Caroline Banerjee on ‘Ink marks’
Caroline Banerjee is a 23-year-old poet and creative from Brighton. In 2019, Banerjee was awarded the T.R. Henn Prize for her poetry, and her work was recently commended in Frosted Fire’s 2021 New Voices Competition. Her poem ‘Lessons’ was recently published in The Black Spring Press Group’s The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021 anthology (2021), and her work has featured in Versification Magazine and Wild Court Literary Journal amongst others. She is currently deputy poetry editor of The Mays Literary Anthology (2022).
What was the last thing that made you smile?
The last thing that made me smile was seeing my dog after a really long time away from home. I find being around animals so grounding, and dogs have such a generosity of spirit that always makes feel more content.
Where did your poetry journey begin?
I have always loved English and writing stories, but I’d never really considered writing my own poetry. When I was 18, I was having a really tough time, and I decided to try a series of workshops at the Poetry School in London. I spent the week doing lots of writing exercises and creative masterclasses, and sharing very new, experimental poems. Poetry felt like some kind of lifeline, and I started writing constantly, jotting new lines down in my phone notes whenever they popped into my head.
What is a core theme of ‘Ink marks’, and what called you to write about it?
The narrative voice of ‘Ink marks’ is fairly ambiguous, but I was writing from the perspective of a child, and the ambiguity and confusion of the poem felt important in achieving this child-like vision. I’m interested in liquids and fluids – tears, washing, ink – and how such substances can be used to explore trauma, and the idea of pain transferred down generations within a family. I wanted to play around with double meanings in this poem, thinking about how the running of ink in relation to everyday spillages can be connected to a psychologically complex desire to escape or ‘run away’ from the determinism felt within one’s own family history. I was also keen to deploy a vocabulary of linguistics – whether letters in the sense of mail, letters as in a scrabble board game, or letters in terms of family name and communication – to think about both the freedoms of language as code, as well as its relation to power and privilege.
Tell us about the experience of writing this poem.
The starting point of this poem came from some lines I wrote in a poetry workshop in London, in which I made this connection between the ideas of family cycles, and the cyclical daily movement of clothes in the washing machine. I wrote this poem quite quickly, aiming to resist the temptation to adhere to a clear narrative or to offer consolation or resolution, and instead remain attuned to the child-like experience of family life and trauma, and how this is felt internally though the senses. I intentionally repeated ‘And’, ‘Because’, and ‘But’ at the start of lines, both to create this sense of overwhelming, accumulating flow, as a child might create when telling a story, whilst also using the ‘but’ to jar any smoothness of metre.
Where does poetry fit into your life?
Poetry has been a big part of my life since I fell in love with studying it during my first year of IB English Literature at Varndean College, Brighton . I went on to read English at the University of Cambridge, and found myself drawn to close analysis of poetry, writing my second year dissertation on the 1912-13 poetry of Thomas Hardy, and writing my final year dissertation on the medieval works of the Gawain poet. I am about to begin a PhD in Contemporary Medievalism which will incorporate analysis of both contemporary and medieval poetry, but I also love attending poetry readings and events in my free time, as well as writing and publishing lots of my own work. I am drawn to short form content and in the future, I would love to publish my own poetry collections, and travel around the UK giving my own readings.
What inspires you?
I’m very inspired by other people’s art. I was at a festival recently listening to a new artist, and was standing feeling quite tired at the back, when suddenly she started to sing these lyrics that spoke to me so strongly. I love that moment when reading a poem or listening to a song, where you are waiting for the last line, hoping it will finish the narrative in the way that you need. I came away from this performance filled with this urge to create, and with this feeling that I needed to find a way to listen to this song again– an urgency that I only really get from art, and a feeling that I hope to evoke in my own work.
Is there a poem you read over and over again?
One of my very favourite poems is ‘The Orange’, by Wendy Cope. It’s quite different to the poetry I tend to read, which is often more contemplative and ambiguous, but the last line captures so clearly, and with such authenticity, the feeling of complete contentment that is so hard to depict without cliché. I love the use of punctuation, and the relation the poem strikes up between the mundane and the eternal. The last line feels like such a direct address and always makes me smile.
Do you have a favourite poet?
My favourite poet has been Michael Symmons Roberts since I first encountered his 2013 collection, Drysalter, on my first day of sixth-form college! I am excited by the way that he uses the Biblical form of the psalms in Drysalter to investigate the relationship between natural cycles of life and death, and the social structure of modern life, and his work engages with complexities of spirituality and faith. I am also drawn to the work of John Burnside and Louise Glück. Burnside engages with ideas of the unspoken, and a natural world that cannot be fully captured, and Glück investigates a long history of Greek mythology to think about feminism, trauma, and the relationship between poetics and loneliness. All three poets use short poems to investigate large philosophical ideas, and the intensity of their engagements with form – the structure of the poems in each of their collections is crucial – gives a unique depth.
What advice would you give to someone new to poetry?
I was on an online masterclass with a playwright once, and he gave me some advice that has really stuck with me. He said the mistake a lot of creatives make is that they look for the briefs given by certain publishing houses or journals, and they try to craft their own writing to this brief. His advice was to write exactly what you want to write, and if it happens to fit, it fits. I think that my best work, and the work that I feel has begun to capture my poetic voice more clearly, has been created with this mindset, where I am writing not with any kind of outcome in mind. I do think, however, that writing needs energy and inspiration. Attending poetry readings and creative workshops often forces you to just write and generate ideas, without time for judgement or perfectionism.
Why do you write poetry?
Writing poetry feels like a necessity. It allows me to turn painful emotions and things that have happened into something productive, and it allows me to give things that make no sense some kind of meaning. I love the freedom of writing poetry because unlike a journal where you feel bound to try to understand things, and make them ‘true’, in poetry your voices and images can just be exactly as they are, and you can let the complexity of the everyday exist.
You can read Caroline’s poem here.