What can you tell us about this poem?
‘The thing that washed up on the beach’ is about being confronted with the memory of a toxic man. The ex resurfaces as uncanny, indiscriminate and fishlike. This man, who once exerted control over the speaker, has now been reduced to something pathetic and totally impotent. It’s about processing trauma, reclaiming female power, and taking ownership of the past. The ocean is such a transformative force, so I wanted to present it as the site of change.
What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?
This poem began as a response to Roderick Ford’s ‘Giuseppe’. In Ford’s poem, a captured mermaid is dehumanised and murdered by men who insist that she is “only a fish.” I was interested in subverting this dynamic. Rather than the female figure being the silenced creature subject to male violence, the violent male is reimagined as the fish. I’m also in dialogue with Jo Shapcott, who uses animal metamorphosis to explore otherness and embodiment in pieces like ‘Goat’. Richard Scott was doubtless also an inspiration, his use of the animalistic to convey how we survive trauma. I’m thinking about poems like ‘crocodile’.
What poem do you wish you’d written?
‘The Last Supper’ by Mary Ruefle. Honestly, wow!
What’s your first poetry memory?
Probably my mum reading me Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. An absolute classic, but I was delighted by the eccentric progression of the poem. The image of the “pea-green boat” was simple but so pleasing. And then there was this “runcible spoon”. Runcible is a made-up word, but (somehow!) you have a sense of what it means. This was when I discovered that poetry is a unique medium: it doesn’t have to adhere to typical rules if you don’t want it to. It can articulate truths through a state of nonconformity, and I think that’s just beautiful.