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Interview

Penelope Shuttle

talks to Daneet Steffens

From Issue 33 ◊ Apr/May/Jun 2007

Penelope Shuttle has a landmark birthday coming up and several celebrations planned: there’s the Falmouth bash, the family gathering near London, a more local excursion to Padstow with a close friend – ‘we’ve booked lunch at Rick Stein’s!’ – and, just to round things off, an extended jaunt in Italy.

She may as well be celebrating a bit of a new emergence: when her husband, poet Peter Redgrove died in 2003, Penelope found herself not just silenced as a poet, but stymied as a person, confining herself between bed and sofa for eight months: ‘I was silenced by the force of my feelings and that’s a real horror, when you can’t express yourself. I stayed in the house so long that when I finally tried to leave, my old agoraphobia had come back for the first time in years.’ But battling old demons can also make you discover new resources – once you let your grief take its course. ‘I did get my speech back through the form of poetry,’ she says, ‘that was something that broke that awful spell really. But that only came with time. When you’re bereaved you have to go through that time, until time lets you off the leash a bit.’

Time’s passing, it is clear, has released Penelope from its once-harsh grasp. It’s a chilly, drippy winter’s day in coastal Cornwall, but it’s nice and warm and dry in Penelope’s lived-in, loved-in, comfortingly higgledy-piggledy house just over the hill from Falmouth harbour. She relaxes in a room wallpapered with well-thumbed books, surrounded by pictures of Peter and daughter Zoe – at graduation, at travel, at ease. Sipping tea, she taps generously into both her early family life as well as her 33-year-long relationship with Peter with astonishing facility. Soft-spoken and with a gentle warmth, her ability to speak at length of her past at the drop of a hat, comes as a welcome and enjoyable surprise.

Of course, there have been outward indications that she had put her crippling grief behind her: she got herself off that sofa, returned to writing and teaching poetry, was back to rambling walks around her beloved Cornwall and, in 2006, she published the acclaimed – not to mention Forward and T S Eliot-shortlisted – collection, Redgrove’s Wife.

Originally published as a novelist, since producing her first poetry collection in 1981, Penelope had released seven more collections, the last, A Leaf Out of His Book, in 1999. She also famously collaborated with her husband on several novels, as well as the groundbreaking Wise Wound. Redgrove’s Wife, her first solo venture beyond that strong, sustaining writing-and-love partnership, is still a revelation.

She celebrates herbs, orchids, arachnids, art, her daughter and the serendipitous West Country weather.

As in her previous poetry, she mines the Cornish landscape and lore for buried treasures, drawing energy from the earth’s core. She writes playful list and alphabet poems, allowing refrains and repetitions to create rhythm. She celebrates herbs, orchids, arachnids, art, her daughter and the serendipitous West Country weather. In ‘Learning To Drive,’ she displays a wry humour when it comes to the quotidian. Her language has a suppleness and flexibility that offers many delights, even to a poetry-reading novice:

‘A poem stays awake long after midnight / talking you from room to room… / Sometimes / a poem is your only daughter / busy and happy in the world….

Grounding some of the more ethereal poems are powerful odes to her husband and father (who passed away six months after Peter). ‘Peter’s Shoes’ and ‘Missing You’ are concrete, moving evocations of the effort of moving on, heart-stopping in their imagery:

‘This year no one will ask how you voted, / or if you know the way to town…No one will peel apples for you, / or love you more than you can bear / No one will forget you’.

In ‘In the Kitchen,’ she clutches at domestic basics, trying to grasp a slice of normality, to find her balance in a space of overwhelming grief.

‘The new fridge hums like a maniac / with helpfulness / I am trying to love the world / back to normal…The kettle alone knows the good he does, / here in the kitchen, loving the world, / steadfastly loving / See how easy it is, he whistles’.

Redgrove’s Wife reveals a freshness and strength that draws on the elegiac and the enigmatic, the practical and the ambiguous, and plays on the contrasts between them all. It is inclusive and wide-ranging, sad and joyous, a generous offering. And, I find once I arrive in Cornwall, that her poems nestle nicely into the surrounding landscape with its in-your-face, dynamic, highly-changeable weather, odd rock formations, beaches that morph from cliff to sand in the blink of an eye. Like Penelope’s poetry, it generates a perpetual sensation of change around you.

