Something Has to Shatter

shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, among many others. Her second collection, egg/shell, was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month, Victoria Kennefick is our guest today on The Glimpse. Victoria Kennefick's poems are brave, exposing funny and dark. They take risks, not only in terms of form and language, but in terms of the real and necessary risks of art: to look directly at difficult subject matter, to implicate the poet in a mesh of moral and

aesthetic questions. Victoria makes her life into poetry, but not in the way of transforming it into something pretty or excusing it. Instead, she opens up even the darkest parts of experience in order that we might witness and feel less alone ourselves. These are poems full of the body, of visions, of humor and intimate hope, raw but never undeveloped, shocking but never untrue. Victoria's work is exposing and real and generous, and I'm so glad

to have her here on The Glimpse with us. Victoria, welcome. Thank you so much, Sean, that was a beautiful introduction. Seán Hewitt: You're very welcome. Your new collection. I'd just like to talk a little bit about it. First, it's called egg/shell it came out this year. For those people listening, which is everyone, they won't be able to hear exactly what I'm saying when I say the title, because there's actually a forward slash between

egg and shell, which speaks a bit to the concerns of the book. Could you tell us a bit about that? That was a very obviously intentional move, punctually or punctuationally, but also, I think, in terms of what I envisaged the collection to be about, because it initially, very much started as a book about fertility, and particularly secondary infertility, and using the egg rather usefully, and

perhaps obviously, as a method to explore that. Particularly as I happen to live near a wetland center, which is this beautiful lake, and swans in it. And the swans breed every year, and it becomes an almost obsessive experience for the people around the area to you know, when are the cygnets going to be born? And so there was something around that energy that spoke to how I was feeling about my body, and how I was feeling about my journey in

terms of trying to have a second child. And I suppose so that was very much the initial impetus for the collection, or certainly the poems I was writing that eventually became the collection. But as time went on and as life develops, things changed for me, personally and my former spouse came out as a trans woman, and that really did put a massive pause on my life for how I thought it was

developing and how I thought it was gestating, I suppose. And that kind of moment of pause felt incredibly important to show in the book: this kind of fissure that that appears and everything afterwards is different. So that kind of allowed me to, I suppose, process the

experience myself as a person, but also as a writer. And then I was really delighted to find out in my extensive research, because that's what I do when things happen to me, I research them both academically and otherwise, and I found that when someone doesn't realize they're trans yet, they're referred to as an egg, and once they have that epiphany that they are a trans person, their egg

cracks. And I just found that to be an enormously helpful way for me to understand what was happening, but also to kind of understand the fact that things do break, but equally something different but more as beautiful or completely different in form emerges out of it. So that was very much, I suppose, how the rest of the collection came together, and then how I imagined over time the entire book.

Seán Hewitt: Yeah, it's an incredible kind of consonance of images there, of two very different experiences somehow coalesced around the egg and and gestation and birth and rebirth, all of those things. Second collections are funny beasts, in a way, because you know, when you come out with your first book, you kind of make a

statement of sorts, whatever statement that might be. And then the second collection either kind of continues that statement or deepens it, or, in some cases, kind of contradicts it or goes in another direction. And all of those are, you know, come with their various troubles and challenges. How did you approach it? I mean, obviously this is a book that changed as you were writing it. But how did you kind of conceive of this second collection? Was it

different to writing the first book? Did it feel different? I really appreciate you asking that question, because I had had, ultimately my whole life, to write my first collection, and though it was slow in terms of how it came together, there was a certain level of, I'm going to say viciousness around it, because I was just very, very focused on it being a very

clean, tight, sharp book with no excess. But then I found with this book, I couldn't bring that same harshness to it, because of what I was writing about and because of how much I had changed because of the first book. And so I had much more compassion for the words and the images and the people in the poem and the experience of the poem. And I think I, I would use the term perhaps grace that I was maybe allowing myself a little more grace with mixed results, as you

know, as cleaving your emotions has mixed results. And it was uncomfortable, but it felt very necessary. So I thought I would be much longer than I was writing this second collection, but it felt incredibly urgent, and the poems came very, very

intensely. There was a it was very emotionally intense experience. But I was very, very cognizant of the fact that while I wanted them obviously to have that resonance, I wanted them to still be crafted and to still so then there was something really satisfying about taking that very urgent emotion and then crafting it, which I suppose is what we ultimately do, but in a different way to how I had before, and the trying that out was what was so wonderful and fun in the

