Interview with Hannah Sullivan

Marelle : Firstly, why did you accept this interview? 

Hannah Sullivan : Because you were French, and as an English language poet, it is incredibly difficult to get any sort of circulation of your work outside of the UK. The book has not been translated into very many languages. There were a number of editions that were kind of on the cards for the first book. There was a Greek one, but the publishing house, I think, went bust. There was a Spanish one, the translator fell out with the publisher. So I think neither of this has come out, but both are hoping to come out at some point. There have been a couple of other translations that were done, but the French one is really the only one that came up properly and got any kind of press. I suppose I’m partly interested in who would be interested in France, in poetry written in another language. I think it is quite difficult to translate it into French. One of the main difficulties, which interested me, actually was the difficulty of pronouns. So for example « You very young in New York » in French doesn’t have the same pronoun that means simultaneously, anybody, me, you particularly and you plural.

Marelle : Do you give any feedback to your translator after his first version? Do you feel your special rhythm is respected or do you consider the purpose of the poetry translator to recreate or be inspired by the original text and therefore provide a new sound scape ? I think Patrick Hersant put a lot of effort into reenacting a rhythm and musicality.

Hannah Sullivan : We had more discussions about the second book, and I haven’t seen the final version yet, but in the second book, there are a lot of lines, basically in pentameter. And in some places, the reasonable regularity of the rhyming, especially the final section of « Tenants » is very close to the form of a sonnet. It has 14 lines. And has a pretty similar rhyming pattern. I think it’s sufficiently close to being a sonnet, which obviously is a very well established and old French form as well as an English form. It would have been a mistake, as he originally did, to translate it into free verse. So I think in the second book, because some of the rhythmical patterns were perhaps more subtle and more traditional, you have more difficulty in apprehending them and seeing that. That was part of my intention, to have this very kind of classical kind of coal. I thought it was also more respectful to the material in the case of « Tenants ». It was really fun to work with him, especially on the rhymes. He was very keen to try to retain that. But obviously, rhyming in French and English are pretty different. My rhymes were more difficult to achieve, and therefore more bizarre, to do that in French. There are a few things which came out quite oddly. I was able to suggest, with the help of a former retired colleague at New College, Jefferson, who’s translated a lot of French. She took a look at it as well from the perspective of a native English speaker. The word « Lecky » is very colloquial in northern English, for electric blanket.

Marelle : Why did you choose to write poetry?  Why not short stories? I think especially about You very young in New York or Tenants. Your verses, when they’re not free verse, are very long, and your poems are often long or in prose especially in your last collection.

Hannah Sullivan : I do want to get on to the question of prose and verse. I do think there are quite a lot of misapprehensions about which parts are in prose and which parts. There is no prose in my mind in Three Poems. In « Tenants », the whole of the middle section is in prose. And I do not regard that as being apart, being a memoir in prose. I think I, or the other obviously, had laws, life studies, with the central section in prose. I also don’t think that in the other parts of « Tenants » that there is any prose. So I wouldn’t say that I have ever written a prose poem that at least I’ve included in one of my books. And I do get frustrated sometimes when people will say that the poem about New York is kind of very prosaic. Maybe it’s novelistic, or has a lot of objects and kind of clutter and detail. It’s more narrative, but it’s not prose. The tension between those contrived and artful was what I was trying to do and I think it’s more lineated in a regular way than most poetry that is further from free verse. As for the material, I would love to write prose. When I was younger, I dreamt of writing prose. I wrote a novel when I was 21 and it was quite derivative. My life would be very different if I wrote prose. Writing poetry is an activity that I do from time to time. 

Marelle : Was poetry an outlet for self expression that you weren’t finding fully in your academic research?

Hannah Sullivan : Because it’s the opposite, because it’s another means of expression, another outlet, outlet for self expression and lyricism, or I do think it does complement it very well. At the moment, I’ve been working on some translations of Horace, which are metrical translations, and I’ve just begun also writing some odes in the meters of Horace. So I was in a class, and students in undergraduate haven’t done very many yet, and a lot of really difficult questions about how you represent spondes in English, like you will have to use a troche. But so I think I’m learning quite a lot about me too from doing that. I haven’t been active as an academic researcher for a long time. So I would say more in reality, the time I’ve given to poetry, which is not just to writing it, but to being part of a sort of poetry community, to judging prizes, to going and giving readings, to reviewing other people’s books, has really just taken away the time that I would perhaps should have spent on academic research. I always see myself as somebody who does a lot of teaching and lecturing, a little bit of academic research, and then as much poetry as is possible.

