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We are never leaving.

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How do you get the candy?

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Creativity and caretaking is messy. Art makes us better people. And creativity isn't all that we've got.

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Hello, this is Sophie Hertzheimer.

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And I'm Dan Schiffer.

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We are the people behind Art and Other People.

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We are delighted to welcome Denise Saul to Art and Other People. Denise's debut collection, The Room Between Us, was shortlisted for the T.S. Elliott Poetry Prize in 2022 and long listed for the Jollock Prize in 2023. It was also a Poetry Book Society summer recommendation in 2022. Denise is a past winner of the Poetry Society's Jeffrey Dermer Prize. Welcome, Denise.

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

Denise, it's an absolute joy to welcome you to the podcast. If you'd like to talk a little bit about what prompted you to write your book that was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, The Room Between Us, and how you came to the poems in that book.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11

Well, my mum experienced a stroke in 2010, and she also experienced phasia, speech disability caused by damage to the speech sensors of her brain. And then I took the role of being her full-time carer for her. And it was in these moments where there was times of silence, non-conversation, which appeared as like that to me. And I thought to myself, I'm meant to be a writer, I'm meant to be a poet. And yeah, how can I write about this situation? How can I translate the situation into poetry? And then I realized that my mother was communicating but with parts of her body, and I was missing something. I was so focused on the vocal aspects of communication rather than the body and what the body had to say. And that really helped me to write the first poem because before I was writing and feeling very frustrated of not being able to retell the experience that I resorted to drawing, resorted to doodling, painting, drawing and painting my mother and parts of her body. And then when it dawned on me, she was actually communicating, that's when the poetry arose, and that's when the poetry came to the surface.

SPEAKER_01: 2:35

So lovely to hear, and I really feel kind of touched to hear you talk about the processes of your own receiving of your mother's gestures and how you had to come to it as well in your own time, especially using drawing, because of course that's really close to my heart. I relate to that a lot, that idea that you've got to find a way to process your own feelings, and it can't necessarily be language when language is so lost or challenged in that way. Do you read us that first poem? Yes, sure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 3:13

The room between us. There you are beside the telephone stand, waiting for me in a darkened room when I force open the white door. There you lie behind it. I never found out why you grabbed a pewter angel instead of the receiver when you tried to call me that morning. I give up trying to lift you from the floor as the room is no longer between us. You point again to the Bible door wall before I whisper, it's all right. All right. Now tell me what happened before the fall.

SPEAKER_00: 3:54

I have so many responses to that poem. And the first response I had when I read it was this idea of the door or a barrier. And thinking about it for a moment just through the lens of care, I'm always curious about to what extent we give people space when we care for them? To what extent do we cross that space? So when you cross that white door, or the narrator crosses that door, is that a relief to get across that barrier, or is it something that happens that is not wished for?

SPEAKER_02: 4:25

I think it's a bit of both, really. In my writing and in that collection, all the poems are rooms in a way. So it was for moving from one poem, one space to another space. I was very aware of space and being a carer, you're very aware of not having that freedom to move around. The lack, there's always a lack there. And so I had to create my own space and at the same time give my mother space. So it's just striking that balance, which is really quite difficult. I used to go, and I still do, but I used to go for walks when I could, even if it was five, ten minutes, just in order to feel and experience an expansion and not be all the time at home. And I found that at times frustrating, but then also liberating. Because there's that idea, isn't there, I suppose, for me, of balance and polarity, because you can have constraint, but then you can have freedom in that constraint. So that's how I found it through writing poetry and resetting my mind to think, okay, can only walk perhaps for only 20 minutes outside, but then there's freedom in that. So it was a question of balance, really.

SPEAKER_00: 5:42

It's interesting also to think about in the creative process, constraints are fundamental to liberation. You need to have those boundaries in order to fill them andor to go past them. Is there a way in which the constraints of caring for somebody in such an intensified form also allowed you as a person or you as a poet or as the narrator of this to also expand into territory that you didn't know you had access to?