middle of this very difficult period of my life. It was the thing that I think really gave me some separation from what I was Experiencing, allowed me to have some form of control over it as well, to curate it and create my experience and maybe own it a little bit more, because it is obviously when something is happening outside of your control, like secondary infertility or somebody that you know has a very big impact on how your life goes,

makes a significant change, you do kind of feel helpless and kind of like you're you're standing in the middle of a storm being kind of bent in every direction. So I think standing in, in the place of creating a poem and but allowing myself a little bit more and being more gentle with the work and myself, which was really difficult, too. I found it hard. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, we often think about how poems might change a reader. You know, this poem changed my life, or changed how I saw

something. But I think for poets, we maybe don't often talk about how much the poems can change us, the idea that when you get to a second collection, you might have been actually changed by the first book. And so that comes with its own complications. You know, you're kind of witnessing the evolution of Victoria as well as Victoria's poems. And I hope you'll write loads and loads of collections, and we'll be able to look back at the evolution of Victoria alongside the

poems. All right, well, the poem you've chosen for us has to, I think, take the medal for the best title I've read in a long while. It's called "The Ego is Crushed like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of its Own Smugness." Can you tell us a little bit about the title and then and then read it for us. One of the things that has struck me as I've grown older and experienced suffering, as we all do in various guises, is how often the ego is involved, and I've become more

aware of my ego's whisperings or roaring sometimes. And of course, it's a necessary part of our human experience, and very useful particularly, I think, you know, if you're a creator, it's always useful. But I think when you're creating something, you have to have some sense of an ego that, oh, this needs to exist in some way.

But I was really surprised when a second pregnancy didn't come to pass for me at the time, and certainly when my marriage fell apart and my former spouse came out as a trans woman, I didn't realize that it would impact on my ego, and I think that when all of that happened, I really had to have a reckoning with my ego, and it was a really cathartic and really wonderful experience in letting go

a lot of ideas I had around being safe as well. Because I considered, I suppose, being married to be safe, or, you know, to have a husband to be safe. And those things are not, unfortunately, in many cases, necessarily the case. So this poem was an attempt, I suppose, to explore that. But it's okay to have those kind of feelings, and, and, and it's okay to feel the loss of something that your ego enjoyed holding on to or felt safe having, and that there is going to be a response to that.

Seán Hewitt: Would you read it for us? I'd be delighted. "The Ego is Crushed like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of its Own Smugness." When you slipped out of your skin, you slip of a thing the skin I thought I knew you in, it was dazzling and terrifying how I too had to slough wifehood off my dry arms, scrub it from my violently blue-white legs exfoliate its unmistakable musk. You were no more

my husband than any other woman. What a thing to miss! And yet, and yet I try to imagine clinging to you like a 1980s polyester nighty sparking in the dark, for God's sake, images of bodies reaching over the mantelpiece and going up in flames, people chimneys burned on my child brain. Maybe I could do it and clutch all that we made tightly until my fists shook. Stupid, smug, ego snail. Who am I now without you, but what I've always been, a white feather in the

wind. I told you that when we met and you cupped me in your hands loosely, and the wind could blow at any gale, get knotted and sure, I'd toss a bit and shiver, but I could mull that over in the dark, in the dark, in the dark did you know? Did you know? They all ask, questions like prodding fingers? Have they stripped their spouse's skin clean? Have they watched something fall away? A lie? No. A pretense, no. A

realisation, yes. An epiphany, definitely. What a ridiculous question, though, when you didn't know and dressed as best you could in what you thought you should. We were just playing, I suppose, until it was clear that it was serious as murder. The end of us, I mean. The dream of us. Not your slinky escape from your chrysalis, not your beautiful fluttering into the light.

Seán Hewitt: Thank you. It's such a brilliant poem. I love it. You, you can't tell where it's going at any given point it slips just into new territory every time it's about to stop, and I think I love the way it just kind of evolves and grows through itself. One thing I'm aware that listeners might not realize from that poem is something about the shape of it. Would you tell us a little bit about the shape?

So when I was writing it, it went through many, many different forms, but the one it really ended on, which is, I suppose you would call it centered. It's almost, yeah, like a tree maybe, or maybe the egg cracking, just that, that sense of it being wider rather than being long. So that was kind of the sense of it. I really enjoy playing with form in my own, my own restrictions, not so much when I have other peoples placed on me.

