Queer @ King’s with Sophie Mayer
Queer@King’s, the research group devoted to research and teaching in gender and sexuality studies, recently hosted another of its events in the opulent Council Room at King’s College.
Poet John McCullough joined our very own Sophie Mayer (who you may remember was featured on the Lit at Ladyfest Ten programme last November) for readings from their respective new collections, The Frost Fairs and The Private Parts of Girls.
In a packed room to an audience fortified by a single glass of wine, Mayer treated us to a set list comprising four poems from the new collection, as well as an homage to the glorious Julie Christie from her previous publication, Her Various Scalpels, and Neptune, from a new chapbook which will be available at poetry events.
The four poems from The Private Parts of Girls started the event. First up was On Being Dismissed as “Plathlike”, Mayer’s pithy and moving retort to lazy reviewers who liken every angry or gender-conscious female poet to the goddess of depression and misplaced hope.
Alive with vibrant imagery, the poem cuts into its subject with Mayer’s signature interest in cultural tropes:
‘It leads us false, a marshlight/wisp of a will not he own rewriting/her flight into myth. Like/the many she stands for, one more blonde/American. Stepford wifelike,/you domesticated her, canonised/and tamed so we cry for her strife like/she was directed by Sirk.’
Sappho’s Cookbook is built from words taken from an existing poem and then constructed into a poem itself, demonstrating Mayer’s fascination with ‘found’ language, just as avant garde filmmakers have used found footage to compose new works.
Trial Proof for the Blue Feet, with its soaring opening line (‘Lysa has stars tattooed on her feet’) is ostensibly about a dancer friend, but in its description of the bloody labour of practice and rehearsal, functions simultaneously as another work that evokes the intensity and obsession often associated with women:
‘Of course it hurt, and what hurts more: wearing ink/away beneath taps shoes and cowboy boots,/fading in sunlight from midnight to twilit/blue. Her feet ache with the dawn, she says:/dew cold under her skin. Old bones turn out/fossils of past leaps, seamed with bright situations./En point, arabesque. These carbonised remains/ of what once took to the sky, one part/rock to one of fire, and feel to earth, blue into blue.’
In this though, the intensity and obsession is rendered in both earthy and ethereal tones, capturing the dichotomies at the heart of much of Mayer’s work.
Mayer discussed her love of writing that is inspired by the sea, which she described as ‘an invigorating principle to work with in love poetry, because the sea is full of strange creatures’.
To this end, Bathysphere, the last of the poems read from the new collection, uses the language of opposites, the hard rock and the fleshy softness found in the ocean, to convey its sense of longing:
‘Come, love, I am your diving bell: the strange/glass fall of me, my ribs a shark cage…blood bubbles like roe, rich and slow enough to pearl…’
Rich and evocative, beautiful and intense – perhaps like the private parts of girls. Intrigued? The Private Part of Girls is published in July by Salt. You can buy it in hardback for £6.99.
Jackie Downs
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