Words: Charlie Parker
There is something to be said for someone who chooses to be a writer. A profession that arguably creates more questions than it answers, the great Barnsley author Barry Hines once wrote;
‘A lot of people have romantic ideas about writing. They think you get inspiration by sitting in a cottage in the dales and watching the sun setting over the dingle. Writing is nothing to do with pretty views. It’s to do with commitment: if you know what you’re writing about, and what you’re writing it for, you could write it in a cellar.’
Beautifully succinct from a criminally underrated Northern writer, it got me thinking: what is this writer’s life?
What of the words, the language, the process of writing? Why do some phrases seemingly ‘work’ and others don’t? Why do some writers stick to one form? Ultimately, why bother writing at all?
To be the first to answer these questions in a new is Helen Mort. A Sheffield poetic powerhouse if there ever was one, it was an obvious choice: a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, multi-award winner, non-fiction and short story writer, Eric Gregory Award winner (2007), Fenton Aldeburgh Prize winner (2015), long listed for the Portico Prize for her 2019 novel ‘Black Car Burning’…I could go on.
However, that would almost feel inappropriate given her personable nature; within a few minutes, I am already at ease, immediately informing her that one of the first poetry books my father gifted me was her 2013 debut Division Street, claiming, “I know you’re into poetry and this is about and miners and whatnot.”
‘I’m honoured he did that!’ she replies in typical modest fashion.
I first met Helen in person at a poetry open mic night in Sheffield where she was the headline act, performing from her then recently-published The Illustrated Woman. “I keep saying that I’m going to find some funding of some sort, because I used to run a poetry night in Chesterfield years and years ago, and that was like a combination of open mic but guest poets. The idea was to get performers or readers that you wouldn’t normally get visiting Sheffield, so they weren’t local – the open mic had local performers.
However, to do that, you obviously need some way of paying them. I didn’t particularly want to charge people to get in, so every now and then I think I need to get back on it and make something happen. Sometimes it’s thinking about venues, sometimes it’s the admin and the amount of work but really…I just need to sort it out!”
Mort’s determination is not unwarranted: “There’s a lot of quite short lived poetry things in Sheffield, which I understand because it is a lot of work, but also I think lockdown was a big factor, and we’ve not yet come back from it. There was a point when there were so many regular nights in Sheffield and Rotherham and surrounding area. However, I think we’re coming out of it because there’s definitely more book events in general. Like this week, I could go to three different things at least if I wanted to, as an audience member. And sometimes it’s like more than one thing on the same night.”
It’s refreshing to hear – a city of Sheffield’s size and history has never been lacking in creative spark, and poetry is certainly an avenue that begs far more attention, especially so given it was only 6 years ago the city appointed its first ever Poet Laureate in Otis Mensah.
Although having grown up in Chesterfield, Mort went on to study at Cambridge, thus is only too familiar of the elitism poetry poses: “It’s got a bad reputation, as an inaccessible art form, hasn’t it? And I think – I’m not talking about us specifically here – but I do think that there’s a bit of a thing where we sort of as poets, we sort of perpetuate that because the thing about poetry commercially, is it’s always going to be the least commercially lucrative of the writing forms of the literature forms. Right?
“From personal experience with other forms, it really is. I’ve written a nonfiction book, a novel, and poetry collections, and I just know what’s been the best. Even just on that level, it’s such a pleasant surprise to go into it that way round; I can see how you could potentially make a living as a fiction/nonfiction writer, but more difficult as a poet if you were just writing the books or doing the performances. So I think because it’s less commercially profitable, what we’ve all done is we’ve kind of fetishised its rarity in some way.
“If we’ve not got status from the best sellers, or whatever, I think we all participate in this narrative to a various degree that it’s something special, and that not everyone can do it, and that it’s ‘divine inspiration’.
I’ve always thought that to be a good writer you need to be a good poet. The needs of language require understanding of the words and language you’re using, strict as that sounds. You got to put the hours in, whereas with poetry, Don Patterson [Scottish poet and writer] has this aphorism where he says something along the lines of: ‘the problem with being a poet, is that you can redeem a whole day in about half an hour’.
