ALAN BUCKLEY: PAUSE, REWIND, PLAY
Alan Buckley. Photo credit: Kate Raworth
In anticipation of our neuroscience print issue, we are delighted to have commissioned Alan Buckley—a practising psychotherapist and the author of Touched—to write a poem as a creative response to the neuroscience theme. ‘The Jump’ is a remarkable, complex narrative—told with such honesty and skill—on boyhood and its unforgettable feats. It crystallises the complexity of human memory, especially the way thoughts exist, function and shape our behaviours.
Buckley has worked as a psychotherapist for over twenty years. Reading his poetry makes one think about the thresholds of language, our instinctive, insatiate curiosity or compulsion to find a reason for everything, and the human desire for love and safety. Intimate yet unflinching, his poetry—with its dazzling variations of form, rhythm and voice—makes it possible for the reader to enter unsettling or traumatic spaces, to leave with such pondering.
Read on through ‘The Jump’, followed by our interview with Buckley, to appreciate the challenges in rendering human thoughts—the instinctive impulse, the gestation of ideas, the sensations that accompany thoughts—in the span of a poem, and the gaps between the young boy’s experience and the adult speaker’s recollections.
THE JUMP
Yet why not say what happened?
– Robert Lowell, ‘Epilogue’
Your hair is spikey-damp, your skin purged,
chlorine-fresh, as you and three classmates race
through the alley behind Byrne Avenue baths,
over the zebra crossing, into the paper shop
for Sherbet Dip-Dabs, down to Rock Ferry station.
No teacher with you: the school day’s over,
and you’re left to make your own way back.
The four of you run to the front of the train
and stop by the first set of sliding doors.
Any moment now they’ll close with a rattle and hiss.
You all jump in. One jumps out. And another. One in.
Two out. One, two back in. Now there’s only you
outside, legs bent, the sweet fizz prickling your tongue.
The April sun is drying your hair and neck,
casting your shadow beyond the platform’s edge.
Home is elsewhere, school is elsewhere (you hear
your Classics master’s voice: In the Odyssey
what precisely are Scylla and Charybdis?),
and right now you’re as happy as it’s possible to be.
All you can see are your friends in their crested blazers
(Beati Mundo Corde), the seats covered in dark grey
moquette, thinly striped with blue, white and red,
a penknife-carved LFC on the wooden panel
below the upturned light. The air pumps kick in –
Kerthung-athung-athung-athung-athung –
and your friends’ laughter is nervous now.
You know you have to jump, but your feet feel
strangely heavy. You try to slow down
your breath, as if that could slow down everything,
stretching this out for a few seconds more.
The picture judders to snow: pause, rewind, play –
Your hair is spikey-damp, your skin purged,
chlorine-fresh … You wonder what hand (though
the hand is yours) picked out a case from the endless
racks of cassettes. What prompted it to choose that tape.
You stop yourself. You know that metaphor’s far
too crude for a thing as almost-nothing as this:
a cluster of pulsing images, no sooner surfaced
from time’s expanding flow than becoming –
under your inner eye’s scrutiny – something else,
then something else again, as you search
for the words to describe them. Even describe
is wrong, too passive for that deft process
of filling in, adjusting, shaping, sharpening,
until these minutes feel more real than when
they were lived. More true, for all your artful
lies, though now you can’t any longer tell
for sure what’s true, what’s false. Whatever it was
you started off with has vanished forever.
Your hair is spikey-damp, your skin purged,
chlorine-fresh… You wouldn’t, of course, go back
to the place itself. What could it offer you now?
But the sun-warmed platform there in your mind
is sacred ground, on which the adult you places
their feet, finding there more than the boy ever did –
the boy whose reflexive legs have, in the other world,
sprung him through the closing doors, stumbling him
forwards into a seat as his classmates whoop and shriek,
the terraces and shipyard cranes – like some
theatrical trick – rolling away past the window.
© 2020 Alan Buckley
Rock Ferry Station, 1980. Photo credit: Geoffrey Skelsey
Jenny Wong: Your poetry handles difficult subjects – emotions, trauma, irreparable histories – very deftly, and with such music and mastery of form. Can you recount the creative processes behind this accomplished form and music in your poems?
Alan Buckley: Firstly, thank you for your appreciation of the music and use of form in my writing. I’d say that the first follows on from the second, which I’ll try and explain! But before that I need to place myself firmly within that group of writers and thinkers who see sound as indivisible from sense, who – if you’ll forgive the pun – are ‘not Saussure’ that the signifier’s attachment to the signified is arbitrary. I’m someone who believes in the essentially embodied nature of language, that it (along with music) grew out of a pre-linguistic mimetic form of communication, one that encapsulated our entire human experience. So although language (as we have developed it) is primarily a means of communicating information, when placed under formal pressure its musical elements become foregrounded – and music, of course, allows us to connect viscerally with emotional states that can’t be expressed simply through denotative language.
