By Morgan Stewart, Sumayyah Mussa and Megan Hall

As part of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival at Manchester Met, poet and activist Clare Shaw shares their thoughts on the power of poetry to inspire connection, healing and change.

Tell us about your work and your motivations for being involved with the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival?

I am predominantly a poet, and I write about the things that are important to me – the things that touch me or motivate me. I write a lot about ecology and landscape, but I also focus on social issues. I see poetry as having a real-world function, in the sense that it can make the world better. I felt that very strongly in my own life – poetry has served a very real function in helping me to live with and overcome some of the impacts of surviving violence. As well as being a poet, I work with various organisations. Until fairly recently, I was a mental health trainer, so I often worked directly with some of the impacts and legacies of violence and trauma. The work that I’ve done around mental health – or still do around homelessness and supporting people who are seeking refuge or asylum – it feels like there’s a big area of overlap. Poetry is beautiful in its own right, but it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for helping us to connect with each other, connect with the world and either endure or overcome some of the things that we struggle with.

How do you see your role as a poet contributing to the aims of the campaign?

I think that poetry is an incredibly strong tool for connection, and that’s connection with the world and all of its realities. I think that when we read or write poetry there’s an incredibly strong invitation to observe and notice and experience in an intense way. I think what poetry can invite us to do, whether it’s through words or through form or through performance, is to connect with and to feel the realities of violence, the legacies of violence, but also to feel the realities of our own agency and power. It’s about asking people to connect with violence, and this is a difficult ask, but it’s also about connecting with hope and connecting with the drive or recovery, or connecting with resilience or connecting with the power that we find alongside each other.

How can events like this generate  meaningful conversations and actions around gender-based violence?

I think we have to hold the reality that these are really difficult conversations and they’re one of a number of really difficult conversations. We need to have conversations about Palestine, for example, and people are struggling to have those conversations. But when we avoid them, that is even more terrible than having the conversation.

I think as a survivor of sexual abuse and a survivor of gendered violence – to not be able to talk about your own life fully, openly, without shame or fear is a really huge burden. I have really mixed opinions about things like trigger warnings. I think that we need to look after each other, so we need to recognise that conversations are difficult and we need to have those conversations with care and compassion, and to hold them carefully and supportively with each other. But also I’m quite resistant to the idea of giving trigger warnings about my life, because I think that if I had to give a history of my life, it would have to come with a trigger warning. I can find trigger warnings very othering in that sense. For me, for example, hearing somebody talk about their lovely relationship with their mum or dad or or to talk about the lovely Christmas that they’ve had, that can trigger distress and loneliness and loss and memories of some of the difficult things that I’ve been through. So there’s something othering about trigger warnings, but that’s not to say that I think that we should have difficult conversations without a careful and supportive framework. 

I think one of the best models that I’ve seen of this in practice is the poet Alice Hiller, who wrote Bird of Winter. It is a very difficult book because it deals in a really head on way with her sexual abuse at hands of her mother. It’s very confronting and quite distressing, but that’s Alice’s life and that’s Alice’s work. When Alice talks, which she does really beautifully, or when she gets a reading, which she does very powerfully, she uses lots of erasures and often uses visual elements. She doesn’t say ‘trigger warning’ – she lets the audience know in advance what she’s going to talk about, and then she reassures the audience that she won’t abandon them in a really difficult place, and that by the end of the reading, she’ll have taken them into another place.

I’ve heard Kim Moore talking about doing this too – she’s very careful not to leave an audience in the middle of some of her incredibly painful and confronting poems about gender violence. It is really important that we do that with care and compassion, and that has to be for ourselves as well. When talking about gender violence, particularly if you’ve survived it, it’s really important to recognise that, you might feel like it’s not impacting you, but it probably is and you need to be super gentle with yourself. If we can be gentle with ourselves, it makes it easier to be gentle with each other. I think gentleness has got as much a part to play in fighting gendered violence as much as rage and fury, which also has his part to play. And sometimes we move away from conversations and we have to shout and make demands.

Are there any events in particular you’re looking forward to attending during the festival?

I’m a really big fan of having poetry events available either in a hybrid form or online so that people can join from all over and so that geography, disability, economics, caring responsibilities and mental health difficulties, and all of those issues aren’t preventing people from taking part. I’m a big fan of Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, but also Naomi Morris and Char Heather. I’m a big fan of their work and I’m particularly happy that it’s addressing stuff around medicine and medicalised spaces and language, because that’s been my kind of area of concern for a very long time, having gone through mental health systems and having been subjected to various unhelpful diagnoses.

I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which is a very stigmatised psychiatric diagnosis, which is overwhelmingly given to women and overwhelmingly given to women who’ve survived violence. I think it is much more helpfully described as complex post traumatic stress disorder. That fight for paying attention to the language that is used in medical spaces has been a driving force in my writing, in my mental health work and in my activism for a couple of decades.

You’re hosting an event with Dr Malika Booker, how did that collaboration come about and what does it mean to you to share the stage with her?

Malika [Booker] is someone I’ve performed with, read with, and hung out with at festivals – and she gets on really well with my teen. We belong to a community defined by friendship, mutual respect, shared goals, shared aspirations, and by a shared passion for language and social justice. But also a shared appreciation of having a laugh as well and enjoying each other’s company.

