Over the course of our call for pamphlet proposals, we'll have some of
our existing pamphlet authors writing about their experience of having a
pamphlet published with us. Here we have Zosia
Kuczyńska talking about her pamphlet, Pisanki!
Turning your family history
into a poetry pamphlet is hard. There’s the ethics of it for a start: you may
have the strongest claim in the world on what is after all your own heritage,
but when push comes to shove you’re still telling the story of something that
didn’t happen to you. When I first submitted the poems in the then-untitled Pisanki to The Emma Press, the fact that
it opened with a poem about Daedalus’s precocious nephew Perdix inventing the
saw by appropriating fish skeletons (and ultimately being shoved off a cliff)
was a very deliberate foregrounding of the anxieties I was wearing on my
sleeve.
It was also far too
self-important. The poem is still in the pamphlet, along with any number of
poems that, obliquely or otherwise, try to navigate the moral mirror-maze that
is the act of storytelling. The finished pamphlet, however, is a reflection of
The Emma Press’s commitment to something I’d forgotten in amongst all that
sort-of-a-little-bit-maybe-comparing-myself-to-a-Soviet-scientist-who-sends-dogs-into-space-to-die-just-because-they-can:
that it’s about your reader way more than it is about you.
What the editorial process
of Pisanki brought to these poems was
context, clarity, and a realisation that I was going to have to give the
running order something of an overhaul: if I was going to do justice to the
story I was trying to tell, I needed to get out of its way a bit. It was a task
made more difficult by the fact that, by the time the editing stage came around,
I’d been recently bereaved. When you have no emotional reserves left and your
brain is turning itself inside out on a daily basis, being asked to rethink a
comma feels like being asked to perform laser eye surgery on yourself with only
your reflection in the back of a teaspoon to let you know how you’re doing.
Rachel Piercey was a superb
editor. She was thorough, sensitive, astute, and—most importantly—stuck to her
guns. Bernard O’Donoghue had already been more than accommodating in
incorporating my babcia’s
(grandmother’s) account of her wartime experiences into his introduction;
Rachel convinced me that the pamphlet should also have not only a ‘Notes’ but
also a ‘Further Notes’. It sounds silly now, but agreeing to both was one of
the most liberating things I’ve ever done. Of course I’d never intended for the
reader to tackle what is, to the Anglophone world, a largely unknown chapter in
European history without some help. However, the insidious idea that has crept
into poetry criticism in particular that Googling, say, Nerval and/or his lobster
is something that should be done in secret—that all those furtive hours spent
trawling Wikipedia ought never to be admitted—is a difficult one to overcome.
Giving the historical context of the poems a dedicated space in the pamphlet
took an enormous amount of pressure off the poems themselves, which were only
ever always about how to tell a story and never the whole of it.
Working with The Emma Press
was an experience for which I will always be grateful. Rachel and Emma
understood what I was trying to do and worked with me to help me understand how
to do it. (I hope it’s not too insulting to Emma’s artwork that quite a few
people who know me well asked me whether I’d illustrated the cover, which is a
testament to the pamphlet’s coherence as an object.) Their approach was
hands-on but with a lightness of touch that meant I never felt pressured to take
the pamphlet in unwanted directions. Their confidence in the poems gave me the
confidence to say ‘here is a pamphlet with a Polish-looking name by a
Polish-sounding person that engages with parts of Polish history you won’t
necessarily have encountered before; reader, I’ve got your back’.
Pisanki is available to order on our website. You can also find out
more about our call for pamphlet submissions here.
No comments:
Post a Comment