AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Body You Control

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Body You Control. The British poet and prose writer Kim Moore started playing the trumpet when she was 10 years old. For over two decades, it shaped almost every aspect of her life. Each day after school, she practiced for several hours, took lessons, sold double-paned windows over the phone so she could buy her own trumpet instead of a clunky rental. She played in the brass band and the orchestra, went around to auditions, she taught. And then, she quit.    

In What The Trumpet Taught Me, she writes about what it was like to be so singularly focused. To be driven by one simple goal: becoming better. And what it was like to then move away from it, and figure out who she was without the trumpet to guide her.

I recently sat down to talk with her about What The Trumpet Taught Me, her prose book, which is just coming out now, and also about her poetry collection that came out in 2021, titled, All the Men I Never Married. When I reached her at her home in Cumbria, England, she had just been stuck inside for a few weeks: first she had Covid, then her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ally.

Kim Moore: Yeah, it’s not been easy, to be honest. And then, it’s like she’s had a personality change since she’s come out of it. She’s turned into this devil child. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Kim Moore: Honestly, before I was like, feeling all smug, because I felt like I had quite a reasonable toddler, if there is such a thing. And now she’s like a normal toddler, like having normal toddler tantrums, and.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: Like this morning—and she’s like a teenager as well. She came into my—this is my writing room—and she said, “I just want some alone time, and she came in here and shut the door.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: She’s not even three.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) That’s perfect. I mean, at least she’s good at communicating about her boundaries. Like, there’s that, you know.

Kim Moore: She definitely communicates. Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Anyway, thank you for taking the time to talk to me when, you know, you’ve just had such taxing weeks.

Kim Moore: No, no, this is, this is nice, honestly, because, this is like a holiday, honestly. I went to a funeral on Monday and I was like, “This is actually less stressful than my actual life at the moment.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I forgot to ask you to grab both of your latest books. So, your poetry collection, All the Men I Never Married, but also your nonfiction book, What The Trumpet Taught Me. Do you happen to have those close by?

Kim Moore: Yes, hold on, I’ll just find the trumpet book. Yep.

Helena de Groot: So can you tell me a little bit, what kind of music was around in your household? What kind of music education you had gotten before that. What was your general experience with music until then?

Kim Moore: Yeah, I think my mum and dad used to play a lot of music, but not any, you know, it was like pop music. So my dad was really into the Stones and Pink Floyd, and my mom was into kind of, the Beatles and, you know, kind of pop music, I guess. So there was always a lot of music played. And actually my mum had a massive cupboard full of vinyl records, and every Sunday afternoon we used to be allowed to take it in turns to choose a single and play it. So, music was a positive thing in that way, and it was something that we all did together. But then, at school, like, we had a music teacher who was great, who had to start people off on the recorder. And then if you were good at the recorder, you normally went onto the violin. But yeah, even at that age, I’d worked out that the violins were not very good, or—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: I thought the violin sounded horrible, and I didn’t understand it was because the children were not very good at playing the violin. So we didn’t do a lot of music in school other than if you, you know, you were keen and you went to recorder practice. I wasn’t allowed in the choir as well. Although, she set up—this music teacher set up a school choir and everyone auditioned, because everyone wanted to be in it, because you got out of class. But me and this lad whose voice had broken early were the only ones not allowed to go in the choir. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: But I’m laughing about it now, but that really kind of scarred me. Like, I didn’t sing for years and years because I thought, “Oh, I can’t sing.” And I can’t sing very well, but that kind of, that really informed my teaching later on when I became a music teacher. I thought, that’s like my bottom line. I don’t want to put anyone off doing music. That should be, you know, your bottom line. And even as a poetry—teaching poetry as well, like, don’t put people off writing or being creative, that should be your thing.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. I thought we can just start with an excerpt. Is that okay?

Kim Moore: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It’s that little bit on page 14 about the Rocky theme song.

Kim Moore: Yeah.

(READS EXCERPT)

I stay behind after junior band rehearsal to listen to the senior band. They play the theme tune to Rocky.

(“Gonna Fly Now” by Maynard Ferguson PLAYS)

I don’t know it’s the theme tune to Rocky. I think it’s the most profound and beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I have goose bumps on my arms, although it’s not the staccato fanfare of the cornets at the beginning, but the entrance of the lower bass that makes my heart lurch. At some point in the piece, it feels like the music turns. It’s at this point I understand what yearning means, although I don’t have a name for it. This feeling, this longing. Later, I understand this was a key change. But this is 1992. I’m 11 years old and falling in love.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I really, I really love this excerpt. How do you think that you got to pick the trumpet, or the cornet, in the beginning?

Kim Moore: It was just random, because I remember, I was 10 and the teacher said, “Who would like to play a brass instrument?” And I just put my hand up, because I volunteered for everything, and I didn’t even know what a brass instrument was. Me and my sister and a couple of other kids were chosen. And then I just really liked it because it’s, I don’t know, I took it home and practiced. So they had like these old smelly school instruments. If you’ve ever got an old brass instrument out of a cupboard, you’ll recognize the smell. It’s just very distinctive. And I went home with a euphonium, first of all, which is probably like a—well, I’ll get shouted at by brass players, but, imagine like half the size of a tuba or a bass.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Kim Moore: It was a bit of an escape for me as well, going to the band, because I think all the way through school, we both got bullied quite badly, but in the band, we were one of the cool kids, we were, you know, it was like an escape from all of that kind of playground stuff at school. There was no kind of bullying or arguing. Everyone, everyone got on.

