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Poets Without Poetry

Dominic Warshaw | September 20th, 2024

Poets Without Poetry

Beinecke Library  |  Poetry  |  Arts & Culture  |  Yale University  |  Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes

PoetsPoetry

Dominic Warshaw Photo.

“Where am I?” poet Jen Hadfield asked the small crowd in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on Thursday night. No one answered. Next to her, poet Danielle Chapman listened gently, her hands in her lap. “I blink awake every morning, like a patient coming round from anaesthetic, and ask, bewildered, ‘Where am I?’”

Hadfield was reading from her memoir Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland during a conversation about the poet as memoirist hosted by the Windham-Campbell Prize Festival. The question reflected the sense of discovery and reverence she brings to the page, and the anxiety and beauty of living on earth. To live a life—never mind to write about one—is to expose oneself to loss and contradiction, tenderness and surprise. 

These elements are crystallized in Storm Pegs and Chapman’s debut memoir Holler, books which are undeniably the products of poets without poetry.

The rocky coasts of Shetland Island, where Hadfield moved on a whim in her late twenties, offered her “the best view of the universe [she] has ever [had].” It is a view she describes with a poet’s attention to detail in Storm Pegs, cataloging Shetland’s long winters, filleted herring, and smuggler’s caves opening into the sea.

Hadfield, who received the T.S. Eliot Prize for her second collection of poetry Nigh-No-Place, writes with a poet’s ear for sound. Storm Pegs is pierced through with Shetlandic words like hameaboots (at home) and baa-brack (sea breaking over a sunken rock), which stud the page like lempits (limpits) on the hull of a sixareen (traditional boat with six sets of oars).

The Shetlandic language, which derives from ancient Nordic, is “so palpable and so vulnerable,” Hadfield said protectively. She described rushing home from conversations with her friends and neighbors in Shetland to write them down—and returning later to ask, “Is this how you would say this?”

Danielle Chapman, who shared the stage with Hadfield, said she feels a similar responsibility to language and culture. Holler, which chronicles Chapman’s childhood in a Southern military family, is also suffused with dialect: her characters chide the durn dog and the guvmint.

The culture that Chapman grew up in is painful to transcribe: she grew up in the same house in which her ancestors owned slaves, in which the furniture had not been moved “since the Confederacy fell.” 

Her accounting layers the memories of a child—loving her family and her home as a child loves, without judgment—with an adult’s capacity for nuance and shame. Mirthful, complex, and mythic, Holler is a project of reconciliation of past and present, good and evil.

Their soft laughter absorbed immediately by the deep carpet of the Beinecke, Chapman and Hadfield commiserated over the strictures and illusions of genre. “An awkward truth, which I am happy to share with you, is that I did not want to write a memoir,” Hadfield confessed. 

Storm Pegs is not a story of self, she insisted, but a romance: “Shetland is the lover, elusive but inescapable.” Chapman drew her own lines between Holler and traditional memoir. The poet’s memoir, she said, permits non-linear narrative and omission of events, observing its own loyalties to memory and meaning. 

Hadfield and Chapman bonded over their affinity for the palpable, the concrete—defying the rumors that poets are, by nature and in practice, abstract. Chapman observed that the “things” in Storm Pegs are “so incredibly thing-y, hard-worn, washed up to shore.”

Like many poets, they attain intimacy through specificity. They are concerned with what is real. Both women came to memoir as poets, and left as poets.