Amy Acre is a poet and writer. She is the author of two pamphlets, And They Are Covered in Gold Light and Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads, and her poem ‘every girl knows’ won the 2019 Verve Poetry Competition. Mothersong is her debut collection.
Liz Berry is a poet and the author of several poetry collections, including The Republic of Motherhood. Her most recent book is The Home Child, a novel in verse.
They spoke to one another about maternal desire, parental archetypes and writing poetry.
Liz Berry:
Amy, I was reading your poems again last night and I thought of a quote that I love from Matrescence, by Lucy Jones:
I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hardcore, edgy, gnarly . . . And it was the most political experience of my life.
What I love in your poems is that you don’t shy away from hardcore feelings: the ecstasy of birth and early motherhood, but also anxiety, birth trauma. When you were starting to write Mothersong did you have any of that in mind or were you just writing into your experience?
Amy Acre:
I felt a need to reconcile the joy, the excitement, the proud Instagram posts, with the more troubling emotions and physical realities that lived alongside them. In the really early days after my daughter was born, I discovered I’d had a minor pelvic organ prolapse, which is extremely common, and yet almost never spoken about. The expectation is that you go through this profound change to your body, brain, self-image and yet never acknowledge it.
Berry:
I can really relate to that. It’s explored in your poem Atheism, isn’t it? I remember reading it first in a magazine and thinking, holy fuck. It does something so interesting. It takes the intensely physical, often wounding nature of becoming a mother, and mixes it with an erotic charge. I love that it explores the way the desires of mothers continue and change alongside the changing of their bodies.
Acre:
I felt stuck under the weight of the idea that having a child – and perhaps especially a daughter – means passing the baton on in terms of your potency, your desiring and desirable self.
Berry:
I wonder if the poems are a way of keeping that burning within you? My poems are the place where I feel most uninhibited, most free, which is sometimes very different to the way I feel in life. This is something I’m really curious about in my writing – what happens to our desires when we become mothers . . .
Acre:
I love the way you approach that in your poem, Highbury Park, where you’re walking with your son and you’ve got that line, After he was born I wanted nothing but the wind to hold me, which I really relate to, and at the same time that poem’s so full of wild sensuality.
Berry:
After I’d had my sons, I became increasingly interested in forms of sensuality that existed beyond heterosexual, baby-making sex; how sensuality might interact with nature, longing, dream, the female body and I feel that in your poems too. You talk about the tree of longing and share all those beautiful complicated fantasies, sometimes involving your partner, sometimes strangers, or yourself. There’s a kind of queering of maternal sexuality in the widest sense.
Acre:
After my daughter was born, I went into a protective state with my body. Having so completely given it to someone else, I started to think about how it had never entirely belonged to me, because young women grow up learning to present themselves as objects of desire for others. And I wanted to grab it back and tune into a sensuality that wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit; into a connection with nature that was full of earth and rawness and openness.
Berry:
Maybe there’s a brilliant lawlessness that comes with becoming a mother, when you’re freed from having to be a ‘sexy young woman’? You can be wilder. More curious.
Returning to that idea of queering motherhood, here’s Maggie Nelson:
How can an experience so profoundly strange, wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?
Acre:
I love that. In Animal Noises, the rapper Dizraeli talks about the idea of the straight white family, and the strange disconnect of having children and suddenly being seen by the outside world as an example of the heteronormative dream.
Berry:
And maybe your poems are a way of resisting that?
What other writers or artists influenced you when you were writing Mothersong?
Acre:
I was pregnant during the Nasty Woman movement, and there was a Nasty Women UK exhibition in Hackney that I gave a poem to. Salena Godden was part of it, and lots of visual artists, and I felt a real pull towards the idea of a tribe of nasty women, of sharing the blood and guts of your experience, and not cleaning it up. Around that time I reread Beloved, and started to write and think about mothers at the extremes of experience, mothers that might have been forgotten or let down or misrepresented. I experienced a lot of intrusive thoughts, and became really interested in postpartum psychosis. I listened to podcasts with women who’d gone through it, and it made complete sense that your brain might distort reality, because your life is so transformed.
