" I think words are wonderful things" - Beatrice Garland Interview by Kaivalya Pullakandam, Wilson's School

Kaivalya: Firstly, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. Your poetry would have made many interested in poetry, but what sparked your interest in it?

Beatrice Garland: Well, I have always been a big reader, since I was a kid. I had read everything I could get my hands on and that was comics, books, newspapers, my parent’s books, books I could find in school, the library, etc. so it was almost like I was greedy for books and I learned from that to love words. I think words are wonderful things - I like their sound, the fact that they convey meaning, and their look of them. At that point, we started to read Shakespeare, which clinched it for me. Poetry, of course, is a heightened use of words - it's not just words like in a newspaper - it's words that are chosen very, very carefully to convey something as intensely and powerfully as they can, so that's why I liked poetry.

Kaivalya: You mentioned Shakespeare, so how would you say he influenced you? How would you say Charles Dickens and other poets and authors have influenced you?

Beatrice Garland: Well, they showed me what you could do with words. I mean nobody is ever going to quite write like Shakespeare because he was a brilliant dramatist and a poet but his skill with words and his love of words is unparalleled.

Kaivalya: What Made you chose poetry over other forms of literature, such as a play or a book or a novel?

Beatrice Garland: Well, the fact is that I have another life - I am a clinical psychologist and I have written a lot in my professional life, under a different name which is Caroline Garland. I have written a lot and have published books under that name, so I wanted to do something quite different because that was technical writing, professional writing describing the work I do, what it is for and who it's with, etc, so I wanted to do something quite different. That's why under my poet's name I write poetry and under my professional name I write books.

Kaivalya: Did you choose to write under two distinct names for any particular reasons?

Beatrice Garland: Yes. There is a very specific reason. As I am a psychologist, I see patients and I wanted to keep my private life, which is poetry, separate from that world. I didn't want patients looking me up on the internet and learning information about my private life.

Kaivalya: Despite working, you still find time to write poetry. What effect\impact does poetry have on your life on a day-to-day basis? 

Beatrice Garland: Well I find, as I go around doing what I am doing, that I am thinking about it and when I am thinking about it I am often putting those thoughts into words. For instance, I live in North-West London and when I go for a walk as I did with my husband on Sunday morning, I look at my environment - the weather was absolutely beautiful and the trees were absolutely beautiful -I find that I am trying to put those thoughts into words. I mean, I don't spend a lot of time doing it, but I like finding a way to describe something that is accurate and that if somebody read it, they would in a way see what I was seeing.

Kaivalya: How long does it take you to write a poem on average? Poetry is playing with words, as my teacher describes it, to craft a poem well, how long does it take you?

Beatrice Garland: Sometimes the first draft comes very quickly. You write it down as you feel. Then you work on it. There is a poem, called Undressing, that I won a national poetry competition with and that took me about 5 years from the time I started to the time I thought okay I am not going to do any more to it. It was because if you overwrite it, you can spoil something and you’ve got to learn when to stop - when to stop fiddling with commas or adjectives. I don't think I have ever written anything quickly - I write something and then I work on it.  A very important thing is that when you have written the first draft, put it away in a drawer or under your bed and do anything with it except go on working on it. Then come back to it later, like a week, a month or a year later. You can then read it as though you were its reader and you can see how and where it can be changed.

Kaivalya: Through Kamikaze, many people have heard of you, but how long did it take you to write Kamikaze?

Beatrice Garland: Well, Kamikaze came about because in the NHS I had a Japanese colleague - a young woman psychiatrist - and she told me about her father to whom this happened. This had stuck with me and sort of haunted me the fact that he turned back and was shunned by society for doing it because the Japanese are quite fierce when it comes to fighting and they aren't kind to those who don’t do what they think is honourable. They didn’t think that returning from a mission the Emperor sent you on wasn’t a good thing. 

This story stayed with me and I think a couple of years later, I wrote it down in a slightly different form. All I can say is that I have edited quite a lot since then and I have taken out bits that I thought didn’t add and added bits that I thought would be useful. I am incredibly pleased that that poem out of my first volume was included in the GCSE syllabus and it's one of the things that made me feel the best I have ever had.

Kaivalya: How did you feel as soon as you heard many students were learning about a poem you wrote?

Beatrice Garland: Well, I felt terrific because it is a poem and if it encourages people like you to read poetry then that makes me very happy. Before I was a psychologist, I was a school teacher and I absolutely loved it when something I read or talked about to the class caught fire with them and they really loved it. So I get hundreds and hundreds of emails from kids who have read the poem and liked it, and who want to ask questions about it. I always answer them.