SPEAKER_02: 6:11

I think with me, because I was a journalist before, I was really used to deadlines and constraints. So I kind of pulled that all into the caring side, having to be really organized, having deadlines, times to do things, times not to do things. And that also moved into my writing as well, having constraints of times of when to write. I remember having that time in the evening, that quiet evening, just to write the lines of a poem or notes of a poem. I couldn't do that in the morning because that was a very busy time or lunchtime. But when the house was dark and everyone was sleeping, then I could write. And then sometimes when I would go for walks, I would just take a pen or I just remember thoughts in my head, and then when I'd got home, I would write them down. So the very short span of time, which really is a constraint. But for me, I work better with constraints, so it wasn't an issue for me. That's just the way my personality is, that's where I am.

SPEAKER_01: 7:18

It's really nice to think about that as a sort of it's a sort of focus-pulling device, anyhow. And I think caring does this because it creates a space in which the not caring time is special. The caring time is also a bit special, especially if it's a person that you're caring for that you really love, and you might feel that the time is limited, or they might not last very long, or they might last for a really long time, which you've got to pace the caring. There are different people, of course, at different times in one's life that need care, and how I think each person brings with them their own care package of needs, and that imposes a different set of limitations on the people around them. So we adapt and adapt and adapt, and in a way, adapting our writing practice with that is a kind of dance in which the time on and the time off are very strongly related to each other. So I suppose another part of the question that Dan was asking too, and that I was talking to you about earlier, is how does the time on when you're caring expand your imagination for when you do have the chance to put the pen to paper?

SPEAKER_02: 8:35

I think caring in self, the act to care, is a creative process. And you're always trying to think of ways to get around a challenge or how to help that person to get or to have a good quality of life, I suppose. So you're always having to be creative, I think, because life is creative. I think to be human is to be creative, and we are creative beings, so I don't see any separation between the two. You know, you have people who say, I'm a writer, and then I do this in this role. I'm a mother, I'm a father, I'm a brother. But to me, the caring side is the same as being a writer, because we take care in what we write, how we write, to whom we write, and to the words in which we use. So to me, there isn't any separation or division between those two elements.

SPEAKER_01: 9:40

I think that's a very true thing. And when I first met you, Denise, I know I was fascinated because you mentioned about aphasia and having to get to the other side of some language with your mum. I could relate to it because of my situation with my son, where he was given a prognosis of never acquiring language because of his autism and learning difficulties and delays. And we had to work with him in very focused ways to help him acquire language. And something about having to put oneself to one side and let the focus be on the person that needs the help is counter to the mythology around the artist who puts themselves first and puts their work first and tells everyone else to do the dishes. And so I think in our culture we've got quite a distorted view of care and creativity as being twin concerns, which of course, as you say, to get somebody to understand somebody who's not using language takes an enormous amount of imagination. You've got to really focus your imagination. That's what you're doing. So, and I know I couldn't have written the poems I've written without having had the inspiration of my son. And my daughter just got to mention it if she hears this. Doesn't feel that it's only him that inspired me, she inspires me every day. But I suppose that the difficulties of the person who's in need of our care, or the people who are in need of our care, are part of the engine of what makes the poem unique or the piece of work unique. Because it's not just our voices in those pieces. We're taking these other voices with us and putting them into the work and somehow representing people who don't necessarily have a voice.

SPEAKER_00: 11:33

I'd be curious to follow up on that with a question about what it means to honor people by giving them a voice in some way. And I'm wondering, in this case, with your mother, who is a character, the main character, one of the main characters in this book, do you have a sense of what she might think about her being present in this book in this way? Would she see it as a gift? Would she be unsure about her being present in this way?