I don’t go hunting for poems. I wait for them to arrive, though that waiting isn’t a passive process. When I’m not engaged in therapeutic work (my other, parallel life) I’m usually reading and thinking about poetry, even when I’m not writing it. In trying to describe how a poem ‘arrives’, I’ve found Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain[1] to be invaluable. McGilchrist, by the way, said in a recent interview that ‘The people who are at the coal face of reality are poets and physicists’, so I think you’ll find a lot of poets singing his praises. For me the starting point of a poem is an image or memory, with both some emotional charge and some words (maybe just a single phrase) attached to it, that suddenly comes into awareness while I’m engaged in some completely unrelated task. The left hemisphere of my brain is doing what it does, giving close attention to one particular thing, and that leaves the door open, as it were, for the right hemisphere to apprehend something from beyond the left hemisphere’s grasp. The opening lines of the first poem in my collection Touched express this process clearly:
Glimpsed for no more than a second or two –
I was pushing eighty-five near Stokenchurch Gap –
but enough for a thought to surface
(‘Badger’)
In line with what I said about embodiment earlier, I try not to rush to put pen to paper. I let the poem gestate inside me, sometimes for a few days, and work on it when I’m walking, or swimming, or cycling. If I want the poem to be memorable to the reader – to stay with them in some way once they’ve put the book down, or finished hearing me read it – I have to prove its durability within me first, before it makes the transition to the page. I need to know it has legs, can carry itself without simply being propped up by the framework of black marks I’ve constructed on a white sheet of paper.
The process of writing and redrafting is another dance between the two hemispheres. The first draft is always handwritten, and is often a semi-continuous scrawl with only minimal attention to line and stanza breaks. The left hemisphere then gets to work, searching for patterns of rhythm and sound that can be built on, and experimenting to find out what the form of the poem might be. What length of line is right for this poem? What ‘rule’ will operate to help determine that length? What shape of stanza best serves the poem? The exact details of the form don’t need to be apparent to the reader – it’s often helpful if they’re not readily apparent. But me having that form in mind puts pressure on the language, increasing its musicality, and opens up the poem to words, and therefore directions of movement, I hadn’t anticipated.
Let’s say I need a three-syllable word with a strong leading stress that chimes with the words around it (and makes sense at the denotative level). That’s where my left hemisphere throws up its hands, and the right hemisphere comes in with the right word. (Although sometimes I might have to stay in not-knowing for quite a long time. Experience has taught me the value of patience, of not being in a hurry to finish a poem off.) In simple terms, form helps take the poem away from me just expressing myself, and into me exploring what the poem itself might have to say. As McGilchrist says, nothing comes into being without resistance. Without a container, water is still, stagnant. Constrict it, and it begins to flow. Place an obstacle within that flow (as in a Kármán vortex street), and you see the most incredible – and unpredictable – vortices appearing. It’s the same water you had before, but it’s now utterly something else too.
JW: Poetry is deeply personal. Do you agree? Any advice on how one can navigate such personal subject, maintaining control over the subject matter and form, while engaging the reader?
AB: Yes. And no! (A typical poet’s answer …) I know not every poet would agree with this, but for me there has to be some personal impulse, a heightening of sensation or feeling in me, in order to start bringing a poem into being. That impulse can be very small, but it has to be there. In starting to write a poem I’m embarking on a journey of exploration, to discover what, in the expansion of that impulse, I was being called to pay attention to. I won’t know the complete picture at the start, that’s the whole point. If I knew, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the poem. But without that impulse, there’s no purpose to the exercise of writing. If the poem doesn’t mean anything to me, it can’t (I’d argue) mean anything to the reader either – though it may try to convince the reader that it means something by creating a display of linguistic fireworks.
However, the me who has the feeling that prompts the poem isn’t exactly the same as the me who actually writes the poem. It can’t be. It’s what Yeats says, that even when they seem most themselves ‘the poet… is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’[2]. The poet-Alan knows that in order to bridge the gap between the Alan at the breakfast table and the reader, all sorts of structuring and manipulation has to go on. In order to feel true to the reader, certain necessary deceptions have to take place. The poem can’t just be a description of an event; it has to be an event in itself. Crucially, the feelings that kicked off the poem in the first place need to be implicit rather than explicit. If someone takes you by the hand to show you something important (as the poet does with the reader), I think you want them to draw your attention to what is most significant in the field, and then fall silent, rather than telling you how they feel about it all. The space left around the words is there to be filled with your sensations and feelings.
