Tessa Berring’s latest poetry collection, Burnt Snow, was published by Blue Diode in February 2026. Towards the end of April, we met up in a coffee shop in Edinburgh to talk about her work, her influences, and her interests as a writer. What follows is an edited transcript of a wide-ranging conversation that touched on defamiliarization, mundanity, writer’s block, lyric, materiality, the present tense, metaphor and its refusal, language as spillage, the importance of surprise, and so much more. Above all, our conversation shows Tessa to be a deeply compelling and incisive thinker about poetry and about language as its medium. I hope you enjoy it.
TOM:
So many of the poems in your latest book feel to me like they’re interested in texture and materiality, but then at the same time, they’re also interested in isolating words, not as references to real things, but as words in and of themselves, as just pure language. And it feels like a tension that your poems are sort of wrestling with, the way that words reference the real world, but also words as, you know, words.
TESSA:
Yes, I do like to think about language as this kind of material, like putty. Roland Barthes talks about the muck of language.
TOM:
That’s nice.
TESSA:
It always was love of words that got me into poetry. And to be involved in the act of writing a poem is to be arranging words on the page in such a way that they ‘say’ something. But I always like to hold that ‘saying’ back a bit, and just wonder for a bit at the ‘pure word’, like ‘anthill’, or like ‘beef tomatoes’.
I think it’s from Elaine Equi that I got the idea of a poem which includes a list of objects. She has a poem in Friendship with Things called ‘Carol Feared Her Narcissism’ which has a nice list. I think it’s just that thing of giving a word it’s due, taking it out of the noise, saying look at this, this word: jawbone, or stagger. The word, away from context and meaning, there by itself, quivering.
TOM:
I can’t remember where it is in this book, but there’s a poem that says: ‘Of course, I’m hungry, / language isn’t oranges.’ I love that line, language isn’t oranges, because it feels like it expresses some sort of – maybe not ‘dissatisfaction’ with language, per se, but a sense that the linguistic playfulness isn’t always entirely fulfilling?
TESSA:
I do get so much from poetry. It really does sustain me in so many ways. And then other times, I want more, I want there to be something physical. I want to drink, I want to taste, and yeah, it’s true: language isn’t oranges. But I also think sometimes I do just like to say things like, Language isn’t oranges, just because you can. You can say anything. That’s the joy of poetry, that I’m not necessarily telling you a story, I’m just putting words together and articulating an image, or articulating a feeling, like, what does it feel like if language isn’t oranges? It’s just seeing what happens when you say something. I’ve got an unpublished poem that includes the line ‘invisible as horses’. Horses aren’t invisible, but in this poem, I wanted to say that they were, just because…
TOM:
Yeah. I like that idea of the freedom that language allows you to sort of create or curate a world out of words. Some of your poems feel like they’re constantly adding new objects into the poem, objects that come out of nowhere often. There’s one poem that ends unexpectedly with a ‘pile // of damp and lobster / coloured blankets’. It feels like you enjoyed putting those blankets there as a surprise for us in the poem.
TESSA:
Yeah, that’s the poem that’s in three parts, and that whole poem felt like a funny little dance. Because first there’s the donkey poem, and then I thought, oh, what do I do with that? So it’s just kind of letting myself be triggered into kind of what the next thing was going to be, quite by accident. And yeah, flinging in the blanket at the end, I think quite often I worry that my poems are too up in the air and kind of floating around, so I think, actually, you know, this one needs an orange, this one needs a blanket, this one – what could I put in this one? – a pair of shoes, whatever it is, something to make them land.
TOM:
Or to anchor the poem in some sort of physicality?
TESSA:
Yes, to give it some physicality, I think so you can actually see it. I like people to be able to see the poem. Maybe a bit like an abstract painting or something. So even though poems aren’t oranges, you can at least put an orange in the poem, to make it visible and tangible.
TOM:
The one poet that I kept thinking of as an influence for you was William Carlos Williams. Partly because of the way that his poems, especially his short imagistic poems, seem to pluck objects out of nothingness, making objects appear just by speaking them. Do you think of him as an influence?
TESSA:
Not until you mentioned him in your email. And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, interesting.’ He’s definitely around. Like ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, and ‘A Sort of a Song’, with the final line about the saxifrage: ‘Saxifrage is my flower that splits / the rocks.’ I always have trouble with that particular metaphor of flowers coming up through the concrete. I think, Ah, leave that metaphor alone. And I think his poem does that: it just lets the saxifrage split the concrete, and you’re there with the concrete and the saxifrage, you’re not elsewhere. He’s not using it as a gloss for the struggle to live or whatever it might be. There’s a Ben Okri quote I like: ‘Things are what they are, that is their power… if they meant something, they would be less.’