‘My parents both had quiet temperaments,’ she says from behind the rim of her teacup. ‘They didn’t drink, they didn’t do a lot of socializing. They were very wrapped up in one another, and they just liked this safe, quiet, comfortable life – they’d had enough excitement already.’

Penelope Diane Shuttle was born in her grandfather’s house, in a very staid Staines, in 1947. Her mother was a homemaker, her father a civil engineer who became the marketing and sales director for an earth-moving machinery firm. ‘My parents both had quiet temperaments,’ she says from behind the rim of her teacup. ‘They didn’t drink, they didn’t do a lot of socializing. They were very wrapped up in one another, and they just liked this safe, quiet, comfortable life – they’d had enough excitement already.’

The ‘enough excitement already’ refers to her parents’ youthful meeting through church dances, their rapid engagement when war broke out, and her father’s subsequent five-year absence, first as a 19-year-old soldier in China, then as a POW. On his return, he was very open with his family about his harrowing experiences, and, on retiring, his wife encouraged him to record his memoirs. Up against a flooded war memoir market, he decided to publish with a small press and, being a keen salesman, market the book himself. (‘Even in his 70s he had a lot of energy, so he and my mum just got in the car and went to about 40 bookshops around Staines.’) He sold out of a first edition, went through a reprint and became a local celebrity. But the book generated even more unexpected dividends: ‘Sharing his experience, he found, made some sort of sense of it,’ Penelope explains. ‘He felt from people’s response that his experience was somehow being honoured. So it didn’t fester away.’

With her parents so happily domesticated, it fell to Penelope’s aunt, a keen walker, to introduce her teenage niece to the delights of the West Country, taking her on walking holidays along the North Devon coast, experiences Penelope describes as ‘eye-opening.’

The other eye-opener, of course, was reading. Penelope’s grandmother had been an avid reader and ‘a real book magpie,’ and her granddaughter chewed through anthologies of Victorian and Georgian verse, as well as Daily Express sets of the Brontës and Dickens. Discovering T S Eliot and Emily Dickinson at 15, she found that she wanted to write, needed to write, but was turned off by The Movement school of Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings. ‘They were very English,’ she remembers, shaking her head, ‘in a bad way. Very controlled imagery, very quiet, very dull. It was so dull. And I thought, “This is contemporary poetry, I can’t write this stuff.”’

Then she discovered Penguin’s Modern European poets in translation series. ‘The first one I saw,’ she says in a nearly hushed, still-awed voice, ‘was Rilke. That was a whole new thing, reading Rilke at 17. I remember my friend had a Saturday job in a bookshop and so she could get books very cheap and I remember her saying, “Oh you’ll really like this book.” I hadn’t ever read anything like that before – it was the language and the philosophy behind it that excited me, it was so un-English. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.’ For the suburban teen, reading became a mixture of escapism and discovery at the same time, and in the Staines library one day, she found another eye-opener, a book called New Poems by American Witter Bynner. ‘They were all surrealist poems,’ – the nearly hushed reverence is back, as though re-living the excitement – ‘some only five or six lines – and they just turned the world upside down for me. I thought “Now this is a way forward!”’

Enchanted by the realisation that ‘you can have paradox, you can have multiple meanings, you can explore the irrational,’ allowed her the freedom to find her voice. And she found that she always much preferred European and American writers. ‘I do like English poets but I think those others have had a huge influence on me because of the energy and the openness of the poet to experience. The English tend to – I mean obviously there is Shakespeare – but the English poets tend to watch their backs.’

