Meet the Poets: Hetty Cliss
Hetty talks to us about her Issue Two poem, "What If I Told You That", her writing practice and the importance of cursive, as well as her early poetry memories.
What can you tell us about this poem?
What If I Told You That is part of a series of poems I’m working on that take their titles from prompts on the dating app Hinge. I’m interested in how answering these prompts ‘poetically’ or within the form of a poem can complement or contrast to the ways users of the app might answer them. At the same time, I’m fascinated by the ways we curate digital selves and present them to the world, how layered these seemingly trivial or ‘quick’ (read: laboured over!) responses can be.
I’m also interested in what I see as the surprising similarities between digital mediums of written language (be it a WhatsApp message, dating app bio, or even a work email) and poems. In both cases, we often have concise, thought-out combinations of words that say one thing on the surface while multiple other meanings or feelings simmer underneath. In What If I Told You That, I wanted to play with a speaker who both reveals and conceals a frankness and sense of vulnerability. In this way, I also consider What If I Told You That to be somewhat adjacent to or in conversation with my poem No Worries If Not :) published in Issue 13 of fourteen poems, for the ways it presents a joviality on the surface to mask sensitivity underneath.
What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?
It feels wildly audacious to say, but Emily Dickinson. I remember reading her poems as an undergrad and thinking: “wow, poems can do that?!” She is the queen of ambiguity and layering multiple meanings in almost every single word of a poem. I love how she substitutes word classes and uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Her poems on the page may appear small in stature, but they are mighty in what they manage to contain, what spills out when we read and re-read them. Although I know I’ll never get close to being able to write like Dickinson (who could?!), I also know I carry her influence with me whenever I write. Or maybe this is just an excuse for having a penchant for writing short-form poems ha!
[Emily Dickinson] is the queen of ambiguity and layering multiple meanings in almost every single word of a poem. I love how she substitutes word classes and uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways
Oh, and some contemporary poets and collections that I’ve been reading and obsessing over lately are: Danez Smith’s Bluff, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, Richard Scott’s That Broke into Shining Crystals, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough’s My Name is Abilene, and Maria Ferguson’s Swell.
What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?
Pretty much every poem I’ve ever written starts its life through writing by hand. For me, I need that tangibility. Writing can all too easily be attributed to the mind and thought, to the cerebral, but in starting with my hand moving across a physical page I am reminded (unconsciously) that writing also lives in the body. I once attended a (life-changing!) workshop led by the brilliant CAConrad who spoke about the importance of writing in cursive. They spoke about how cursive writing is freedom – it gifts us the ability to write at the speed of our thoughts and therefore to break away from internal editors.
Once I have something down in my notebook, I’ll transition to typing on my laptop. Moving from gripping a pen to typing with my fingertips is like a signal to my brain that we’re shifting gears, moving from a purely generative state to one of revision. From writing to re-writing. This often happens in the same sitting as the initial writing by hand. I like the first pass of edits to occur within the headspace that initiated it, if possible. How long I stick at edits varies wildly. Sometimes, I’ll get that brilliant hyper-attentive feeling which makes it impossible to look away from the poem and what it is trying to say. Other times, I know I need to give the words time to breathe and so I leave them to percolate without me, while I percolate without them.
What’s your first poetry memory?
I was actually quite late to leap in love with poetry. It’s something I’m sad about and to be honest a little resentful of… it’s such a big part of my life now that I can’t help but think about the lost time! My first poetry memories are from reading poetry at a young age in school and being so self-conscious when trying to express what I thought. The poems we were studying often didn’t resonate with me or at least not in the way they were being taught. There was that feeling of pressure to get it ‘right’, which I know isn’t uncommon. Now I really enjoy introducing people who don’t often read poetry to poems I think will speak to them or running poetry workshops with people who have never tried to write poems before. It’s so rewarding to see people light up as they connect with poetry for first time.
The poems we were studying [in school] often didn’t resonate with me or at least not in the way they were being taught. There was that feeling of pressure to get it ‘right’, which I know isn’t uncommon
What song helps us get to know you better?
My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski. The way Mitski’s songwriting holds the big and the small, the intimate and the cosmic, the personally immediate and the publicly historic, together (often in the same breath!) with such ease is so satisfying to me. It’s also something that’s characteristic in many of my favourite poems. How good it feels – or rather how seen I feel – to shout: “My body’s made of crushed little stars and I’m not doing anything” or “I better ace that interview / I should tell them that I’m not afraid to die!”
Hetty’s debut pamphlet Inhabit is published by 14poems and is available to buy online now.
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This was a beautiful read!