Kaivalya: What is the effect of using the daughter’s perspective, telling her child, rather than using the Kamikaze pilots?

Beatrice Garland: Well, I think it is because I am capable of imagining what it was like to be the daughter of a man who did something very difficult, which caused him a great deal of anguish. That I can imagine. I cannot imagine writing from the pilot’s point of view. What I did though was make the daughter, in the poem, imagine what her father saw. In a way, I felt that it was the message of the poem that was important. The message is Don’t always do what you are told, don’t automatically do what you are told - think about it. Is it a good thing or not? Is it on the side of life or something much more deadly? In my mind, that is what the pilot thought. He saw this wonderful scene below him and he remembered his own father and brothers and the games they used to play by the seashore - and he thought, that's better, that's more important than flying out to the pacific and bombing and killing hundreds of young men on a ship. Now, he made a very brave decision because in one way he saved his life by turning back but in another way he sacrificed his life by turning back because it is no kind of life to live with no one speaking to you.

Kaivalya: Yes, I think you mentioned this in your last stanza when you wrote,’ And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die.’

Beatrice Garland: Yes that was exactly what I was getting at.  So the poem’s got a moral really which is Don’t automatically do what you are told to do no matter who really. I mean I know parents, like one, expect you to do what they tell you to do straight away but think about it. And if you don’t agree with it, talk about it.

Kaivalya: You yourself have published two volumes but have you ever had a poem declined by a publisher? If so, how did you handle it?

Beatrice Garland: Yes, hundreds. It took me 20 years to get a poem published and 25 years before I had a book published so you get loads of rejections, sometimes it is because it doesn’t suit that specific magazine or journal and sometimes it is because it is not a very good poem. But what you have to do is just carry on. You carry on writing and you carry on sending it out. One thing you can do is enter competitions or send things to journals and don’t ever be afraid to get a rejection slip - it happens all the time, far more with poets than anyone else I think.

Kaivalya: How did you handle being turned down?

Beatrice Garland: You will be disappointed but don't let it stop you from writing. Just go on working at it. In a way that's, the message I really want to get across is that writing well doesn’t mean writing great stuff, but writing well is hard work. You have to work at it and it takes time and it takes a critical ability to be able to criticise yourself. Now I am a member of a group of poets, all of us write and we had to stop during the pandemic and then it went on to zoom. We would read our poems in the group and we would each comment on them and you learn a lot from other poets that way and you just have to keep doing that. If you want to succeed you got to be able to take a few knocks and a lot of disappointments but keep at it. It is important, important for everything in life actually: it is important for relationships and it's the same with publishers.

Kaivalya: What is it like for you to be a poet?

Beatrice Garland: Well a short answer to that is Great. I have written something that I like and I put it out there other people have understood it and responded to it and it's a wonderful feeling. I mean I really like getting emails, like yours and hundreds of others. Well, I don’t walk around thinking to myself that I am a poet but I like writing. I will tell you something else - I like cooking. I like cooking for my family and the grandchildren and so on. And it's the same thought of thing as you put something together that tastes good or that sounds good and then you offer it, whether it is Sunday supper for the family or a poem for the GCSE syllabus. It is making something that you have worked at, you feel that you can do well and you are offering it to others. And if they like it, that is wonderful.

Kaivalya:  Once again, I appreciate you for allowing me to interview you. Who would be your inspiration? Which poet would you describe as your favourite?

Beatrice Garland: I don’t have favourites but I have poets that I really enjoy reading and Seamus Heaney is one of them -  I think he is a genius with the English language. He is Irish but the Irish use English in a very special and heightened way. So Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop and A. E. Stallings. She’s an American and lives in Greece.   She is very intelligent, has good ideas and is a first-class writer who clearly spends a lot of time constructing her poems. I also love W.H. Auden. Younger poets today will regard him as being quite old-fashioned but he is highly intelligent. He writes very thoughtful poems. I also love Don Paterson, who is a modern poet. You can see from what I am saying that what I do is read a great deal. My house is absolutely full of books. I don't have a favourite poet but if I am stuck on writing, the thing to do to unlock it is to read somebody else’s work and it sort of releases something. You can then get going again. I just finished writing a long series of poems about my father, so as you can see I am interested in relationships between daughters and fathers. 

My father was an immigrant who had a very hard time when he went to school in England and he became a scientist. He did some very important work in the field of immunology which led to the fact that we can now transplant some organs from one person to another. I tried to describe this work which he did, which is science, in poetry.

Beatrice Garland also has a poem on The Friday Poem which you can read here. The poem was written around 10 years ago, but it is about an event that happened well over half a century ago. It is about Beatrice Garland’s early days at University.