In this The BARS Examiner piece, Adam Neikirk interviews the poet, Sarah Doyle. If you would like to conduct an interview or review a theatre production, film, podcast, or exhibition for the new blog series, The BARS Examiner, drop us an email!
Sarah Doyle is the Poet-in-Residence at the Pre-Raphaelite Society, the former winner of the William Blake Poetry Prize and the Wolverhampton Literature Festival poetry competition, and the author of a pamphlet entitled Something so wild and new in this feeling (V Press), which appeared in 2021. Something so wild and new in this feeling comprises a series of “collage poems” based on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. I was lucky enough to interview Sarah about this work for The BARS Examiner blog series; my questions and her responses appear below.
Adam Neikirk: Talk about your inspiration for Something so wild and new in this feeling. When did you first decide to write, or rather construct, these “collage poems” (as you call them)? Was it different from writing that you have published in the past?
Sarah Doyle: I’m researching a PhD in the poetics of meteorology at Birmingham City University, and in 2019 I turned to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals as a means of gaining insight into and context for some of William Wordsworth’s poetry.
I was bowled over by Dorothy’s writing, by her evocation of place and her almost sororal sympathy with landscape, plants, and animals. Of greatest interest to me initially, however, was Dorothy’s meteorological engagement. Many of her journal entries are scaffolded with remarks on the weather at both the beginning and the end of day, with weather conditions playing a significant role in the life and activities of Dorothy and her associates. Being a complete weather obsessive, I felt a great sense of affinity!
The forming of these poems was more demanding in some ways than writing poems from scratch – there are, after all, finite opportunities for expression when working from a pre-existing manuscript – but the creative potential of almost limitless permutations was thrilling to me.
AN: You mention in the introduction to your book that “all the poems here are comprised entirely of phrases … mined from Dorothy’s writing.” Did you find it difficult to preserve this phraseological fidelity? Were you ever tempted to include original writing?
SD: I’ve used found text from different sources in some of my other poetry, where it has been rewarding to create a conversation between my voice and that of another speaker. Here, though, I decided very early on not to include my own writing; I wanted Dorothy’s voice to sing out. The poems are woven through with my own sensibilities – which ally closely with Dorothy’s – but I wanted to tread lightly, and have even preserved Dorothy’s spellings as a means of acknowledging the source text. I was also wary of ventriloquism in these poems, so it was equally important to me to honour Dorothy’s character; to create new narratives which celebrated rather than corrupted her legacy.
AN: What qualities of Dorothy Wordsworth’s personality and writing do you hope readers will notice (or feel) when they read these poems?
SD: First and foremost, I think that Dorothy’s sympathy with the natural world shines through in her journals, and I hoped very much to illuminate that in these poems. Although she is a keen-eyed recorder of natural phenomena such as weather and seasons, Dorothy’s writing transcends observation to become vividly experiential, and I wanted to convey that immediacy in poems that were immersive and sensory – at times, even intimate. I perceive a sense of rootedness in Dorothy’s writing, a communion of human and non-human, which I have attempted to explore and articulate in the extracts I’ve used and the conjunctions I’ve created. Dorothy is a gifted writer, with the ability to express a sense of wonder in the mirror she holds up to the world. Her writing is rich in colour, texture, sound, temperature, light and shade, with a gaze ranging from the panoramic to the microscopic, and I hope that readers will get a strong sense of Dorothy’s curiosity and intellect, her energy and compassion.
AN: This collection contains what we might call direct allusions to famous poems by
Wordsworth (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”) and Coleridge (“Dejection: An Ode”), and
DW’s journals naturally contain many references to the poets. Yet they are conspicuously
absent from these new poems. What was your thinking behind this?
SD: My intention was always to spotlight Dorothy as the star of this collection, rather than situate her within the relegated context of sister or friend. I made a conscious decision to exclude any directly named references to either William or Coleridge, and to ensure any instances of ‘we’ were non-specific. The reader might infer the presence of either (or both!) of the poets – and perhaps even of others – in the interactions described, but these poems are deliberately Dorothy-centric.
To elevate her further, I’ve included Dorothy’s account of the siblings’ famous daffodil encounter, extracting the text in its entirety and shaping it on the page to highlight her amazing sensitivity to rhyme. As an illustration, here is the first stanza, where I’ve boldened a series of rhymed (and even repeated) words embedded within the prose:
When we were in the woods beyond
Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils
close to the water-side. We fancied
that the sea had floated the seeds ashore,
and that the little colony had so sprung up.
But as we went along there were more
and yet more;
and at last, under the boughs
of the trees, we saw that there was a long
belt of them along the shore, about
the breadth of a country turnpike road.
I never saw daffodils so beautiful.
Later on in the passage/poem, there are several pairs of rhymed words and repeated phrases, which provide another quite extraordinary exhibition of Dorothy’s facility for phrasing.
AN: What is your favorite poem in the collection, and why?
SD: Oh gosh, if I answer this, please don’t tell the other poems! I had enormous fun shaping
‘beautiful to see’ as a small sailboat on the page. I love the drenching repetition of ‘rain’ in
‘When the rain’, along with Dorothy’s imaginative observations of the night sky in ‘All the
Heavens’. However, my two favourites are ‘A heart unequally divided’ and ‘Lights and
Shadows’. Both poems attempt explorations of Dorothy’s interior life, and give, I hope, a
sense of the woman behind the journals: her passion, her depth, and her humanity.
For more information, or to purchase a signed copy of Something so wild and new in this
feeling (V. Press, 2021), Sarah can be contacted here:
https://www.sarahdoyle.co.uk/contact.php
Interview conducted by Adam Neikirk
Dr Adam Neikirk holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Essex. His dissertation, entitled Your Very Own Ecstasy: A Life in Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, comprised a verse biography of the poet Coleridge together with a critical commentary. Adam’s critical and creative writings have appeared in the Coleridge Bulletin and Charles Lamb Bulletin, and in Creel: an anthology of creative writing. His second book of poetry, entitled Itchy, will be available from Muscaliet Press in early 2023. Adam is Communications Officer for the Charles Lamb Society.