CAD:Yes, “Medusa” Again, another favourite character of mine from Greek mythology is “Medusa” with her head of snakes, and if you looked at her you turned to stone. So this is a poem about jealousy. Medusa feels that her “perfect man, Greek God” will betray her. Her suspicions grow in her mind until they become so poisonous that the hair on her head transforms into “filthy snakes”. So the hair becomes snakes and, if you ever have been jealous, that’s pretty much what it feels like—maddened by jealousy and paranoid. I just thought that was a great image for jealousy, poisonous green snakes. And then, after the change in her hair, her breath changes, her language changes, and she becomes this terrible creature and rather than allowing him to carry out his betrayal in a serious way, actually, she would rather he was dead.So she starts looking at things and they turn to stone: the bee becomes a pebble, the singing bird gravel, the cat a housebrick, the snuffling pig a boulder, the dragon a mountain spewing out fire. She’s capable of turning everything into stone. And in the original story, Perseus, who sets out to cut off the head of Medusa, knows that he will have to use his shield to reflect her head so that he can see what he’s doing and avoid being turned to stone. In my poem, his shield is his heart and his sword is his tongue, and he kills her by betraying her and not loving her. And she says: “Look at me now”, and she means both: you’ve done this to me, I used to be loving and happy; and also “look at me” because she wants to end it, and we know what happens.
BW: The poem does seem to connect the with previous one, as poems about betrayal, but also because of the form, the clipped lines which are full of passion and tension and hate, including self-hate.
CAD: I don’t think hate, but love. All these poems—from Queen Kong onwards—are about love that’s been betrayed. The women love the men—Mrs Quasimodo adores Quasimodo, Medusa adores Perseus, so these poems are about people whose partners are doing them wrong. The love is there, it’s just twisted. There’s no point at which the women hate the men.
BW: Well, okay, it’s “love gone bad”, so Medusa is aware that what was love has become its opposite.
CAD: No. Love gone bad has changed her. She doesn’t hate, she’s distressed, and jealous and paranoid and desperate. But she doesn’t hate him. She says: “it’s you I love,/perfect man, Greek God, my own; … you come/with a shield for a heart/and a sword for a tongue”: she doesn’t hate him, she loves him. But love has twisted her as it twisted Mrs Quasimodo and ends in a loss of self-esteem. So that’s why: “Look at me now” is an appeal as well as a look-at-me-now and I’ll turn you to stone. And the look- what-you’ve-done-to-me connects with the next poem--“The Devil’s Wife”, another monster created by twisted love. And of course Medusa is referred to in this.