The Lure of Space: Imogen Cassels in conversation with Will Burns

Earlier this year, Imogen Cassels published her first poetry collection Silk Work (Prototype) to considerable acclaim. The book, as Maureen N. McLane observes, ‘is an astonishment’, as notable for its deft inclusivity—‘its birds, suns, melancholy, balletic leaps, tender zingers’—as for the range of formal strategies employed: ‘Each poem feels like its own peculiar dawn, a striking apparition.’ The book was eagerly awaited by many following a run of chapbooks and pamphlets—Mother, beautiful things (Face Press, 2017), Arcades (Sad Press, 2018), VOSS (Broken Sleep (2020), and Chesapeake (Distance No Object, 2021)—that presented readers with the emergence of an authoritatively and authentically new poet. Reticent yet obliquely expansive, her work concerns itself with the mordancy of self-presentation and crackles with articulate energy.

Imogen was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2013, and in 2015 was selected as a Young Poet on the Underground. Her poems have appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review, The White Review, the London Review of Books, Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, Ambit, The London Magazine, and Still Point. She lives in London. In the following conversation, I talked to Imogen about the making of Silk Work: about its manoeuvres, influences, and contexts, as well as a feeling that one poem calls ‘citational beatitude’; an affect, or stance, that readily pertains to the collection as a whole. (WB)

1

First, a word on the title of the collection. ‘Silk work’ can denote silk embroidery as well as the manufacture of its primary material. One sonnet, ‘Moss’, speaks of ‘a hot line of fabric’. What sort of parallel were you looking to draw in the collection between poetic work and work in textiles?

Silk is a very generous fabric because it has so many attitudes: it is remarkably strong and exasperatingly delicate, or sensitive to damage. It’s cool to wear, and also surprisingly warm. You can weave it so it’s stiff and hangs off the wearer like a plane of something, or you can make it so it drapes, and describes the form under it. Silk as a fabric can be a cliché, but actually often gives expectation the slip – it is exciting to try and pin down, though frequently impossible to do so, which is really the way I feel about language. I think this feeling for language – often a frustration with it, really – is a real engine in my poetry, where the poems are attempts at doing thinking, or doing feeling, in words. And I guess that’s the ‘work’ bit; we talk about a writer’s ‘work’ as a way of describing their textual output(s), but I suppose I wanted to centre the -ing of work, as something that is the end result of a verb, or of a lot of process.

And, I’ve long had it set as a parallel in my head – and am still trying to figure out ways of writing criticism about it – that making or wearing clothes might in some way be like writing or reading. Clothes are a kind of (textural, formal) filter for experiencing the world, and being perceived in the world, when we happen to wear them, and language is a (textual, formal) filter for the world when we use it to describe what we do, feel, think, or see. Both language and clothes have a kind of mutually acquisitive function: we acquire language(s) to express ourselves but find that language has a reciprocal hold on us, in that it limits what we can say in words to those words themselves, and perhaps even pre-supplies us with innumerable fixed phrases or half-remembered utterances which lurk somewhere around or just below the level of consciousness. Clothes are perhaps more simple: we acquire clothes for work or life or love, and with time those clothes acquire us back as they get worn into the shape of you. Denim gives and slackens, leather wears. My own clothes are stained with blood, suncream, icing sugar, etc., and they know where my body is. The language I use knows where by body is by now, too.

2

Many of the poems seem to believe in the importance of learned technique, know-how or, as you write in ‘Faun’, ‘rehearsed articulation’. I found myself reading this poem aloud compulsively, trying to land it successively. Do you consider reading poetry a more choreographed activity, compared with the exploratory acts of improvisation at work in its composition?

I don’t really think of reading poetry as particularly choreographed at all, though it depends how strict you are about choreography. Reading has habits, and doing reading (particularly in a concentrated way, where you might have to write or talk about it later) can certainly have fixed ‘steps’ or ‘moves’, which we all learn, and then learn for ourselves. These might be, for instance, a quick scan of the rhyme scheme of a poem, assessing metre, and so on. A kind of textual triage. But there can be no truly fixed choreography to reading because no text is the same, no reader is the same, and no reader has the same day, or hour, or minute, twice. If choreography exists in reading it persists as the memory of a dance you have done, sometime in the near or distant past, which might stray into the method of reading you are doing now, as something that worked well and led to good thinking or which fell flat and led you nowhere (or, somewhere between these two points). But it was never a choreography: the dance you are remembering was itself improvisation, like you are doing now.