School itself she found boring, so she created another freedom in the form of a commercial secretarial course – ‘wonderful, I use touch type all the time when I’m drafting’ – but otherwise became a bit of a recluse in her parents’ house, plagued by bouts of anorexia and agoraphobia: ‘Looking back, I had a kind of tunnel vision when it came to poetry, and I had a lot of trouble adjusting to the outside world.’ At 18 she had ‘what was probably a breakdown’ – not working, staying at home, severing social links – but by 21 she had turned life around, moving to Somerset on her own, working in an office half the year, then writing until she needed to work again. Spurred on by those walking holidays and the novels of John Cowper Powys, she settled in Frome.

At this stage she was writing novels as well as poetry, but ‘I put big quotation marks around calling them novels now because they are really prose poems. It was a misplaced love affair with Virginia Woolf, writing those novels. The characters are really split-off bits of my psyche and they don’t come together. They are more like poetry journals.’

She met Peter, his first marriage already on its last legs, through a mutual friend – ‘a Carmelite monk, an absolute sweetie,’ – at a writers’ retreat near Zennor, just up the road from where D H Lawrence lived, ‘so you couldn’t have a more literary spot.’ A correspondence followed, and when Peter’s marriage ended, Penelope joined him in Falmouth where he was teaching. It was 1970, and she’s called it home every since.

‘If you had told me before Peter,’ she confides, ‘that I would be living and collaborating with another writer, and a partner, I would have said, ‘That’s not possible, it’s a solo activity.’ But working in ‘an atmosphere of love,’ suited them both: ‘Our collaborative thing was like ping-pong: someone would write a chapter or a part of a chapter and sort of bat it across the room to the other person who would take it on, work on it and bat it back.’

Collaborating on poems proved more of a challenge. ‘Of course there were clashes,’ she says. ‘With our poems it was harder to maintain a kind of distance. We used to read the working drafts of each other’s poems and there are lines of mine in Peter’s poems and lines of Peter’s in mine and actually they are so interwoven now that I couldn’t tell you which is which. And we couldn’t do the poems in the house,’ she says, laughing at the memory. ’We had to get away from the domestic setting.’ They carved out neutral areas – park benches, cafes – and did poetry work there.

And in that successful teamwork lies the tongue-in-cheek but heart-felt sentiment behind the poem ‘Redgrove’s Wife.’ ‘I never felt that I was in the role of a wife,’ she says firmly. ‘It was a very equal partnership. We were just two people who knew each other’s work really well. And I miss that dreadfully.

And in that successful teamwork lies the tongue-in-cheek but heart-felt sentiment behind the poem ‘Redgrove’s Wife.’ ‘I never felt that I was in the role of a wife,’ she says firmly. ‘It was a very equal partnership. We were just two people who knew each other’s work really well. And I miss that dreadfully. Even when he was unwell the last two years of his life, he could still look at a poem and he’d know where the weak line was and he’d go straight for it. You’d be thinking, “I think that’s going to work, I hope he doesn’t notice” — and of course he would.’ She laughs again. ‘He had a great bullshit detector.’

When Peter began to suffer from a lethal combination of Parkinson’s, diabetes and arthritis in 2000, the degenerative aspects of the diseases took their toll. Penelope didn’t write at all during the last year Peter was ill, and for about eight months afterwards – ‘I thought I wouldn’t write again I felt so down.’ It was creating the poem ‘Missing You’ that restored her: ‘It’s about trying to find meaning in time when your partner’s no longer there to share time with you. That proved a very rich resource.’ Since then her pen remained active. ‘I’ve written several poems about the scattering of his ashes which for me was,’ – she pauses – ‘the moving thing. The funeral was a nightmare; I just wanted it to be over so I could get back to bed. But we scattered his ashes 15 months after he died, in Maenporth.’ That action brought some relief.

And what’s it like now, to share those personal poems about her grief, her return?

‘I had to start very gently,’ she says quietly. ‘I started by reading ‘Missing You’ here in Falmouth. Gradually, I took it to a wider audience.’ Another poem, ‘Repose of Baghdad,’ was also always well-received. Much as her father found, decades earlier, sharing her experience in the written word became an integral part of the healing process. ‘People asked me how I could read these poems, but actually, to be able to articulate your feelings is very strengthening and comforting.’

