Biography
Until I was five, I believed a family myth that my real mother had asked the sea to take me away because I was the ugliest baby in the world. My sister told me that she found me washed up in a basket on the beach in Sheringham and persuaded our parents to keep me. Sometimes I’m still not entirely sure she was teasing. I grew up in rural Suffolk in a small, silent village that felt both sheltered and unsettling – I had a theory that the throb of the electricity cables between the fields was my murky feelings getting sucked away. On a typical weekend, we’d eat jacket potatoes in a local café with Mum and Dad then spend our pocket money: me on a John Clare collection from W H Smiths; my sister on a Morrissey cassette from Woolworths. Later, I’d escape to explore ditches, lanes, an abandoned plague village on my white racer that I mangled when trying to impress the boy I fancied by riding with my hands on my head. My best friend’s mum put hydrogen peroxide on my cuts, they fizzed and stung and made my eyes water, yet I utterly loved her for it. There was something beautiful in the ferocity of her care. I’m fascinated by such paradoxes: by the appearance of one thing sloughing its skin to reveal its inner opposite; by that space between fantasy and reality and what can take root, poem-shaped, and start growing there. Whether I’m playing with my children, swimming, sleeping, writing or painting – what I’m really thinking about is that space – that gap or synapse in thoughts and feelings that can only be expressed in a poem.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
The first inklings of Milk Fever came on a flight from Texas to London after a wedding in 2009. I was travelling with my four-year old daughter. The plane hit turbulence as we clipped the corner of Kansas and without taking her eyes from the film, my daughter clung to me with a sticky, lolly-poppy hand and was instantly soothed. I had such a strong urge to do the same to a polished lady sitting on my other side. To distract myself, I tried to think of all the older women who have shaped me. When I counted thirteen on my fingers (no, I don’t have extra digits), I decided to write a sequence of thirteen poems under the awful title, Meet My Other Mothers. By the time we landed, the first draft of a tiny, tentative poem had formed. The collection grew and evolved from there.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
Sheer mayhem. With two young children and a desk that’s wedged into a corner of the kitchen, there is always someone wailing, weeing or ingesting small toys nearby. Luckily, I am a devoted notebooker and have a dogged muse who trails me wherever I go and has even been known to crop up like Hades and drag me to my writing underworld until I produce at least a first draft of a new poem. When I resurface, bleary-eyed, ravenous and mad-haired, I am aware of very little that has happened around me. This was certainly the case while I was writing Milk Fever, though I have it on good authority that I completed my Creative Writing MA, basked in a Jungian analysis and my sister had another baby while I was elsewhere, scribbling.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
The surprise and delight of realising I had so much to say for myself through these poems was wonderful. Sometimes, when jotting down an idea for one poem, another would sneak in on its back. I ended up with three notebooks of ideas, titles, scraps of lines, cuttings, dreams, sketches and quotes. The day I noticed how the poems had begun to talk to each other and reverberate off each other I knew I was writing a cohesive collection for the first time. A turning point came when I was researching the Eleusinian Mysteries and re-read the Persephone and Demeter myth. It seemed to encapsulate the overarching themes of Milk Fever: the difficult, visceral, tender and wounding components of the mother-daughter dyad.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
Milk Fever took two years to write – though of course there were days when I got lost, lost faith, gave up, stamped my feet, ripped pages up and shook a fist at my muse. But there were also the times when editors of literary magazines accepted some of the Milk Fever poems, or they were placed in competitions or an audience responded with applause when I read.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
My father wrote poetry and my mother is an avid reader, so I grew up with an understanding that words are a powerful currency. A French teacher I had a protracted, agonising crush on inspired the usual terrible verse – but also led me to my favourite book, Olivia by Dorothy Strachey, which still fuels my writing. John Clare’s ‘I Am’ was an early thunderbolt, shortly followed by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ and Erica Jong’s collection Fruit & Vegetables gave me the thumbs up to be a little bit saucy in my poetry. I was one of the first students to study creative writing with the late Dr Edmund Cusick and later on, I wrote television scripts for Hollyoaks and Grange Hill, which were then produced by Phil Redmond. As far as I know, he doesn’t write poetry, but he did instil in me some basic writing skills that translate from TV to poetry. For example, knowing when to come into and out of a scene or poem, how to workshop and redraft (then redraft and redraft and redraft), the importance of the image you leave your audience with. My current hero is my MA supervisor, Michael Bayley.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
I am currently writing my second collection, Touchstone, which explores my relationship to a single pebble; the person who gave it to me; what it means to feel touched (beyond the physical); our attempts to control our impermanence and how human beings use objects as surrogates for experience. I am hoping to start a PhD in the autumn that would enable me to write my third collection, Call Her Alaska, which is a contemporary re-imagining of The Snow Queen as well as a kind of female bildungsroman.
Pomegranate & Pin
I have waited for the tenth day to tear
this fruit apart, my thumbs dig deep
in its rusty skin, get stung by its sharp, slick
spill. Just six of these gelled seeds – swaddled
embryos bursting with talent –
I’ve picked to place on my tongue, keep
warm as a first kiss, safe as a daughter.
