English Channel. Photo by Markus Trienke, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
For our Poetry Making series, we asked poets and translators to dissect the poems they contributed to our pages. Jana Prikryl’s “Dover Calais” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254.
How did this poem begin for you? Is it with images, ideas, phrases, or something else?
In the most basic sense, it begins with an implicit, unstaged scene King Lear—Cordelia’s escape from England with her new husband, France, after she was exiled by her father. I’ve been going in circles Study for about a year at that point, writing dramatic monologues roughly from Cordelia’s point of view, based on what she experiences in the play. (She experiences quite a lot, although most of it is only reported by other characters.) I think more specifically it starts with the image of Cordelia falling into the water as her ferry crosses the English Channel. When I wrote this monologue, I wasn’t so interested in inventing plot lines, inventing fresh scenes for him to go through—I tried more to eavesdrop on his language as the play progressed, but strangely his language often made things happen. The image of him falling reminded me like a memory, which is probably why I felt able to write about it, and why the poem opens with the blunt statement, “I fell once…”
Did you have other poems or works of art in mind when you wrote this poem?
I read and reread Shakespeare’s other plays, and a pile of Shakespearean criticism—besides greats like Bradley, Frye, and Kermode, the important ones to me are Stanley Cavell, AD Nuttall, Germaine Greer, Lukas Erne—as well as the English poets and writers I missed in my youth (among others, Anne Finch, George Crabbe, Sebastian Evans, Alice Meynell, George MacBeth, David Gascoyne, VS Naipaul) … All these British Things, because, ultimately, the monologue allowed me to reflect on my relationship to the English language, the British government and center of power, and all forms of great power. I learned English artificially, even performatively. My family arrived in Canada as refugees from Czechoslovakia (after a stint in Austria) when I was six years old—which means this language feels like things that possessed me over several years that included a lot of disorientation and schoolyard bullying—so I think I’m trying to get down to the roots of where awareness emerges under the pressure of conflict, pain, and power.
How did you feel when you wrote the first draft? Was it easy, or difficult to write? (Are there difficult and easy poems?)
It happened suddenly; I write the script every morning before my son wakes up, and some sessions last an hour or two, others a few minutes. I built this long monologue gradually, which felt like I was standing in a void, because writing fiction was foreign to me. I needed each line of iambic pentameter to sound just right to justify, to give solidity, further movement across the bridge that had not yet been tied on the other side. A really good morning means writing a whole stanza (seven lines) or part of a stanza. Often I go back and revise when a new line doesn’t form.
With earlier poems, I rarely began with a pre-prepared episode or image that I then tried to convey to the reader, like a servant bringing a dish (although I did re-read Larkin’s poems around this time, to remind myself of how much richness this approach could bring). My (my?) dialogue with language usually shapes “what happens” in the poem. So the challenge of “Dover Calais” was that I knew something beforehand—Cordelia’s story was completely overblown—but I needed to tell it in such a way that the telling came first, bringing me into a space of not knowing where I could write.
When did you know this poem was finished? Are you right about that? Is it done?
There was an earlier version, one that was “finished” and looked completely different, and I knew it wasn’t working—it kept sliding off the page. One of the things I had decided beforehand was the form of this monologue. Each is fourteen stanzas long, which creates tension as I approach the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth—will I be able to meet the moment?!—and often the writing involves backtracking and cutting loose lines, rearranging certain passages, and giving more room to play toward the end. With “Dover Calais,” the ending began to work when I made the last few stanzas more specific, involving the story of myself and my family more personally—it was a shift toward a more lyrical impulse—so that in some ways Cordelia’s feelings could find a new situation, a new form. However, the last stanza is almost the same as the previous stanza, a wrong draft. I thought I had succeeded in managing my mood from the start, but I had to achieve it through a different route.
As for whether the poem is finished—I thought this one was finished, but as I write this monologue, one of the things I keep finding is that, in the Platonic sense, the “poem” is never finished. It’s as if you’re pulling up sand from the bottom of the sea, and you can grab a bigger or smaller handful, but the stuff you can pull up is endless, and one of the things the poem asks of you (the writer) is how to handle the necessary things. stopwhether to make silence formal or intimate, how to signal that there is always more to say, whether a more formal closure might imply endless ramifications, or a more intimate spoken voice creates a better echo… So ultimately, of course, you have to start a new poem.
Jana Prikryl’s fourth book of poetry, Channel, will be published in summer 2026 by Faber & Faber in the UK and in autumn 2026 by Norton in the US
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