Berry:
Similarly, after my first son was born, I remember trying to find poems about postnatal depression and thinking: where are they, these poems that I need?
Now my sons are older, I understand it better: by the time you’re feeling well and you’ve got space to write again, the heat has gone out of the experience, the intensity’s dissipated, and that’s why it doesn’t often get caught. That’s why I wanted to write the poems for The Republic of Motherhood as I was living it, to try to make the poems I needed.
Did it feel like you were working alone or as part of a community of mother-writers? I’m thinking here about the Eavan Boland line:
I had entered into a life for which poetry had no name.
Acre:
I think there’s been taboo-breaking in recent years. For a long time, it was shameful to admit you felt anything except bliss. Now it feels like there’s a community assembling, but a community of people who are often alone, in our satellites, sending flash signals to each other across the dark.
Berry:
I’m so interested in that word: shame. There is a real push-pull between wanting to write about an experience of motherhood and also feeling that you shouldn’t or couldn’t write about it. Did you feel that too?
Acre:
I did. There’s an idea that the story of motherhood is somehow niche, which, of course, is ridiculous.
Something I’ve struggled with is uniting my natural self with my ideas of a parental archetype, and what that looks like. The standards of tidiness, organisation, patience, diplomacy to which I hold myself have radically changed. It’s not enough to be the mess you were before.
Berry:
I wonder if poetry can hold the mess for us? I feel my daily life is very tidy, while my poems allow me a space for wildness and chaos, to be myself.
And your poems spread their roots deep and wide, Amy. They allow room for so much as they’re about your own experience of being parented too.
Acre:
A lot of the book is about the early loss of my father. I didn’t plan it that way, but I think it came about because when you have a child there’s a sense of continuity, of waking things in your bones that have been passed down from someone else. Sometimes looking at my daughter feels like getting a bit of my dad back.
Berry:
That’s such a moving thought.
There are also some beautiful poems about your partner in the book. You hardly ever hear about the genuine, pleasurable eroticism between parents so that gave me such joy. When you’ve been through an experience like pregnancy and birth together, which strips away the romance of the body and pushes you perhaps closer to death than you’ve ever been before, it’s a very intense intimacy and I’m interested in how that translates to the body and to sexuality afterwards.
Acre:
There’s such an animal nature to having a child and going through pregnancy and birth. As a family unit, we’re lions and cubs. The fierce protective spirit, and playfulness, and how everything becomes much more physical – it comes through in the way you relate to each other as adults.
Berry:
I love that idea of the extension of the animal into the sensual world, of play not only between children but also between partners. It makes me think of the first poem in your book, about being on the tube with your baby, where you describe yourself as a tigress. And later on you’ve got that great line, the thrill of being skinless. Tell me a bit about that.
Acre:
I wanted to capture the vulnerability of loving a child; Sylvia Plath’s idea that it’s as if my heart put on a face and walked out into the world. I love your line in ‘Connemara’ – I stepped out of my skin. Suddenly you have this love, this person who’s a part of you, but exists outside of you, and doesn’t belong to you. And you can protect them up to a point, but not entirely.
Berry:
The word ‘thrill’ speaks beautifully to that. It holds the delight and the ecstasy, but also the terror. We don’t often think of motherhood as thrilling, do we? But it feels like a perfect word for the emotions involved.
I’ve got one last quote for you, and I think it touches on what we’re doing when we write these poems. It’s from Adrienne Rich:
I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.
These poems, they feel risky don’t they? But if more of us are willing to write our experiences then we build our collective power.
Acre:
I think it’s happening. I see more and more women talking about the reality of birth and parenting in ways that empower, that give permission for us all to do the same. I want to be a part of that.
