Masks, Boats, and Diving into the Wreck
Poet Kate Potts on finding the right form and process to explore imposter feelings.
In 2018 I read a blog piece that subtly rearranged the furniture in my mind. In ‘Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling’ sociologist Maddie Breeze reflects on her experiences as a feminist in academia. She writes: 'Failing to meet some definitions of success – publicly, collectively, and strategically – might expose how feeling inadequate and inauthentic is a function of assessment according to criteria that not only are impossible to meet, but that one wishes to reject, politically and epistemologically.' I began to realise that my feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence in certain creative writing teaching jobs hadn’t only been down to a personal lack of confidence; there was more to it than that. At a new job with supportive colleagues, teaching students who were mostly state school educated, I began to feel somehow more authentic, less invisible. I started to think about imposter feelings in other contexts, including writing. I wanted to find out more about how other people experienced imposter feelings – specifically, emotionally, and in their bodies – and what this might be able to tell us about the ways hierarchies, prejudice, and ideas around status, deservingness, authenticity and belonging affect our lives. I hoped that imposter feelings, if approached in the right way, might become, as Maddie Breeze puts it, ‘sites of agency’.
I decided to write a long poetry piece, Pretenders, focusing on the imposter phenomenon, or ‘imposter syndrome’, as it's more commonly known. I'm very interested in the possibilities of multiple voices and dialogue in poetry and I'd been studying the BBC’s ‘actuality’ radio feature documentaries of the mid-twentieth century. I also love the speech rhythms of verbatim theatre and multi-voice page works such as Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer. I planned to interview a variety of people about their imposter feelings and capture those conversations on the page. I wanted to communicate awkwardness, evasion, ambiguity and silence as well as more direct speech. In addition to the interviews I decided to write a series of new poems about imposters from history who’d been actual (rather than imagined) pretenders, such as Hannah Snell, an 18th century woman who posed as a man for her entire career as a soldier.
In 2021, soon after moving to Gloucestershire with my 5 month-old son, I was awarded some funding to work on Pretenders. The interviews, the first few of which I did while carrying my sleeping baby in a sling, were a pleasure. The people I spoke to were generous, funny, and refreshingly honest. Often they were keen to know how the project was taking shape, what the finished manuscript might look like. But I began to realise the very obvious flaw in both my process and structure: 12 interviews with generous souls who were prepared to make themselves vulnerable and share their difficulties and hard-won insights, and some carefully constructed poems I’d written about historical figures. Where was I in all of this? How could I honour my contributors’ honesty and vulnerability, and also make clear what my process was and what I was trying to achieve? My relative invisibility in the work seemed dishonest, even cowardly.
When I was younger I thought of the ‘lyric I’ in my poetry as somehow selfish, a bit narcissistic. And who, after all, would be interested in my writing voice without a bit (or a lot) of imagination and performance? But I’ve since come to realise that some of the best art – while not necessarily autobiographical or confessional – is enormously generous in what it reveals, and how it allows us to connect and share. I knew this was going to have to be a very different book to my past collections. ‘What’s at stake?’ is a question a mentor of mine used to ask when a poem wasn’t working. What was being risked or reconfigured? How was I moving beyond my comfort zone – which is often, for me, where the really interesting stuff happens.
I think poetry, in more obvious and immediate ways than prose narrative, can help us to access, craft and integrate what's hidden away in our murky unconscious, the words we can’t speak out loud. For me, form and process are a big part of how this magic works – they’re the boat to carry me across a chaotic sea, or the diving bell that carries me down to the ocean floor. Game-playing exercises, constraints, or specific prompts are often helpful. Without them, I can get stuck in the blank page’s overwhelm. By ‘form’ I don’t only mean sonnets, haiku or ghazals; I also mean the shape and limits of more freeform work. So I needed a form and a process that would help me to figure out what I was trying to do with this work on imposter feelings: an appropriate container – or diving bell.
I recently spoke to a friend who’s working on a memoir. He explained how, often, he finds himself reaching for experimental form when faced with writing about emotionally difficult material – a tool for navigation, or sometimes for avoidance. I thought about my generous interviewees and decided to begin by interviewing myself: same questions, same rules, and no preparation. I needed see what came up in the conversation. I also decided to include in Pretenders (with permission) snippets of some pre-interview conversations in which people explained why they couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about their imposter feelings. The actual imposter figures from history I’d initially planned on writing poems about are still included, for now, but as short prose pieces – part of what I'm beginning to think of as a multi-voice lyric essay in which I often use spacing to suggest breath, pauses, and silence. There’s a single, more conventional line-broken poem at the start that (hopefully) frames the book. There’s a brief, more practical introduction which includes some context, motivations, and my process. I’m also writing a piece about my own imposter feelings which may end up as part of the manuscript, or may be a way of working things out. This includes, among other things, the house I grew up in, some family history, and my panic attacks when I first started teaching in 2004. So this collection of multiple other voices is, of course, in many ways about me. But I hope Pretenders is finally finding a shape that’s flexible enough for its component parts as well as welcoming and questing. I hope the work will open up new conversations beyond the confines of the book.
Kate Potts is a poet, editor, mentor, creative writing lecturer, marketing manager for a small publisher, and solo mum. Feral (Bloodaxe, 2016) was a Poetry Book Society choice and a Telegraph poetry book of the month.
Find out more about Pretenders at https://www.katepotts.net/pretenders/
@skatepotts