I think this separation of selves is key in writing about traumatic personal material. Peter Levine (the founder of Somatic Experiencing, a therapeutic approach to working with trauma[3]) talks about how curiosity and trauma can’t co-exist in the same space. So when your own trauma is triggered, if you can just access some sliver of curiosity into the unpleasant sensations occurring in your body then you’re immediately not wholly within (and subsumed by) the trauma. There is a part of you that can see a bigger picture. That curious part can be thought of as the poet-self at work. There were numerous occasions during the writing of poems in my collection Touched where the personal material I was working with triggered strong emotional reactions (or bouts of dissociation) that almost derailed the writing process entirely. I just didn’t think it was worth carrying on. But the poet stayed curious, trusting that something would emerge from the mess and chaos, as long it kept attending.
Writing the above, I think it’s true that whatever the starting point of a poem, if it’s a poem that really matters to me there will be some point of rupture. I’ll have set off writing, full of energy – and trust me, being in a writing flow is one of the best sensations in the world – and then everything will seem to fall apart. Lines start falling flat and jarring with one another. The poem stops feeling coherent. It loses its vibrancy; loses heart. This is where the left hemisphere gets overwhelmed, and comes up with a story that says ‘This poem is impossible to write’. The right hemisphere is the one holding some above-and-beyond kind of faith that something else is possible. However, that’s not to dismiss the importance of the left hemisphere. By this stage it will have done its work in establishing some basic form for the poem, and that form – like a therapy consulting room – can act as container for all the difficult feelings emerging in the rupture.
There’s an argument to be made that the greater the degree of trauma, the stronger the formal container of the poem needs to be – examples that immediately come to mind are Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust poem ‘The Book of Yolek’ (a blank verse sestina), and Thom Gunn’s tightly rhymed and metered ‘The Gas-poker’, which describes his mother’s suicide when he was fifteen. It’s worth noting that it took Gunn forty-eight years to find a way into addressing this subject (Gunn said in a radio interview around the time of the poem’s publication that he suddenly realised he could write about his experience in the third person). It’s important to remember that there’s no rush. I’ve found that if a poem is really important to me, it will normally be willing to wait until I’ve acquired the skills and the maturity to write it.
JW: We’d like to explore the reference to ‘Epilogue,’ by Robert Lowell. Is his a poem which resonates deeply with you, not only with respect to your writing of ‘The Jump,’ but also within a wider context? If so, could you tell us what that resonance is and what meanings you personally discover from ‘Epilogue’?
AB: I hadn’t read ‘Epilogue’ for several years until I was directed back to it last year, when my friend Jacqui Saphra used that line (‘Yet why not say what happened?’) as the epigraph for the poem ‘Recusatio (Redacted)’ in her collection Dad, Remember You Are Dead. It struck me as appropriate for ‘The Jump’, because that poem is in part an exploration of the impossibility of simply ‘saying what happened’. In part this is because of the reconstructive nature of memory, and the sense that the past is always flowing into an evolving present that recontextualises it, and repurposes it for the needs of the now. A memory – as ‘The Jump’, makes clear – is not like some discrete piece of video tape that can be objectively watched. The act of remembering the past (I love the implicit sense of bringing something back into embodiment, re-membering) occurs in the now, and inevitably reshapes the past in some way, even before we get into process of attaching words to it in order to communicate it to someone else.
[I would add in here that in describing all of us as being, in some way, unreliable narrators, I’m focusing on the episodic / autobiographical aspects of explicit memory. As Levine and others make very clear, the implicit emotional and procedural memories carried by our bodies absolutely can be trusted; ‘The body keeps the score’, as Bessel van der Kolk says in the book carrying that title. This is precisely why I see the starting point of a poem being sensation and feeling, an expression of the body calling me to give attention, as opposed to me focusing on something which I think might make a good poem. Ideas rise out of poems; they aren’t where poems – for me at any rate – begin.]
Lowell’s poem also draws attention to a wider question for me around ethics in writing. There are a lot of other people whose lives are referenced in my collection Touched. Some are alive, and some are dead, though for the me the fact of someone having died doesn’t really change the degree of questioning I need to do around how they’re represented in my poems. (Again, that lovely expanded meaning: re-presented, made present again.) As far as I’m concerned, the dead are as much with us as the living, wanting to be talked to and about, to be given breath and embodiment by us. It’s only our failure (often very understandable) to attend to them appropriately that makes them ghosts who haunt us.
