Maria Hardin in Conversation with Poppy Cockburn

Maria Hardin: What is your origin story as a poet?

Poppy Cockburn: Lol. How long do we have?

I always liked Oberon’s sections in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school. I wanted to write plays and direct when I was in my teens. I was excited by Artaud, Sarah Kane and Katie Mitchell—encouraged by my college drama teachers who were into avant-garde theatre.

 When I was eighteen I went to university in the city of Sheffield. It was grey and concrete and a shock to the system coming from a very rural, wooded place. I lived in a new-build tower block where it felt like it took forever just to get outside. It wasn’t all bad. I went to a lot of gigs and I remember loving an exhibition I saw by the artist and writer Tim Etchells that contained a neon sign saying ‘PLEASE COME BACK I AM SORRY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE’. But ultimately, I wasn’t happy there and got really depressed. My brother’s girlfriend at the time sent me a letter and inside, she’d copied out by hand Philip Larkin’s poem, Home is so Sad. I remember being really emotionally affected by that poem. It made me realise I needed to make a change, and I transferred universities. 

 I studied English and American Literature. I loved everything related to Frank O’Hara and the New York art scene. Especially Personism: A Manifesto, and the image of O’Hara writing lunch poems. And Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was revelatory in terms of showing me the possibilities of what writing could look like—how weird, playful and domestic it could be.

 A friend took me to some poetry readings when I first moved to London in my twenties, which I loved, but I struggled to find more literary events to go to. I was probably looking in the wrong places.

I wrote my first poems out of boredom during shifts invigilating at art galleries. I couldn’t tell if they were any good. They were probably terrible. The first poem I had published was in a journal called Black & Blue. I remember my poem got printed next to one by the musician Molly Nilsson. I was, and remain, a big fan so I was pleased about that. 

In my late twenties, I joined a band where I wrote the lyrics, and I was in the artist Jenny Moore’s queer punk choir, F* choir for five years, which has definitely influenced my lens and voice.

I didn’t start writing poetry more seriously until 2019 when I went on a residential Arvon course. The poet Clare Shaw kindly offered to mentor me afterwards. That gave me the confidence to apply for an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, which I started during the lockdown in 2020. I also attended the first of Sophie Robinson’s Devotion workshops, which opened up a new sense of writing space and community.

I haven’t stopped writing poetry since then. It’s tiring.

So I guess I’m saying there wasn’t one single thing. Origins are complex!

MH: I am so glad that you mentioned O’Hara. Since Every time I meet you feels like doom is being published in the US, the line “having a coke with no one” felt like a little wink. Can you describe Margate to readers who are not familiar with the United Kingdom?

PC: Margate is a seaside town on the south-east coast of England. I first visited around 2010 when the public art gallery (where I now work) had just opened. I felt an instant sense of connection with the town, and I can’t properly say why.

From the Victorian era up until the 1970s, it was a popular holiday destination for Londoners, but it went through a period of deprivation after air travel became affordable, and there’s been a lot of poverty. Over the last fifteen years, it’s experienced regeneration as well as gentrification. There’s been an influx of people from London, particularly East London, and with that, lots of new cafés, restaurants, bars and pubs. The result is a town of disparate wealth and poverty, which can feel uncomfortable.

The town has a poetic history. T.S. Eliot famously wrote parts of The Waste Land here and the painter J. M. W. Turner loved the light. Several well-known contemporary poets are based here now, and the artist Tracey Emin grew up and returned to live here, and set up a gallery and residency programme a few years ago. The painting on the cover of Doom is actually by an artist on her programme—Elizaveta Zalieva.

I moved in 2022, feeling a sudden urge to leave London after covid—a bit like when you suddenly realise you need a new haircut and have to do it immediately.

I live in an incredible spot—with a view out over the main beach. The sunsets pour into the living room in my rental. The whole room turns ochre, orange, peach, pink, red as the sun goes down. I swim in the sea regularly in the summer, including lunch breaks. It feels a bit like living on holiday.

You can’t go out without running into someone you know. It’s a rockpool in that way. Some people can’t stand the lack of anonymity, but I mostly like it.

