New Poetries VII: Lisa Kelly
This week's blog post in our New Poetries VII series comes from Lisa Kelly, as we continue to showcase each of the featured writers from the forthcoming anthology. They each share some thoughts on their work and a poem, as we draw closer to publication in April 2018.
Lisa Kelly is half deaf and half Danish. She is Chair of Magma Poetry and co-edited issue 63, The Conversation Issue, and issue 69, The Deaf Issue. She is a regular host of poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House in London and has an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Lancaster University. Her pamphlet Bloodhound is published by Hearing Eye. She is currently a freelance journalist, and has worked as an actress, life model, Consumer Champion, waitress, sales assistant and envelope stuffer.
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The other day I asked my daughter, ‘Can you pass me the thing that opens the door?’ The word key having eluded me. The idea of fluency interests me – and whether we can ever claim fluency in any language. Words and articulacy are power, but words escape me all the time; not only words that I can’t recall or names I’ve forgotten but words I mishear or miss altogether because of my single sided deafness in my left ear. Also, listening to my mother speaking Danish for two weeks every year when my grandparents visited from Copenhagen was fascinating, yet alienating as I couldn’t understand my mother’s tongue. Three members of my family suffered with dementia and journeyed from fluency to the ultimate inarticulacy. To what extent language builds or diminishes identity is a preoccupation. How Danish am I not speaking Danish? How Deaf am I with my clumsy attempts at British Sign Language? I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How can form not matter? To understand what you say, I must attempt to control our interrelated physical space. Of course, I often fail and confusion, mis-interpretation, annoyance, as well as humour are by-products. My poems reflect my obsession with form and the physical space that words occupy on the page. Attempting to ‘hang onto’ sound means helpers, such as rhyme, are appreciated. Escaping from noise into silence and reading means lines, phrases, fragments from books are often more keenly heard than what is being said to me in everyday life. However, language is as much visual as it is aural. I am excited by the appearance of words, their material quality and the condensed narratives of names. Working as a freelance journalist specialising in technology gives me a level of fluency in esoteric acronyms and a specialist language which masks technophobia. Alternative perceptions offer a relief from the tyranny of pseudo articulacy. Only politicians’ speeches pretend otherwise. The multiplicity and multifariousness of language, communication and understanding means every interpretation is possible, and possibly wrong. But some fun and perhaps progress towards empathy can be had playing with these ideas along the way.
Out of Order
You say a sign should hang from my ear,
you say torture with Chinese Whispers,
like the door on the toilet refusing to flush.
I’ll say whatever comes into my ear as shush.
I say there is no blockage, no glue or wax,
you’ll accuse me of negative feedback,
just nerves dead as disconnected wires.
I say thank God for books, my ear retires,
you say playing with a rotary phone
far from the playground’s monotone,
picking up the receiver to my good ear,
you say you’ll get me in the mere –
bad: dial tone/no dial tone, is wacko.
Oh-noes playing Marco Polo,
I say I’m testing how to differentiate
a unilateral ear unable to locate
between fitting in/not fitting in.
Oi! Are you deaf or something?
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Watch Lisa read at A Celebration of the Critical and the Creative, at Lancaster University:
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
