Subject matter naturally informs structure, definitely. Free verse comes the most natural for me, and I feel that it particularly suits "still life of womb" precisely because it's so loose, so unstructured. You re not particularly coherent when you're curled up immobile and trying to not literally cry out in pain, after all.
What was your main inspiration to write “still life of womb”? What sparked the initial idea?
Short answer: period cramps. Long answer: extremely excruciating period cramps — I was basically curled up in fetal, couldn’t move for hours. The next day, I thought hm, if I’m going to have to suffer through it anyway, I might as well try to get something out of it, and decided to write a gore piece, and — yeah, that’s basically the inspiration for “still life of womb”.
This piece evokes a delicate violence and your use of consonance is powerful—something even more evident when reading the poem aloud. How do you go about word choice in your writing process to evoke such visceral imagery?
I try to pay attention to alliteration and internal rhyme — I learned from a few of my friends that it matters a lot more than you’d think, when it comes to writing poetry. The way things sound matters almost as much, or if not, as much as what you’re saying. Half of it was trial-and-error, trying to match the right words that have the same ‘flow’ for sound, and the other half was sheer word association.
As for the word choice, I was experimenting with a pretty fast, loose style of diction — compound words, for example, “ghost-girl”, and stacking adjectives one after the other, so you’ve got things like “stark stretched husk” and “stabbing swollen pustule”. The word choice is as much association as it is contrast, so “stabbing” vs “swollen”, that’s contrast, and “stark stretched”, that’s association. Basically, I just tried to keep stacking while keeping in mind the way the words sound. Very loose, so it’s quite effective in conveying the spacey feeling of pain.
For you, when crafting a poem, does the subject matter naturally inform the structure or do you consider the structure ahead of time? Do you have a favorite line in “still life of womb”?
Subject matter naturally informs structure, definitely. Free verse comes the most natural for me, and I feel that it particularly suits “still life of womb” precisely because it’s so loose, so unstructured. You’re not particularly coherent when you’re curled up immobile and trying to not literally cry out in pain, after all.
Favourite line, hm — has to be the last line, “of this empty room this empty / bloodied bloodless womb”. I like the internal rhyme of room/womb, and the repetition — empty, empty ; bloodied, bloodless. It sounds almost manic, which was exactly the tone that I hoped to convey. And when put in context of the poem, I was thinking of it as the womb meant to be the space for childbearing — hence, room, and bloodied because, well, periods — you’re bleeding, and bloodless because you’re bleeding out. Mildly horrifying.
What do you hope readers take away from this piece?
The piece was primarily a way for me to vent emotion, rather than to advocate for any message in particular. It’s a catharsis piece for those of us who experience period cramps to this degree of painfulness.
Also, the lack of knowledge that some people have of periods is frankly appalling, considering that half of the population has to undergo this process on a monthly basis. So… I hope that this piece can help people understand what it can feel like for some of us, that’s all.
A couple more questions just for fun! Do you have any particular writing rituals?
Not any particular rituals, no, mostly it’s just me trying to find either time, energy or motivation to write. It’s quite rare that I hit all three, so I do my writing mostly on spur-of-the-moment bursts of inspiration, rather than sticking to a routine. Even then, I try to keep it consistent, if not regular — it’s important for me that I write often, even if the method and type of writing that I produce can be really varied. Writing’s my way of processing the world around me, I need it to keep some measure of sanity in a world that keeps hurtling forward at full pitch, all the time.
Lastly . . . what scares you?
Really going for the jugular here, aren’t we? I think a lot of things scare me, and in no particular significance or order: the flying ants that keep flitting outside the lights in my room, the many deadlines I have that are coming up soon, the inexorable march of time and its equally inevitable burial of love — not all, but some, too much — olives on pizza, capsicums on pizza, spiders, the not-spider-but-i-also-don’t-know-what-it-is thing that may or may not be in my room, unfinished friendships, unfinished memories… This world can be a pretty scary place, but equally, I think, it’s something worth trying to love.
Chloe Ho (she/her) is a Singaporean writer who enjoys dabbling in poetry and prose. Her pieces have previously been featured in The Amazine, (s)crawl magazine and Four Tulips Magazine, amongst others. She serves as an editor at the literary magazine Inklink (@projectinklink), and more of her work can be found on her Instagram @vizscribbles.
