White Ink Stains
Eleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages. Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children. A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections.
Eleanor Brown was born in 1969 and lived in Scotland until the age of 12. She studied English Literature at York. After graduating she worked variously as a waitress, barmaid, legal secretary, and minutes secretary, to be able to work also as a poet and translator of poetry. In 2001-02 she was Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. She now lives, works, writes, sings (alto) and dances (Argentine tango) in Sheffield. Her debut collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was one of the five poets featured in Bloodaxe’s 1997 New Blood promotion. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019.
Two of her works for theatre were commissioned and produced by Inigo Theatre company: a verse adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, performed at the Cockpit Theatre, London in 1997; and the first version of Frank Wedekind’s Franziska to be published in English, performed at the Gate Theatre, London, in 1998, and published by Oberon Books. More recently, in 2014 she led workshops for the University of Sheffield’s French department, on translating poems by Baudelaire and Gautier in the context of musical settings by Vierne and Berlioz to produce singable versions of the texts. Since 2013 she has worked with the support and sponsorship of the Reading Sheffield oral history project, a grant from which funded a writing week. Some of the poems in her forthcoming collection White Ink Stains were presented at the University of Roehampton’s 2016 Oral History Conference Beyond Text in the Digital Age? in a paper discussing voice in oral history and voice in poetry.
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