Pushing the Boundaries On Hags, Slags, and Sluts: Poet Katie Beswick in Plumstead Pram Pushers

Whether in serial bullying, the joshing of friendship, or the post-trauma epithets that cut and remain tender in life, the names we call one another really matter. Far beyond the locker-linedhallways of high school, these slurs can take on power and rob the recipient of the fundamental agency of self-naming. Katie Beswick’s new collection of poems explores these realities by going mano-a-mano with an old term of derision for women—taken from what is to be cast off from smelting of metals. This gendered put-down is her material and she works it with all the skills of a theater artist, writer, and scholar with the energy and ability to explore naming with great inventiveness. The power of her collection grows from her instinct and strategy to let the poems take charge, pushing past the surfaces to explore the phenomena of names-calling from adolescent rivalries to the distant echoes that too often haunt our adult and mature minds. Can these poems cast off the sting of adolescent insult while embracing and recasting the term with the power of human dignity and fuller experiences of women? This seems to be the quest of Beswick’s fascinating and courageous new collection of poems, Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre Press, 2024). Our conversations took place during the release of the book and were conducted in video calls between the US and UK in Summer 2024.

Scott LaMascus: Your new poetry collection speaks for itself, of course, but you’ve been developing this material a long time, not only in the composition of poetry going back at least a decade, but also in Being Slaggy, a poetry performance and installation with the Camden People’s Theater in London. Can you unpack the British usage of the term that might elude some English-language readers outside the UK?

Katie Beswick: Yes—it’s probably worth saying that although some of the poems were written a decade ago, the works were mostly created between 2018 and 2022, which coincides with my working on a scholarly project (I’m also an academic, working at Goldsmiths in London), that explores the etymology of the word slag and its appearance in British art and culture. In sum, slag as a noun has been used as an insult for centuries to imply someone’s worthlessness (as a verb it can also mean simply “insult,” as in “to slag”/“to slag off”). It comes from the word slag/slaggen for the product that is leftover during industrial smelting processes, so can be mapped through the industrial revolution. There have long been classed and gendered connotations to the insult. At some point, likely in the nineteenth century, the word became aligned with prostitution and eventually in the twentieth century came to mean “a woman of disrepute”—usually to suggest sexual excess and/or a spoiled sexual reputation. In the mid-twentieth century this became its dominant use; there are a few sociological studies from the 1980s and 1990s which explore how schoolgirls use the term with one another. These are interesting because they show that although the word stands in for a spoiled sexual reputation, it’s often just used as a way of controlling or putting someone in their place (lower in the social order than the speaker), that has nothing to do with their sexual behavior at all. This is borne out by a study I carried out, looking at women who have been called slag—most of them told me that the word was mainly used when they refused to comply with the demands of a man, or less frequently a group of women. There are also a few plays from the late twentieth century that explore the term—mostly written by men—Slag by David Hare (1970) and Jim Cartwright’s I licked a slag’s deodorant (1996), immediately come to mind.

There haven’t been huge attempts to reclaim the word slag in the same way as slut—but certainly there is evidence that it is experienced in complex ways, and there is some pleasure and joy involved in the excesses of the idea of the slag—to be a woman who revels in sexual excess and is sexually experienced can be freeing. The journalist Sophie Heawood wrote an article a few years ago that explores this.

It’s probably worth saying the term can also be used towards men, though this is rarer and usually in a jocular context (the humor comes from its association with femininity). Slag can also be used, like all insults, jokingly between friends. It has been geographically pretty widespread across the UK (this is contested in my research, but respondents from all over the UK report using and having had “slag” used against them)—but often associated with London and the cockney accent. This is perhaps because the East End actor Danny Dyer famously uses the phrase you slag as a kind of catchphrase. That’s as brief an overview as I can give you. I go into more detail in the scholarly book I’m writing, which is called Slags on Stage and should be out next year, god willing.

SL: You’ve written that your installation Being Slaggy among other things, “complicates the notion of ‘slaggyness’,” both presenting it as an abjection but also playing with the ways that sexuality offers avenues for pleasure (even when those are bound up with sexisms). It also plays with icons and objects from late twentieth and early twenty-first century culture—by, for example, sampling the famous Jackie magazine and offering the audience a take-home poetry collection focused on a character of Jackie as a south-east London everywoman, coming of age in the early millennium. It is fun and funny, moving, and attempts to shift our relationship to poems in performance. What’s planned and what happens in reality are rarely the same. What might you have learned about shame, gender, poetry-in-performance, or the reckonings of coming-of-age through this production? Did you or do you now consider it daring, or perhaps, courageous?