Marelle : Diving into your verse, in what way would you say T S Eliot has inspired you whether it be in your academic research or in your collections? Why him? For instance it struck me in « but the two meter gap is too long for your arms, so you panic, the mask riding into your teeth like a thong. Sorry. Then the time left to come and the time that has gone will be placed in the pans of the scale and find balance. Sorry. » Of course made me think of the interruption verse that studies the poem  « Hurry up please it’s time » in The Wasteland or religious chorus in Ash Wednesday.

Hannah Sullivan : It’s interesting. I didn’t think of Eliot being an influence at all. I feel like there’s already an influence on the kind of prophecies that you get in Shakespeare plays or 17th century writing. But it may be that, in that sense, both Elliot and I were influenced by the same sort of fools prophecy in King Lear or by something in the more remote past, and have created some similarity. I mean, there’s a massive influence on the poems I wrote, I didn’t feel that he has been such an influence on more recently. There have been, in terms of writing free verse while retaining some kind of musicality. But mostly I was impressed by the number of different types of things that he got into his poems. By the range and the scope of available items, they have different parts of the world. I think that’s much more true of the early poems. It’s a very desiccated, you know, rather consciously impoverished sort of sensory landscape. But the writing opportunity, especially the wasteland, and which I think also last year, because it was a centenary, I was involved with a lot of events, and I performed it twice with other poets. So it was a poem that was in the air, sort of in everybody’s mind.

Marelle : Talking about the exchange of literary currencies between the US and England, why choose the subject of  « a young woman in NY »? Is it some kind of mythical theme from your biographical life?

Hannah Sullivan : Joan Didion, in Goodbye to all that, of course. You have to understand what that essay means, particularly in America. Around the time that I was writing that poem, there was a collection of people’s prose writer’s responses to that essay. So I think it was very late in 2000. It was a very popular form for young women to write about in prose, about their experiences, mostly leaving New York, but of being in New York. This was also the time of, you know, programs like Gossip Girls finishing on TV. Or The Sex and the City had been much earlier. And those things were not influences on me, but on the particular way that womanhood and sexuality were treated by New York, or might be a part of culture in New York. I think that I was living in America when I wrote this poem. So it was more a response to prose tradition. I would say the other influence on that poem was much more clear in the first drafts as Whitman, not just in the long line, but in the original version, there was an I, which eventually kind of got rid of. So the I was much more clearly calling out to the you, sort of across the passage of time, saying, sort of in a Whitmanian way, I am you, and I’m not you. I’m one with you, not one with you.

I think the poem improved when I got rid of the I speaker, but the sort of hospitality and non judgmental access of the poem, whether I wasn’t what the character was doing was approved of, but it also wasn’t disapproved of. It was sort of laid out quite flatly. I felt that came very strongly from the Leaves of Grass, from the sort of panoplies of experience the suicide, the pavement blabber, the horse, the man having sparkling his knife on the wheel that the things that he litanizes.

Marelle : Your poetry is very much rhythmic, but is also very visual. There are some images which are very striking « All summer you have been eating peaches from the green market » « now you are meeting them for Pisco sours at The peruvian dive bar » (You, very young in New York)

Hannah Sullivan : No, I wouldn’t say that at all. Actually, I enjoy film, but I would feel I was doing something very wrong if I was influenced by film and I was writing films. Adrianne Rich wrote a series of poems in the 70s, I think about it was certainly about films. A lot of them about old films. These sorts of things make me very unrequited about film. Like poets describing things that they have seen on the screen make me feel very uncomfortable as as it seems so derivative to and so the two dimensionality of it. I think that there may be some filmic or narrative tropes, like the trope of the of the cabs going by. I could see how you might think that is filming, but in terms of the individual images, it really has come from things that I’ve seen when, and I would say also, to a much greater degree than than film, from photographs. Photography has quite a big influence on rewriting. On the hardback of the first edition of my book, the front page had a photograph of me as a child on the cover. A lot of people mistook what genre of book it really was, and, actually discovered the book. There are more photos such as the Catholic church that I was interested in, the motorway, the garage in Charlie Cross Hospital. I had inherited my father’s photograph space, which is quite a keen amateur photography. I grew up in the north And I was living when I was writing that book in Shepherd Bishop, which is about five miles east. So during the there wasn’t much review. I would find myself taking my kids kind of to some of the places, because it’s more rural that I went to as a child, to the park that I went to today for me, the sort of open air space, or sort of hill.. So there’s this kind of superposition of right now and then that’s interesting. 

Marelle : And especially the photo of the Grenfell tower, that was one of my questions, because I think your poetry has a lot of contemporary references,

What’s your take on the use of contemporary references in your poetry, the Grenfell tower fire in 2017, references to apps, brands, dates, places, books? I’m particularly interested in this topic because I want to work in contemporary literature for my thesis (PHD) and I’m always curious about an author or poet’s reason to insert very casual and modern references.

