Clearing Out - Joe Wright

When  we  redid  the  plastering  in  our  house

everything  was   bare,  there  was   unforeseen

space, nothing on the walls, no souvenirs

from   our   lives.   I   had   a   fear  of   touching

anything. The  corridor  seemed  to stretch me;

there was so much whiteness but the house

felt   darker.    Stacked   portraits    kissed    the

backs        of each others’ heads at our feet. We

had      nothing to look at but ourselves.

And when it was done and we put it all

back  in  the  same   places,  it   was   like   they

weren’t in the same places, and  once I  caught

Dad  glassy eyed, vacant, as  if  he  was  looking

around for  something  he  knew  wasn’t  there:

boxes full  of  him  that  I’ve  tried  to  tear  into

with scissors, but stay shut.

According to the OED, the word ‘souvenir’ relates to the Classical Latin verb ‘subvene’, meaning ‘to come to the aid of; to rescue from someone or something’. These are the rabbit holes of researching questions for Postscripts! But ‘Clearing Out’ does appear to invest in this etymology — in the crutches of souvenirs and what we do when they are put away, with no objects left to ‘rescue’ us. What do we need saving from?

This poem is, in some ways, about the question of how we know the people we love. Families tend to build up things like shared codes and artefacts, and I wanted to explore what might happen when we take away all that baggage. Is that even possible? Would we know them better, or feel cut off from them? I suppose what we might need ‘saving’ from is the sheer size of that question.

Twice in the first stanza, the house and its contents animate as though in response to the plastering: ‘the corridor seemed to stretch me’ and ‘stacked portraits kissed the backs of each others’ heads at our feet’. How near the second phrase comes to the ‘stacked portraits kissed […] our feet’, an image of subservience. Something altogether more rebellious is going on. Are you interested in the relationship between spaces and their occupants?

When writing the poem, I had in the back of my mind the Renaissance trope of the poem-as-house, which I feel is a rather tired conceit these days. The word ‘stanza’ comes from the Italian for ‘room’. We often think about ‘filling up’ a poem’s form with words. I wanted to play around with the house/poem comparison — the furniture in this poem is familiar to the speaker, but cannot be controlled by him. In that way, I wanted the poem to have an unsteady relationship to the space around it (a lot of line endings leave the thought incomplete, wandering into the space), like the white corridor in the poem. I find myself thinking about spaces a lot in my writing — about how they change us and shape us.

Can you talk about formatting the poem?

This is linked to the last question — I wanted the poem to look and feel tightly contained and sparse, much like the emptied house. Also, like quite a few of my poems, it’s not too far off from the dimensions of a sonnet. That wasn’t planned, but it fits with how the poem subconsciously plays on those tropes from Metaphysical poetry. it’s not a sonnet, but works itself out in a similar way. I suppose you could also think of the two stanzas as ‘boxes’, if you squinted a bit.

Although final lines are tough customers, ‘Clearing Out’ manages a last, raw gasp I guess most poets would yank your arm off for. How do you hold your nerve approaching the end of a poem?

That’s very kind! Often the last line comes to me first, and then the game is to try and find a way to get there. This was one of those cases. I think the key with last lines for me is listening, trying to find the point where the rhythm clunks into place. In this poem, however, I wanted to try and throw the rhythm off a little, which hopefully gives the sense of attempting to open something, before the last three words close it off again. You could almost say they are the sellotape on the box.

You received the RF Kuang Writing Bursary (congratulations!) to help develop a draft of your first poetry pamphlet over the summer. How’s that going? What do you see as your next steps creatively?

I’m really grateful to the donors of the bursary, which has given me the opportunity to prioritise writing this summer in a way I haven’t been able to before. Working towards a pamphlet may take time, and I want to make sure I get there at the right point without rushing, but it’s been lovely to just explore over this summer. I now feel like I have a body of work with its own ecosystem, which I can start to send out into the world! I’m also really grateful to all the people who have inspired me in Cambridge, like my college mum Ahana Banerji. I’m learning so much from all the fantastic writers here at the moment!

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