Villain Elle

by Sophie Hannah

Stories are stories. Real life is real life.
You hint that you might sue for defamation.
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

Fictional bitch gets stabbed with made-up knife
and you perceive your stab-less situation.
Stories are stories. Real life is real life.

Is ‘trouble’ just a few lines down from ‘strife’?
That’s where you’re finding risk to reputation?
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

Traduced ex-friends, from Oswestry to Fife,
privately think she’s an abomination.
Stories still stories. Real life still real life.

Discussion of her awfulness is rife
(yet lawful) at Heathrow, at Cambridge station.
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

I could invent a creature called a Spife
(spindly-wife-esque and prone to pustulation).
Stories remain just stories, life is life.

The law allows me not to like your wife.

 

 

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Interview transcript

Mark: Sophie, where did this poem come from?

Sophie: Well, as clearly alluded to in the poem itself, somebody threatened to sue me for defamation for a hilarious reason. And the whole situation was so comically absurd, I couldn’t resist… It wasn’t even that I couldn’t resist writing a poem about it, it was that the first stanza of the poem appeared in my head almost fully formed as I was thinking about the situation. And that is how a lot of my poems start. So, basically, I write… As well as writing poetry and murder mystery musicals, among other things, the main thing I’ve been writing for the last sort of twenty years is crime fiction, murder mysteries.

And I had recently published a novel called The Couple at the Table, which is a kind of contemporary take on Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which is completely different from Death on the Nile in so many ways. But one thing it has in common is that there is a couple on their honeymoon and the ex-wife of the man is there, too. She is there with her new partner. And on this holiday, the new wife, the second wife, gets murdered, and the husband immediately accuses the ex-wife of having done it. And this is not a spoiler for The Couple at the Table at all, the ex-wife has not done it. She’s not the murderer. And we know this from the start. But she is absolutely outraged to be accused by her ex-husband of murdering his new wife.

And because she’s outraged to be so accused, there is a passage in the novel where she, the main character, reflects upon the ethics of accusation, which was the kind of driving psychological preoccupation of that novel. So, she, having already been ditched by the husband who’s gone off with his new wife, which was kind of bad enough from my main character’s point of view, she’s now being accused by him of killing his wife. And he actually says to her, ‘I know you did it. No one else here has a motive. You have a clear motive because I left you for her. It’s definitely you.’

Now, Lucy, the main character, knows it’s not her, and is absolutely outraged that somebody can make an accusation as if they know it to be a true fact when they don’t know it to be a true fact. So, there’s a passage in the book, it’s maybe two paragraphs, where Lucy lays out her opinions about the ethics of accusation. And her opinion is, basically, if you don’t know for a fact that someone has done something terrible, like murder, then it is absolutely unacceptable to communicate as if you do know that for a fact.

So, I, in my personal life, had had a friend who is now an ex-friend, accuse me as though she knew it to be true of a range of terrible things that she decided I had done. And I had not done any of them. Like, I hadn’t even done them a tiny bit. She had just completely made up in her head the notion that I had done these three terrible things. And she wrote me this vicious vitriolic letter saying, ‘You’ve done these terrible things. You’re a terrible person. I don’t know how you sleep at night.’ Three and a half pages of handwritten vitriol. And I read these accusations and thought, ‘I really haven’t done any of these things even slightly.’ And I immediately contacted her and said that I hadn’t done them. And she sort of said, ‘Oh, sorry, I thought you had, but I’m glad to know that you didn’t.’

And I then entered into a long phase where I just kind of couldn’t believe that somebody who didn’t know I’d done any things, because I hadn’t in fact done any of them, could think it was justified to send a three-page, poison-pen letter, basically, saying that I had done these things. And that got me thinking about the ethics of accusation. And I thought to myself exactly what Lucy thinks in The Couple at the Table.

So, when I was next writing a murder mystery, I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, what if I put in my feelings and thoughts about the ethics of accusation as a really relevant thing in the novel.’

Anyway, a few months after the book comes out, I receive an email from the partner of the poison-pen letter sender. I get an email from him saying, ‘I’ve read your book. I think it’s potentially defamatory,’ or words to that effect, and the woman, the partner is going to be consulting a defamation lawyer. And I just thought this was so hilarious because the book, the characters, the situation bore absolutely no resemblance to the real situation that had led to the… You know, the characters who are in the novel are completely fictional characters. I know this beyond a doubt because I made them up myself, including all their characteristics, where they live, what they do for a living, everything about them.

And so, I had to write back to this chap and explain to him that what he was recognising was my thoughts and feelings, my outrage at having been accused as if it was an established fact of these things that I hadn’t done at all. And I had to write to him and say, ‘Let me explain. I am allowed to put my thoughts and feelings and my anger at being accused of loads of things I haven’t done as if I have done them, I’m allowed to put my thoughts and feelings in a book. And as long as I put them in a book in relation to an entirely fictional situation, that is not libellous.’ So, I tried to explain this to him. But anyway, that bizarre saga was what gave rise to the poem.

Mark: That’s a very interesting story, Sophie. And I mean, the poem itself is about the relationship between truth and fiction. And it’s a question for writers how much of your own life is in a book, and I guess for readers as well. But it’s interesting when you describe it like this; quite often the answer is ‘Quite a lot, but not necessarily in the obvious way’.

Sophie: Absolutely. And there’s lots in this poem that is entirely fictional. So, for example, in verse four, ‘Traduced ex-friends from Oswestry to Fife / privately think she’s an abomination.’ Now, that is entirely made up. The only traduced ex-friend that I’m aware of that this person has is me. And when I wrote the poem, I was neither in Oswestry nor Fife. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in either Oswestry or Fife who was a traduced ex-friend of hers. So, totally made up.

But the point, the sort of true communication in that poem is true. So, for example, lots of people I know who previously knew her and now think poorly of her do think her behaviour is abominable. So, it’s like the sentiment and the message is completely true. But there are no real life ex-friends in either Oswestry or Fife. And I hadn’t gone up and down the country looking for people who dislike her.

And then the next stanza, ‘Discussion of her awfulness is rife, / (yet lawful) at Heathrow, at Cambridge Station.’ I happened to be at Heathrow on one occasion because I do a lot of travelling for book events. And there was one time while this was all was going on, I was at Heathrow, and I was having a conversation with someone who had previously known this person who was telling me all the terrible things she’d done to them and how awful they thought she was.

So, the Heathrow bit was true. I did have a discussion about her awfulness at Heathrow, but I’ve never had a discussion about her awfulness at Cambridge Station. I just put that in because I live in Cambridge and I’m often at Cambridge Station. So, it’s that whole blend of fiction and truth in order to make a point that’s very true. And the point that’s very true is that the law of the land does currently permit me not to like the wife of this guy who threatened me with a legal action.

Mark: And, I mean, I don’t know why Oswestry to Fife is so funny, but it is.

Sophie: I’m so glad you think it is, because I really thought hard about which places to include. And I can even remember having a discussion with my Mum, where my Mum… I often send my poems to my Mum as soon as I’ve written them to see what she thinks. She’s a very lovely supportive Mum so she always thinks the same thing. She always goes, ‘Oh, this is so great. I love it.’ Maybe that’s why I send them to her. But she said, her first comment on reading the poem was, ‘Oswestry is just perfect for that line. Why did you choose Oswestry?’ And I said, I honestly don’t know, but I just felt it was perfect for the line. There was no other place name I could think of that worked as well as Oswestry.

Mark: It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s funny and it scans and it’s unexpected. And ‘traduced’ – that’s an unusual word, isn’t it? Could you gloss that for our listeners who may not be familiar with it?

Sophie: Yes. And again, I mean, one thing about my poetry, and this applies to all my poetry, my poems are generally shortish and they are almost always in some kind of metrical form, and they almost always have a very clear rhyme structure. And I work on every single word and line and punctuation mark. I’m really quite geeky and OCD-ish about the specific words. And I remember when I chose traduced… Again, a lot of it’s instinctive. I thought of traduced and I thought, ‘That is it. That is the word I want. That is the perfect word.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, hang on a minute. Traduced is a word that maybe not everyone would know the meaning of.’ I don’t know whether you’d agree with that, actually. I mean, just to me it’s…

Mark: I only know it through Hamlet, where he says ‘This heavy-headed revel, east and west, / Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.’ Everyone thinks less of the Danish because they drink so much!

Sophie: Yeah, well, what actually happened was I thought of the word, loved it, put it in. When I was editing the poem, I thought, ‘Should I change that? Should I swap it out for a different word? I could say ‘accused’ – ‘accused ex-friends’, or ‘betrayed ex-friends’. And then I thought, ‘No, I really want it to be traduced. It has to be traduced’. But then I thought, ‘I don’t use that word often. I have a vague sense of what I think it means, a sufficiently strong sense, actually, for me to be sure it’s the right word. But I’d better look it up because it’s not so familiar to me that I totally know what it means.’ So, I think I Googled it and it said, ‘To speak maliciously and falsely of someone. To betray, violate, or fail to uphold the principle.’ And that, for me, was just the perfect definition of exactly what I felt this ex-friend had done to me. And I was like, ‘Yes, my instinct was correct. Traduced is the perfect word.’ And I decided, therefore, that I didn’t mind if some people had to look up that word because it just is exactly what I wanted to say in that particular place in the poem.

Mark: And I never mind it if a poet makes me look a word up, if I don’t know and I have to look it up, because I’ve learned something, I’ve expanded my vocabulary. But also here, I mean, I think it’s pretty clear from the context, even if we’d never heard the word before, we didn’t know what it meant. It’s not something good, is it?

Sophie: No, exactly. It’s one of those words that sounds exactly like what it is, what it means.

And it’s interesting that you say it comes from Shakespeare, because what I felt about this particular ex-friend… You know, I’ve been around many, many years. People often behave in a grotty way. We all do, right? People can let each other down, disappoint each other, behave badly to each other. But this particular level of wrongdoing felt Shakespearean in its grandeur. It felt like, okay, you’ve not only suspected me of doing these three things that I would never do, you’ve also accused me of it. You’ve also written a three and a half page handwritten letter of pure viciousness, posted it through my letterbox. You know, it just felt so extreme that, a word of Shakespearean magnitude just felt appropriate for the occasion.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. So, going back to the origins of the poem, it’s really interesting you say that the opening stanza came to you pretty well formed. I mean, this is the Romantic image of poetry, isn’t it? That our effusion appears as if from the Muse or the unconscious or wherever. And did you say that that’s a common experience for you?

Sophie: Absolutely. So, since I’ve been writing primarily crime fiction, and that has effectively sort of become my day job, I only now write poetry when an idea lands in my head as if by magic and demands to be written. And it really does feel like being visited by magic inspiration. And that always takes the form of a line or lines.

And I remember it was during the correspondence with the husband of the awful person. And I was trying to convey to him, okay, I was thinking in my head, I was thinking like, ‘Okay, let me explain. You seem to have some difficulty understanding a very basic concept here. Some things are made up, like characters, stories, all of that. And that’s over here in this compartment. Some things are true, like my thoughts and opinions about the ethics of accusation. And those are in two different buckets.

And the line, ‘Stories are stories, real life is real life’ came into my head. And I immediately thought, ‘Oh, oh, ‘The law allows me not to like your wife’, or ‘It’s not illegal to dislike your wife’. And then as soon as I have those two lines, which literally came to me in a flood of amazingness, I was like, ‘Oh, those would make two excellent villanelle refrain lines. Now then my next thought was ‘Villain Elle,’ in other words, female villain. And since I felt that I was dealing with the biggest female villain I’d ever met in my entire life, I was like, ‘Okay, Villain Elle’. And then obviously I knew I was writing a villanelle with those two lines being the refrain.

Mark: Wow. And that must have been a red letter day as a poet, when all of that comes together.

Sophie: I love this poem so much, and I put it as the first poem in my new collection work experience. And it’s interesting because I have definite thoughts about the form. So, the poetic form… When I say I mainly write poems that are formal and rhyming, very often, there isn’t a sort of set poetic form that has a name. It’s just the stanza shape that I end up with happens to rhyme and scan and you can see the structure. But a villanelle, it’s a preexisting traditional poetic form. And I had before I wrote this one, I had kind of mixed feelings about it.

So, I knew that I had read several villanelles by Wendy Cope, who is one of my favourite poets of all time. And when Wendy Cope writes a villanelle, I always love the results. Some of her best poems are villanelles. So, I was a big fan of villanelles when written by Wendy. But I was also aware of having written a few villanelles myself, which I had never thought were among my best. Because I just sort of thought, ‘Did it need to be a villanelle? Is it as good as Wendy’s villanelles? Possibly not.’ I just wasn’t convinced about the form. And so, I started to think, ‘Well, Wendy does it brilliantly.’ But I think actually it’s probably a difficult form to do well because the refrain lines, as and when they occur, have to feel like necessary and brilliant repetition rather than they’re just sticking those lines in because that’s where they go in the poem.

And with this poem, as soon as I knew it had to be a villanelle, the rest of it, writing all the other stanzas, fitting in the refrain lines so that they were reoccurring but slightly different each time they recurred, it was just effortless and felt perfect. And I ended up loving this poem as much as any of my other poems, as much as any of Wendy’s villanelles. So, then I was like, ‘Ha, ha, I have finally written a perfect villanelle’. And it really did feel as though what I wanted to say was just almost predestined to take the form of a villanelle.

Mark: Yeah. So, I’m really curious about this. Because, quite a lot of listeners may have the impression of formal poetry, meter, iambic pentameter, full rhyme – and the villanelle itself looks like a very constrained form. I mean, you’ve basically got three line stanzas. You’ve got these two refrain lines that repeated all the way through in a set order. And so, it looks from the outside, it’s very constrained, very restrictive. And yet all the language you’re using to describe the process is ‘it just came to me’, ‘it fitted together’, ‘it fitted perfectly’. I mean, how do you… What’s your experience like? Because I think a lot of people tend to think metrical rhyming, formal poetry, you have to work really, really hard and it’s this big slog, but that’s not the description you’ve just given.

Sophie: No, I don’t have that experience at all. What I find is, I mean, it obviously depends on what kind of poet you are. And it’s same with prose. You know, some people like me, when writing fiction, find it easier to write a very intricately plotted crime novel with every part needing to be in the right place. Others would hate to do that, would find it impossible and like to just start and see where the story goes. And I imagine it’s the same with poetry. Some poets would feel that they were having to twist themselves and twist what they wanted to say into all kinds of uncomfortable positions and contrivances in order to fit a villanelle form or any traditional form.

But I have the opposite experience. For me, my strength as a poet is being able to say perfectly exactly what I want to say in a form that looks as though it should be a constraint, but actually ends up being a sort of enabling device. So, I knew that I had to have the refrain lines there and there and there. I knew what the rhyme scheme was, but I was just able, on this occasion, to have the exact words I wanted to, the exact effects I wanted to create were made easier by the form rather than harder.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have to occasionally think, ‘Oh, okay, that won’t fit here, so let me put it over there.’ But I see that as an amazingly fun and rewarding part of the writing process. And crucially, crucially, I go into it knowing I can do it. So, if I write a line and it doesn’t work in a position and I think, ‘Oh, well, that messes up that,’ I never worry that it can’t be fixed. I’m like, ‘Okay, what other word could I use? What other position could I put that line in?’ And I have a strong belief after all the years that I’ve been writing poetry, I can just make it work because I am… As I say, that is my strength as a poet. I have many weaknesses as a poet. My strength as a poet is that I can always be very verbally dexterous within a set form so that I can make it look as though the poem just came out this way effortlessly and happened to fit in with this form rather than that I kind of strained to sort of manoeuvre it in there.

That’s what I do best as a poet, and on this occasion it just worked exceptionally well. So, I ended up reading the villanelle and thinking, ‘That just reads as though it just came to me effortlessly.’ And although, as I say, there were moments where I moved things around, it did, overall, have the experience of coming to me fairly effortlessly. But that’s only because I’ve been practising and thinking this way and writing this way for so many years.

Mark: Thank you, Sophie. You’ve just confirmed a thought that I’ve had. I’ve been wondering about you for years. I’ve been reading your poetry. It’s pretty obvious to listeners from this podcast, I love formal poetry. I love the way your signature style is so skilful and witty and clever and beautifully crafted and put together. And I write formal poetry myself, and I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said about the joy of writing this kind of poetry.

But I also knew that you write murder mysteries, and that has always been a genre that’s a complete mystery to me, if you’ll excuse the pun! I mean, I’m the guy who when I watch a Poirot movie, my daughter’s laughing at me, because even at the end when he explains who did it and why and how, I still don’t understand it. I still find it too complicated. And I find it a bit like chess. I just think it’s like mental torture trying to figure out one of those, let alone write one. So I can relate to your description of writing formal poetry more than the murder mystery side of things. But I did wonder for a long time, is that why she does both genres? Because of that.

Sophie: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: It kind of dovetails so tightly. Otherwise, people will see the join.

Sophie: Yeah, I think there’s a clear link between my obsession with metrical rhyming poetry and my obsession with crime fiction, especially of the sort I write, which is very tightly plotted. And, that clue here is going to come to fruition in that chapter fifty pages later. And the link is an obsession with structure. I have always loved reading and wanted to write the kind of literary works where the structure is just beautifully elegant, perfectly balanced. Everything is in exactly the right place in relation to everything else. And metrical poetry and tightly plotted crime fiction are two genres where that is the most important thing.

Mark: And it’s all in the details, isn’t it?

Sophie: Absolutely.

Mark: The reader has to be alert.

Sophie: Yeah, the individual word choices, the punctuation. I mean, I think in this particular villanelle, the fact that the refrain lines subtly change. And this was something reading Wendy Cope gave me permission to do. In some of her best villanelles, she also uses other forms like rondeau and rondeau redoublé, and triolets as well, she does lots of those. She will always allow herself to vary a refrain line slightly. And I think, I’ve been influenced by her deliberately. I sort of have chosen to do it the Wendy Cope way. And so, I love the fact that in this villanelle, the refrain line for most of the verses is, ‘It’s not illegal to dislike your wife. And then at the very end it’s, ‘The law allows me not to like your wife. And the other refrain line, ‘Stories are stories, real life is real life,’ some way down the poem, it changes to, ‘Stories, still stories, real life, still real life,’ which makes all the difference. It wouldn’t be as good without those little variations.

Mark: That’s right. And then right at the end it’s, ‘Stories remain just stories, life is life.’ And I mean, to me, the variations, the fact that they come later on in the poem, it’s just like, this is the rising exasperation.

Sophie: Yes, exactly.

Mark: How can I spell this out?

Sophie: Exactly. And that was what I was feeling because, my email exchange with this deluded chap went on for some time. And so the changing refrain line, I’m like, ‘Yet this is still the case. Yet this remains the case.’ It reflects the attempts I had to go through to convince him in various different ways that, whatever he was cross about… So, yeah, absolutely, there was that frustration of like, ‘You still don’t get it. You still don’t get it, but this is still the truth. This is still the facts of the case.’

Mark: And another bit that was made up is the ‘creature called a Spife.’ Tell us where this came from or how it appeared.

Sophie: So, one thing I love to do in poetry and fiction actually, is to take it slightly absurd, take something to a slightly absurd level to demonstrate a very non-absurd and kind of prosaic truth. So, what I’m saying there is… And obviously, people who don’t know the background to the poem would never sort of know all of this, but they might be able to imagine or guess at something similar. So, so far until we get to that last verse what I’m saying in the poem is, ‘Listen, mate, there’s a difference between a made up story and putting true life facts into a book.’ Difference between those two things.

But in the last stanza, I’m going to an absurd length, I’m taking it to an absurd level by saying, ‘Listen, if I wanted to, I could invent a kind of totally fictional, almost like monster creature,’ which I never do. I don’t write magic realism or fantasy, so I don’t write about hobbits, elves, goblins, any of that. I write about human beings. But if I wanted to, I could invent a kind of fantasy creature called a Spife. And the name would come from the adjective spindly and the word wife. And the Spife could be all spindly and bony and kind of weak looking, but also, erupt in pustules or, sort of a plague-ridden, spindly, monster creature. I could invent that creature if I wanted to, but it would just be a story.

And just because Spife rhymes with wife would not mean that you would have grounds to sue me if you thought, ‘Well, hang on a minute. I’ve got a wife. She’s very skinny. Spindly wife, is it based on my wife?’ No, it’s a fictional monster called a Spife that is not legally actionable, right? Unless I say in the book, ‘This spindly Spife is based on this guy’s wife,’ then it’s not actionable. So, it was kind of an absurd way of making the same point. And obviously, in a villanelle, you want to kind of work up to an almost like a crescendo-like last verse, I think. You want a big payoff at the end, not just more of the same. And I love my Spife, and I feel she delivers that payoff at the end. And hopefully, people will maybe subconsciously, if not consciously, spend a couple of fractions of a second wondering what a Spife might look like if such a creature were to exist.

Mark: Yeah, I imagine one of those kind of Quentin Blake illustrations to Roald Dahl.

Sophie: Exactly. That was what I had in mind. I actually had in mind something a bit like a flamingo. Very skinny, pink legs, and a big, fluffy bum. I don’t know why I imagined that. But, yeah, totally made up creature called a Spife.

Mark: Wonderful. Sophie, thank you so much for sharing the making of such an entertaining, but also, anger-fuelled poem. I mean, exasperation. Maybe we should have more exasperated, scathing poetry. And in the case of this book, it’s not just scathing poetry, is it?

Sophie: No. So, unusually for me, all my other previous poetry books have just been poetry. This one, the poems come first. There’s all the new poems I’ve written since my last book. But then, also included in the book are two plays that I’ve written. The Mystery of Mr. E and Work Experience, which is the title, Work Experience is the title of the whole book. And they are both murder mystery musicals. So, there’s the entire script of each play, but also included are all the song lyrics because they’re musicals. So, a lot of the plot comes out in the song lyrics as well as in the play, bits of the play.

So, they are included in full for two reasons. One is, the lyrics within those two murder mystery plays are how I am currently using my poetic muscles to a large extent. I still am writing poem poems, but I am writing a lot of song lyrics for these two murder mystery musicals and for other… I’ve kind of gone into song lyric mode, but my song lyrics, when you see them written down on the page, are very similar in type to my poems. And so, it just felt really sensible and organic and sort of like a good idea, basically, to put all of these in the same book.

And, yes, well spotted, there is a strong note of scathing in the plays as well, because the detective hero of these two murder mystery musicals is a schoolboy, a 14-year-old schoolboy called Oscar Landrigan, who is a genius detective who can solve mysteries brilliantly. But he attends a school called Pffisham School, which despite being a private school that’s very expensive to attend, it’s nevertheless the worst school in the world. It is kind of the Fawlty Towers of schools. It’s really, really bad. And so, while Oscar is attempting to solve bafflingly difficult murder mysteries, the school are hampering his efforts by being ridiculously awful on every level. So, the teachers are terrible, the headteacher’s terrible. Everything at school is a complete farce. And while Oscar’s trying to work out who murdered who and why, the teachers are annoying him and underestimating him in every possible way. And I must admit, I did enjoy writing scathingly about a terrible school.

Mark: And as you say that, it reminds me villanelle, villanella in Italian, originally meant a country song.

Sophie: Oh, really?

Mark: And all lyric poetry is ultimately… Originally, it was song lyrics. That’s why it’s the same word. And there’s a strong vein of music in all of your… I mean, a lot of your poems could be set to music.

Sophie: They could. And I mean, I have had poetry set to music before. But I mean, another thing that the song lyrics from the musical plays have in common with the poems in this book is that that element we’ve discussed of taking it towards the absurd is present in the poetry and the song lyrics. So, just as in villanelle, there’s a creature called a Spife. I mean, one of the song lyrics is a detective character, a policeman who thinks he’s cleverer than Oscar Landrigan. But Oscar’s going to show him who’s really the best detective. But this police inspector is explaining how, in the denouement of any crime story, the killer has to be present. There’s never a denouement without the killer there because the detective has to be able to say, ‘And it was you!’.

And so, the chorus, the chorus of that song, I, for purely sort of obviously rhyming reasons, I took it to the absurd level. So, the chorus goes… And this is the detective talking. He’s like boasting about his detective prowess, and he says… I won’t sing it. I will not inflict that on you, but I’ll just say it. He says:

I arrive at each denouement,
And I walk into the room-ont
And immediately know who-mont
Is the one that did the deed.
While he yells ‘To hell with you-mont!’
I explain what’s false and true-mont
From my expert point of view-mont
And success is guaranteed,
Yes, success is guaranteed.

So, all that sort of ‘clue-mont’, ‘room-ont’, ‘who-mont’, it’s obviously totally absurd. But when it’s being sung to a rousing tune with a chorus of people dressed up as police officers dancing around the stage, it really works incredibly well.

Mark: And it’s absolutely in keeping with the bang, bang, bang of the gotcha moment where the detective says, ‘And it was you!’ You know, they line up all the evidence and the rhythm picks up.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Wonderful.

Sophie: So, I think that is something that’s really noticeable both in the lyrics and in the poetry, that I will sometimes take it to the level of absurdity deliberately in a way that I don’t think I would have done in previous poetry collections. You know, I think in previous poetry collections, I might not have had a Spife.

And there are other poems in the collection where… So, for example, there’s one poem where, in order to rhyme with Magaluf, which ends ‘-uf’, I’ve got, the rhyming words to rhyme with Magaluf are effectively ‘truth’ and ‘youth’, but I spell it ‘truf’ and ‘youf’. Deliberately wrong, right? But I don’t think I would have dared to do that in my first or second poetry collection. But in this one, I’m kind of saying, ‘Yes, I am a rhyming, humorous poet. Yes, I don’t take this too seriously. I want this to be as fun and rewarding as possible. And I am going to change language if I want to, to create comically absurd effects.’ And I’ve just given myself permission to do that where I want to.

Mark: Wonderful. Well, it’s been huge fun reading the poem and listening to you talking about it, Sophie. So, thanks so much for sharing all of that. And let’s have a listen once again to ‘Villain Elle’ and enjoy the music of exasperation.

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Villain Elle

by Sophie Hannah

Stories are stories. Real life is real life.
You hint that you might sue for defamation.
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

Fictional bitch gets stabbed with made-up knife
and you perceive your stab-less situation.
Stories are stories. Real life is real life.

Is ‘trouble’ just a few lines down from ‘strife’?
That’s where you’re finding risk to reputation?
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

Traduced ex-friends, from Oswestry to Fife,
privately think she’s an abomination.
Stories still stories. Real life still real life.

Discussion of her awfulness is rife
(yet lawful) at Heathrow, at Cambridge station.
It’s not illegal to dislike your wife.

I could invent a creature called a Spife
(spindly-wife-esque and prone to pustulation).
Stories remain just stories, life is life.

The law allows me not to like your wife.

 

 

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Under the Blue

‘Villain Elle’ by Sophie Hannah is from Work Experience: New Poems and Two Plays published by Carcanet.

Available from:

Work Experience is available from:

The publisher: Carcanet

Amazon: UK | US

Bookshop.org: UK

 

Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of crime fiction, poetry and musicals. She’s the founder and coach at Dream Author Coaching and an honorary fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007.

SophieHannah.com

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.