Seán Hewitt: The Glimpse,
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.
Seán Hewitt: Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host. Sean
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.
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 Kennefick: Thank you so much, Sean, that was a beautiful
introduction.
Seán Hewitt: 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 Kennefick: 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 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 more 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.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, it's an incredible kind of consonance of
images there, of two very different experiences somehow coalesced
around the egg and 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, kind of 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 kind of conceive of this second collection? Was it
different to writing the first book? Did it feel different?
Victoria Kennefick: 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, 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. And 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. There was a it was 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 and
to still 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, 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 and but allowing myself a little bit more and being
more gentle with the work and myself, which was really difficult,
too. I found it hard.
Seán Hewitt: 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 and then read it for us.
Victoria Kennefick: 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, and, 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 Hewitt: Would you read it for us?
Victoria Kennefick: 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 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 try 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've 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 spouse's 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.
Seán Hewitt: Thank you. It's such a brilliant poem. I love it. You, 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 Kennefick: 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. So that was kind of the sense of it. I
really enjoy playing with form in my own, my own restrictions, not so
much when I have other peoples placed on me.
Seán Hewitt: 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 you know, 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 you know your beautiful fluttering into the
light. So it feels like a generous poem in the way that it approaches
that.
Was that tension between, you know, these two quite opposing things.
Was it at the forefront of your mind when you were when you were
writing, trying to get the balance between this tension? I mean,
Victoria Kennefick: 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 okay 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 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 Hewitt: Yeah, you know one thing I think this book does really
well. And you know, we sometimes don't see enough of 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 Kennefick: 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 mean, 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 any paperwork or and the person that is now co-parenting
our child with me, and we get on exceptionally well, really a 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, but 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 were 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 Hewitt: Yeah, you know, the poem is a way of empathizing with
various versions of yourself. It's such a great poem, Victoria.
And I think what you know, one of the things that that is so great
about it and all of your parents, even though they come from very
specific personal circumstances, I think you you have a way of 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, you know how I feel about
something," but to say that when it begins to enmesh every 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 Kennefick: That was so lovely. Thank you so much.
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 Hewitt: Welcome back to The Glimpse. Victoria Kennefick you've
chosen a poem by Carolyn Kizer. It's called "Hearts Limbo." Do you
want to tell us a little bit about it before you read it for us?
Victoria Kennefick: 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,
and 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. Yeah. Would you read it
for us? 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.
Seán Hewitt: That'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 kind of 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.
Victoria Kennefick: 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. And somebody said recently, "your
issues are in the tissues," which I thought was an amazing, 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, or don't do that. Yeah. 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 rub down, or slap it around, or tenderize it. She's like, Oh, here
it is.
Seán Hewitt: 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 Kennefick: It's terrifying.
Seán Hewitt: 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,
does both of those things. It kind of reminded me of the quote that
Has been doing the round from I think it was Hilary Mantel's
interview with the Paris Review. As 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 Kennefick: 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 heart 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, it's acceptance,
Seán Hewitt: Right? You know, you've let go of your own
responsibility for your own ego, and you've, you've entrusted it to
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, who your courage
givers or permission givers have have been poetically.
Victoria Kennefick: 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, yeah, 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 to
for me to maybe see that I might necessarily feel like I fit in, but
I don't know, does anyone? And then, of course, I think 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, the drama and the religion and the
the 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 Hewitt: Yeah, yeah.
Victoria Kennefick: for who you truly are, the whole messy, gooey
lot.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, and it's often not as scary to other people as we
imagine it might be.
Victoria Kennefick: I hope not. I hope not.
Seán Hewitt: 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
what's going on? Everything is okay.
Victoria Kennefick: I don't do breaks. Seán, I really mean to and
yeah, I yeah, I'm working on maybe doing more breaks. And I'm working
on essays at the moment, and 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 poem in my head, they're just not poems. I've been working on
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 Hewitt: yeah. So essays, maybe a novel and more poems,
Victoria Kennefick: So three or five books together.
Seán Hewitt: 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 Kennefick: Thank you, Sean, it's been wonderful.
Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host. Sean 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 and
Collected Poems 1960 to 2000 published in 2002 it was used with
permission from Copper Canyon Press
Coming up next week, poet Mícheáll 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 The Glimpse Poetry Podcast@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.