SPEAKER_02: 12:02

When I first started writing poetry, I remember I wrote one poem. I mean, families always creep into the poetry, don't they, one way or the other. And I wrote a poem and I read it out to her, and she said, That's me, isn't it? That's me. And it's and I thought, my gosh, she doesn't mind this. She's really understanding it. And when I while I was writing The Room Between Us, I would read back notes, some of the words and notes that I had written to her. And she was fine with that. And she knew that I was writing a book about the experience because she knew obviously I was a writer, and so I didn't have this kind of censorship at all. Some writers don't want to write about their families, they think, oh no, I can't write about them. But for me, there's no space that is taboo. I will write about it because that's my job. And my mum was fine with the book. She didn't get to read the finished product, but she was fine with the book. She knew that was what my job was.

SPEAKER_00: 13:15

I had one more thought also from before, which is when you were talking about writing in the book as a house or a space. I think about the architectural dimension of poetry, right? And so, like stanza is literally Italian for room, which is amazing. And so I don't know. I wonder whether you might have more in your brain about that, about what it means to journey through poems or journey through a relationship and how you take care of the people, the characters that you are on this journey with.

SPEAKER_01: 13:49

But I think also to give another subtext to what you're saying, there's a sense of space in the book and spaciousness, which I think, Denise, you've partly talked about in terms of being able to go out and have some breathing space and having 20-minute walks and having an idea and writing. And I think that's something that's very generous and it comes across in the book. You go from page to page, you don't feel cramped, you don't feel constricted, you feel you can breathe your way through these pieces of writing that are spare and not convoluted. I mean, they're not simple, but they're not convoluted. So you've got this spacious feeling around them that gives the reader a kind of privileged access to a person who's in quite a tender state. You need a lot of space around that. You need to give that person in the poem space, and you need to give the poet space, and you need to give the poem and the reader. It's like a relationship between all of us when you're in the book, which is lovely because it's exploring a house that's not crowded while you're not being stared at.

SPEAKER_02: 14:58

When my mother died and I was clearing all the possessions, I opened a handbag, and there was a stone in there. And I remember mum telling me a story that her mother had given her that stone when she immigrated to the UK. And I always wondered about this stone. I thought, wonder why she had this stone. And it dawned on me that she wanted to remember. She wanted to have a connection to Guyana. And I think that's what it is about objects. It got me thinking about why we name objects and why we have objects. And I had to go through so many objects, deciding which ones to keep, which ones to pass on, which ones to give away. And it reminded me of how memory is, you know, ancestral memory and how we cast things on, objects on, so that the line, our lineage is never forgotten. And to me, that was really fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 16:04

I absolutely love the image of a stone in a handbag. It feels like what are handbags for? Is that nobody's ever said, but actually they're for carrying a piece of stone from a place you no longer live. And that's something so beautiful to think about carrying a little tiny bit of that place that it's what the place is made out of. Whereas a handbag is so much about appearances. Having a handbag, that's all very nice, isn't it? But inside that handbag is who you really are. It's not for public consumption, nobody needs to know where you really part of you lives. Again, it's what poems can do, which is this thing of holding two ideas at once and holding two places at once. And that feels to me that it holds your mother's home, your home, and a long-ago home, all in the poem, really beautifully, in a sort of image. It's just gorgeous, actually.

SPEAKER_02: 17:08

And it's quite interesting that I no longer have the handbag, but I keep stone. Yeah. That's far more important.

SPEAKER_01: 17:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:16

There's something beautiful about that in terms of I don't know, if we think about the body and the soul, the body is the handbag and the soul is a stone. You keep some essence of the person.

SPEAKER_01: 17:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:29

And let go of the accoutrement.

SPEAKER_01: 17:32

And also that stones are so brilliant symbolically because people say, you know, heart of stone or blood out of a stone. And it's as if a stone is a symbol of something that has no feelings. But when we think about the history of the stone and where the stone has been and what it's seen and its incredible ancientness, we know it may not have feelings, but it's certainly carrying a lot. Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_02: 17:59

And I don't know if you know this, but I actually collect stones. So there's lots of mentionings of stones in the collection. And I use some stones to help ground my mother. She liked to hold on to the stones. So that was a really important aspect to have the physical, to have nature in the book itself to reflect the grief and the process of grief and process of care as well.