TOM:
Yes, I love that Williams ending. The surprise of the saxifrage. I’ve been thinking a lot about the compositional process behind your poems, maybe because they do often take the reader by surprise: it’s always hard to predict which way a Tessa Berring poem is going. Is that something you consciously do in your writing? Are you aiming to surprise yourself?
TESSA:
Often it happens because I don’t know where I’m going with the writing myself. I’ll quite often start a poem and then think, Ooh… And then the poem happens. And I think in many ways, especially with Burnt Snow, poems are just a way of writing down living. And I think the last few years of my own life have been quite unpredictable, or interrupted by things happening, or things I expected to happen not happening. So I find that my poems do that too, almost half-consciously. They’ve become like mirrors, broken mirrors. But also records of the process itself. Louise Nevelson describes her artworks as ‘survivors’ – the art is what remains after the process of composition, of arranging, of cutting, of hammering, of sticking and unsticking.
There’s some brilliant chapters in the Oxford Book on Music and Disability Studies about queering or ‘cripping’ music, music that includes notes or sequences that are at odds with traditional tones and chords and scales, and because of that you have to pay attention, you have to listen, you’re actually using your ears rather than any preconceived idea of where the music’s going to go. So you wouldn’t have it on in the background. The unfamiliar becomes less a strangeness and more a new way of being alert, a way of bringing listening into the present tense. And so maybe when I’m writing poetry, I try not to have any preconceived ideas. I want it to be kind of like a poetry of the present tense: oh, this is happening, oh, I’m feeling this now. I like the idea of poetry as the present tense of language.
TOM:
I wanted to pick up on what you were saying about feeling unmoored in the acknowledgments of your book.
TESSA:
I didn’t think anyone read the acknowledgements…
TOM:
And one poem asks Where has poetry gone? which I found incredibly moving, and I think every poet will have experienced this at some point. I love the idea of poetry being a visitor who has disappeared for a time.
TESSA:
Yes, like, Where have you gone? You were here yesterday.
TOM:
Could you talk a little bit about that – I guess – ‘writer’s block’?
TESSA:
I think writing Burnt Snow, I knew I wanted to do a third book to sit next to Bitten Hair and Folded Purse, but then that thing that made me able to write the poems in Bitten Hair and Folded Purse wasn’t there, or at least it was out of reach, out of earshot. So I was sort of making the poems up as I went along, or I’d get to the end of a poem and think, what can I do? I don’t know what to do with this. So I thought, oh, I know, I’ll put this here. I can stick God there. Take out the fist. Add dirt. Swap the title. Call it a prayer. So it felt slightly – ‘desperate’ sounds too urgent and sad – but it felt much more makeshift and piecemeal, and I was having to grapple with the poems and stay unsatisfied. I had a fear that the poems would be found ‘wanting’ in some way or another. But then I thought: it’s poetry, Tessa, stop worrying, go with it, enjoy the relentless veering and vanishing, enjoy the sometimes stubbornness of it all…. Play, look sideways, see what happens, allow the brittleness, the creases, the rips in the seams. I tried to trust the process. No one is looking anyway! And I also thought, well, if poetry’s gone, then at least I can write down its absence, and then maybe it’s not quite so absent.
It can feel uneasy though. My inner editor saying: Shape this better, let it set, be patient, smooth off the angles, find an anchor, start again, stop shouting. But the other inner editor saying: Allow it, let it be, leave the stain, say it again, frame the fragment, ‘unanswer’ the riddle, allow the contradiction, the brokenness, the blunt exclamation…. So the poems might be thought of as conversations as it were between these two editors!
TOM:
I think what I like about the poems is that they feel spontaneous and piecemeal and off the cuff, almost…
TESSA:
They do often start with an emotion or an ache or a panic. Or they start because I found a phrase that I really like and want to take and put in a poem. Like the Lyn Hejinian description of a rainbow as ‘mere scratches’. Or when I was writing Bitten Hair, there was this phrase, ‘Buy your eels alive’.
TOM:
‘Buy your eels alive’?
TESSA:
Yes. It was in an eel stew recipe in European Peasant Cookery: ‘Buy your eel alive and have your fishmonger kill it’. So yes, the poems often start from something that I find that then leads into the poem. But I don’t have an overarching project, like loss or childhood or landscape. It’s just whatever’s happening in and around my head.