Helena de Groot: And do you think that the bullying was just kind of a normal part of school, I guess? Or were you two particularly singled out in any way?

Kim Moore: Um ... we went to quite a rough school. It was, it was quite rough when we went there. It’s better now. But now I look back and think it’s really shocking, like what was, you know, we had teachers taking us home in their car, because they couldn’t guarantee we would be safe on the way home. I remember being locked in the drama teacher’s office once because there was an older girl who had been expelled already, but she was kind of rampaging around the school with a piece of wood. (LAUGHS) And honestly, I laugh about it now, but it was, it was pretty bad.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. It’s something that I found also remarkable about your book, that you weave in this whole class dimension. Can you give me an example of, like, when you first realized like, oh, there’s this, there’s this dimension that keeps being pointed out to me.

Kim Moore: I think, I wouldn’t have articulated this at the time, but the very simple difference between the trumpet and cornet when I was, in terms of classes, I could go to a brass band and get one for free. Or we paid 50 pence a week subs or something. But there was nowhere to go and get a trumpet for free. So if you wanted to play the trumpet, you would have to buy one. And I don’t know, a beginner trumpet now, you can get one for probably a hundred pounds, but they’ve come down a lot. You know, they were probably maybe three or four hundred pounds back then, which would have been completely out of reach for my family and families like mine. So, the brass band was a place I could go and get an instrument and you get the tuition for free as well. And you got a uniform for free. It’s all provided for you. So, I didn’t understand the difference really until I, when I went to A-levels and I started with a different teacher who was a trumpet teacher, and started getting ready to audition for music college. And he explained to me, “Look, the trumpet is more flexible. You can play it in lots of different groups.” But by that point, you need like a 2,000-pound instrument. So how am I going to get one? So I borrowed his trumpet, and then had to go get, like, part-time jobs to save up for an instrument. And my sister was the same, but she was even worse, because she went from tenor horn in the band, all given for free, and then she got this French horn teacher and just fell in love with the French horn, which is an even more expensive instrument to buy, but.

Helena de Groot: That’s interesting.

Kim Moore: And then we started playing in orchestras, which are different again to brass bands, and I remember there was a moment—I don’t think I write about this in the book, actually, but when I first went into the orchestra, the other trumpet players who were all boys, I remember them taking the mickey out of the way that I talked because of my accent. My accent was really common compared to where they were brought up, because we were like, in the middle of Leicester and they came from the villages on the outskirts. So, I remember immediately feeling kind of self-conscious and realizing, oh, there is a difference.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. And how old were you at that point when you first joined the orchestra?

Kim Moore: I would have been 16.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. That’s so interesting to me, that that is relatively later, right, to be made aware of that kind of difference. I mean, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that, before that time, sure, there was a practical consideration of like, “Well, if I don’t have the money to buy this, you know, £300 instrument, I’m going to go with this 15 pence a week” or whatever it was, one. That’s like a practical consideration, but the way in which class is kind of beyond the practical, you know, like, the way in which it marks, I don’t know, the way you dress and the way you hold your body and the way you, you speak. And you know, we have all these—we’re so sensitive to this, right, as human beings. It’s so interesting to me that this really dawned on you when you were 16.

Kim Moore: I think as well, because, at the time, I wouldn’t have thought, “Oh, I can’t have a trumpet, so I’ll get a cornet.” It wasn’t presented like that. Like, the teacher just said, “Go to this band and get a cornet.” So I was never given the option. But there was probably like, other times as well, like, me and my sister entered into a rotary duet competition, and we won. And then we got asked to play at this big dinner, and it was a really kind of fancy 10-course dinner or something, and we were stood up at the end and, you know, the rotary people were lovely, but that felt like going into a different world and like, we didn’t belong.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Moore: And I could see that my mum and dad felt very uncomfortable there as well. But up until that point, all of my music education had been in brass bands, with people that were probably very like us in terms of background. So it had never really come up.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. There’s an excerpt that I thought was really beautiful in like, how subtle the way is that these things were kind of communicated to you, you know, without ever speaking the words sort of explicitly. It’s on page 40.

Kim Moore: Yep.

(READS EXCERPT)

My A-level music teacher tells me I’m not good enough to go to music college. I don’t tell my parents or my trumpet teacher that she said this. I know she doesn’t like me, and doesn’t know what to do with me or my twin sister. That she can’t believe we’ve never been to an orchestral concert or visited an art gallery. She doesn’t understand why we’ve never sung in a choir. Why my instrument doesn’t belong to me. She doesn’t understand brass bands, and says the brass band is a waste of time. I don’t tell my parents that either.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I thought this was so moving, because you keep repeating, “I don’t tell my parents that.” You know? As if you’re trying to protect them from this thing that you know is really about them, in a way.

Kim Moore: Mm.

Helena de Groot: How come you remember this so well? Is that something you wrote down? Is that just something that marked you? Why do you think that stayed with you?

