An interview with Lydia Unsworth

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Erbacce, 2018), for which she won the 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ambit, Pank, Litro, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Sentence: Journal of Prose Poetics, among other places. Based in Manchester/Amsterdam. Twitter@lydiowanie

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

Well, as an adult, I came at it through the visual arts, which I studied. At high school, I was mainly drawing, but then you go to university and conceptual art barges in and starts firing excitement at you from all over the place. I stopped buying paint, the visual side fell away (via a string of mixed-media installation type things), and finally I was just left with the words.

What keeps me going is partly that you dig around in the mire of everything you’ve ever seen or overheard or thought about and pull out these strands, like plasticine worms, and then you get to mash them up into these shapes you could never have foreseen. I find that very exciting, the surprise of it. And whenever I read something amazing, I find I just want to be a part of that, to answer back and join in. Like a long-distance time-travelling language chorus. Like saying, yes! upon seeing some new combination of words, and being brought for a second to almost tears.

With two published collections to date, do you feel your process of putting together a manuscript has evolved? How do you decide on the shape and size of a manuscript?

To an extent, it decides it itself in collaboration with me, and to a greater extent I think this is something I have yet to perfect! The first one, I left fairly chronologically, as that was the point, the evolution of the narrative: like walking a route or mapping a path. The second was written when I was pregnant, and as such I was very certain there should be a before and an after (there also turned out to be a middle and an epilogue). The first half mapped a countdown, so also remained chronological, and the second half I arranged alphabetically, which amused me, because the coldness and dismissal of the arrangement was totally opposite to the kinds of emotional considersations more commonly associated with such a time. It’s also a lack of confidence, I think; I create a rule that attempts to take my agency out of the picture.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

I was heavily influenced by the borderlands of prose before I was in any way influenced by poetry; so Samuel Beckett and stuff like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić each had their moments, and visual artists using language, repetition, and chance in their work, such as Sophie Calle. Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces has a special place in my inner folders, something like thought-poetry, just having ideas and writing them down in whatever state of completion they happen to be.

As for actual poets, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa taught me a lot about prose poetry. I currently seem to be dipping into the collection, Nowhere Nearer, by Alice Miller over and over again. And recently Isn’t Forever by Amy Key also totally bowled me over. I’m influenced by whichever poet (or anything else) I’m reading in a given week - an influence goes in and mixes with all the previous influences until eventually (I hope) one starts to sound more like oneself, each new influence having less of an impact to the accumulating whole.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Certainly various friends and tutors believing in me in recent years has given me a push to eliminate a rather ravenous doubt. And a good rejection letter can also teach you a thing or two! I think I’d actually love some mentorship, I often feel like I’m treading water in a rather perillous void.

What are you currently working on?

I’m trying to write a collection that deals with authority and anxiety. To take different starting points, from current reading/watching habits etc., or to take the essence of a scene or a sentence from somewhere, and to free-associate and craft from there. I’m interested in how confidence affects a person’s experience of life, so I’m meticulously scanning for versions or exaggerations of a past self in some poems, while in others also enjoying the freedom of being out of the subject-box entirely and becoming purely the excitement of joining or creating dots and justapositions from the thick tapestry of the current cultural world. The removal of the personal, or sheltering beneath the banner of an expert, thus allow different ways to explore authority.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Everything I read online by Crispin Best and Kate Feld I absolutely love! And I read a poem today on Rust&Moth by Adelina Sarkisyan that I thought was beautiful.