Hannah Sullivan : I think insert is not the right word, because I’m not inserting them purposefully. Of course, they’re part of everyday life, and it’s more that to not include them, I would have to purposefully remove them, to produce something, I suppose, more classical or more enduring or more consciously poetic. But that feels very artificial. When I read the literature of the past, and most of the writing that I teach is from sort of 1780 to about 1930, I love those details. They’re the best way of doing history, knowing when you’re reading a Gaskell novel, or a George Eliot novel, the little details of the things that they eat, the types of products use, the kind of clocks that they have… And that’s true with Elliot’s work as well. I enjoy the drying rubber overshoes like I can imagine what those might be like. These duck shoes, that old fashioned Americans thing, the pills and the wasteland. I take pleasure from those details in other people’s work. The habit became most extreme in the final Poem of the second collection. I was very strongly influenced by James Schuyler’s poem « A Few Days » and if you know the poem, he is describing going back to his parents house. When he’s sitting on the train, he tells you exactly what he is eating and drinking. He’s drinking a fresca. I found that very fascinating, because I had been in America recently enough, I think it’s been discontinued, not to know exactly what that color of that bottle was like, and to me, the fact he was having a ham sandwich in a fresca is just so much richer than if you been having a ham sandwich and an olive lemonade.. If I’d never seen the bottle, maybe it would not have been not rich. 

Marelle : So maybe they’re a vector of certain images rhythm as well. Because if you put, for example, M&S into a poem. It already creates a different rhythm, a pause. 

Hannah Sullivan : In that case, it wasn’t, there was a poem that was sort of being finished during lockdown, but it was written. It was a sort of odd thing. It was written really just before COVID, like in February of 2020, we had a strangely locked in feeling, being a stay at home parent with kids and not being able to go out of the house. So it’s sort of important to have the Amazon, you know, m&s delivered straight to your door, rather than things I’ve acquired by wandering abroad in the world. But, my editor did not like the fact I had both Amazon and m&s within a couple of lines of each other to remove them. For the majority of people who live in England, they know exactly what I mean by this particular M&S slippers. They’re incredibly practical to have this sort of rubber heel. You can go out into the garden, or you can go outside, you know, to collect the post if it’s wet. They’re not delicate. They’re comfortable and padded like proper little shoes. But they are ugly, and very few people under the age of about 40 or maybe 50, would choose to buy them. Either they’re made of a sort of pink or navy blue, kind of fake velvet. So I think definitely you get a much clearer idea if you don’t. I do think that much is lost by it. 

Marelle : It’s true that your poems are already very dense, but I think it conveys even more density to have those little references for a  contemporary audience.

Hannah Sullivan : I know a lot of people don’t like it. It has been something that has been repeated. There were a few cases people thought that the purpose of it is more just for purely formal effect. So in the New York poem, I was very happy when I realized that I could rhyme. « I’m the star promen » with « Tonkotsu Misu ramen », just incongruity of the words, for these two totally separate languages. There’s no etymological connection. The ramen rhyme I found very funny and so weird, and it seemed to speak to the nature of eating in New York, where you really do bring things from many cultures into a kind of fusion. I imagine in the future that my writing will probably be a bit less of that kind of specificity. I think it is a younger person’s habit, and in some way, I don’t feel as exposed as I  was to particular products.

Marelle : Talking about the your last collection, especially the last poem, « Happy Birthday », made me realize that your poetry is very much filled of the idea of the feminine writing, because you do have a lot of moments when you choose to write about a feminine experience, sex, maternity here, menopause especially. Do you feel like those topics belong only to women’s literature?

Do you feel like taking part in a feminine literary lineage, that has endeavored to explore the feminine voice such as Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Julia Kristeva, (In Stabat Mater, that’s what it made me think of) Sylvia Plath, and more recently, authors like Joan Didion or Kate Braverman, and Adrian Rich Anna Kavan that I discovered recently?