Look, a globe of pale moon spins,
a darkening world turns below. Between
fair freckles of a star-blown night and hard
arthritic roots pulsing beneath my feet,
I stand alone inside this moment, this covenant
I am making with you, with her, the self I pray
to find. I push my fingers inside
the two half-shells, into unhealed flesh; live
fibres until a kind of blood weeps to my wrists,
leaks on my chest. I sprinkle dropped pips
around a mountain ash, whispering my hurts,
my fears, my lusts until the language I nursed
on runs dry. I seal my eyes, my lips,
each failure and regret as I crush the seeds,
feel a bittersweet surge of life, its prickling
rush urging me to taste, to become and keep on
becoming both the weapon and the wound,
Persephone and Demeter; pomegranate & pin.
Discover more about Kaddy Benyon
Twitter – @KaddyBenyon
Poetry:
Publications:
http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/2011/10/ambit-206-is-here/
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/the_london_magazine_december_january_2011_i022184.aspx
http://frogmore-jp.blogspot.com/2011/09/frogmore-papers-no-78-is-out-now.html
http://www.popshotpopshot.com/Issue_05_TheChildhoodIssue.pdf
http://www.mslexia.co.uk/magazine/newwriting/nwpoem_46.php
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roof-Red-Tiles-Other-Stories/dp/1907090401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329741624&sr=8-1
http://issuu.com/sampeczek/docs/spilt_milk_issue_two05
Placings:
http://www.picador.com/blogs/2010/11/Picador-Poetry-Prize-shortlist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/25/picador-poetry-prize-shortlist
http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/alss/deps/english_media/news_and_events/news_archive0/kaddy_benyon_picador.html
http://www.fishpublishing.com/test/2010/11/winners-of-the-2010-fish-poetry-prize/
http://www.chapteronepromotions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=414&Itemid=123
Television:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becca_Dean
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1405998/filmoyear
Fiction:
Visceral, haunting and vivid, Kaddy’s poetry both shocks and comforts – giving voice to hard to express emotion with specific and charged energy. Brilliant.
I have read Kaddy Benyon’s work in Mslexia and other publications and always find it startling and beautiful. She explores ideas in such an original way and I love the visceral images in her poem that often end with an emotional thump in the stomach. Great.
Congratulations! I’m so (selfishly) hoping that I’ll soon be able to buy your collection and thus be able to read it whenever I like: a single listen is never enough, any more than one could listen to a symphony once and hear all it has to offer.
The ‘gardening glove/ moulded to the shape of her absent hands’ is just one example of an image which has never left me. Your book will not sit on my too-tall to-be-read pile, but in the small selection of well-loved books – next to the work of Tim Liardet, Robin Robertson & Dikra Ridha.
I am thrilled that Kaddy Benyon has been short-listed for the Crawshaw Prize. Writing on subjects as diverse as ancient mythology, motherhood and the South Pole, her poems have the precision and structure of Jo Shapcott and the storytelling of Kate Clanchy. But her poetry’s lyrical heart is all her own.
I think Kaddy Benyon’s poetry brings something extraordinary to the surface, and there’s a disquiet that lurks there that reminds me a little of Schubert. I particularly like her poem, Sirius, published by Mslexia http://www.mslexia.co.uk/magazine/newwriting/nwpoem_46.php the poem made me catch my breath and cry.
Kaddy Benyon’s poems startle me: their strength of feeling; their unpredictability; their sinewy language which sears through your defences… There’s nothing her compact and unfeigned poems are unwilling to confront: loss of a loved one; the anguish and joy of motherhood; the yearning for comfort in a world that jangles, pulls and bruises. Poems not asking for pity but to be able to cope, even if dealing with life means walking all over yourself first. These tough, tender and attractive poems need to be read and reread. Some raise a wry smile; others leave a lump in your throat. They are my choice for the Crashaw Prize.
I whole-heartedy support Kaddy Benyon, as I find her poetry very moving and skilled. Her poems cover a wide range of topics, ranging from family life to mythology, always in beautiful, emotionally-packed language and with a distinctive voice. They are all moving and genuinely expressive, as well as well-crafted.
Even the interview is beautiful! Kaddy Benyon may be a new and emerging poet, but she writes with an incredibly mature voice. Her work sits easily beside the collections of more established writers. The poems are dazzling. Winning the Crawshaw Prize would be extremely well deserved.
How is it possible that Kaddy has grown so fast into such an impressive and engaging poet? She has a sure instinct for connotation and a well-tuned ear for pattern and felicity and surprise in sound. I love her courage in handling emotion and her absolute commitment to her writing.
I love the ferocious intensity of Kaddy Benyon’s beautifully crafted, complex poems. On first reading, they hit you like a punch in the stomach; each re-reading reveals new layers, new shades of possible meaning. I can’t wait to read them all collected in one volume.
So sharply observed they can leave you breathless, and with details so clear and new-minted they heighten our sense of the world, Kaddy’s Benyon’s poems always deserve rereading. Yet this poet also takes us further, into a deeper, more chthonic process, a place she makes just as real and just as sharply felt. See, for instance, ‘Pomegranite and Pin’ about a woman’s fight to be creative, raw yet ritualised, brilliant yet disarming and, like all successful poems about such struggles, embodying the encounter with that self the poet ‘pray[s] to find.’