TOM:
They definitely don’t feel premeditated, and I mean that in a good way. There’s that saying, you know: no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. I mean, I don’t know if that’s necessarily always true, but I definitely think that surprise for the writer is likely to lead to surprise for the reader.
TESSA:
Yes, you’d hope so, yes. I do feel surprise is important, and I do surprise myself. And I do bore myself too. Sometimes it’s like, Tessa, you have used this word so much. Let’s get some new vocabulary in here… And I think I was finding that with Burnt Snow. A lot of poems were coming out the same, and so I had to kind of chop them up and I had to swap titles.
TOM:
To shake things up a bit.
TESSA:
Yes. Alice Notley has this idea of a poetics of disobedience. And J.H. Prynne died yesterday. He talked about the need to escape one’s poetic habits: ‘To hear poems that must have been written by a poet is to find them trapped in the poetic habits from which they originate.’ I quite like that idea, that we don’t want to read poems that have been written by poets.
TOM:
Oh, I didn’t know that J.H. Prynne had died.
TESSA:
Yes, just yesterday. Aged 86.
TOM:
Maybe we can talk about that idea of escaping one’s habits of writing or thinking, and of a poetics of disobedience. Because often your poems will include lines that feel like they are being maybe slightly disobedient towards syntax or grammar. There’s that couplet from Bitten Hair, ‘it’s good having jeans / all over my legs’. It’s not that what you’re saying is ungrammatical, but something feels weird about it. And also, ‘language isn’t oranges’ has something slightly uncanny about it. And I just wonder if often the effect you’re trying to achieve is a sort of defamiliarization of language itself.
TESSA:
I do enjoy that, because again it does bring you into the present tense, and you enjoy the words for what they are rather than for what they mean. But I really love very literal language as well: it’s good having jeans / all over my legs is quite literal, because that’s where jeans are. And language isn’t oranges, so I’m not actually saying anything that outlandish.
I do find people will tell me, oh, your work is very surreal, but more often I feel it’s not, actually. My mood is often quite matter of fact: this is how things are. There isn’t much in my poems that hasn’t happened, that can’t be called real. So maybe it’s not that the poems are uncanny but that the way they use language is uncanny. Because yes, we don’t talk like that. I love what W.S. Graham says about wanting to ‘disturb the language’. That’s what I want poems to do. Maybe not always in terms of sentence structure, but in another way.
TOM:
Yeah, I guess the whole thing about defamiliarization is that you’re actually just trying to make people see the world as it actually is, aside from their preconceived notions of things. Art should make the stone stony, that’s what Victor Shklovsky says.
TESSA:
Oh, that’s nice.
TOM:
It’s a lovely idea, I think. But yeah, I do find the literalism of your poems endlessly exciting. There’s that line about how, ‘If clouds were made of putty…’
TESSA:
‘Then it would never rain.’
TOM:
‘Then it would never rain’, exactly. Which is, as you say, one hundred percent true. It’s almost an inane thing to say, but I feel like your poems enjoy saying things that are just facts.
TESSA:
I do like the mundane and the matter of fact. Maybe it’s an attempt to make the mundane wonderful, but that sounds like a bit of a cliché.
TOM:
I did want to ask about lyric. Do you identify as a ‘lyric’ poet?
TESSA:
Yes, I think so. Definitely in terms of exploring emotion and the first person. And I like the word ‘lyric’, it’s a bit like the word ‘spirit’. It’s very breathy, very ephemeral. And I like my poems best when they feel a little lifted up, or just light, caught on the wing like that word ‘lyric’. I don’t like writing when the process starts to feel too heavy, too laboured. But yes, emotion is important to my poetry. In particular emotion as a kind of movement, which is the origin of the word ‘emotion’ – a ‘moving out’.
TOM:
Oh wow. I didn’t know that.
TESSA:
Again, we’re back to the idea of disturbance, of agitating language, of creating movement that isn’t necessarily under control. I like the poems to be these emotional objects that move down the page. And I want the objects in my poems to become objects of feeling, or to stand in for feelings, or to take on unexpected associations.
There’s an essay called ‘The Fractured Idiom’ by Kristina Chew, which talks about speech development, in particular with her own son, but also other people born with particular cognitive disabilities which can mean they order speech differently and very individually. A lot of it’s about literalism in language, and how certain words come to stand in for other words. There’s a brilliant example of how, one time she took her child for a bike ride to a sushi café, which means bike rides are now always connected to sushi. And so when they say, let’s get sushi, that actually means let’s go on a bike ride. And so it’s this sort of word association: one thing becomes another thing in a different context. I think in some of my poems I’m probably doing that, and obviously the reader won’t know why I’ve said, for instance, ‘the yellow rainbow will never be a chimney’. Even I can’t remember where that came from, but it was something at the time. And now that meaning’s lost to me, but it’s still there in the poem.