SPEAKER_01: 18:25

And you know that Jews put stones, bring stones to graves instead of flowers. Did you know that? No, I didn't. Oh Dan, you talk about that because you're a better Jew than me.

SPEAKER_00: 18:35

Well, I'm a different Jew than you. In this case, there's not that much more to say. It is traditional to bring stones and you put them on top of the gravestone, and it's something about the eternal bond with a person or with God. And there's something very senseate about it. And I know when I've done that, I've felt that that rock may blow off at some point, but it's not going to be dead in three days. I wonder about your second poem, No Word for Blue, if you could read that, because there are some other connections that have occurred to me as we're talking.

SPEAKER_02: 19:07

No word for blue. She who is quiet is boring company. I had my ears pierced for the first time at the age of seven, and as I grew, my mother added hoop after hoop. The stretched lobes enhanced my neck. My mother's ring has no beginning and no end. I donated it to a charity shop. A month later, a friend returned the ring in a recycled box. In colour theory, green is complementary to red. I watch a ladybird meditate on the grass. Homer had no word for blue. He referred to the sea as dark. I wonder whether the sea exists or if it's just a place where the beach ends. One is only a number, different from others, except Set by coming first. All things are really one.

SPEAKER_00: 20:05

I love this poem so much. The thing that I wanted to make a connection to was the ring and a ring or the jewel being a kind of a stone. And in this case, as opposed to maybe the holding of the stone that came over where you were holding on to or keeping alive memories of ancestors. In this case, the ring, maybe representing your mom, comes back to you and maybe is still has work to do to take care of you.

SPEAKER_02: 20:34

I mean, for this poem, it was also about the silences and not being able to communicate and processing the whole idea of care and the idea of quiet and boring company. That's sometimes what being a carer, being in that space, what it's like. And I purposely had the spaces between those lines in the poem just to connect to that silence. I wanted the reader throughout the whole collection just to connect to the silence and to space and to give my mother's voice a space. I think that was really important. It's mostly about space for my mother's voice to be heard, and that's the reason why I wrote the collections.

SPEAKER_00: 21:23

The room between us is also about the space between us and having that be something positive and honouring.

SPEAKER_01: 21:30

Yes, totally. I love that, and I think that the scale, the minutiae in that poem are also very touching. The ladybird and the ring. These are small things, things that we can look at and encompass in the pupil of our eye. They're holdable, they're lookable at. They've got a scale that is human to insect scale, which gives again space because there's all that space between us and the small thing. And the idea of the ring that has no beginning and no end and also comes back to you that contains a space and it contains that bodily space of the finger that's no longer there, and the kind of things that you could whisper through a ring. And so it's very poignant. The physical quality of something that the mother wore and put her vibes into day in and day out, that then we inherit and we choose to wear or not wear and have her near by a physical thing that's just an intimate object like that is so particular because it's not really materialistic anymore. You know, you lose an object like that, and it really is important somehow. I was also aware that when you said about talking about your mother's possessions, and I thought of the word possession and how it means that we can be possessed by a spirit, an ancestor spirit, family member spirit, and that we can be possessed and we can be dispossessed and we can possess others, and how possessions are, and how magical and talismanic possessions are because they are little portals into a person's world and their imagination, and certainly I mean, I've used them in everything I've ever done as a sort of way of connecting, so that when I wrote my collection in my granny's voice, and my granny died in 1980, and so I've had to carry her in a pocket way for years. It's not like I talked to her recently, but her voice has always been in my head. And when the publisher asked me to do pictures for the book, I thought, no, I don't want to do pictures for the book. And then I thought about her objects, and I could see them, and in my mind's eye, and I thought, I'll make paper cuts of 20th century household objects because everyone's knows what a hairbrush looks like. Everyone's granny had a hairbrush or a packet of cigarettes or a hall stand with a phone on it. So it won't be so much my granny, it will be everybody's granny, maybe the reader's granny too. And I really enjoyed using those objects as portals to her world. I did a handbag as well, actually. But who knows what it had inside it. You have to sit and look at the object, you have to let the object enter your heart in order to make something about it. It's not just an object, it's not just a possession. You have to let it possess you in order to re-manifest it in a poem or a picture, and that's why still lifes can be so powerful. I mean, I love there's some still life paintings that you could look at forever because they're so not just a jug and an apple, they're so dense with spirit about the objects.

