I'm Giving You a Lemon
Claire Collison on whetting the poetic appetite with the right title
I recently had an encounter with a famous poet in the basement of the LRB. She was surrounded by bookshop staff, collecting together a pile of books to take back to the States. Someone recommended Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, which I happened to have in my hand, so I offered her the copy. She turned to me, smiling.
She’s a poet, someone told me.
Me too, I said. My pamphlet launch is next week. (Dear Reader, I cannot tell you how good it felt to be saying that.)
Congratulations, the poet said. What’s it called?
Turns out the poet was Claudia Castro Luna, and she couldn’t have been sweeter. We sat together on a sofa, and swapped Twitter handles, and chatted about how, by the time you’re publishing something, it’s old to you but new to everyone else. How you’re ready to rush on to the next project, but first, before you do, you need to introduce this one to the world. And that introduction begins with the title. The title of my pamphlet is Placebo, I told Claudia. And based on that, an impression was made. Did it leave the right impression?
Until recently, Placebo was the title of one of the poems in the pamphlet, but now it’s Head Girl poem, the first you encounter, and it sets the tone for what follows. It’s strange to have this fixed. I know for many, a pamphlet is a finite project, but Placebo wasn’t conceived like that, it evolved from work made over a period of years - before, during, and after my treatment for breast cancer. Some of the poems were already published, and a bit big for their boots, and certainly weren’t intended as part of a sequence. Some of the cancer ones had been incorporated into Truth Is Beauty, my single-breasted life-modelling monologue that I toured in the year before Lockdown.
I’m incredibly proud of this work, but the poems always had a life beyond this framework: they were part of a continuum - me - that either had nothing or everything to do with the cancer narrative. Because I don’t know what that cancer narrative is, or where it begins and ends. Even in my most cancery poems, I’m not entirely concentrating: while waiting for chemo, I’m watching Sharapova at Wimbledon; during a consultation, I’m noticing the sheen of my oncologist’s tights. To capture this ambivalence, I tried both Chemo with Sharapova and The Oncologist’s Ankle as pamphlet titles, but they both still privileged the cancer treatment as the main event. My poem Fantastic Voyage references the 1966 film, where Raquel Welch is part of a team shrunken down and injected into an injured scientist’s body to repair his brain. I use the film to illustrate the way I’ve always visualised my insides - my understanding of medical processes being a blend of this and The Beano’s Numbskulls. As a pamphlet title, it had a nice trippy retro feel, and was forgiving and generous, but ultimately I couldn’t countenance the ‘journey’ aspect, as used in every reality TV show - it’s been such a journey.
The poem Placebo wasn’t written until 2018 - three years after my treatment had ended. I’d attended a conference at the Wellcome Collection called The Power of Placebo. It was an inspiring day - a perfect example of a Julia Cameron-style ‘Artist’s Day’ for nourishing the writer’s soul. One of the speakers was science journalist, Jo Marchant. She demonstrated that by visualising a lemon and anticipating eating that lemon (assuming we’ve previously tasted lemons) our bodies will produce saliva. I am still excited by this. I love the way it elegantly establishes the power of the imagination, and its impact on our wellbeing. I began the poem almost straight away. The first draft included fake acupuncture and knitting and Lourdes, and was giddy and impenetrable, even to someone who’d been at the conference. I sent it to Alice Willitts, who convinced me to ditch all but the lemon, which I duly did, submitting it to Butcher’s Dog, where editors Jo Clement & Aoife Lyall whittled some more. We wrangled, and I embraced most of their suggestions. I was left with the slimmed-down poem that had, along the way, become an Ars Poetica. As a side project, I made the single poem into a tiny limited-edition book, Placebo: I am Giving You a Lemon.
Film of Claire’s handmade book Placebo: I Am Giving You a Lemon
I was thinking about how to write this blog - how not to write ‘about’ the poems. I felt I ought to explain my selection, but I realised I didn’t really want to explain anything. I was half asleep, listening to an episode of the New Yorker Poetry podcast. Saeed Jones and Kevin Young were discussing ‘The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart’ by Deborah Digges. Regarding the openness of Digges’s imagery, and her lack of clear pointers, Jones says, ‘Because we are narrative creatures, we find ourselves looking for meaning’. The phrase ‘narrative creatures’ woke me up. An exercise I use when I’m teaching is to get everyone to draw three things they encountered that day on three separate scraps on paper. Anything will do - a dog, a coffee cup, a Lime Scooter. They swap their scraps, creating a narrative incorporating all three pictures, and then share the resulting stories. It’s easy - no one ever fails. Part of what makes it easy is using someone else’s objects, as it removes all the personal associations - the duty to truth, the chronology and backstory. I was a poet before I got cancer. Placebo is the title I settled on, because it champions the role of the imagination in both the telling and the receiving. We are narrative creatures. We find our own meaning.
Notes
Jo Marchant: ‘Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body’
Writer, visual artist, and educator, Claire Collison was one of 3 winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, 2018. She came second in Resurgence Prize, 2014; Hippocrates Prize, 2017; and Winchester Poetry Prize, 2020. Her poetry can be found in magazines, including Perverse, Corrupted Poets, Magma, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures, and Rialto, and is in various anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, and Field Notes on Survival (Bad Betty Press) She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet.
Her debut pamphlet, Placebo is published by Blueprint, 2022.
To order, email blueprintpoetry@gmail.com
For signed copies of Placebo the pamphlet (£6.00 plus p&p), and also the limited edition handmade book Placebo: I Am Giving You a Lemon (£10.00 plus p&p) please contact Claire via her website - clairecollison.com
Twitter: @Clairecollison1
Instagram: @Adalodge
READINGS
Claire will be reading newly commissioned work in Hebden Bridge on Saturday 22nd October 2022 as part of the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival.
Saturday Late: Dead (Women) Poets Society Séance and Open Mic
9.30pm Nelson’s Wine Bar, West Yorkshire, HX7 8EJ
Claire will be launching Placebo at a Blueprint poets showcase on Tuesday 25th October 2022 at the London Welsh Centre, Grays Inn Rd 7pm (pay what you feel).