3

Another aspect common to many of the poems in the collection is their habit of allusion. In the notes appended to Silk Work, you claim two ‘invisible epigraphs’ for ‘Chesapeake’: a phrase from Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ (‘this knot of imaginary servitude that love always has to undo or sever’), and the entirety of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. What sort of claim do these citations have upon the poem?

I hope I’m not making too many claims in including them as ‘invisible epigraphs’. I suppose there are a few things going on here. On a practical note: ‘Chesapeake’ was written relatively quickly, over the course of a long weekend. I sent it to Luke Roberts, he said we should do it as a pamphlet with Distance No Object – before I know it ‘Chesapeake’ had become an immaculate little object, with no room for stray epigraphs roaming around. I guess my choice in Silk Work to shove them out of direct sunlight, at the back, comes also from a personal distaste for, or confusion about epigraphs when they appear at the beginnings of poems (I don’t mind them so much in longer-form work, like chapters or whole books). Who are they for? Are they a lens? I don’t know. Other people’s epigraphs often seem very boring to me, and I think they should have been edited away a long time ago. So me putting mine at the back is cheating, really, and a way of fudging being non-committal about their actual relationship to ‘Chesapeake’. The ideal epigraph really is ‘invisible’ – everyone, I imagine, would have thousands of genuinely invisible epigraphs to their texts – but mine of course are not, and only say they are.

Practical limitations and personal bias aside, the Shakespeare sonnet is one I was thinking of quite a lot around the time I wrote ‘Chesapeake’, and particularly in the context of William Empson’s very wonderful writing about it (‘I am only sure that you are valuable and in danger’, he says as his closing note). The Lacan is a phrase that has stuck with me ever since I read it as an undergraduate, mostly because I couldn’t get my head around it then, and can hardly do so now – love as an undoing? A severance from imaginary servitude? I wasn’t thinking of it, or not consciously, when I wrote ‘Chesapeake’, but realised sometime in the weeks or months after I had written it that it really seems to end up chasing or fulfilling that phrase of Lacan’s, at the end. So to include the Lacan seemed honest, a reflection of standing up and looking back at the poem and noticing what is in it, or where it came from. Maybe all this makes them post-scripts rather than epigraphs. I guess I hope these, okay, semi-visible epigraphs might function as a kind of background noise to the text – not as jumping-off points, or lenses, or specific ways of reading, but a kind of hum or occasional flare of recognition or possibility. When you tune out of or away from something, then find yourself occasionally registering it again.

4

‘Our Lady of the Soil’ also uses allusion in an interestingly sustained way, and declares a debt to the French anthropologist and polymath Roger Caillois. What initially attracted you to this figure?

The same teacher who gave me ‘The Mirror Stage’ also gave me Caillois’ ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia’, an article which draws lines between experiences of psychosis – how people suffering from psychosis feel in space – and the habits of certain kinds of insects, which are subject to their own mimetic powers (he focuses on insects which resemble leaves, or thorns). As they line up on a branch as leaves or thorns would, these insects (Caillois says) submit to the ‘lure of space’. I wrote a very strange master’s thesis about it. Caillois is an incredibly charismatic figure – he spent time early on with the French surrealists, he wrote extensively about the anthropological history of play, he psychoanalysed praying mantises – but it was the ‘lure of space’ that I was drawn to first, rather like a helplessly mimetic insect. I think I’m attracted to him, or these ideas of his, for the same reason I’m attracted to that phrase of Lacan’s: because I don’t understand it or quite believe it (yet), but desperately want it to be true, or real. It’s quite mythological in its scale. So my engagement with Caillois was often about finding ways for what he wrote to make sense to me, or for me to find ways of seeing how it could be true.