TOM:
That ‘rainbow/chimney’ moment is one example of how your poems seem interested in exploring – or refusing, or pushing the limits of – metaphor. You know, the rainbow that cannot be a chimney is like a failed metaphor, in a way.
TESSA:
I think maybe that kind of just happens. I think it also comes from a love of the idea of the idiolect – ‘a language for a community of one’ – and how such a language can be understood or simply ‘heard’ from the outside. It is sometimes good to just listen and not know, but within that not knowing is another form (or possibility of) understanding.
Funnily enough, a poem that I forgot to put in Burnt Snow, has the line ‘metaphors bore me’ in it. Don’t get me wrong, I love metaphors.
But I’m reminded of when I first started to study sculpture, and I started making a sculpture out of lots of wooden bits and pieces, and I stuck it all together. And I told a friend at the time that it was sort of a metaphor for life: that you can make completeness out of lots of bits and fragments. And he said, ‘Does it work? Do you feel complete now?’ And I was like, ‘Well no…’ I sort of realized I was fooling myself. Actually I’ve got this lump of stuck-together bits of wood. That’s reality. I want the reality. I don’t want to float off in some metaphor. I guess, to go back to William Carlos Williams, it’s like what he says in that poem: no ideas but in things. I think it’s much more exciting to have a thing before your very eyes. To be in life. But maybe the poems happening on the page are the metaphor: This is life right now, happening, being surprising.
TOM:
You mentioned earlier that you think of poems as like little dances. How else do you conceive of ‘the poem’, or your poems in particular?
TESSA:
I never feel too sure of what they are – fragments of story, yes, expressions of emotion, details from things I want to remember, secrets I want to carry in plain sight, words I simply want to see (or own for a moment). Verbal snapshots of time, place, things. Sensual snapshots. Still lives, yes, but at the same time animated, the motion of words. Scratched out or scratched at portraits. Pieces of living. Pieces of the struggle of expressing living with words.
Sometimes they are poems. Or sometimes they are words sitting in the shape (or in the misshapenness) of poems. Words hiding within things disguised as poems… Mostly it is a relief that there is the word ‘poem’ to contain and allow for all that a poem can be.
But yes, little dances, or at least an ‘activity’. Because often, you know, I sit down to write the poem and it’s like the poem starts happening. It’s like the poem happens to me, rather than me doing it. And that’s good.
TOM:
Do you know Denise Riley’s work at all?
TESSA:
Yes, not well, but yes.
TOM:
In The Words of Selves, she talks about the poet being a zealous secretary to language, or a transmitter of messages from the dead. The emphasis is always on the poet being more passive, or at least wrestling with language, rather than being in any position of authority with regard to the poem.
TESSA:
That sounds like W.S. Graham too.
TOM:
Yeah. Language, ah now you have me.
TESSA:
I think that’s why it’s also very difficult to talk about poetry, or to see myself as a poet and talk about what it’s like being a poet. I almost feel I am betraying it by talking about it, or not allowing it its necessary mystery… Because it does feel, often, like quite a muddled, mysterious, untameable thing, and so I really only have muddled language to talk about what I’m actually doing when I sit down and write. I just know it comes out, and I’m alive, and then the poetry just seems to develop a life of its own. And I just have to kind of let it. Even if it starts disappearing, and I think, Hey, where are you going, come back.
So yes, I like the idea of a poem as a dance, as a wrestle, as a spillage. I like the idea of language as something that spills, something that’s mucky and messy. I think in my poems I’m trying to find ways – often through miscommunication or strange turns of phrase – of accessing the real ‘matter of language’, of revealing the truth about language: that it is something chaotic, alive, a formless putty. We get so used to encountering it in its controlled state. So often in our everyday language, we have to make sense and be polite and finish our sentences well, and communicate. Whereas poetry kind of gets me off the hook. Actually, I don’t have to communicate. I can leave a stain on the page. I can miss out that question. I don’t need to answer that one. It’s not filling in a form. Poetry reminds us that language also spills.
I know that people worry about the inaccessibility of poetry – the lineation, the non-sequiturs, the seemingly obtuse desire to confuse, to avoid ‘straight-talking’. But maybe poetry isn’t something to be ‘accessed’ – poems are not fields or buildings or boxes – but a language to be heard differently. I like the idea of a poem ‘accessing’ us or troubling us a little.
