Love Was Science Fiction*

There is only one scene I remember, on foolscap.
It’s almost static and does not disclose
where it belongs in the order of things.
I admit that I put her out there,
the woman on the highway
standing on the driver’s side
with sweat patches blooming
in the armpits of her blouse.
And I admit I put a man there, too,
just alighted from the passenger’s side.
He is arching his back in fatigue
and looking imploringly across the bonnet
at the woman who stares instead
at the gridlocked traffic
stretching far ahead and behind.

What lived around them for me back then,
the man and the woman and their crisis?
Light catching the hairs on the arms
of a boy in class;
the deep vertical cleft in our teacher’s brow
(we made her think too much on our behalf);
her kindness, especially her complicity with the girls,
just go love just go home early it’s OK.
And another vision,
or perhaps it was real:
something alive and left wrapped in a blanket
in the middle of the road
(the man and the woman cannot see it,
they are poised to embrace or part).
For me, I can swerve and swerve as much as I like
but what might happen next is there through all of time. 

*Title owes a debt to the song by Divinyls ‘Science Fiction’ 

——

James: Okay, I’ll start with, sorry if this doesn’t make sense.

Lucy: No please, fire away, stop making sense, I think is the reply to that.

James: I resonated with your treatment of memory in the poem. 

It felt indelible when recorded on foolscap and flimsy when internally recollected – I felt that in the lines “And another vision/ or perhaps it was real…”. 

I want to ask, then, about your title – has love in this poem become something fictional, or has time helped the persona in the poem see some unreality within their own recordings?

Lucy: [My] very literal geeky response is that when I was teenaged, love literally was science fiction. 

I love science fiction.

I think that where love is located in the poem is this memory of the excitement of that kind of teenage reading

I didn’t so much love hard scifi, I kind of veered towards [Ray] Bradbury or [John] Wyndham and then when I was a young woman that bled into things like Angela Carter or Ursula Le Guin and all of that. 

That is the kind of literal idea of what is love in the poem – but it is also a love of making things.

So that idea, when you pick up on the foolscap, this sort of materiality of making that is lost in some sense, but is the thing that you remember simply because it is material.

Analog culture gives your archive or your memories a body… even though it can feel dispersed.

I actually went back and looked at… an earlier draft that I wrote and it starts with this sort of image of ash raining down because I wanted to suggest that the paper’s disintegrated. 

I wanted to suggest [climate crisis], and  then I was like ‘no no no’ it’s too didactic… so the whole beginning of the poem is just scrapped and it begins with the thing, the act of trying to make, trying to recover.

It is [a story] that I did write as a teenager and the only thing I can remember of it is… the woman and the “sweat patches blooming”.

I think probably [it was written] around the time of the first Alien movie. 

For me as a teenager or young woman, Ripley is the first time you… almost just see a woman’s body that’s not connected to glamour; you know, she’s a warrior.

She’s just herself and she’s completely unselfconscious. 

So I think there’s kind of the ghost of that in [the poem].

I hope that I can keep it sort of radically open, that there’s all sorts of possibilities in this poem… again, I don’t understand much about physics, but I do have a sense of time being a simultaneous thing.

Hannah: I really enjoyed how the poem played with the concept of authorship and authority, or maybe authorship as authority. 

In my reading of the first stanza, the speaker is positioned as a sort of architect or omniscient narrator standing over the couple, but by the end of the poem the speaker has quite literally lost control of whatever power they laid claim to in the beginning. 

I wanted to ask what drew you to this idea of authority and authorship, maybe in relation to this exploration of memory as radically open?

Lucy: The way that poem sort of blows open…it doesn’t feel like necessary rational progression, does it? […]

And the thing, which is in the middle of the road… I think now that what I can locate in that is something unfinished, a creative act that is unfinished and keeps unfurling out into the future and cannot, for that reason, be controlled, that you have to maybe give up on something…

Hannah: And the broader question that I want to ask, and I’m sorry if this is too broad… but do you feel when you write that you write from a position of authority?

Lucy: Never, no.

For a start because, as I’ve aged, I rely more and more on dreams. 

[Dreams are] clearly an iceberg metaphor – that there’s so much going on underneath and there’s just this little bit that we can access. 

Access to that remains entirely mysterious to me. And I think I need it to be.

Hannah: So when you’re writing, does it feel – and sorry if this is a false dichotomy – do you feel like it emerges more out of a place of coincidence or accident or something beyond you, or do you feel in control? 

Lucy: No, the former. Most definitely. 

And sometimes if I try to sort of assert control over it more, it can often go horribly wrong.

For me, poems have always been as much about how they look, about shape, as meaning. 

Also about sound, open meaning, trying to make meaning. 

I write by hand, and once I feel that I’m enough in control of what is drafted then I’ll start to transfer over. 