5

Many of the poems announce their status as ‘after’ the work of other writers, not only past ones like Petrarch or W.S. Graham, but also contemporary poets, including Holly Pester and Dom Hale. Influence clearly isn’t anxious. Is there a sense here, then, that influence and the practice of imitation instead express a more sociable relationship between texts, between poets?

I suppose it’s more than I don’t differentiate between being influenced by a poem of Graham’s or a poem of Holly Pester’s. The effect of being moved or excited or motivated to write something is the same, regardless of how old the text is, I think. The ‘after’ is important, and also maybe tongue-in-cheek – I can’t help writing things that come ‘after’ the fact of these other texts. The chronology is factual. I have a sense of timelines, of these meeting-points when I first encountered these other poets or poems, and everything I do following that point does occupy a kind of after. So the poems that title themselves as ‘afters’ are just particularly concentrated responses to those meeting-points, but you could probably find traces of that same influence anywhere, unlabelled in my other work. But not all ‘afters’ are the same, either; ‘French Work’, which is after Pester, is quite a conscious study of the work she’s doing in Common Rest (Test Centre, 2016), whereas Dom Hale’s after is much more careless, really – perhaps I was just thinking vaguely of the spirit of his work, or the way it moves, when I wrote it. 

6

‘Demain, dès l’aube’ is described in the notes as a ‘loose translation’ of Victor Hugo’s poem, transcribed phonetically. This reminded me of what Hugh Kenner writes about Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, a ‘sort of reflection of the ghosts that dance before schoolboys’ eyes’, although in this instance we are not dealing with semantic shades but rather homophonic echoes between languages. Does translation inform your poetry more broadly?

Completely. Translation is really one of the most exciting aspects or things you can do with language, as far as I’m concerned – there is so much scope for play, for failure, for infinite variety of expression, for an ideal dissatisfaction. It kind of contains everything. I’ve been very influenced by translation and translators over the years – Peter Hughes’s version of Petrarch comes to mind, which in turn took cues from Steven Rodefer’s Villon – and fragments of translations I’ve attempted are shored up in some of the poems in Silk Work. From a general standpoint I suppose I believe that any use of language is a translation of experience, so in that sense translation is a kind of mesh through which we experience the world.


7

There is a terrific run of lines in Silk Work’s final poem, ‘New Song’: ‘Each want is past having, | which is why I wanted it.’ And then later, ‘I don’t think beauty | could explain it for you, | wherever you are, whoever.’ It reminded me of your essay, ‘You Met Me At a Strange Time in My Life’ (2020), where you talk about how ‘in poems we see ourselves, maybe, but always reflected or refracted strangely, or where least expected. An image transformed in miniature or upside-down.’ Is there a similar relationship between selfhood and its image at work in these poems?


I think so. Selfhood and self-image run up against the same problems any other subject does, in poetry or in writing, which is that problem of language again – of its being almost an involuntary translation, or of language acquiring us, again, as we acquire it. So selfhood, in writing at least, is bound by language; maybe that’s why I’m interested in that stubborn repetition in those lines you quote, of dull simple want stumbling over itself, of the tenses not quite working, that throwaway ‘wherever, whoever’. The line I take with language is often quite a frustrated one, or one maybe where I take out other frustrations on the language. Sometimes my poems feel like a desperate attempt to align my own desires with both language and reality, as if I could somehow have it all. And then, of course, they become negotiations with the impossibility of what we want, and how we get to express it. The counter to this, of course, is what language makes possible, in that it actually grants dimensions beyond what I am capable of thinking of or imagining, on my own. So language becomes a prosthetic for extending our selves, our realities, and our desires. Which makes it worth coming back to.

8

One last question: What are you reading at the moment?

Right now I’m reading Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews, put out by Semiotext(e). Surely no-one else could have covered both Aleister Crowley’s bloody attempts at reanimating a skeleton and Colin Farrell’s thighs in their body of work. And he does it with this extraordinary indivisible cadence, of brilliance and wicked humour and absolute tenderness.

Imogen's new collection, Peach Machine, is now out with Last Books.