She also draws strength, comfort and writing inspiration from an always-eclectic range, from poets Denise Levertov, Louise Glück and Brigit Pegeen Kelly to novelists Donna Daley-Clarke, Hilary Mantel, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley and David Mitchell, from artists from Rembrandt to Paula Rego, to mystical sites like Stonehenge and the Uffington Horse.

This is a renewed and invigorated Penelope – ‘Cornwall is a very transformative place,’ she smiles – confidently weaving her present and future: She’s a 2007 National Poetry Competition judge (‘I do love judging competitions. You never know who you will discover’); her 1988 collection Adventures of My Horse is being reprinted by the Poetry Book Society for its Back in Print series; she’s working on a memoir of her time with Peter; and she currently chairs the Falmouth Poetry Group she founded with Peter in 1972. She has also accumulated ‘huge numbers’ of almost-completed poems for a new collection that marks a new beginning. ‘At first,’ she says, ‘you just can’t bear to look back, because it’s too hard and painful to think back to a time you were happy. As time goes on, those memories become treasure and you can look at them and hold them and enjoy them.’

PENELOPE SHUTTLE’s Selected Poems (Oxford UP, 1998) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is currently a Hawthornden Fellow and works as a tutor for The Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation.

My first memory

'is of hot, bright sunshine. I’m crawling across my grandfather’s garden towards a huge bush of vibrant lavender. I’m drawn irresistibly towards its perfume and its overwhelming colour. If I’d known anything about art as an 18-month-old, I would compare the bush with all its visual and sensual impact to a Kandinsky.’

My first writing

‘When I was about 14 I wrote a full-length comedy science fiction novel, inspired by a heady melange of Ray Bradbury and P G Wodehouse. This is still my mother’s favourite of all my oeuvre. She still feels I could have been a Terry Pratchett.’

Thanks to…

‘New Poems by Witter Bynner. This book freed me from the straitjacket of the English verse being written in the early Sixties.’

The first book that affected me

‘was Jane Eyre. I read over and over again the part where Jane is shut away in the Red Room by the vicious Mrs Reid, and felt so at-one with Jane. Even as a young reader, I felt the power of this book. Also, great story!’

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*33 The Shuttle Method

• Redraft a lot. When you think a poem is finished, put it away, don’t send it out. Forget about it for a period of time, and then come back to it so you can read it with fresh eyes.
• Sharpen your critical faculties: Look at your poem as though it was written by a student in a seminar you are teaching. What would you recommend to them?
• Listen out for what you can overhear in streets, in cafés, on trains. Listen in your dreams. Keep your radar on.
• No morning commitments? Go back to bed and read, or start a new poem, or write down your dream. Do some writing in bed.
• Focus elsewhere. Do yoga or read a book or a newspaper. While doing so, a phrase might leap out at you. Use that as a starting point for a new poem.
• Drink one morning coffee, then stick with tea for the rest of the day.
• Handwrite poetry into notebooks, even if your hand is rubbish with arthritis. Reviews, essays, memoirs can all be written directly on the computer screen. Poetry requires that active hand, that physical action.
• Keep six or eight notebooks on the go with early, handwritten drafts you may have written a while ago. When you are ready, type them up and work on them (if you are lucky, you’ll find the poem you are looking for).
• Visit your poems and change them. When you’ve got a second or third handwritten draft, that’s a place to start from. Type it into the computer and get to work.
• You don’t need a special poetry writing hat. Keep things random to start with. If you get stuck on a poem, go on to something else.
• Keep your eyes and your mind open.
• Use assonance a lot, rely on sound patterns. When you get the form right I can only say it’s like having a pair of shoes on the correct feet after stumbling around with them on the wrong ones.
• When organising a collection of poems, try different combinations and sequences. Be sure to take a mental step back: it’s not a randomising process. Generating the raw material has a more random aspect to it; when organising the completed poems keep it very specific.
• Live in a place that inspires you.
• Don’t restrict or limit yourself by adhering to the ‘popular’ writing models of the time. Explore the library stacks and find models and inspirations that work for you.
• Be generous with yourself: give yourself time to write.

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