Confessions Of An Alchemist: The Poetry of Cassie Fielding
Cassie’s work is a cauldron of shapes and dreams, loops and echoes lurking in liminal spaces. She writes sentences that melt on the tongue like acid. It sends you into this beautiful and surreal world. I hadn’t read anything this good in a very long time. I am extremely excited to have interviewed her for the journal.
Can you share the journey that led you to becoming a poet? I read you came to it quite late, so I am interested in diving into that with you and what or who initially drew you to explore poetry as a medium?
Emerging from what I can only now understand as a mid-life crisis of sorts, I was initiated into the world of the strange. Externally, that meant Tarot cards, Twin Peaks and encounters with Death. Internally, it meant confusion, curiosity and Big Dreams. I looked for answers in the writings of Carl Jung and I looked for questions in the writings of my own hand. Always fascinated with words and language, I had dreamed of being a writer when I was a child but never had the courage to put pen to paper, yet for some reason that still evades me, I began writing poems in my 40th year. In poems I found a way to play – the kind of serious play that children are often absorbed in. Through poetry I can experiment, I can wonder, I can risk, I can be a tree and I can be a teapot. I am often an eyeball and I am frequently a hand. Belonging to I don’t know who. It isn’t that poetry is an expression of emotion, not even an offloading of emotion – I don’t find relief in it or solace or acceptance. Rather, poetry is a revelation of emotion, not mine but feeling as such. Poetry teaches me about feeling through feeling, it allows me to experience emotion and to experience the senses, it gives them a body.
I see you practice automatic writing, active imagination and ekphrasis in your work. Can you tell me more about how you came to employ these in your work?
Automatic writing is the basis of my poetry. Every poem I write utilises it to some degree or another and I learned how to do it from a fellow Surrealist poet and painter, Jairo Dealba. I think I had been practising a form of automatic writing already, quite naturally, but self-awareness crept in a little too much, hindering my ability to really let go and connect with something beyond myself. The first time I attempted automatic writing was thrilling. I loved the process - though it was unnerving and destabilising it was also extremely liberating – but I hated the poem! It didn’t ‘sound like me’ but I had to accept that it was me and that lead me to really embrace the multiplicity of me’s that make up me, to see that I am as much un-me as I am me. It taught me that freedom can be uncomfortable, that in experimentation we contend with parts of our own humanity that take some warming up to. Sometimes I leave my automatic writing as is – bare bones and raw – but mostly, as my practice has developed, I take an approach more aligned with Surrealists like Ithell Colquhoun who implemented a two-stage method in her art and writing: the first stage being automatism and the second stage being a shaping of the automatic result, a more leisurely affair with a more intimate relationship with the image and the unconscious. However, for me, the two stages are not completely separate in time.
I meet with active imagination through automatic writing which I view as active imagination through ‘doing’. Dialoguing with the unconscious via the imagination can be a powerful experience, but to shape that dialogue through poetry (or some form of concretisation) gives it flesh and blood. Although active imagination is often a very visual, I encounter it through mood and feeling which, through my pen, become visual. The goal, if there can be said to be a goal, is to find the cross-section of psyche, matter, consciousness and the unconscious, which I believe to be where one meets with what the Surrealists call The Marvellous.
Ekphrasis came about for me because I love Tarot and Oracle cards. I found myself dissatisfied with my readings, whether they took the form of a more traditional, psychic approach or a more archetypal attitude where a kind of self-development is preferred. I began writing poems in response to card pulls instead and see it as an active imagination in which the visuals are already in place. One of my interests at the moment is alchemy and transformation. Unfortunately, the current understanding of alchemy favours interiority and so it is incomplete. I’m investigating the importance of matter, of things and objects in transformation. Ekphrasis is a connecting to things, a connecting of psyche with matter which brings with it a connecting of known and unknown aspects of both myself and of the world in which myself exists.
Could you walk me through the process of your own personal writing practice?
There are a few ways I practise, some more ritualised than others. Most mornings I wake and before I do anything else I light a candle, make a black coffee, put a ring of the self-devouring snake on my finger, pull some cards and write an automatic poem for them. This is always done at a small round table I’ve had since I was a tiny girl with my dog either pressed up next to me or sat on my feet. Before I go to bed, or as I’m in bed and before I lay down to sleep, I write automatically. Sometimes in a notebook I keep by the bed, sometimes on my phone. If I do the latter I’m very particular about the font and font size I use: EB Garamond , size 8, if anyone cares to know! These are the only routines I keep and I find writing upon waking and upon sleeping the most fruitful time for me when consciousness abates and the dream-mind is active.
Throughout the day, I often randomly write some poetry down – a few lines, a whole poem – it depends on what comes out freely or if I’m randomly inspired by something, either internal or external. I don’t like to force anything and will very rarely edit my work beyond the tinkering I do as I write. I keep an ongoing ‘anti-diary’ – a rolling collection of prose poems that I add to on most days that recount my waking reality in surreal language: I see it as a way to dissolve the split between dream and reality.
Tell me more about your pull towards surrealism?
It was Surrealism that really drew me in. It seems I had been writing surreal poetry without knowing that I was. From my point of view I was writing in the only way that made sense yet, as it was pointed out to me by other poets I was interacting with, I was writing nonsense and that turned everything on its head as it meant that nonsense and sense were not so clearly differentiated. It also meant that to find meaning in my life, in the world, I didn’t have to have answers. I simply had to participate in the mystery of it all.
The longer I practice surrealism, the more intimate the practice becomes and the more I’m aware of how transformative it is. It has changed my relationship to my self, to the world and the way I see my self in the world, the way I see myself in things. Plus, I get a massive kick out of the absurdity! It isn’t just a practice but a way of being. In a sense, I feel that I have been initiated into a tradition and a collaborative relationship with the ancestors of surrealism.
Who is your favourite poet/writer?
I’m not sure I can name a particular poet but I love Frederico Lorca, HD, EE Cummings, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Joyce Mansour, Elise Cowen, among others. Writers I enjoy include Clarice Lispector, Haruki Murakami, Ithell Colquhoun, John Steinbeck, Ted Chiang. Anyone who tests the limits of my imagination.
Is there anything coming up you would like to mention?
At the end of this month I’ll be presenting at the London Arts-Based Research Centre at their Strangeness and Oddity conference on the Self as surreal and how oddity is the art of selfing as part of my PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies on the alchemical nature of surrealism.