Kim Moore: I think—I never wrote it down. And I think that point of, I knew I had to protect my parents from—well, I knew at the time if I told them they would have come down and shouted at her. (LAUGHS) And that wouldn’t solve it. So it’s like realizing your parents can’t solve everything for you. This is something they cannot fix, because it’s kind of indelible in you, it’s something that she’s seen. And now, like, looking back on it as a teacher, I guess she was trying to direct me, I suppose, and say, “If you want to do this, then these are the things that you need to do,” but they were kind of impossible things a lot of the time. But yeah, it really, it really hurt me because I was obsessed. All I wanted to do was go and play the trumpet. But I didn’t understand then that being a musician is more than just performing, which is actually all I wanted to do. I just wanted to play the trumpet. I didn’t really listen to classical music or even listen to other trumpet players. I just wanted to stand up and play and practice on my own. So, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Did you ever talk about this with your twin sister?

Kim Moore: Yeah. Well, when I wrote this book, she said, “Did she really say that to you?” And I said, “Yeah, did she not say it to you?” So I didn’t even tell her at the time.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Kim Moore: But my sister was on a slightly different trajectory because she was playing French horn, which is a very much rarer instrument. There was less French horn players anyway. And she’s always been a better musician, naturally, I think, I’ve had to work hard to keep up with her. So our A-level teacher didn’t say that to her because it wouldn’t have been true. She was good enough to just get into music college. So, she was fair in that way. Like, I think it was right what she was saying now, but it was very painful to hear it at the time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Is your sister a musician still?

Kim Moore: She still plays. Yeah, she went to a conservatoire and did a degree and she did a post-grad. And she played semi-professionally, but then she kind of—we’ve both kind of, I don’t think she would mind me saying that there’s been a kind of self-sabotage going on, because she was doing really well with her playing and then kind of moved, moved away from London.

Helena de Groot: Moved away from the opportunities, you mean?

Kim Moore: Yeah, yeah. She met a bloke and then moved up here. And now, she looks back and she says, “I really threw it away,” because she was depping in, like, West-End shows and things and been offered some really good opportunities, but didn’t really see it at the time.

Helena de Groot: It’s interesting that you describe it as self-sabotage. Is that how it feels for you, the walking away from it?

Kim Moore: I think for me, I don’t think I’ve got the right temperament to be a musician. And it’s taken me a long time to realize that. But yeah, at the time, like I was, at music college, I was told by various teachers that I could make it and I was good enough. And I never—I didn’t chase the opportunities. I didn’t kind of go for it in the way that I should have. But now, I’m older and I look back and think, I don’t think I have the right temperament either, because I care too much. Like, when I perform, I get so, like, het up and worried. Like, the perfectionist part of me comes out too much, whereas with poetry, I can just, I know that if I write a bad poem, even if it’s a truly terrible poem, I can just write a better one tomorrow. Or I can scribble the line out, whereas, trumpet playing, for me, it feels like if I play out of tune in the Messiah, everyone will know, and I’ll be known forever as the trumpet player who played out of tune in the Messiah, which is ridiculous. Like, when I say it, it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what I’m telling myself. So for me, poetry was like, oh, it was just such a relief, because I can scribble things out, I can delete them. I can, I can even disown them.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: And you can still be a good poet and write a bad poem, whereas I don’t know if you can do a bad performance and still be a good—I suppose you can, but, I mean, writing this book has been really interesting because it’s been like a form of therapy almost. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just going to ask that, you know, like, I mean, it’s interesting to me because I always thought that perfectionism is a trait that you carry wherever you go, you know, like that it’s not—it doesn’t discriminate between this activity that you take on and this other one. Can you speculate about what, what is the difference, or what does it feel like inside you when you get up to play the trumpet and when you, you know, get down to write a poem. What’s the difference?

Kim Moore: I think with a poem I feel more in control of everything. So I’m in control of what I put out into the world as well. So, when I’m writing, I can put all of those voices, those kind of critical voices aside and just write. And then I get to the editing and I find it actually—I always would normally read a poem out at a reading to try it out before I would publish it anywhere, so I can hear it in the air and I can feel what it feels like in my voice and my body. And if there’s flabby bits, I call them, I can hear the energy in my voice going down and I think, “Well, I’ve got to cut that line.” The steps in poetry as well can often be quite communal. So I can take it—I’m in a group of friends that we share poems once a week, or we try to write a poem each week and get feedback from each other.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: And it’s an equal relationship. You know, we’re will published writers. We’re all, we’re writing different types of poetry, but we can offer feedback on that equal playing field. Whereas, any feedback I ever got on my playing was always from like an expert or a master. You didn’t get feedback from your colleagues because you’re actually competing against them for gigs, right?

Helena de Groot: Oh yeah.