SPEAKER_02: 24:57

You know, when you hold the object, I think you actually become the object. I use objects, quite a few objects in the collection in writing about my mum. And by holding the ring, by holding the handbag, it just allowed me actually to become one with the person I was writing about, which I find really interesting. And that's why, actually, with the Ephrastic poem, I've written in response to GF Watts' painting, The Eternal. And that for me was like a whole connection with the oneness, I think that you all are kind of alluding to and talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 25:41

Ekphrastic being a poem or work of literature that is responding to, let's say, a painting or a photograph.

SPEAKER_01: 25:47

Yes. Work of art, yeah. Yeah. It's good to have the odd definition. Yachtsite, ekphrastic. We've had a couple, but I can't remember the others.

SPEAKER_00: 25:56

Sorry, part of my brain is always just trying to hold those pieces.

SPEAKER_01: 25:59

And Dan is a walking dictionary.

SPEAKER_00: 26:03

I am a big fan of etymology. That is true. There were two other things that I think we wanted to talk about, and I wanted to give you enough time to talk about them. One was just having to do with maybe how you grew up and about how creativity was present in your life and however you were defined it, and also how care, practices of care were present for you. And I don't know how close you are to Guillaine's culture and whether there are elements from Guyana that are connected to how you think about that, and just to bring those things in as it feels appropriate.

SPEAKER_01: 26:52

Okay, there's a lot of questions.

SPEAKER_00: 26:53

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 26:54

Basically, who cared for you and how was it? And what did you grow up doing and loving doing as well?

SPEAKER_02: 27:01

My mother cared for me. My mother was a widow, so she cared for me, but she had a real love for poetry, so and my father was a teacher, so he taught literature. So I had a real love for poetry, and from an early age, I just wanted to communicate with words. So I used to write a lot in poetry and everything else like that. And I had a real idea about care. I think the whole idea when you talk about care, it's really about respecting a something or an object, I think, with care. And to me, that's just part of being human to care and to be a creative person, to be a creative practitioner, you're always caring. Do you ever do it carelessly? Do I ever do it carelessly? Yeah, I do. I think, yeah, because when you're writing free writing, you don't care. You're not censoring yourself, you're just writing, or you're just thinking about something. There's no barriers or limits as such.

SPEAKER_01: 28:06

Because sometimes I think that with writing and making things, all the ideas are born in a carefree, careless way. And then it's the processing of getting them to another stage that requires care.

SPEAKER_02: 28:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:20

And maybe it's similar when we're children and we're being cared for, is that if our mother or carer or whoever's looking after us can let us be careless and carefree, then they're really caring because they're allowing us to be a bit nuts or free or uncensored or wild. And that's also a kind of balancing act that I guess is different in every family, household, whatever, is the balance between spontaneity and the law. I guess Dan's question was partly about that, about what kind of encouragement did you get? And you've said it about your mum loving poetry. What kind of poetry did she love? She had liked Thomas Grey. You start you've got an elegy. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 29:11