KB: I made that show—which was really more of an installation—because I wanted to get back to making theatre after a lot of years of writing and teaching about it. I found myself wanting to explore ideas coming out of my scholarly research through creative writing, and I had all these poems, some of which I thought were good. I knew I didn’t want to perform them myself, and I am partly drawn to poetry because of what it does on the page, as opposed to performance poetry, which to me works quite differently. So I had the idea to present them as a kind of exhibition, working with scale (some of the poems were huge and some smaller) and with other objects to create a sensory experience which was driven by the written word. There was also a recording of a chapter of a work in progress novel playing over headphones, but loudly enough that my voice bled into the space. I wanted to capture a sense of late twentieth century adolescence and how it lingers.

In the end, I was really pleased with how the show turned out. I felt it achieved what I had set out to do. It was staged twice, once in Leeds (in the north of England) and once at Camden People’s Theatre in London, and both times I used a white space and managed to get the feel of a gallery space. My husband, who is a removals person and a handyman, hung the installation for me. He has a real talent for knowing how to lay things out and get an exhibition up and down. I thought the installation did something quite innovative with the intersection between visual art, poetry and theatre. I think putting any work out into the world takes courage and daring—though I wouldn’t say my exhibition was especially so, other than that it took me a long time to step back into creative work after a career in scholarship.

SL: The poems in this new collection are, indeed, what one jacket-blurb promises: “unflinchingly raw.” But sometimes they do achieve beauty, too, even as they resist romanticizing sexuality, sexual violence, and the cultural forces that empower sexual exploitations and shames. (You really know how to be “ugly,” if I can say that as a compliment. I’m thinking now of a character the poem presents with black gums and green lips, for example.) But the tiniest bit of empathy for coming of age seems to reveal beauty and strength here, too. Which beauties and strengths did you intend to present and why?

KB: I think for me the rawness and ugliness is part of the beauty. I come from a cultural space where people are raw and authentic in that rawness, particularly in language—for example a common south London word is “cunt,” and it isn’t even taken as particularly harsh in a lot of contexts. Growing up, I went to a girl’s school in south-east London where vulgar language about sex and speaking frankly to your experiences had cultural currency. When you present or speak that way outside of the cultural spaces and contexts I grew up in, there is often shock and disgust. People don’t know what to do with it. This has to do with class, and the lack of understanding middle class people often have for working class ways of being. But for me the people I love and grew up with, although they sometimes had a rawness, I saw their beauty and strength and I wanted to explore that through language. How could I use the vernacular and expression of my upbringing to render raw experiences in all their beauty and complexity? That has been the challenge of this project.

How could I use the vernacular and expression of my upbringing to render raw experiences in all their beauty and complexity? That has been the challenge of this project.

SL: Can you discuss the collection’s use of form? Why did you choose some standard poetic forms, such as the sonnet and the haiku, to cite only two? How do you envision these returns to form in counterpoint or contrast to your more experimental forms in the collection?

KB: I began writing in free verse and some prose, because that is all I knew how to do. As I got more serious about writing poetry, I knew I would need to understand form more fully to achieve what I wanted to do with this project. In theatre, which is my primary medium in that it is what I have studied and taught and worked in for many years, I am aware how form can elevate a subject matter and the way experiments with form can help you to say something different. But I didn’t have that knowledge of poetic form outside of what I had done in compulsory education and what I had gleaned through being a pretty avid reader. So I started studying poetry through reading and taking courses—mainly at the Poetry School, although I also took a couple of workshops with the poet Fiona Benson in Exeter.

For me, form is connected to the last question. How could I make these raw experiences poetic? Part of that was through the choice of words and sentences, but part of it was also in finding forms that somehow helped me to wrangle an experience or a set of ideas into a poetic shape, or to give it meaning and weight. In “A Sonnet for Jackie’s Mother,” for example, I was interested in how traditions of witchcraft and botanical innovations made by women exist as a kind of residue in our culture, as well as how the figure of the hag becomes almost a counterpoint to the slag. The hag is excessive but not really sexual. I was also thinking of the way reputations of older women in my locality were tied to those residues of a kind of pagan culture. The sonnet form allowed me to somehow play with those ideas through lyric and rhyme, and to find a net form to express something quite complex—while holding on to the vernacular and expressive tradition I wanted the book to work with.

SL: The collection includes a graphic which depicts the phrase, “you wouldn’t call a dog a slag.” Could you unpack that a little without spoiling the collection’s surprises?

KB: The graphic comes from a series of drawings I did for the Being Slaggy installation. That was my favorite one and I wanted to include it as a nod to the show. Again it also references something about Plumstead in terms of its lyrical expression but also the slapdash graffiti nature of it. So its inclusion is not particularly complex, I just liked the image and felt it gave an interesting rhythm to the book.