Kim Moore: So you don’t want to be like, showing, you know, letting your weaknesses be seen. So your feedback is always from—and I’m terrible with experts. Like I’m, you know, if someone’s an expert, I just do what they tell me to do. And I don’t think—it stops me thinking, whereas poetry, I have to, I can keep thinking, even while I’m editing and making it better. So, and then I publish it and I’m in control. And, you know, sometimes I might publish a poem in a magazine, but it won’t make it into the book, because I’ve changed my mind about it. And that’s all part of the process of writing. And I don’t feel—obviously, I want the poems to be as good as they can be, and I work hard on them. But it doesn’t get into my heart like trumpet playing does. Even though, you know, I love poetry more, I think, than trumpet playing. I love them in different ways. But trumpet playing feels completely like there’s always some mystery, and I think maybe it’s because the body is so heavily involved and you can never be in complete control of your, of your body.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Kim Moore: Obviously, some musicians, you know, amazing musicians are in control and they can produce those performances time after time. But I’m not, I’m not at that level. I’m like a good amateur or a really bad semiprofessional.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: If I were in practice, so. Yeah, and it’s such a, you know, you’re putting your breath into it, you know, and you can hear, whatever you put in comes out. I think before, as well, so through writing this book, I’ve been practicing again, because I’ve been starting to get invitations to play, so. And writing the book has reminded me how much I love it. And then I’ve started to be a lot more kind of tech—I think when I was practicing before, it was like I was in this mad panic for 15 years of, “I’ve got to get better, I’ve got to get better,” without slowing down and thinking, “Right, well, what actually is happening with my embouchure? What am I doing?” So now, I practice in front of the mirror and I record myself. And I’ve been putting, like, practice videos up on my personal Facebook with mistakes in, to get over this performance anxiety. Because I’m like, well, I’m not professional anymore, so it doesn’t matter if I make mistakes. And then I’ll put another one up doing exactly the same piece in a month so I can hear the difference. So I’m kind of forcing myself to perform mistakes to, so I can tell myself, the world isn’t going to end. Like, you know, people aren’t going to be really disappointed because you’ve, you know, people don’t care, they’ve got their own lives. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Last year, in 2021, Kim Moore published her second poetry collection, titled, All the Men I Never Married. In 48 numbered poems, she investigates her encounters with misogyny: the man sitting opposite her on the train who won’t let her read her book in peace. The leery cab driver. The stalker ex-boyfriend. The violently abusive ex. Which is also why I want to give you a heads up: one of the poems we read and discuss is about a near-sexual assault. It’s not graphic in the body parts kind of sense, but it is—at least I found—upsetting. So please do what’s right for you. Okay, so now here’s the rest of my conversation with Kim Moore.

Helena de Groot: Well, I feel like it’s kind of a perfect segue to go on to your latest collection of poetry called, All the Men I Never Married. And I was just wondering how you got the idea for that book.

Kim Moore: Yeah, it was after I finished my first collection and then I was in this, I always assume everyone else has this, but maybe they don’t. I have, like, a pit of despair that I fall into every time I fin—I say every time, I’ve only, this is book two. So after my first collection, fell into this pit of despair that I’m never going to write another poem again. And then, just for a kind of joke to myself, I thought, I’m going to write a list of all my terrible ex-boyfriends. (LAUGHS) Which became number 1. “All the Men I Never Married, 1.” And then I really enjoyed writing it. And then I thought, oh, I could write a poem for each of them. So it didn’t actually start off as being, I’m going to write about misogyny, but as I started to write those poems, I started to notice that that’s what I was writing about. And then I went to—it was the year Claudia Rankine won the Forward Prize for Citizen. And I went to the reading at the Southbank Center and it just completely blew my mind and changed the way I thought about racism and my kind of complicity in it as a structure. And I thought, wow, poetry can do this, poetry can be transformative, this is amazing. So then I thought, could I do that about sexism? Could I write poems about sexism that could have even a little tiny bit of that effect, which feels like a very grandiose thing to say. But I started to then think, well, okay, let’s look back and think about the things that I’ve experienced. So I started writing them and started to realize that, a lot of the time, I didn’t know why I’d remembered those moments again, and it was writing the poem made me realize why I’d carried that moment for so long.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Have your parents read the book?

Kim Moore: Yeah, yeah. And they come to my readings sometimes as well.

Helena de Groot: What is that like for them to read these poems, these anecdotes?

Kim Moore: Yeah, I think some of them, they were fine about, but there was a few poems in there where they were really upset and they said, “I wish you’d told us at the time.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: The poem about being at a party and nearly being, kind of coming very close to being assaulted, and that one really upset them, because they remembered that incident. They remembered the party, because I came home really, really upset. But they didn’t know exactly what had happened because, you know, I was 17 and you don’t tell your parents that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: So I think that, yeah, there’s some poems in there that really upset them. And yeah, and my dad’s quite old fashioned. And we’ve had great conversations about—or not great, but challenging conversations that I feel like he’s moved his thinking because of reading the poems.

Helena de Groot: What you mean he’s quite old fashioned and he’s moved his thinking?

Kim Moore: Well, you know, he’ll say things like—(LAUGHS) he’ll probably kill me for saying this, but I remember we were coming out of the pub once and someone was walking past in a short skirt and my dad said, “And they wonder why things happen.” And I was like, “Dad, how dare you!?” And I just went off on one and like, shouted at him.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: And then he was, and I was like, “Would you say that if I had gone out in a short skirt? What would you do?” And he was like, “I’d want to kill them —and so, you know, we had a really good conversation about victim blaming then, which I think, for me, that’s the point of the book that it’s not, you can’t just say, “Oh, it’s horrible men that do these things or say these things. It’s men that I love. It’s men that I’m best friends with.” And that’s where the conversations have to start as well. It’s not—I think that’s why sexism or any ism is hard, because we can’t just box people off and say, “Oh, it’s the bad people that do those things.” It’s people that we live with and that is our family and our husbands. And …

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what is so interesting about it is also that, of course, because it’s all so close, this misogyny, this kind of victim blaming, we also internalize it, because that’s how we were raised. And a lot of your book is … yeah, makes that explicit too, you know, the ways in which you shame yourself or you doubt yourself or you think, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have, you know, ‘led him on’,” you know, all this? I was wondering, do you want to read that poem about you being nearly assaulted or is that like just not right for now, or?