Many a rose is born to blush on scene. Yes, that's what she always used to quote to my sister. We won't even go any further. But coming back to your question about heritage and about Guyana, I think that the Guyanese heritage or tradition is that you care. There's a very lot of emphasis on caring within the family for each other, but in different ways. So it might be cooking, maybe nice meals, or even storytelling, which is an element of care. If somebody was feeling a bit challenged, they would just tell you a story, almost like a parable, to help you on your way. There's no division between living and caring. In the Guyanese tradition, I think it's all one. There's it's built on community, everyone being together. You have families coming to your house and cousins, and there's all that element of having an extended family, which is not just your own nuclear family, but people that live on your street, people who you talk to not every day, but you might bump into them once in a while. They're all part of your family, and they all are entitled to care. And in the village where my mother grew up, you would pay, you would donate some of your earnings to upkeep their village, and that's an element of care in itself. It extends outwards, not just in the place where you live or with your family, but to your community, and I think that's really important. But different aspects of care.

SPEAKER_01: 30:51

It is a really important aspect. I mean, I think our communities and how we interact with them is a really important part of being an autist and a carer, because both things can make you feel very isolated, can't they?

SPEAKER_02: 31:03

Yes, totally, completely so.

SPEAKER_01: 31:16

One thing that we haven't asked you, well, there's a loads of things we haven't asked you, but I was gonna say about what poets you look to and what poets have really influenced you, or poems, or pieces of art, or music. Music.

SPEAKER_02: 31:33

I think Pascal Petit, actually.

SPEAKER_01: 31:35

Yeah, she's brilliant.

SPEAKER_02: 31:37

She's brilliant. When I started writing poetry, I would just eat up her, literally eat up her workshops and attend her workshops because she has a new, she has an ultimately unique way of looking at objects, at art, at life. And she also has this idea. I remember listening to one of her interviews when she says that no one's interested in what she's been through. What they're interested in is how she makes art out of a difficult subject.

SPEAKER_01: 32:10

It's nice to think about Pascal's attitude and the way that she's processed her extremely difficult stories and made them into these very vivid, vivid, lively, nature-rich work, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 32:26

And she trained as a sculptor, didn't she? Yes, and she talks about in writing outpacing the sensor. So when you write, you don't censor what you're writing in the first draft. You just keep writing and writing, and it's to stop yourself from judging what you're writing and thinking to yourself, no, I shouldn't write about my mother or my father. Just keep writing. And I just think she has such a healthy way and approach to creativity, yeah, which I love.

SPEAKER_01: 32:56

Yeah, she's fantastic, very freeing and very warm. Very, and I think that warmth, getting that warmth to come across in poetry is amazing because poetry is a sort of when you look at it, it could be anything. It's not like a sculpture or a jewel or a stone, is it?

SPEAKER_00: 33:15

Although I jumping back into etymology again, which I try not to do.

SPEAKER_01: 33:19

Why? Don't fight it. No, please. I love etymology.

SPEAKER_00: 33:22

Oh great, yeah. It's well, so just and I'm sure you know this, right? So poetry comes from the Greek, and it means something that is made. We say like a playwright, it's like a blacksmith, it's like a rite with a W. So there's something about poetry that is both architectural, as we talked about, in terms of having these different rooms and stanzas, but it's also it's a craft, it's something you've created. There is something solid and object-like about it, and we forget about that.

SPEAKER_02: 33:48

And I think it's also a spiritual act as well. There's a communion between yourself and what you're writing about. It's something that you take utmost care in in shaping and crafting. And you mentioned that word crafting, but there's something else going on there when you're writing poetry, and you're kind of pushing yourself to a higher state of awareness. And that's why I think it's spiritual.

SPEAKER_00: 34:14

Denise Saul, thank you so much for joining us on Art and Other People.

SPEAKER_02: 34:18

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 34:23

Art and Other People, dedicated to the support of healthy families and communities through the arts. Our theme music is composed by James Rolfe. Join our community at artandotherpeople.org.