SL: Jackie magazine was a new one for me, though the US teen had plenty of analogs to choose from, including Tiger Beat and the like. Was it your scholar’s eye that brought this cultural history and connection to your poems? Or some other feature of the magazine itself? I loved the collection’s personification, but don’t want to spoil it for your readers. What can you say about the magazine that might help younger readers of online material sync up with your generation’s pulpy content?

KB: The Jackie magazine reference does come from my scholarship. There’s a feminist sociologist called Angela McRobbie, who I have read a lot of, who writes extensively about Jackie and its place in the culture of girlhood. Jackie was an extremely popular magazine for adolescent girls. It was pretty typical of the genre in that it included fashion and beauty tips, gossip, short stories, and comic strips. In the 1970s particularly it had a huge circulation, and this was across class, across geographical areas. So it was very influential in the lives of girls in the time I am writing about in my research.

So the “Jackie” poems were a way of my thinking about the every-womanness of Jackie; who might this person who read this magazine be? How might she grow up? I also think a whole collection sustained by a relentless “I” can feel very self-absorbed to a reader. I wanted to remove my personal experiences from the frame, and write through the lens of someone else. As a person trained in theatre, I am also drawn to characterisation.

In honesty, Jackie wasn’t a magazine I read myself as a young woman; it is a little bit more from the generation above mine (when it was discontinued, in 1993, I was only nine years old)—I know my mum and aunties read it, and I think I did have an anthology that an aunty bought me one Christmas. The magazine I read as a teenager was called Just Seventeen; it was a fantastic publication; it never spoke down to young women and gave really great and straightforward sex education as well as brilliant features. I think it was inspired by Jackie, which by then had maybe become a bit dated and fallen out of fashion.

SL: I have so many poems I love that it is hard to choose only one, but would you be willing to discuss “Entropy” for me? (Close seconds were “Jackie Rides the Night Bus,” “Longing,” and “Up the Common.”)

KB: Sure. I turned forty this year—at thirty-nine I had my daughter, my first child, and I got married that year too. I had had this kind of extended adolescence until I met my husband in my late thirties. Suddenly it seemed to me everyone is old, everything in the world is falling into disaster and crisis—things are getting worse and there is so much uncertainty. That poem, “Entropy,” looks at the idea of uncertainty and degradation by taking the narrator’s long relationship with her manicurist as a way of thinking about the passing of time. Like many of the poems there are elements of my own experience in there—I do have a woman who has been doing my nails for over twenty years, and we have often spoken about our lives. The role of the beauty parlour as a space in women’s lives, and the nail salon in working-class women’s lives is fascinating. I read that there is some research happening on that at the moment, and I am intrigued by it. What is interesting to me about that relationship is the intimacy of beauty procedures, and the closeness of a relationship which is also detached and which also has a commercial transaction at its heart. There is also a class element here: I am paying someone else to slough the skin off my feet, and it is racialised (she is Asian)—but yet we are growing old together. We speak about our children and there is a shared culture in that we are part of a local community. I’ve had a lot of experiences filtered through the lens of sitting in a chair, being tended to by the same woman, and she has filtered her experiences through me in a similar way. There is a kind of mutual degradation and growth. So “Entropy” explores those things. I think you could also read it as an extended metaphor, but actually it comes from quite a literal experience for me.

SL: What’s next for you? Tell us more about your writing, process, or interests, please!

KB: My challenge for this summer is to finish my scholarly book Slags on Stage and send that to the publisher. It includes a few of the poems from this collection as well as some different ones, and tries to use a hybrid form of scholarship/poetry/memoir/art—all writing to explore the concept of “the slag.” It’s a big challenge and has been waylaid by lots of things, including COVID, pregnancy and my turn towards poetry. But that is all grist for the mill. I am also putting together a poetry chapbook which looks at urban experiences. It is similar to Plumstead Pram Pushers in some ways, but looks more at the urban environment and the role of place—whereas Plumstead  is more focussed on sex and desire. I am also working on a full-length poetry collection, which will be quite different. And I have a second scholarly book, which is also quite different, in that it looks at class in British musical theatre. So I am busy!

In terms of my process, I write a poem every day. It might be a haiku on my iphone or a more serious attempt at a new form. If I’m really stuck, I write a one-line poem. I take several poetry courses with The Poetry School each term to keep up my learning too. Then I also try to get work done on my scholarly projects every day—it’s all a bit of a juggle, and I am finding new rhythms as a mother, because before I had a baby I could work at two a.m., but now everything needs to happen between nine and five!