Here, Kate Hendry shares a poem, and chats with Charlotte about the vital balance – in life and in poetry – between hiding and being seen.
Breaking the News Leena says, it’s absolutely not a death sentence, not at all. Cheryl says, not just the majority, the vast majority survive. Hilary says, this is a chapter in your life and, you can do this! Hamish says, I miss you, Mum says, perhaps think carefully, and happy to talk or not talk, whenever suits. Sarah says, just wondering how you are? Wondering whether you’ve negotiated time off work? She says I hope, I hope. So does Mum, and Hamish, who sends a wave from round the corner and a list of crime novels such as Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman. Penny says, you sound positive and calm. Roy says how sorry he is to hear of my troubles, he tells me to look after myself, to be good to myself. Mum asks, can she look after me? Dad says, be brave. Nicki says, your heart is strong. Hilary says, keep the updates coming! Jonny says, your news is awful, Vivienne is full of anger and sorrow. Mum thinks I should take extra Vitamin D. Becca is thinking of me, as is Kathleen and Chris and Jen and everyone at work – they are behind me and have my back. A huge FECK, says Morag. That is shit news, says Susan. I bet you hear stories like this all the time, she says – My Auntie Mae; my friend; my student, Lyn; my sister, Lucy; my close colleague, Wendy. She’s in stonking good health now, happy with her upgrade (one’s a tad higher than the other, but she can’t be arsed with more surgery). I can feel very confident, Teresa says, about the treatment I’ll receive; it is world-class, the best in Scotland, in the UK, in Europe. The NHS are incredible, says Rachel, fucking amazing, from her experience when Greg was at death’s door. Though it is, of course, shocking, brutal, terrifying, scary, overwhelming Kate Hendry, first published in The 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology
Charlotte Gann: Thanks, Kate. I read this powerful poem as a kind of tapestry of voices. It’s a beautifully controlled and executed piece, and I love the movement through it – arriving at the inevitable input of lots of friends-of-friends’ good outcome stories – before landing in that final line of washed-up adjectives. They seem like words, concepts, that haven’t found a workable home within the piece?
What it conjures for me is how, when we deliver difficult news, we then also have to deal with everyone else’s reactions. This provides a covering of sorts, but it’s also a complicated, energetic exercise. The tendency to offer solutions, hope, encouragement is strong and near-universal, I suspect. This poem shares a recipient’s experience: with all those things coming at you from all sides. Other people’s anxiety?
I, as a reader, experience it as a wall of words more than communication. A barrier. There’s very little room inside – no stanza breaks, and notably, actually, no words at all from you, the poet… The cumulative effect, for me, is of a weird silencing? Does this make sense to you?
Kate Hendry: Yes, absolutely – none of the words are mine (even the adjectives at the end); there’s no space for my reaction to my own news, or my responses to others’ responses, if that makes sense. At the time, ‘responding’ did feel overwhelming – though many friends were sensitive enough to say something like ‘please don’t feel you need to reply to this’, it felt against the grain not to. Like a refusal of communication or conversation.
I wanted the poem to capture that sense of being bombarded with responses to my news (of a breast cancer diagnosis), bombarded with love, really. Friends and family responded in all the ways one might expect; with shock and sympathy, positivity and practical suggestions. I am lucky enough to have lots of good friends, so there was rather a flood of messages!
I had mixed feelings about these responses to my diagnosis. I wanted to hear more survivor stories, as if they had the power to shape my own future. (I still find these tales beguiling.) I hated hearing people’s horror, their fear for me. But more than this, I began to lose track of my own response to my diagnosis – how I actually felt. And I found myself reassuring others – minimising and tidying up my feelings, and the seriousness of the diagnosis (if you’re going to get cancer, breast cancer’s the best one to get, and mine’s the best – most treatable – kind of breast cancer etc) to make things (myself?) easier for them.
CG: Yes, I get this, I think. I very much like your expression ‘tidying up my feelings’. There is something, isn’t there, about the quickfire exchange of reassurances – our impulse to rush in and fix – that tidies something up, and shuts it down?
We’ve couched this whole challenge sometimes in terms of how can we stay with our discomfort? (I ended my poem ‘Our Children’s Childhoods’, published on The Friday Poem, with that notion.)