Kim Moore: No, I could read it. I never read it at readings, so it would be, yeah. I just avoid it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. But do you feel, because really, there’s no, I don’t want to make you read something where you’re like, leaves a bitter taste in your mouth or, you know.

Kim Moore: No, no, it’s fine and actually, like, that’s the interesting thing about, one of the interesting things for me about writing, like, I remembered that moment, but I didn’t understand why I had remembered it for so long until I wrote it down as a poem. And I was calling that sexism in my mind. And then when I wrote it, I thought, “God, that’s not sexism. That’s, like, sexual assault. That’s really bad. That could have turned.” And it was the poem that made me realize how … how awful it was. And that was something I was carrying around, and I’d just kind of boxed off in my mind. So I think that act of putting the white space of a poem around it, it means you can’t look away, actually. I’ve read a lot of Jonathan Culler when I was doing my PhD, and he talks about the lyric convention of significance. That whatever we put in a poem becomes significant. And, you know, I’ve played around with that throughout the whole book. I can put these little moments in and they become the size that they are, rather than being minimized, which is a coping mechanism. That’s how I’ve … how I’ve coped with it. So, I don’t read that poem out loud, because I don’t want to drop a near assault into a room of people that I then have to sign books for. But it doesn’t, it’s not a painful—the pain is kind of in the poem, and it’s kind of safely locked away.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Well, let’s get to the poem so we can talk about it. Before you read, can you tell me what, because an American audience is going to have questions about this. What is this, you use “Zulu warrior?” What is that about?

Kim Moore: Oh, well, I think it’s a rugby chant that. I mean this—you’ve got to remember this is the ’90s as well. So it’s probably like, I’m guessing it’s really racist, it’s a really racist rugby chant.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that’s why I was like, can we just—

Kim Moore: Yeah. So it’s like a chant that you drink, that you chant while you’re drinking beer like a, you know, like a beer drinking game. No, I did think about it when I put it in, but it was, it’s like the whole atmosphere of a rugby team. So it’s a rugby team party.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Kim Moore:

(READS POEM)

All the Men I Never Married

4.

his dad handing out shots

bright green

liquid sloshing

over the rim

onto my wrist

steam on the kitchen windows

and the living room

full of bodies

sitting in a circle

his mother nowhere

get em down

you Zulu warrior

                        get em down

you Zulu chief chief chief

            follows me

the singing

            the dull thump of a bass

                        the staircase bending

and swaying

            faraway bathroom

                        my hand on the bannister

to keep myself here

            inside my body

                        inside this house

            there’s darkness to my left

there he is                       on a bed

in the dark

                        rolling a joint

                                    hey babe

I liked that word on his lips

            his friend

                        at the open window

                        letting smoke

slip out into the night

                                    it was good

to sit down

first I was there

                        now I’m here

on the bed

            on my back

                        a naked woman

blu-tacked and glossy

stares down from above

then the weight of him

                        on top of me

at first it’s funny

            as I try to get up

his knees                     on my wrists

his hands                     on my shoulders

that panic                    in my belly

I’ll remember it           as long as I live

the friend coming towards me

                        a hand on my breast

the laughing                both of them laughing

my knee          into his groin

he topples sideways

and I’m up and out of the room

and into the night

and the dark asks why

            were you there in the dark

and the wind asks what

            were you doing upstairs

and the moon asks why

            were you wearing that skirt

but my body

            my body asks nothing

just whispers

                        see

I did not let you down I did not

let you down I did not let you down

Helena de Groot: Thank you. That ending is really … powerful. Yeah. I mean, what I thought was so interesting, too, about this poem is, you know, you end with all those questions that … are so, so much a part of our society, so much a part of our own psyche, because we are a part of society that you can almost attribute them to the dark, the wind, the moon, you know, they seem to be almost so eternal, you know, such fixtures of, well, that’s what it is. You know? “the dark asks why / were you there in the dark,” “the wind asks what / were you doing upstairs”, “the moon asks why / were you wearing that skirt.”I love those lines about the body, “my body asks nothing / just whispers / see / I did not let you down.” But the way that it starts is something I want to talk about with you. “his dad handing out shots / bright green / liquid sloshing / over the rim / onto my wrist.” And then a little bit further down, “his mother nowhere.” I’m interested in that. You know, like, this awful thing happens. This boy does something totally, as you say, it’s not just misogyny, it’s sexual assault. Him and a friend. And he does it at home with his dad downstairs, kind of creating the vibe for it, or whatever, you know, mother, nowhere to be seen. How—was that something that you realized at the time, or is that something that came to you, that you saw that, when you sat down to write the poem? When did you see that, oh, the dad actually kind of plays a role here?