I think the biggest piece of work I’ve done with Malika was last year when we judged the Manchester Poetry Prize together. When I hear Malika talk about poetry, I’m always taken aback that she is not only just incredibly creative and dynamic, but she also has such a depth of knowledge and insight. To share a stage with her is brilliant. I absolutely love performance, although I do write for the page, I’ve always really enjoyed performance, so I’m really looking forward to this shared energy. I imagine that me and Malika will kind of send each other into new heights of performance energy when we get together and read.

How does the act of performing poetry live add another layer to their exploration of trauma and resistance?

It’s a funny old mix. I think the more that I’ve done it, the more I’ve become aware. I think I’ve been aware from the outset that there’s a tremendous power in it and I’ve hugely enjoyed the sense that these are my words and this is my stage. I really enjoy the music and texture and rhythm and the dance and sculpture – the kind of visceral nature of poetry and something about performing that, sharing that with other people makes that particularly true for me. There’s joy in it, and there’s power in it. But I am also aware that there’s a price and if you’re performing material particularly that that that is drawn from, or that uses your own experiences as material as a resource.

Also, I’m aware that something about the incredibly crafted and stylised nature of poetry, whatever kind of poetry it is, then invites you to take a step away from your experiences that makes them ‘handleable’. It means that you can deliver them to an audience. It means that you know they can become universal. They’re not just about you doing your trauma – you’ve made something else of them, but it also builds in an element of separation. If you’re performing that work a lot, you become a little separated from your own life and your own narrative, and I think it’s taken me a few years to recognise that. It’s one of the reasons I think that my 5th book I’ve written uses a lot more prose. It’s partly to sort of disrupt that and to go, ‘I want something that feels like it approaches these realities in a much less stylised way’. I don’t want to make a song of them, I don’t want to make a rhythm or a dance. I just want to speak it in this much calmer, flatter voice.

Your poetry follows a range of personal themes, from understanding love to navigating childhood and relationships. What is it like to share your personal life and feelings through books and live events?

It’s great. I really like it! I sometimes forget, though, that that’s what I’m doing, because I’m just making art, you know? That’s the driver, whether I’m writing about moths or writing about a particular experience with my mother when I was nine, I’m just making art and it’s just that I’m using different different resources in making it. There are different drives and different outcomes, but it is just the act of making art. Sometimes it’s weird because I meet someone and then I’m chatting with them and they know stuff about me and a bit of me is kind of confused about how they know it, and then I remember that I’ve just performed to them or they’ve read it in the books that I’ve written about it. 

I guess I’m reflecting on that separation element in a way that I think you need to keep track of. I’m just watching that carefully. But on the whole, I’m just somebody who has really big feelings and sometimes that’s really difficult and sometimes it’s really great. And whether it’s really great or really difficult, I want to write about the things that give me the big feelings, and they’re always going to come in and often, whether I’m writing about the moss or my mother, I’m just writing about the things that excite me and that I feel deeper.

What advice would you give to other poets and writers who want to tackle issues such as gendered violence in their work?

Write about what matters to you. Inform yourself about what matters to you, and let that be the good stuff as well as the painful stuff. If you’re going to write about gendered violence, it’s great to give yourself an intellectual framework, as well as an emotional framework, for writing about it, because the last thing we want to do is want to do as artists is replicate the same tired old narratives around gendered violence. But it’s also really important that you’re open to and that you’re aware that poetry is a really live and deep way of connecting with the world, and that you let it make you as open to what’s beautiful about the world as the things that are painful, and that you take care of yourself within those conversations. 

It’s really important that people know you don’t have to suffer. The notion of the suffering artist is just a bit silly really. We don’t have to suffer if we’re engaging with the world fully; whether we’re mothers, friends, lovers – whatever we are, we’re going to suffer sometimes anyway. Just just engage with the world as it is in all of its pain and beauty and look after yourself and recognise that if you want to draw on your own experiences, for example, of trauma, that there are ways of doing that that are much more gentle than just diving in head first. Metaphor is one of poetry’s greatest gifts. Or experimenting with points of view. Writing about yourself in the third person, or even the second person. Writing about yourself as you know, an object on the mantelpiece or experimenting with form as ways of holding difficult experiences.

I think erecting boundaries of care around your practice is really what I’m talking about, and erecting boundaries of care. Whether that’s time limits, whether that’s boundaries around form, whether that’s recognising that if you’ve spent 20 minutes or two hours writing about gendered violence, it’s hard going. You need some care. Go and get yourself a cake. Go and speak to a friend. Remember that the world is a beautiful place as well as a painful place. Take care. That would be my advice.

I think that people have unrealistic expectations of catharsis and that they think that catharsis in itself is really valuable. Catharsis isn’t necessarily, it can be really painful, and it can take people into dangerous places. It’s about having those boundaries of care, knowing what you’re doing, knowing where you’re heading with it, and that the point of poetry isn’t just to write trauma onto a page or speak trauma onto a stage. That it is to create something else with it and in that creating something else with it, that’s often where the beauty and the hope and the agency can lie, in that magical act of alchemy that that poetry can enact.

Join poets Dr Malika Booker and Clare Shaw on Tuesday 26th November at 2pm. Book your tickets here.

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival runs from 25th November to 10th December, 2024. For more information and tickets, visit mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events.