But how both the living and the dead are spoken to and remembered is a highly charged area. While I feel I have a duty to write truthfully, I’m not someone who believes that the exposure of some third party is automatically justified by the strength of the resulting poem. Writing to Lowell in response to the poems in The Dolphin (which drew heavily on letters from Lowell’s estranged wife Elizabeth Hardwick), Elizabeth Bishop wrote:
One can use one’s life as material – one does, anyway – but these letters – aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission – IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much[4].
However, whatever the rights and wrongs of The Dolphin, there is no fixed line for writers, beyond which they should not go. There is no safe space, free of all risk of offence, that poetry can be written from – at least not if it’s to have any meaningful impact. And as Lowell himself demonstrates in ‘Epilogue’, poetry is particularly well suited to performing those necessary acts of remembrance and honouring of each other’s existence, through which life is given both dignity and meaning:
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
For me, those are among the truest and most beautiful lines Lowell wrote. To ‘say what happened’ is far from straightforward, for many reasons, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted.
JW: ‘The Jump’ has an intricate structure, by which I mean there is interleaved repetition along many strands (lexical, syntactic, phonological, semantic), which can be experienced by a reader at various levels. What impact do you intend or expect they have on a reader or audience? Did you feel these repetitions viscerally as you were writing and, if so, in what way?
Rock Ferry Station, 1983. Photo Credit: Phil Richards
AB: As I hope I’ve already suggested, so much that occurs in the act of composition is unconscious, intuitive. When I’m in flow, the poem really does start to feel as if it has a life of its own; it starts to draw words towards it that chime – both sonically, and in terms of connotation – with existing words in the poem. Everything starts to become charged with resonance. For example: the sliding doors of the train, and the shadow being cast to the platform’s edge, are at one level just there because they were actually there. But in the context of the poem I can feel them invoking a sense of liminality, of the poem – like the boy – existing not just between school and home, but between two states of being. Is stepping into the train akin to the act of being born, of being carried into life? Or is it a step from childhood to adulthood? Is the edge of the platform the boundary between life and death? These possible readings weren’t consciously intended, but the fact that they emerged as I reflected on and reviewed the poem as it evolved acted as confirmation to me that I was onto something worth pursuing.
Some things – such as the reference to Scylla and Charybdis – were placed more consciously; and the phrase ‘something else, / then something else again’ is a deliberate borrowing of the last line of ‘Something Else’ by Paul Muldoon. It’s also the title of a PhD thesis by my friend Helen Mort, which explores neuroscience and connection-making in contemporary poetry, and which I was re-reading during the process of writing ‘The Jump’. But on the whole I’m more interested in the unconscious echoes of other texts that I discover when I’m redrafting / editing. For example, the careful description of the seat covering (and the use of the word ‘moquette’) conjures up – for me – the soft furnishings in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Filling Station’. And the ‘play’ at the end of the second stanza’s first line for me offers a little echo of Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Soap Suds’, a breathtaking poem about the recollection of childhood memory.
As for the sonic patterning, or ‘soundscaping’ as I often call it, there’s a mixture of the easily given and the worked-for. The opening line and a half – ‘Your hair is spikey-damp, your skin purged, / chlorine-fresh’ came attached to the surfacing of the memory, and set me off writing the poem. I can see why it works – it’s got a strong sense of forward movement, and there’s a patterning of repeated consonants around shifting vowel sounds. It’s not rocket science (or maybe it is: rocket science is actually very simple) – if you have a good pulse and that kind of patterning the language will sound musical. Once I’ve had some ‘given’ lines my work is largely about consciously trying to create lines that will match that musicality, that will maintain some sense of the language being heightened. Within this I’m always strict about using words that are genuinely congruent with my everyday language, even though the overall impact will feel distinct from me simply talking. I don’t go searching in the dictionary for ‘interesting’ words to put in my poems.
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory[5] gives neuroscientific evidence for what people have always known, that it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters in terms of establishing social engagement with another person. Song and music are key ways to help people feel safe, and I guess – in a way – by creating lines that ‘sing’ I’m trying to communicate to the reader that they’re in safe hands, that even if there’s something difficult they’re going to encounter, they’re going to be contained by something greater through that process. As I’ve said, when the words are fitting well, I experience sensations and feelings that are my surety that the poem is working in some way – that it’s working on me. My intention is that the poem will also have some visceral impact on the reader, that it will stir them in some way, disturb them (in the best possible sense), and will – by demanding to be re-read – start taking up residence and working on them. The precise nature of that work, and the exact sensations and feelings the reader experiences, I have no control over. I can only hope that the poem has some impact on some people. As Antonio Porchia wisely observed, ‘I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received’[6].