We’re each learning to work with the instrument of our human selves – like sea anemones, we are all, I think, constantly opening and closing to protect ourselves. (And there may be times when we need to push everything and everyone away?)
So, maybe there’s always some sort of barrier of resistance to push through or tolerate to get somewhere less familiar, and explore what we don’t already know.
KH: I love your poem, Charlotte, and its final question resonates with me very much.
I often find I shrink my difficult feelings so they’re more comfortable/acceptable for others. But when those tidied-up feelings are also overshadowed by other people’s feelings, it can become impossible to hear anything of one’s inner experience. I do vanish in the poem, but it’s also a way to empty myself of other people’s voices. To give them their words back. In any case, it’s the end of conversation – no one replies to a poem, do they?
The passivity and silence in the poem very much reflects the experience of being a patient. Silence is impossible to enact in a hospital and hard in relationships, but it is a possible response in a poem.
I think it’s also just very hard to write a poem – directly – about fear. Using other people’s (adult) voices is a kind of fix – I’m leaving it up to the reader to infer my unvoiced/unvoiceable fear.
I love your image of the sea anemone. They only open up to feed when all around them is still and quiet.
CG: Yes – to so much here.
I like your thoughts about silence. Silence can be powerful, I think.
And I like the idea of sitting quietly until the water runs clear again before we respond (when we can manage it!). It’s a navigating between our aloneness and our communication with others? Maybe our poems can provide an antechamber between the two!
KH: Jane Hirshfield says in her essay ‘Poetry and Hiddenness: Thoreau’s Hound’ (in Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry – see Other Resources) that ‘a distinctive self is created by navigating a path between the desire for hiddenness and the wish both to see and be seen’ (p. 21) and I find that helpful – in writing and in relating – that these energies are necessary and complementary.
Hirshfield quotes Winnicott on ‘the dilemma of childhood’ – ‘it is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found’ (p. 21). This contradiction makes sense to me. I feel a bit as if my poem’s about a wrong/inept way of relating – I should/could have said how I felt more clearly, I should/could have asked for what I needed… But I didn’t. We can’t always, can we? And perhaps poetry arises out of that not-saying.
I suppose I’m trying to get to the tension that exists between speech and silence, revealing and concealing, sharing and keeping things to oneself. Hirshfield’s synonyms for the hidden – ‘mystery, secrecy, camouflage, silence, stillness, shadow, distance, opacity, withdrawal, namelessness, erasure, encryption, enigma, darkness, absence’ (p. 14) – point to its complexity, richness and allure.
CG: I hear all this (I think). I know that quotation from Winnicott about its being ‘a disaster not to be found’: it really speaks to (and I think for) me.
And I understand hiddenness as a sanctuary. Utterly!
Always, it’s vital to me, in my own work and others, that an awful lot is left unsaid. (One of my treasured collections is Tom Duddy’s The Hiding Place, by the by.) And I never enjoy poetry (or conversation!) that seems to me to ‘spill’ unreservedly.
I like that image that I pick up from your Jane Hirshfield quotation: the carving out, almost, of ‘a distinctive self’.
I think for me there’s a really fine balance between withholding and intruding: but that takes me back to my sea anemone. And also, my sense that we each see the world differently, and from our own unique vantage point – of being inside ourself and no one else.
KH: None of us is entirely hidden or visible, I’m sure, and both positions are as necessary for us as for your sea anemone. I suppose, to return to my poem/our poetry generally, I just wanted to make sense of my need to hide/remain invisible.
In my long-recovery, the urge to shield myself is SO intense. I woke up this morning feeling fine, but sure that what I most need is to be soothed (to soothe myself), and be protected. I know this isn’t new, entirely, and is triggered by the trauma of treatment, but it’s a very demanding voice. Last night I dreamt of a small flat with sky-blue walls that was mine and which felt like home – such relief. There was no one there but there was a spare room for visitors. So, I think for me, currently, hiddenness is a sanctuary – a place of solace and safety.
CG: Oh, how wonderful: to have made it ‘home’ to your small flat with sky-blue walls. Love this!
Feeling safe is essential: I couldn’t agree more. The Tao Te Ching says there is ‘…. a time for being safe, / a time for being in danger.’ It’s only once we’re safe, perhaps, we can begin to open up to explore what it means to be in danger?
Thanks so much for talking, Kate. This seems to me such an interesting and vital area, as well as unusually hard to put into words…