Seán Hewitt: One of the things that came to mind when I was reading this poem was a line from Sharon Olds in "Stag's Leap," actually the title poem of the book; she has this brilliant moment that always comes back to me. She says, "When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from. I am half on the side of the leaver." And it seems to me to kind of speak to a lot of the tension in this book, which is, you know, wanting to retain two things that

are intimately intermeshed. One person and another person, and the actions of one person affecting another person, but still not wanting to begrudge another person, even though you might be upset and discombobulated, and you know, have your ego crushed, and you know all of that turmoil, there's still a sense of celebration even in the language. You know, you can feel the warmth and tenderness of the language, and you know your beautiful fluttering into the

light. So it feels like a generous poem in the way that it approaches that. Was that tension between, you know, these two quite opposing things. Was it at the forefront of your mind when you were when you were writing, trying to get the balance between this tension? I mean, Thank you for saying all of that, because I think

that was very much what I was hoping.Because I think my project in my life, maybe and certainly in my work, is self-actualization, that sense of to thine own self be true, and that's something my mom always said to me when I was growing up, and something I always found really desperately difficult in some situations and impossible to ignore in others. And so I think when somebody tells you what they need to do in order

to be their true selves, you cannot help but admire that. And you cannot help but just say, yeah, like, if that's what you need to do, that's your step forward into being more yourself, which is, I think perhaps our only purpose, if we have any. And so I think that was a huge part of my experience, on the best of days, and even on the okay days, and then other times, obviously, kind of thinking. But what am I going to do? What will become of me? How will I

gather the wreckage of what I perceive to be a break. And breaks can be very positive, and breaks like the cracking of an egg, can have positive outcomes, but still, something has to shatter, and somebody has to maybe clean up, and somebody has to kind of see what's emerging, and somebody else has to maybe clear away the fragments and so on. So I think I couldn't ever in my work, certainly escape from the fact that what was happening was a manifestation of someone's true self.

Seán Hewitt: Yeah, you know one thing I think this book does really well. And you know, we sometimes don't see enough of of this dynamic is acknowledging the difficulties of our interdependence on other people. We often, I think, read books or talk about books as though people are atomized, completely insulated, and that "I have the right to my story," but it's quite hard. You know, when your story is someone else's story, and there's no real delineating line where one

stops and the other starts. And you know, we often think about poems as ways of tracking experience or holding experience, you know, kind of frozen moments in time or looking back in time. But this, this seems, in a way, a poem about having to rewrite experience or seeing a different version of the past that was not the one you thought you were in. Is that a kind of propulsive force in the book? Do you think?

Yes, what I did in the work was try and look at how I had to take responsibility myself for where I was when I wrote the

book. And I mean, I went through all of the maybe more challenging and difficult emotions in that regard, but I think most usefully coming to the realization that there was something around the dynamic that protected me from something in myself that I found challenging, and now was time to meet that part of myself and get another chance to heal that part of me or allow that part of me to grow, or even just acknowledge it. And so obviously there is a weird

sense of the person that I married doesn't actually exist anymore, legally, or any paperwork or and the person that is now co-parenting our child with me, and we get on exceptionally well, really a great person, but is a different person? Very similar in lots of ways, very different in other ways. And not just, I mean, not just physically, of course. But looking back and

kind of going, well, who was that and, but who was I? And I think I found that much more helpful to look at well, how have I changed?

And how would it best benefit me to look at this from a perspective that helps me to grow and helps me to change and helps me to explore in my work, through my writing, ways that we can meet our former selves that acted in ways that maybe were like maybe we could have done something different there, but ultimately lead us to where we should be, which is at another point where we can choose, I think, to grow. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, you know, the poem is a way of empathizing with

various versions of yourself. It's such a great poem, Victoria. And I think what you know, one of the things that that is so great about it and all of your parents, even though they come from very specific personal circumstances, I think you you have a way of of allowing them to be universal.It's quite easy to kind of say, "No, here's a bad thing I did," or "here's, you know how I feel about something," but to say that when it begins to enmesh every everything around you,

there's real bravery, and I think you've done it beautifully. Yeah, okay, we're going to take a quick break now, and when we come back, you're going to tell us about a poem that inspired you, in which a woman puts a heart in a freezer. So we'll take a break and then we'll come back. That was so lovely. Thank you so much. Cathy and Peter Halstead: We hope you're enjoying this second season of The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff

Poetry Foundation. We're the founders Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we do that in a variety of ways, through partnerships, our film series, this podcast and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thank you so much for listening.