For the first few years I was still working in London so I’d go back every week, but now I’m much more here, and there is a grief in the loss of that connection—in choosing one place over another.

MH: There are references to artists throughout the book, both explicit and embedded, have any of their artistic approaches influenced your writing practice?

PC: Yes, absolutely. Visual art is very important to me—and especially artists who use language in interesting ways in their work—Jenny Holzer, Sophie Calle, Ed Atkins, Katrina Palmer, Penny Goring, Helen Marten...For me, they’ve all opened up new ways of thinking about how language can be applied, formatted, looked at etc.

But I love art that says something words can’t. Rothko, Botticelli, Turner, Munch, Picasso, Gentileschi are among the many masters whose work has profoundly affected me.

That said, I’ll be just as moved by an Instagram reel, so I think the high-low mix is fundamental. There’s a video clip of Tom Jones singing with a contestant on The Voice that makes me cry every time it pops up in my feed.

MH: The high-low mixture is part of what made Doom was so compelling to me. The poems in flow in and out of one another like a perfect mixtape. What was your writing process for the book? Were the poems written in-order as part of this project or did you weave them together at a later date?

PC: I’m glad you experienced the book that way, because I experience life like a kind of mixtape or mood ring. The poems weren’t written in order, though some were written at the same proverbial party. The manuscript started as a very different book and evolved, and it was the same with many of the poems themselves. The early manuscript included some of the first few short ‘germ’ poems that ended up growing into a separate book altogether (Naked Oyster). There were several title changes before I arrived at Every time I meet you feels like doom, and then things started to slot into place and I felt able to write into the manuscript more. A few recent poems missed the boat.

MH: How did you decide the order? And how/when did you know that you actually had two books emerging?

PC: I’d already given these short poems a section of their own, and then I began posting them on Instagram, which was actually very generative. Around then, Sam (at If a Leaf Falls Press) suggested an entire book of short poems—so that’s how they segued into a separate project.

For Doom it was actually quite hard to choose an order because the poems span years but circle similar concerns, so there’s no obvious, resolution-oriented narrative arc. It was fairly intuitive. Having said that, when I submitted the book to SARKA, the poems were in a completely different order than they are now. At some point, I had a feeling they needed to be restructured. I think the emotional effect now is hopefully closer to the feeling of reading the same page over until it transfers meaning. It’s a bit Snakes & Ladders. 

MH: Reading Doom feels like lingering in the afterimage of a painting, or maybe the afterglow of a painting seen online moments after “the internet turns off like a trick, like new knowledge.” Hilma af Klint is mentioned very early on in the  manuscript so I imagined the colors of the book in shades from her series “The Ten Largest.” Perhaps you imagined something else? Or, not at all. Did you have a color story in mind as you were writing the book?

PC: I didn’t have an intentional colour story, though it’s interesting to think about as another lens or path through the poems. I love Hilma af Klint. Her pastel palette has definitely influenced my poetic colour scheme. I wrote the poem Feather Play in response to her painting series, The Swan, which I had to find, at the time, through different mediums, some of which were screens (of varying scale). I responded automatically at first, trying to intuit them, before shaping the lines into a more poetic form. The paintings for me are rich with colour symbolism—the black and whites seemingly battling to transform into something less binary. Softer.

MH: Speaking of color, there are a lot of pinks in the book — pink swimmers, wanton-pink, pink felt tip, pink memory, pink-worm, etc.— in writing these poems did pink accumulate meaning for you or empty of it?

PC: Rather than accumulating or emptying I think it’s become a persistent phantom in my writing. I have a poem in my 2021 chapbook Waiting Room titled Millennial Pink which tries to explore pink as generational branding, projection, matter etc. A few years ago, I bought twenty pink fine-liner felt tips. I had a theory that it might help me write with greater tenderness. Many of the poems in the collection were written in pink felt tip.