I’ll make a digital file of it, but [at the beginning] it’s often quite sort of shifting and unwieldy and almost more math-like. 

And then much, much later on, once I see it on the screen, there’s then the beginning of more cerebral kind of work, more rational work, where you’re kind of going, ‘well, does it work?‘

Are the sound patterns working? Is there enough ambiguity?

Hannah: Does the shape begin on the page when you’re writing it out?

Lucy: Yes, very much so.

You know how people say the sentence is the unit of prose; I think that the line drives a poem. 

And I know I’m writing a poem that I’m going to keep and work on if I straight away get a few lines that I think are lines, real lines.

So that sense of where the line ends and then where it takes up again on the next line is super
important for me. 

And if I don’t have that straight away, [I stop]. Might as well be prose […]

[Terry Eagleton says] that the poet tells the typesetter where the line ends.

If you want to locate authority, maybe that at the end of the day is the only authority.

Hannah: I did have a question about narrative, if I can kind of shoehorn it in now, because it feels like we’re talking about that a little bit. To me, the poem felt quite driven by narrative, even if it was in a kind of ambiguous sense. There are characters, I mean, especially with the couple, they appear and then they sort of reappear. 

There’s an overall sense of a trajectory, even if it’s kind of thwarted at the end. In this poem and in your other work, what role does narrative play specifically in poetry? 

Does poetry allow for some kind of narrative exploration which is different from prose?

Lucy: I feel like lots of special claims get made for poetry. 

Really poetic prose can, in a way, have the same tool kit and the same effect. 

Maybe poetry can get away with  contrapuntal, abrupt changes. 

[Tess Gallagher said that] poems are time machines, but she doesn’t mean it in a sci-fi way. 

She means it in the sort of capacity to just sort of enter these moments of preserved consciousness.

Maybe poetry is a bit more fleeting at doing that than prose.
[Poetry] can be long-form, but if we think of it as a traditional lyric, it’s often shorter, right? 

Compression, in a way, is the special domain of a poem. 

And as readers, I think we are much more likely to accept that from a poem. 

We can orient ourselves more easily inside a poem than, say, with experimental fiction…

Hannah: I have a question that’s not fully formed, sorry, so it might come out a little bit rough… it’s similar to the narrative question maybe, sort of about autobiography or memoiristic elements.

Lucy: Like a life writing?

Hannah: Life writing, yeah… It feels like the form of poetry most of the time demands kind of an augmentation… you’re unable to just record something quote-unquote “as it were”… I’m being totally presumptuous here because I have no idea, but this feels like quite an  autobiographical poem.

Lucy: Yes, it is very, yeah. Hannah: So is there something that you have in mind when you write from a place of autobiography, or from something that not only draws on your perceptions…but also the actual events of your life?

Lucy: I said to James when we were first walking over here that I remain quite close to, and interested in, teenage experience. 

I think because there’s an openness in it, and a curiosity in it.

There’s a fantastic Jeff Dyer quote where he goes, ‘stay 15 for as long as you can’. 

For me, there is a kind of creative erotics around the kind of freedom and subversiveness of being teenaged.

I know there’s a lot of doom and gloom at the moment, and people [have nostalgia for] the ‘70s, the ‘80s or whatever.
When I was there, I mean, it was good, but it wasn’t any paradise. 

But… the transgressions, the intense friendships, the intense reading experiences are what formed me, are what made me. 

And I think I need to keep going back there.

For a long time, I did hold this story. 

I don’t really know much about [it] anymore, I just know that there was a man on a highway and it was dystopian and there was always going to be a future that felt terrible. 

And here we are. What’s the Burroughs quote? ‘The future’s already here – it’s just unevenly distributed’.

Hannah: Drawing back into those [teenaged] experiences, but, I guess, finding something new every time.  

Lucy: Yes, yes, yes. Every time, you’re a different person, aren’t you, in a way; again, just love of making things and interest in making things.

My parents were both really busy people, both medical doctors. 

[But my mother] sculpted… [she had] proper lessons and everything and set up a little studio. 

And she had a very cool kiln, an enamel kiln […] I think [my parents] needed to do things part-time.

Growing up in a house where there was kind of creative mess was really important for me.

Hannah: Do you resonate with the idea of the poet as a worker or an artisan?

Lucy: Yeah, one hundred percent. 

And I also, in my early working life, worked as an arts worker and in community arts.

Whereas I might have had quite a bougie upbringing and went to UWA and all that kind of stuff.

We moved to Newcastle when I was [in] my late 20s, and I almost straight away just lucked out and got a job with Newcastle City Council. 

That was the ‘90s, so that really was a cool time. 

Newcastle was on fire then; [it] was in the beginning of a sort of post-industrial renaissance […] so, you know, I thank you for picking up on that because I do think [writing is] work.