Hannah Sullivan : Yes, I do. I do feel that I’m part of a tradition, although I wouldn’t put, for example, Emily Dickinson in that tradition, not because I don’t love her poetry, but the tradition would be women writing quite straightforwardly and candidly about the forms of experience that they have had to do with sex and pregnancy that have happened to them specifically because they’re women. But it is quite interesting that so many female poets are women who were gay or unmarried or did not have children. Dickinson will be an example of one of those poets, but Marianne Ward or Elizabeth Bishop. A lot of the best known female poets do not have these experiences and Bishop most certainly did. But she died when her children were tiny, and long before menopause. So Adrienne Rich certainly wrote about all of those things, but I think she’s a much less normally sophisticated and interesting part than the others that we’ve mentioned. And I would say despite having children and younger ones, they’re very cerebral. They’re not really interested in writing  particularities of female experience, but I’m very interested in medicine, in science in some ways, and the body like how the body functions in general. So I’m sure that I would be writing perhaps if I were a man that was also quite drawn to the narration of particular forms of bodily experiences. But these are the ones that I had. In « Happy birthday », I did find the writing about menopause was actually not that it was particularly challenging for me, but other people seem more unhappy about it than they did about most of the other writing about women’s bodies that I’d done so, particularly the metaphors of peacock with its broken tail, People seem very uncomfortable whenever I read that out, you know, tap tapping the ground, like this sort of leftover gaudy dress. Audio from the peacock minor peacocks have their tail that’s entirely from for mating, that it should be left it doesn’t really they don’t really need it actually probably an encumbrance to heading around so they can live for a long time when they don’t really have a proper train anymore, which seemed like the outcome of women’s lives. I think this is also related to plotting in some ways, in the western we’ll see a lot of male poets who have had quite tempestuous lives. That’s the majority of them with, very often multiple marriages, or, you know, like Yeats or Elliot remarriages in very, very late in their lives, so that they are essentially able to remind or potentially re-mine. I mean, Elliot didn’t really have the plastic material of lyric approach, like the young man’s material of a man being loved and a beautiful young woman. 

Marelle : I reread both the Collections and whereas you have this lyrical subject that is talking about her sexuality her masturbation embodies actually her own body and then you have the last poem which is kind of surprising for the shift just after the autobiographical narrative of “Was it for this” and then you have this so it kind of feels like it gives some kind of expectation for the rest for poems that would be a bit more grave in a way. 

Hannah Sullivan : I think I would like but I do have a bit of a problem of sort of stating my age caught up to the age that is appeared to be I mean in other words I was a middle aged person you could see when I read it out to be looking back on my ears anyway so it wasn’t really old tiny child I was gone through the metaphors that feature I don’t uncomfortable about this tendency which I think is rule fixation of energy which is definitely create another speaker in a primary things I write who’s older than the speaker in Happy Birthday when he’s not really funny people yeah the question actually avoids of speaking voice was become increasingly difficult to me I think I have four men into our habit between rising the last Pro and three bones about pregnancy and the last year of being very attracted by one of Elliot statements in his Blake essay the unpleasantness of great poetry as it was creating these I was also very influenced I think by the Victorian dramatic monologue but increasingly nasty speakers or speakers who had Edge tube I think that was also response to what sometimes seems to be the political complacency of contemporary English language to say the disabled people are treated horribly or racism terrible thing these things that obviously true but writing from perspectively anxious time to adopt a slightly more and these dramatic of course And so the anecdotic way of telling Withers something that for example would left first because in his poems in pros he literally like takes details from what he’s seen and what he seen ya during his his walks his work version Paris and talk about in poems but then I’d say I say also because you have he’s very materialistic but he worked about in lupati Pedro shoes he worked about the very material way that word can imitate life so you have this like this sense of rhythm and of yeah imitating the you know reality but in a political way because he was part of the movement so it’s I mean it’s very radical I wouldn’t say it’s really it fits but there are some similarities and then it’s true 

Marelle : I had a question about reading it out loud because in « Tenants » you have two columns. How would you read that out loud? In a polyphonic way with two people reading? It made me think of Sarah Kane’s monologue where she has polyphonic actresses standing and saying the verse at the same time.

Hannah Sullivan : I would like to I have I’m not really entitled this this turned out I was quite limited because this was so clearly based on a real conversation they are outside London believe that the building had only change very much about that we use phrases  I suppose you’ll know when you hear collection dies or  lives by your ability to reproduce it already you buy the bill because they have been interested in hearing you voice it so it seems that you can’t easily voice sometimes actually in three almost writing lines that were so long to do you really awkward like decided it’s not really good idea for material so I wouldn’t now write something I think I can’t do which is basically all accents I would feel that I need to work properly that’s very interesting yes because I as I told you I discovered is you know hearing it and that’s what I don’t know if what do you know about French literature but as you asked me about the French audience what French authors do you like what do you appreciate hmm well I have to say that I didn’t really like reading in Translation and giving my limited to linguistics because I’ve always had the hope to be the properly read very little French pros I did an influ r an influence I was an alternead Proust, woolf, Laforgue. I’ve always absolutely hated Laforgue’s poetry because I wasn’t reading him properly. 

And I also feel it would resonate with an audience that also reads novels in the UK. I always feel it is a perjury reading that it is a success if someone buys it who is not a poet? Poetry can be very self-referential.You have the same thing in France: creative writing forces really half the people who come to reading poetry and who usually read novels exactly.

Mélusine O’Connor