Seán Hewitt: Welcome back to The Glimpse. Victoria Kennefick you've chosen a poem by Carolyn Kizer. It's called "Hearts Limbo." Do you want to tell us a little bit about it before you read it for us? So I think if I were to characterize 2024 for myself, there have been many interesting moments, but overall, I think my general focus for the year was keeping my heart open. And I

hadn't realized at all how often I closed my heart. And as someone who would have considered themselves previously, to be an open-hearted person or to be an open person, I realized that in many ways, that wasn't the case at all. And that really fascinated me, because I could actually feel at certain times my heart closing in situations, and I realized that's what's happening when I have that feeling. It's my heart going "nope," or "I don't want that," or

"I'm scared," often. And so when I came across this poem, it actually really moved me. And I suppose in many ways, it has a levity to it, and when it's dealing with something that is, I think, one of the bravest things that you can do in your life. And so when I read this poem, I cried, I laughed and I gasped at how brilliantly Kizer talks about the heart and what we do to it. Yeah. Would you read it

for us? I'd be delighted to "Heart's Limbo" by Carolyn Kizer, I thrust my heart, in danger of decay through lack of use, into the freezer compartment,deep among the ice-cubes, rolls ready to brown 'n' serve, the concentrated juice. I had to remember not to diet on it. It wasn't raspberry yoghurt. I had to remember not to feed it to the cat when I ran out of tuna. I had to remember not to thaw and fry it. The liver it resembled lay on another shelf.

It rested there in its crystal sheath, not breathing, preserved for posterity. Suddenly, I needed my heart in a hurry. I offered it to you, cold and dripping incompletely thawed. You didn't even wash its blood from your fingertips. As it numbed them. You asked me to kiss your hands. You were not even visibly frightened when it began to throb with love.

Seán Hewitt: That's such a great poem, and in some ways it reminded me of some of your poems in Eat or We Both Starve, they're really bodily and intense and almost kind of a sort of body horror comes through them. Is that something also that kind of pulled you into this poem? You know the lack of fear about things bleeding and throbbing and going in the freezer and being thawed.

It's such a great way of, I think, describing the internal workings of our emotional bodies, because it's really difficult to describe that experience, especially, I think I don't know, obviously, how other people feel, or how they experience

feelings in their bodies. And somebody said recently, "your issues are in the tissues," which I thought was an amazing, an amazing line, and how, I suppose, as we get older, we move our bodies less and, you know, we expect them to be able to hold all of these experiences that are, you know, emotion is e-motion. So they get stuck and they freeze up, and they get rusty. And I was really struck by how banal it is as well that, you know, she's just plopping her heart there

in the freezer, next to the liver, which is also there. And that's another poem, probably about something, but also next to the rolls and the concentrated juice and like, Oh, don't, don't feed it to the cat, or don't do that. Yeah. I loved that. It was integrated into a very domestic scene, and that in giving this other person her heart, it wasn't like, you say stylized, it wasn't, you know, she didn't take time to thaw it out and maybe, like, I don't know, give it

a rub down, or slap it around, or tenderize it. She's like, Oh, here it is. Seán Hewitt: Yeah. I mean, even the act of receiving that heart, you know, the other person is there. And it seems for the speaker, such a terrifying idea to give the heart, you know, the expectation seems to be repulsion, kind of wanting to throw it away or give it back. And there's something quite moving about the surprise of the poem at not being rejected. You know, in that way, that's a lovely

thing about the ending. One of the words that really stands out to me is, "As it numbed them, you asked me to kiss your hands. You were not even visibly frightened when it began to throb with love." It's the "visibly" there, which I think puts a sort of doubt, still in the poem. It's almost wanting to believe that the person isn't frightened. But "visibly frightened" seems to me to leave a doubt that the person might

still be internally frightened. So I can kind of see two frightens you know, well, it's a scary thing. It's terrifying. Seán Hewitt: And, you know, sometimes I think we don't appreciate the responsibility that we're putting on other people as well. You know, we make demands of people. And I think this poem does, does both of those things. It kind of reminded me of the quote that Has been doing the round from I think it was Hilary Mantel's

interview with the Paris Review. As she says, "The question is, not who influences you, but which people give you courage?" And I wonder if that feels kind of closer to your experience of this poem. Does it give you courage? I think so. I think when you're wondering how to self-actualize and to maybe be your true self as much as is possible, given the world that we're living in and so on, but it seems like