Kim Moore: Hmm. I think I noticed when I went, you know, 17, I was 17 years old when I walked in the house and I remember thinking, “God, this is weird because my mom and dad would never be having this drinking in the house and loads of teens.” You know, there was 50, probably, teenagers all getting drunker and drunker. It was just … and I remember thinking, this is, but you know, when you’re 17, you just think, “Wow, this is really cool, I’m getting alcohol.” And so I was already kind of, you know, now, looking back as an adult, I think, “Well, that’s a really bad sign.” So it was writing the poem I remembered, “God, I remember his dad.” You know, it all kind of came back to me through the writing, the writing of the poem. And the questions that you talk about at the end, I’ve put them, the moon and the wind and the dark saying them because it was … I didn’t want to kind of blame my parents for, you know, because I think … I vaguely remember my mom saying, “Well, why did you go upstairs at a party?” when I came home upset.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Kim Moore: And I don’t want the poem to be about me blaming my mom, because actually, that’s, that’s not what the poem is about, either. It is about this being embedded in society, and I was probably saying that to myself way before she said it.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because that is also something that you state explicitly at the beginning of the book. You know, this way in which you decided to see what would happen when you stopped minimizing these kinds of things, you know. And in the minimizing is something that I think all women do just as a matter of … survival mentally. You know, like, you cannot dwell on all of these things, because you’d just go mad. And yeah, you have this epigraph by the feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed: “The past is magnified when it is no longer shrunk. We make things bigger just by refusing to make things smaller.” And I’m wondering what that process has been like. Like, over the course of writing this book … what was it like to no longer shrink all of those instances.

Kim Moore: It felt really freeing and like, I’m not a very rebellious person by nature, I like to do—I find it much easier to do as I’m told a lot of the time. I definitely like to please people. So I like, you know, performing the poems has been a really interesting journey for me because, you know, they’ve been challenging for some, some members of the audience. And they’ve, you know, I get kind of extreme reactions from lots of women coming up to me and saying that they recognize these experiences and they haven’t thought about it that way until now, but I’ve articulated something, and now they’re remembering this or they’re remembering that. Which is, you know, like, really beautiful moments of kind of solidarity and recognition. And then, I also get kind of quite defensive reactions to the poems. And learning to deal with that has been part of the process of writing the book. And I think that’s why it took me kind of six years to publish it, because I kept most of it being written for a couple of years, but I knew I wasn’t ready to. I had to keep practicing, you know, if I’m met with defensiveness, not to then jump to defensiveness as well, because then we’d just end up in a kind of impasse. So, you know, like I had a friend and again, a man who’s a friend and a poet, say to me, after reading that poem that I’ve just, number 4, he said, “Oh, that made me feel guilty for being a man.”

Helena de Groot: Oof. Sorry, yeah.

Kim Moore: And I, I immediately felt, like, really angry. But instead of saying, “That makes me angry,” I just went, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I immediately jumped to apologize and, like, pacify. But I couldn’t work out in the moment why I was cross. And I had to go away and write about it. Not poetry, but just write critically about it and think, right, what does it—you know, I found this great quote by Audre Lorde, which I’m not going to remember, but she’s talking to white feminists at a conference, and she’s saying guilt is not an appropriate reaction to my anger. And basically, you can have it back, sort of thing.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: And I think that man meant well, he was coming from a good-hearted place, I think. But he was giving me his guilt to deal with, and I immediately went, “Oh, okay, I’ll deal with it.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: So it’s trying to work out what is a better reaction. And a friend of mine said, you know, you just, next time, say, “That’s interesting. What are you going to do about it?”

Helena de Groot: Gorgeous.

Kim Moore: And that was just, you know, she’s been a feminist for a long time, but just talking about and having those conversations with women and trying to unpack, “Well, where did my anger come from? And what can I do with that that’s positive rather than just saying, oh pee off and ruining a friendship, which I didn’t, also didn’t want to do. It was, writing the poems was actually very freeing, and I, I kind of enjoyed it, like, thinking back to these little moments and just thinking, “Well, why have I carried that moment with me and what does it mean and what did it teach me at that time that I’ve kind of internalized?” But then performing them was like another kind of learning as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. But that is something that I found so interesting, too, like the ways in which we as a society keep perpetuating … this behavior, this reality that women then have to live in. Women and men do this, you know, perpetuate this. You know, when we raise kids, like, there are quite a lot of mothers and fathers in this collection. For instance, there’s the one poem, like it starts with that little reference to Othello, Desdemona, Iago. And then there’s also that line about the mother. I was wondering if you can read that poem and we can talk about the mother. It’s the poem on page 38. Number 23. Oh, and maybe, for people who don’t have their Shakespeare fresh in mind, can you just give a quick, the quickest summary of—

Kim Moore: Oh, God. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: What is that story? (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: So, I’m going to completely screw this up. Yeah, so Othello and Desdemona are married, and basically, Iago stirs trouble, doesn’t he, between them, and convinces Othello that Desdemona has two-timed him. And then Othello kind of flies into a jealous rage and kills her. And I guess, you know, when I was at school learning about this play, it was all about, you know, you know, Desdemona was an innocent victim and Iago was a terrible stirrer. And it was almost like Othello was driven it, and it wasn’t really his fault, he just lost control.

Helena de Groot: Right. He was driven to jealousy, and of course, we do terrible things when we’re jealous. That’s not our fault. That’s just, yeah.

Kim Moore: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Right. Okay.

Kim Moore: Okay.

(READS POEM)

All the Men I Never Married

23.