TOM:
Do you write with a reader in mind, would you say?
TESSA:
I don’t really know. I often feel I’m talking to myself. I think because I don’t talk to a lot of people on a daily basis, I can quite easily get out of the habit of conversation. So it’s talking to myself, yes, but I do write with an awareness of ‘poetry’ I think. The idea that I’m writing into this great kind of mulch that is poetry. There are these poets over here, and these poets over here, or maybe I’m writing to my favourite poets of the past, saying, ‘Hey, do you like this? I’m being like you!’ I like the idea of writing into poetry, because I love being a part of poetry, and being a part of language. Writing is a means of joining in.
TOM:
To quote Riley again, she talks somewhere about how whenever we speak we are insinuating ourselves into a conversation that pre-exists us, so whatever we say is another contribution to the ‘rustle of echoes’ of literary history.
TESSA:
And it’s just fun that we’re all sitting here, part of this conversation, trying this and that. I think of something Fanny Howe said in The Winter Sun, about poetry as the vocation that has no name: ‘Why was I chained to these language problems that I myself had created? Why all this scratching and erasing?’ I suppose there’s something calling me to it. It’s strange, and yet we do it. And we love it. And I love that other people are doing it too.
Sometimes I think I would like to write heavier poems, just to see if I can. But I always kind of stay at that level of play and miscommunication. I think that’s often the source of things: miscommunication. It’s often those moments of not quite meeting, or not quite understanding, that something begins.
TOM:
They are some of my favourite moments in your poems: the mistakes or the miscommunications, the playfulness and willingness to challenge the reader or frustrate their expectations of what a lyric poem should look like. Refusing epiphany or whatever.
TESSA:
Yes. Refusing or avoiding too much resolution or conclusion. Conclusions often feel suspicious in poetry! Perhaps because I find them so elusive in my own work. Sometimes when I receive rejections from magazines or journals, they might say – if I’m lucky to get feedback – ‘We felt the poems lacked “meat”.’ Always this word, meat! This dead bloody stuff… I don’t know. I’ve always preferred the quality of skeletons and faltering outlines – something more brittle, lighter, accidental, open to vanishing… But also the editors of the magazines are always right! I’ve submitted plenty of odd bits and pieces and its’ often more of a relief than a disappointment when they come back!
TOM:
It doesn’t feel like your poems are necessarily, you know, an ‘exploration of X’ or ‘about Y’. And I’m glad that they’re not. Because I don’t like the way that poets are expected to write ‘thematic’ books now, and that each book has to be a project exploring X or Y or Z.
TESSA:
Yes. There are residencies I think I might apply for, but in order to apply for them, you have to have a project, and write a thousand words on your project. But so often I’ll only know what the project is when it’s done. I only realize what I’m doing, once I’ve done it.
TOM:
Do you think you’d ever write prose?
TESSA:
I don’t know. People ask me that, and I ask myself that, actually. W.S. Graham once said that he was determined to remain proseless. I like that. But I like that he says, ‘determined’, as though it’s a struggle. Prose is sometimes a temptation, but I also think I love poetry too much, and want to hold fast to it. Maybe I’d write quite broken prose, and it would probably turn into a poem by the end. I’d quite like to write a play. I think that would be quite fun, getting all that direct speech, all those people talking, interrupting and arguing with one other.
TOM:
Some of your poems feel a bit like mini-plays, with different speakers.
TESSA:
I’m quite fond of jokes too, and the ‘joke’ as a genre, maybe because they also work through miscommunication. When you tell a joke you have to lightly trick people. And then you get to make people laugh, and that’s nice. Or you don’t make people laugh but then they laugh because they were expecting to laugh but they aren’t, and that’s nice too.
TOM:
Jokes feel like another way for poets to avoid doing metaphor while achieving some of that same effect. Natalie Shapero has a poem that ends: ‘What did one candle say to the other candle? Let’s go out tonight.’ It’s devastating.
TESSA:
Oh, I love that.
TOM:
Her poems are full of quotations, and historical facts, and jokes, and quirky things she’s read. But also they almost completely avoid imagery and metaphor and stuff, so it feels like she uses those other things as a replacement for the typical apparatus of capital P Poetry. I guess I’m interested in locating those different ways of ‘doing poetry’.
TESSA:
Yes, perhaps that’s why we have – or why I personally love – poetry, to make a space for other ways of being with language and experiencing language. And I love that a poem so often happens by chance.
Tessa Berring is a poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the author of Bitten Hair (2019), Folded Purse (2022), and Burnt Snow (2026), all published by Blue Diode.
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