JW: Your use of second person pronoun and the deictic shift towards the end of this poem are intriguing. What was the rationale behind these choices?
AB: To be honest, I didn’t really think about why I wrote this as a ‘you’ poem until you asked me! It just instinctively felt right this way. With some poems I can experiment with making it first, second or third person, but with this one I just knew from the off that it had to be second person. The great trick of writing, of course, is that the way to create a poem which can potentially connect widely with others is to focus on highly specific, ‘personal’ details. Something about that sharpness of attention evokes a similar process in the reader – I think at some level the reader experiences that a trustful sharing is being made. They then instinctively reflect on their own life to find an equivalent experience, or one as nearly equivalent as they have access to, which they can map onto what is being shared with them. It’s what Roger Robinson said about his collection A Portable Paradise – ‘I want these poems to be useful and to help people to practise empathy.’
Alan Buckley. Photo credit: Kate Raworth
Obviously, the use of ‘you’ throughout the poem encourages the reader to place themselves in my shoes, and connect to their own childhood experiences in order to do that. But I also think that with a long poem like this, a simple first person narration, with all those ‘I’s, ‘me’s and ‘my’s, would have become tiresome very quickly. The repeated ‘you’s and ‘your’s, however, feel quieter, and – to my ear – subtly insistent rather than irritating. My role is to show the reader something I think is important, not to keep asking them to look at me.
The deictic shift you refer to at the end of the poem is something else I did instinctively, though in reflecting on it during the editing of the poem I could make a solid post hoc argument for it. I-the-poet and you-the-reader began the poem in the past (and it clearly is the past, though it’s spoken in the present tense), and then we shift into the present to explore the nature of remembering itself. That’s all well and good, but the memory fragment ends on a cliffhanger. What happens next? It feels unfair, in this poem, to leave the reader in a state of not-knowing. However, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss the train I have no recollection of exactly what happened next, so in order to complete the gestalt of the poem I needed to ‘lie’. For the boy to make his physical leap, I needed to make an imaginative one. In doing this – and again, it’s only something I realised in retrospect – the boy really does enter ‘the other world’, a world beyond memory and time. That separating off of the boy from both poet and reader feels part of a necessary opening out, that counters the sense of the poem as a closed and coherent system. The poem needs to feel coherent, for sure, but if it’s to have any lasting impact I think it has to also invoke something greater than itself, some not-knowing, even as it performs the act of closing itself down. It needs to make sense, but it also needs to summon up some mystery.
One of my favourite phrases in the poem – and the one that, when it presented itself to me, helped confirm that I’d got the right ending – is ‘like some / theatrical trick’. It has that consonantal patterning I mentioned earlier, and points to how the word ‘trick’ is embedded in ‘theatrical’. It evokes memories of 70s sitcoms, with characters sitting in a railway compartment built in a studio, while a projection of passing scenery onto a screen behind the window creates an illusion of movement. The train that heads out of the poem – heading to who knows where – is both absolutely grounded in the actual trains (dating from the 1930s) I travelled on as a child on Merseyside, while also being imagined, and potentially symbolic. It’s a common piece of advice in creative writing workshops that you should aim to end the poem on an image rather than an abstract statement. Here there’s an image of something real that is also being connected to something not-real, a visual trick. I think for the reader to have to hold that duality in mind is an appropriate way to end a poem that explores the complicated nature of memory. As well, it points to the way in which a poem often feels like a magic trick – there’s a real, breathing body at the centre of it, showing you something they hope will startle you, even disturb you, something that will prompt a felt response in you and set you thinking. And for me, knowing how the trick is performed makes it more, not less, magical.
Alan Buckley was brought up on Merseyside, and now lives in Oxford. He is the author of two pamphlets, Shiver (2009, a Poetry Book Society choice), and The Long Haul (2016). His first full collection, Touched, has just been published by HappenStance. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, and has been highly commended in the Forward and Bridport prizes. He was a First Story school writer-in-residence for eight years from 2011, and was on the editorial board of ignitionpress (based at the Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre) from its inception in 2016 until 2019. He also works as a psychotherapist, and for the last five years has specialised in trauma work with refugees.
[1] The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale, 2009)
[2] A General Introduction for My Work (1937)
[3] Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past (North Atlantic Books, 2015)
[4] Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
[5] The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (W.W. Norton & Co., 2017)
[6] Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)