It didn’t really help, the story of a Othello and Desdemona

and Iago and poison in the ear and though our teacher

taught us about poor Desdemona, bad Iago, Othello escaped

almost blame free, possessed by jealousy, driven into a state

so when my ex became my stalker all the boys in class ignored me

and every lesson he looked through me until the evenings when he

was drunk and in a nightclub and then he’d ring and start to cry

and try to found find out where I was or where I’d been, asking why

I wouldn’t listen, why I’d stopped picking up the phone.

Sometimes I answered it with silence, imagined him alone

listening to my nothing. That year of A-Levels, I got myself a stalker

and the police said aren’t you flattered? In the station there was laughter

at the forty phone calls every day for weeks. He said I’d agreed to

be with him forever, and then I’d changed my mind, what could he do

but become my stalker and wait till darkness fell and slash my father’s tyres

or call fire engines to my house though there was nothing catching fire.

When my ex became my stalker, he convinced my mum to let him in

then locked himself inside the bathroom. It felt like I’d let him win

even though it finished with him in a police cell because of texts

he’d sent with threats and words like kill and guess what happens next

and so the police kept him overnight to think about his actions

and rang his mother, who had no idea how any of this happened.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, the tone in this poem is so—you’re like a scalpel, you know? Very, very precise and very rational. I thought that about a lot of, I mean, the whole book. The precision of it is really thrilling. The precision about things that we—most of us—never really think about with any kind of rigor, because it just feels like too much trouble and painful and annoying. So it was really thrilling to see that kind of precision about all the parts of it. You know, the parts of uh, “He said I’d agreed to

be with him forever, and then I’d changed my mind, what could he do // but become my stalker.” (LAUGHS) I’m sorry. I’m laughing. This is not funny at all, but, you know, the kind of ironclad logic of it.

Kim Moore: Yeah, I actually wrote this as a joke as well, because this guy, I mean, not all poems have to be true, of course, but this guy, like, sent me a friend request on Facebook and I was like, “Are you actually kidding me?” Like, in the middle of writing this book. And I was like, “Right, you’re going to, you know, get in a poem.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: And of course, you know—what do you call it?—I just ignored the friend request. And it was kind of a joke in my head. I thought, “God,”—I hadn’t thought about him for years, and then he popped up and I thought, “God, that was absolutely mad. Like, what he did.” You know, through the writing of the poem. So I was writing it in that kind of rhyming couplet and that strong rhythm, because it was a joke to me. And then as I started to write it, in fact it was, I performed it at a reading and I thought it was a funny poem. (LAUGHS) And nobody laughed, and I was like, “God, this is really, actually really dark.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: So again, it was the poem, writing the poem made me realize that it was really bad. And, you know, since then, I’m working with a project through university with turning testimony of domestic violence victims into poems.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Kim Moore: And then also the testimony of families of victims who didn’t survive. And the stages that you go through for a domestic homicide, they’re always the same. And that was, that’s like, number two or three. You know, his behavior then was going up the steps and, you know, early intervention is really proven to work, but.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: I don’t know if the Sarah Everard case was—

Helena de Groot: Yeah, a 33-year-old woman last year was stopped by a police officer. And then he basically kidnapped, raped, and murdered her.

Kim Moore: Yeah, I mean, for me, part of the kind of trust in the police was never really there because of the cause of reactions like that. Stalking, I mean, again, this was the ’90s and the police did behave like that. They did say, “Oh, are you not flattered?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Moore: And they did, you know, they did put him in the cell to scare him, but he came from a really nice family, so it was just, that was enough to scare him. But yeah, and the mother I was conflicted about putting in there. I was worried, because I don’t want to blame mothers. In fact, someone challenged me on—when I was writing the book, I wrote, something happened to me on a train with some young lads and I said, you know, I said something really sexist like, “What have their mothers taught them?” And someone rightly challenged me and said, “Well, why is it the mothers and why not the fathers?” And I was like, God, that is such internalized misogyny that I’ve just come out with, even though I’m doing a PhD in sexism. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: But, you know, you have to just take it, don’t you, and learn from it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So why did you decide to leave in this line? You know, the police put him in the cell and “rang his mother, who had no idea how any of this happened.” Why did you decide to keep it in?

Kim Moore: Part of it, because it was true.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: But I think it’s—I don’t know why I kept it. Maybe because I am interested in that dynamic of, you know, there’s often things in the book that teenagers are getting up to that their parents don’t know about. I don’t know, it’s a really good question.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: There’s one last poem that I was wondering if you wanted to read. It’s the one on page 65. It’s number 43, so it’s pretty close to the end.

Kim Moore: Yeah.

(READS POEM)

All the Men I Never Married

43.

When I open my ribs a dragon flies out

and when I open my mouth a sheep trots out

and when I opened my eyes silverfish crawl out

and make for a place that’s not mine.

When I open my fists two skylarks soar out

and when I open my legs a horse gallops out

and when I open my heart a wolf slips out

and watches from beneath the trees.

When I open my arms a hare jumps out

and when I show you my wrists a shadow cries out

and when I fall to my knees

a tiger stalks out and will not answer to me.

Now that the beasts that lived in my chest

have turned tail and fled, now that I’m open

and the sky has come in and left me

with nothing but space, now that I’m ready

to lie like a cross and wait for the ghost

of him to float clear away, will my wild things

come back, will the horse of my legs

and the dragon of my ribs, and the gentle sheep

which lived in my throat and the silverfish

of my eyes and the skylarks of my hands

and the wolf of my heart, will they all come back

and live here again, now that he’s left,

now I’ve said the word whisper it rape,

now I’ve said the word whisper it shame,

will my true ones, my wild, my truth

will my wild come back to me again?

