nevertheless. I have come to really like the little drawings in there too. It’s as if someone, you or someone else, left clues about the past.

One of the poems in this little Mariscat group, ‘Thunderstruck’, ends with the words, ‘I was meant to be here; to be part of it.’ And this is a celebration of actually, for a few minutes, a feeling of belonging rather than of doubting, a memory of a kind of ecstasy.

CG: Peter, I’m so glad you mentioned ‘Thunderstruck’, as I was about to too. It’s a poem in your group I’ve been most… struck by! I find it stunning (maybe even my very favourite).

It seems to me a poem of resilience. That eighteen year old self on the top deck of a London bus: all so vividly captured. I can relate to it utterly – that fragile age, and the tiny vital sense, though, of belonging, beyond where we’ve come from. (Like Mary Oliver’s ending to ‘Wild Geese’: ‘announcing your place / in the family of things’.) It’s a fantastic, beautiful poem.

I also agree that the time to write about a thing – to explore it through writing, and thus potentially also eventually share something at the heart of it with others – announces itself, too, as we sit at our desks and discover just what it is we’re writing.

I like your suggestion of using this particular memory (or maybe-memory) as a case study – to explore the whole experience and process of revisiting and weighing early, potentially traumatic, memory. (I’ve also felt quite case-study inspired myself – certainly, in writing Noir and The Girl Who Cried; motivated by if-I-feel-like-this, that’s interesting useful information; and I can’t be the only one…)

I love ‘The idea that we are mysterious to ourselves is really magnetic to me.’ Me too – I discover, as you say that, feeling a space in my chest expand…

It seems to me close to self acceptance and self compassion too: the not needing to know, exactly; but trusting ‘the soft animal of your body’ (to return to Mary Oliver), and what we learn by listening quietly?

Do you feel it’s your ‘unconscious’ you’re listening to: attending for ‘clues’? As you conduct this exciting experiment you’ve embarked on?

PK: What AM I listening to? Well, that’s an interesting question. To my mind there are three layers. The crust is made up of all the tiresome and egocentric scribbly stuff in our conscious minds.

Beneath that is the subconscious, which contains all the submerged stuff from our own lives, the fossils of our memory. I think all writers try to access this layer. I always try to invite my subconscious to participate in my creative work – like noticing my ‘mistakes’ and considering what they tell me about what I’m truly thinking.

Deeper still is a place as big as the ocean, perhaps akin to Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. It’s something you can draw on, that belongs and connects to everyone.

You know this old story… A fish is asked what it thinks of the sea. The fish flounders for a bit (sorry), but then replies ‘What’s the sea?’ The point being it’s hard to notice what you are utterly immersed in.

While meditating I’ve occasionally experienced a loss of the sense of my self. It is a beautiful connected-to-everything feeling. One memory stands out. While meditating I felt that I was no longer in the room. I was outside, listening to the people on the street, or in the nearby park. I felt that I was a giant bell (without the clapper inside), resonating at the edge, not sitting in the back of a shop. Later, when I visited the ancient city of Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, I entered at least one temple shaped like a bell, and it gave me the strangest sense of déjà vu.

The feeling is a bit like what I describe in ‘Thunderstruck’. It’s like a halibut suddenly realising… ‘Holy smokes… I’m in the sea!’ The filmmaker David Lynch, an advocate of Transcendental Meditation, writes about his connection to this deeper space in his book Catching the Big Fish about creativity and meditation.

So that’s a long-winded way of saying that I listen to my subconscious. But I think we are all plugged into something beyond that – perhaps like Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious – that belongs to all of us. Every now and then, if we are very lucky, something from this deeper level bubbles up into our lives, bringing a sense of vibrant connection. And, going back to your earlier point, I believe Oliver is a great example of someone who taps into this source.

CG: Ah, yes, indeed – what a lovely account. And I respond so readily to the marrying of the personal poetic endeavour with the deeper out-there something – it’s long felt richly paradoxical to me how exploring darker corners of my life and isolation has been so closely related to a burgeoning sense of belonging and connection. It’s subtle – there’s a lot of silence and perhaps perceived disapproval in the reception, in some ways. But at a more core level, a liberation – out of shame and embarrassment and into something more like connection. With myself. And with the ‘sea’ I swim in…

The worst and the best of being alive (for me) side by side. And the poems feel light, for me, not heavy or dark. Lit.

I like your poem ‘Relic’. (An aside: the TV series Detectorists has always made me smile, and think of poetry circles!) And that image you share of:

the anoraked hobbyist you spot
beyond the broken wall,
who shares the sky with crows

I see this as an image for the strange undertaking we’ve been discussing… ‘the opposite of business, / of trade or industry’ – and yet, somehow, precious?

Thank you so much Peter, it’s been brilliant talking.

PK: Exactly! Venturing into the spidery places is where it’s at. For example, reading The Girl Who Cried, the more difficult and probing the exploration of dark corners becomes, the more it resonates with your readers and feels true. I love the idea of poems being lit from inside, as if they have their own electricity, like a house full of people on a dark street.

‘Relic’ is a kind of message in a bottle poem for me. I have always been obsessed by the idea of silence and sometimes think of poetry as a way of annexing territory from it. I love the notion that there are entire continents of thoughts and images yet to be articulated, and I feel impatient with people who tell you that everything’s been done before – be it in music or poetry or any other art form. ‘Relic’ is also a kind of fantasy, imagining a poem being discovered one day in the future, like a coin found in the mud.

Thank YOU Charlotte, I’ve loved having the opportunity to chat with you in this way. Your work has absolutely inspired me in recent years, and I hope I’ve not repaid you by being too much of a blowhard.