The Monthly interviews poet and prose writer, Dawn Watson – Part 2 – Getting to grips with poetry and prose

How did you develop your poetic writing and your writing of prose?

I probably got to grips with a certain style of poetry – at least, one I began to recognise as potentially my own – while writing my MA dissertation in 2018. I came across Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America at this time and was blown away by it. It’s a book in short sections where ‘trout fishing in America’ becomes a symbol for various everyday things and people – a carpet shop, a river, a dead body. The absolute audacity of this book set me on fire because it has so much heart. It’s kind of devastating in its authentic emotion while at the same time reading like nothing you’ve ever seen or imagined. I very much took that into my writing. How can I make something real, true, and honest, while also being like nothing you’ve ever seen?

Did, or do, you have any influences?

The poet who first made me go: here, wait, you mean you can put this sort of thing in a poem? That was Leontia Flynn. Mental health, family weirdness, LOL humour – Flynn had that, and I was a bit worried she had done it so well I’d never be able to do it myself. Elizabeth Bishop is an influence, I wrote my critical PhD thesis on her. Ciaran Carson, too. Medbh McGuckian is a genius and seems, more than any poet I know, to get at the truth of the profound weirdness of existence.

More broadly, I’d point to Anne Carson and, also, Stephen King. My number one consideration for any writing is: does this feel authentic? Does it make me feel something? I’m influenced by anything that sparks emotion, whether it’s a song or a film – especially film.

What ideas or themes do you investigate through your work?

I would say hope, grief, class, and power (who holds it?). Childhood, motherhood. Queerness, to an extent. Being a woman. Being formerly a young girl. Being middle-aged. Time, and how we move through it, and it us. Sweets (candy) – someone said I talk about sweets a lot and I think they’re right.

What about form or structure – particularly regarding poetry. Is that important to you?

For me, form and structure are at the heart of everything. I deeply love thinking and talking about form. As a fledgling student of poetry at undergraduate level I got it in my head that the formal structure of a piece of writing is really the bones of what is being communicated. It is as important as the words. This is perhaps more obvious in poetry, generally, but I also encourage my prose students to take lessons from the poets in terms of thinking about how a story fits together. What does its structure communicate? It’s line lengths, its rhythm, its sounds.

A story like Donald Barthelme’s ‘The School’ speaks to this idea of structure and form and building to image while at the same time holding space in the zone of the not-explained – where poetry lives full-time and owns a video store.

How many poetry collections have you published and what is the process by which you produce a collection?

My first full collection We Play Here was published with Granta last year. Before that, I published a poetry pamphlet called The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher (The Emma Press).

The books were quite different in that the pamphlet was a series of margin poems, whereas WPH was a book-length poem sequence (four poem stories). I think I have two rules, regarding writing – either I write something really quickly and fully-formed, or I tinker with it for 150 years. There is no in-between.

I wrote WPH as part of a PhD at Queen’s. It felt different – I mean, I was aware I was writing something that raised questions around form. Maybe something in the fact of it being a PhD (and the directive to produce an original body of work) seemed to give me permission to experiment. As an eldest sibling, I tend to be a permission-seeker. The yoke is off now, though. Granta have unleashed a beast.