Helena de Groot: Thank you. This poem is so tonally different from all the others, like it has this layer of myth to it. And I love where you took it. Yeah, the way that you put images to this feeling of what happens to us when so much of us has been chased out or shamed or curtailed or told off. And I wonder, in what ways you try and answer your own question? You know, “now I’ve said the word whisper it rape, / now I’ve said the word whisper it shame, / will my true ones, my wild, my truth / will my wild come back to me again?” How do you carry that question into your life? Like, how do you live with that question?

Kim Moore: Yeah, it’s interesting reading the poem, because that’s another one I don’t, I don’t read out after saying, “Oh yeah, you know, it’s all kind of fenced away in the poems and it’s all fine.” There are ones that I avoid.

Helena de Groot: Interesting! Why is this one not one that you read?

Kim Moore: I think because of that ending, because it’s got that word in there, I find so hard to say. And really, this poem it’s a kind of, it’s a bridge between my first collection and this book. So, my first collection has a sequence of poems about domestic violence, and this poem is talking about something that happened in that time of my life, which, yeah, which … so I never kind of link them at readings. And it’s a very—it feels like a very personal poem, even though it’s got a lot of this myth and animal imagery. It’s probably the most true poem in the book, even truer than the ones when I say, “Oh, and this is about this guy that added me on Facebook.” This poem feels more true to me, so, maybe that’s why I don’t read it out. Yeah, but I guess taking that question forward for me, it’s always, I think it’s about speaking out when I’m confronted with those moments of misogyny. Or actually choosing, choosing when to speak out, because you can’t speak out all the time and you can’t resist all the time, because I think you just become exhausted and burnt out. So it’s trusting myself to speak out when I need to, but also recognizing that there are other forms of resistance, which is, you know, I try and write about in the book, like, the body resists. You know, sometimes our body resists when we are not. We are kind of compliantly going along verbally, and our body will kind of, you know, jump out of a taxi before—

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Kim Moore: So there’s this disconnect. Sometimes the body kind of saves you and you don’t know, and sometimes you’re saved with words, with language, because you can kind of answer back. And sometimes silence is the only kind of recourse that you’re left with. So, that is the wild for me, is recognizing those things and also giving myself grace as well. Like, not being, trying not to be hard on myself when I don’t react in the perfect way, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: I think because I’ve got a daughter now, she’s three, you know, she’s a lot younger, but seeing her already starting to negotiate these things. You know, she reminded me of me this morning because she said she didn’t want to wear a skirt, she wanted to wear trousers like the boys. And I had this whole thing when I was younger that I wanted to be a boy, not because I felt like a boy, but because I understood and recognized that the boys got a better deal in life.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: And she just reminded me, she said, “I don’t want to wear a skirt, I want to wear trousers,” like her friend, and then named him. So I just kind of swapped them over. But I think, already those kind of gender, awful binaries are already starting to happen. And, you know, those little comments, like someone said as we were walking past, she was, you know, she picked something and then she changed her mind and this woman went, “That’s what women are like! They just change their minds!”

Helena de Groot: Oof!

Kim Moore: (LAUGHING) I’m like, “Yes, sometimes we do change our minds.”

Kim Moore: It’s like, nonsensical, but also, it’s really powerful messages, isn’t it?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Kim Moore: And then she’s getting those already, and she’s only three. So it kind of breaks my heart, but.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Do you feel like the therapy, as you said, you know, of writing this book has brought you any closer to knowing something you can help her with that you did not know growing up?

Kim Moore: Oh, yeah, definitely. Like, I’ve already started the whole—I mean, there’s a big, I think there’s a massive thing in America as well about, like, you know, this whole thing—and here as well, probably everywhere—of fathers, like, looking after and protecting their daughters’ bodies. Like, you know, this kind of guarding their virginity, which was so, it was massive, like, in my family. But I think the problem of that is, if you are taking care of your daughter’s body, when she goes out to the world on her own, she’s got no one to take care of it, because she hasn’t learned to take care of it herself. And that’s, you know, that’s probably why some of the things happened to me that happened. I’m not blaming my dad, but the idea that someone else will look after your body is a really dangerous one. So I’ve already started this—you know, and she’s already very strong willed. But, you know, the other day, I was saying to her, even about food, I was saying, “You decide what you want to put into your body, because it’s your body and you’re in charge of it.” And you know, then it kind of bites me on the backside the next day, when she won’t eat anything—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Kim Moore: And she’s like, “It’s my body. I choose what I want to eat.” I’m like, “Yeah, I did say that to you. you’re right,” you know. But, you know, I suck it up because I think it’s really important that it is her body, and she protects it and she decides.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Kim Moore is the author of four books: her chapbook (or pamphlet, as the Brits say), If We Could Speak Like Wolves, winner of the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year Award; The Art of Falling, winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; All the Men I Never Married; and her prose debut, What The Trumpet Taught Me, which will come out in May. She has won an Eric Gregory Award, a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, a Northern Promise Award, and residencies with the Ilkley Literature Festival and The Poetry School. She is one of the codirectors of the Kendal Poetry Festival, and lives in Cumbria, England with her husband and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ally.

To find out more, check out her website, kimmoorepoet.co.uk. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.