I know what he means, like suddenly if you have a day where you get an idea and you’re able to work it into something that feels like a poem on the page, and it’s good, and it’s alive, you just feel it’s like nothing else. It’s like this joy, and you feel like you’ve made something but actually in terms of the time you’ve spent on it.
Then there are other poems that take you 10 years to work on it and it’s not the same, but you can occasionally get those things that sort of seem like they arrived like a gift. But I would argue that if you’re thinking like an artist or like a writer, I’m not just saying this as a cop out. You’re sort of working all the time anyway.
Subconsciously, you see things you’re observing or you’re putting yourself in the way of things that are going to inspire you.”
Mountain You are very successful but you have rocks in your chest, skin-coloured sandstone wedged where your breasts should be. Your stomach is a boulder. To hold you up, your legs grow stony too. You zip your jacket up and nobody notices you are a mountain. You buy coffee, run board meetings where no-one says you’re made of scree but above your head, their talk is weather, your eyes collect new rain and you know what you are because like any hillside you don’t sleep. Your feet could hold you here forever but your sides are crumbling, and when you speak your words are rockfall, you’re scared your heart is tumbling from your mouth
Are you a poetic mountain now within the UK poetry scene?
That’s really interesting. That poem, if it’s about anything, is about mountaineering and finding metaphors to describe the act of climbing, but part of it was almost like a reversal of that. It’s borrowing a metaphor from the idea of mountains and what mountains are to describe anxiety, or more specifically, the feeling of imposter syndrome.
It’s like this: I think what I wanted to convey is this idea that some people are always walking around with this constant sense that there’s something wrong with them and that they’re going to be found out at any point for being somehow not adequate to what they think they’re doing with their life. I remember writing that poem driving on the way back from Manchester Airport, through the peak districts. I get a lot of ideas for poems while I’m driving, as well as when I’m running or walking. And I just had this line going round and round in my head: something about ‘you’re very successful, but you have rocks in your chest’.
I got to Hathersage in the Peak District, pulled over the car, parked up at the side of the road and just started writing it down on whatever I’d got to hand. I was scared that I was going to lose it. That happens to me quite often with driving. It’s almost annoying. It’s like having a benign version of having intrusive thoughts, because it’s like ‘I don’t want to hear you right now’. Especially if it’s something that’s a bit troublesome to you.
I feel very lucky that I get to make my living around making writing the centre of what I do. It’s kind of a dream come true in many ways to be working as a writer and as a mentor and teacher and stuff, so when you get a bit like, ‘Oh, I’m no good’, I thought it’d be an interesting move to start a collection with this metaphor of the crumbling mountain.
This sounds quite a facetious question, but do you enjoy writing? Do you enjoy what you do?
That’s a great question, because the answer is yes and no, both in terms of the act of writing and in being a writer. I think it’s a fortunate thing to get to do. My colleague at Manchester Met Uni, Andrew McMillan, says, whenever we’ve got a difficult thing to do at work, ‘it’s not like going down the mines, is it?’ It’s a huge privilege for people to listen to you, and you shouldn’t take it for granted. I think that a lot of people don’t have easy access to. The act of writing itself is like a love hate thing, isn’t it?
How much do you focus on language? Do you ever mimic what you’re reading?
I definitely accidentally imbibe bits of whatever I’m reading at of the time. And so, for example, recently I’ve been reading a lot of a certain poets work and I wrote this poem that I was really pleased with. I sent it to another friend who’s a poetry critic. And he was like, ‘Oh, this really reminds me of so-and-so’, because you just attune to their choices of language and theme. And if I can’t write, if I don’t feel like writing, I read to get myself into that frame of mind. That’s because I get excited by someone else’s language choice.
I’m focused on lyric and sound and image maybe to an extent, but also combined with some kind of narrative. Whereas I know there are some poets that are interested in sound over sense, for instance, they don’t care if you can’t follow a kind of narrative in some way. And that’s really interesting, I think, and one isn’t more valid than the other. It’s just a different kind of element and craft.