quite a rebellious thing to do, or quite a radical thing to do. But what it really means is trusting yourself to be open, because the opposite of love is fear, and the fear can often be about your own inability to cope with being hurt, or your own perceived inability to cope with being hurt. And in resisting that hurt, we obviously

resist all of the things that bring us joy. So even though the heart is not, you know, table-ready and is dripping on this person's hands, this person accepts it, because that is, ultimately what love is. It's, it's acceptance, Seán Hewitt: Right? You know, you've let go of your own responsibility for your own ego, and you've, you've entrusted it to

to another person. You know, I think, really, you're probably one of these people now, which might be a courage giver to other people or other poets through your poems, but I wonder who, who your courage givers or permission givers have have been poetically. I would love the idea of being a permission

giver. That sounds amazing. I've had so many, and I'm always searching for more, and it's just interesting the idea of permission, because we have it already, yeah, certainly, I think very early on, Yeats, I think, gave me permission to be passionate and maybe a little bit nerdy and embarrassing in my passions. Kavanagh gave me permission to be grumpy and cantankerous and made it okay to for me to maybe see that I might necessarily feel like I fit in, but

I don't know, does anyone? And then, of course, I think for the dramatic two very different writers: Sylvia Plath, obviously, who felt like coming home when I read her, and Flannery O'Connor, I think both of them for the drama, the drama and the religion and the the I think particularly with Plath taboos that I would have thought were in place for me, around things I could or could not write about.

And I think with Flannery O'Connor, the sense of her being, you know, problematically in many different ways now looking at her from this perspective. And indeed, then you know a southern woman, you know, conservative background, Catholic and writing these incredibly violent stories. I think, too Sally Rooney. I'm just really interested in how she writes about relationships and about the

heart and about interdependence. And in a sense, watching reading normal People, and certainly watching the show at a very particular time in lockdown and in the kind of beginning of this disintegration of things at home. That sense of wanting interdependence, actually craving it, and realizing it's something that rather than keeping your heart in the freezer, it's far better served, and you are in your life by allowing it to be passed around.

Maybe not willy nilly, per se, but certainly taking a risk and allowing yourself to be shock, horror, loved, Seán Hewitt: Yeah, yeah. for who you truly are, the whole messy, gooey lot. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, and it's often not as scary to other people as we imagine it might be. I hope not. I hope not. Seán Hewitt: I'm just nearing the end of Intermezzo now, and I'm really enjoying it. So big thumbs up for Sally Rooney, okay, so before

we leave, I'd just like to ask you, what's next? If you can tell us, are you working on anything? Are you having a break? You know what's what's going on? Everything is okay. I don't do breaks. Seán, I really mean to and yeah, I yeah, I'm working on maybe doing more breaks. And I'm working on essays at the moment, and I've had a few published, one in The Stinging Fly. Olivia Fitzsimons commissioned me to write about being a writer with ADHD, and that was an extremely interesting thing

to do. And there are a few things I suppose, that I'm really interested in exploring in essay form that don't seem to be packaged in poem, in poem in my head, they're just not poems. I've been working on on some of those. Dabbling a little bit with maybe longer fiction, which I find really daunting, and it's like starting again and procrastination, which is part of the ADHD rainbow of symptoms, and I'm sure everyone has, to some degree, experienced it. It's quite

profound. And I'm really interested in observing that in myself and maybe using that, maybe later, to explore that kind of experience in poetry. Seán Hewitt: yeah. So essays, maybe a novel and more poems, So three or five books together. Seán Hewitt: Well, thank you so much for taking time out of a very busy life to talk to us. Victoria Kennefick, thank you very much. Thank you, Sean, it's been wonderful.

Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host. Sean Hewitt, Victoria's poem "The Ego is Crushed like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of its Own Smugness" is from her collection egg/shell, published in 2024 and aired with permission from

Carcanet. "Heart's Limbo by Carolyn Kizer" comes from Cool, Calm and Collected Poems 1960 to 2000 published in 2002 it was used with permission from Copper Canyon Press Coming up next week, poet Mícheáll McCann on the challenges of writing about queer domesticity, Mark Doty's impact and the power of a firefly in the right hands. Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website.

brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast. We'd also love to hear from you. Drop us an email at The Glimpse Poetry Podcast@gmail.com . The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm your host Seán Hewitt, our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive

Director, and our co founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening.