Disability Arts Online

Colin Hambrook asked Allan Sutherland about the process of creating The Explorer.
The idea for the transcription poems started with my doing an oral history interview with Paddy Masefield. Paddy had been thinking about setting up a disability arts oral history project. Then he learnt that he had six months to live. So, forgetting about funding, I went and stayed with him and we did a life history interview. Shortly after the interview, I read an article in the ‘Oral History Journal’ about how you could use the techniques of poetry, line breaks and stanzas and moving stuff across the page, to get a more accurate record of how somebody had spoken.

So I revisited the interview I’d done with Paddy and tried making poems. It actually worked quite well. When we came to doing the project with Nancy Willis, it was the first time I’d done an interview with the express intention of making poems. So we worked in a quite different way.

Nancy wasn’t happy just sitting down and doing a life history interview. She was comfortable with the idea of talking about her paintings, so we went through a selection one by one. Given that her work is quite personal, it wasn’t far off a life history interview by the time we’d finished. But in a sort of directed way. That was interesting for me. It became a process of negotiation. In many ways, it was all very much an experiment, learning how to do things as we went along.

The other big exploration was in the actual writing of the poems. I’m very used to dealing with text: sub-editing, putting in punctuation and carving out unnecessary stuff to create a good, readable piece of text that flows. I didn’t do that so much with this. I left in a lot of the stuff that you’d cut out if you’re just doing a straight, journalistic edit.

Hence one of your favourite lines – ‘And I, and I, and …’
‘And I, and I, and …’, which I think is an excellent line, yes. So that kind of derails things a little bit. Sometimes, it just adds emphasis by showing when Nancy is feeling hesitant about something, but sometimes it just goes off in another direction. I think it’s quite good to do that. That again is a sort of exploratory thing for me.

Where would you like to go next with the process?
There are various things. I was really pleased that one of the poems that we got out of it this time was a Haiku (Neo natal). I’d be very happy indeed if I could do an oral history interview and produce a sonnet from it but that may be a little unrealistic!