The tenderness of pink is something that appeals—the pink of pleasure versus the pink of pain. I often feel drawn to artists (and writers) who use the colour in their work. I enjoyed Jack Robinson and Natalia Zagórska-Thomas’s photo essay titled Blush a few years ago, and I love the way Louise Bourgeois used pink in her work across media and material.

As a word, ‘pink’ is slight in contrast with its possible spectrum. There are many shades I dislike. My favourite shade and texture is a kind of antique blush, preferably on silk.

Margate’s sunsets are an embedded influence. For example, yesterday evening, I stepped outside just as the sky had turned completely pink. The romantic spectacle of something like that seeps into your psychic irises.

I feel like pink is a presence in your poetry too?

MH: It does. My work is pink-haunted. As you mentioned, it is such a small word that holds so much. The poet Meghann Boltz has a line that I used as an epigraph for my chapbook Tragedienne, “No one told me the void would be millennial pink,” which came to mind when I read your lines “I fill voids with scented density / cotton-candy soliloquy.” and  “I insulate voids with tissue-thin poems”. Were you thinking by any chance of Audrey Wollen’s “Girls Own the Void” meme when you wrote those poems?

PC: I hadn’t seen the meme before, but it makes sense you’d think of it. It’s a great meme. I’m often thinking about the idea of the void in general, because the word has an abject connotation, yet a void can be potent, fertile and mystic. I think women often take on the responsibility of embroidering gaps, making things feel warmer, less dissonant, fuller. It reminds me of an ex saying that he felt afraid when I’d finish speaking in case he couldn’t think of anything to say. I was pretty horrified by that. It made me feel like a personal immersive experience producer. I aspire to feel free to say nothing. I like doing ‘nothing’ because that’s often where poetry happens. I like to think of the void as a ‘site’, as a studio.

MH: I am curious about your relationship to gurlesque.

PC: I only recently learned the term and I’m not too familiar with many of the poets associated with the wider movement, but I’m a big fan of Chelsey Minnis. I particularly love Poemland and her most recent book, Opera Fever. Both the imagery and sassiness are off the scale. For me, Minnis’s technique is almost ‘perfect’. She manages to aestheticise the most absurd acts and images. I don’t think this is necessarily always ‘good’. But it’s something I adore.

I suppose it’s impossible not to be influenced by a lineage of other writers, consciously or unconsciously, if you read a lot of contemporary literature, because the influence is diffuse.

I think the idea of what constitutes femaleness vs a female persona, and the blurring between these is endlessly fascinating. And the distance between person and perception. In my own writing, I’m personally less invested in building an outrageous female persona as I am with allowing registers and forms, feelings and objects, sincerity and irony to unashamedly co-exist and commingle.

My poem Lana del Reymix is more a comment on, and warping of, persona rather than an attempt at enacting persona itself.

MH: The book documents longing in a way that is simultaneously contemporary and timeless. In a blurb about the book, Nadia de Vries notes that yearning is a form of suffering. But, so is fulfilled desire. There can be something life sustaining in a crush. Do you find pleasure in either?

PC: I agree that a crush can be sustaining, and meddled with, ruinous—I guess that’s the territory some of the poems in Doom get into. It amazes me how quickly something soft and sustaining can become harsh and painful. Perhaps it’s this amazement, this inability to parse disparity, that draws me back repeatedly.

Prolonged ambiguity feeds the romantic imagination and creates an intensity of desire that cannot realistically be met or sustained in real life. A deep suffering can come from that, as well as a kind of wounded pleasure, perverse as that may be.

I still believe it’s important to be brave and test the water if the opportunity for meaningful connection is there. Even if it doesn’t turn out well or dissolves something ambient. I prefer things that are hot over tepid, definitely over maybe. Though I prefer my colours pastel or muted so I’m a contradiction when it comes to sensory and emotional intensity preferences...

MH: I could talk to you forever! As a final question, for now,  In “Long winter ahead” Co-star advises the speaker of the poem to fall in love with a dead writer. Have you ever done so?

PC: Honestly, no. Sometimes, it feels like it would be easier than courting the living but I fear my heart is too contemporary, and slutty. But maybe I just haven’t met the right dead guy.