The English Channel. Photograph by Markus Trienke, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jana Prikryl’s “Dover Calais” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

In the most basic sense it started with an implicit, unstaged scene from King Lear—Cordelia’s flight from England with her new husband, France, after she’s been banished by her father. I’d been circling Lear for about a year at that point, writing dramatic monologues from approximately Cordelia’s point of view, based on what she experiences in the play. (She experiences quite a lot, even if most of it is only reported by other characters.) I guess more specifically it began with an image of Cordelia falling into the water as her ferry crosses the English Channel. As I wrote these monologues, I wasn’t really interested in making up plot, making up fresh scenes for her to go through—I was trying more to eavesdrop on her language as the play unfolds, but curiously her language often made things happen. That image of her falling in hit me like a memory, which may be why I felt able to write about it, and why the poem opens with that blunt declaration, “I fell in once …”

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote this poem?

I was reading and rereading Shakespeare’s other plays, and a big pile of Shakespeare criticism—aside from the big fish like Bradley and Frye and Kermode, important to me were Stanley Cavell, A. D. Nuttall, Germaine Greer, Lukas Erne—as well as British poets and writers I’d missed in my youth (among others, Anne Finch, George Crabbe, Sebastian Evans, Alice Meynell, George MacBeth, David Gascoyne, V. S. Naipaul) … All this British stuff, because, ultimately, the monologues allowed me to ponder my relationship to the English language, the British polity and powerhouse, any powerhouse. I came to English artificially, even performatively. My family arrived in Canada as refugees from Czechoslovakia (after a stint in Austria) when I was six—which means this language that feels like the stuff I’m made of possessed me over several years that included lots of disorientation and schoolyard bullying—so I think I was trying to get down to the root where consciousness springs up under pressure from conflict and pain and power.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

It came in fits and starts; I wrote the manuscript early every morning before my son woke up, and some sessions lasted an hour or two, others a few minutes. I was building these long monologues by accretion, which felt a bit like standing over a void, because writing fiction is so foreign to me. I needed each line of iambic pentameter to sound right in order to justify, to give solidity to, the move farther out across this bridge that was not yet fastened on the other side. A very good morning meant writing one entire stanza (seven lines) or a decent portion of one. Often I backtracked and revised when new lines wouldn’t form.

With previous poems, I’ve rarely started with an episode or an image cooked up in advance that I then tried to convey to the reader, like a waiter bringing out a dish (though I reread Larkin’s poems around this time, to remind myself of how much richness this approach can produce). My (my?) dialogue with language usually shapes “what happens” in the poem. So the challenge of “Dover Calais” was that I did know something in advance—the story of Cordelia literally going overboard—yet I needed to tell it such that the telling came first, delivered me into the space of unknowing where I’m able to write.

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

There was an earlier, briefly “completed” version that looked quite different, and I knew it wasn’t working—it kept sliding off the page. One of the things I’d decided in advance was the form of these monologues. Each would be fourteen stanzas long, which created pressure as I approached the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth—would I be able to meet that moment?!—and often the writing involved going back and cutting lines that didn’t wear right, restitching certain passages, and clearing more space to play with near the end. With “Dover Calais” the ending started to work when I made the last few stanzas more specific, implicating myself and my family’s story more personally—it’s a turn toward a more lyric impulse—so that in some sense Cordelia’s feelings could find new situation, new form. Yet the very last stanza is almost the same as in the earlier, wrong draft. I guess I’d nailed the mood early on, but I needed to get there by a different route.

As to whether the poem is finished after all—I think this one is, but as I wrote these monologues, one of the things I kept finding is that, in some Platonic sense, “the poem” is never finished. It’s as if you were pulling sand from the ocean floor, and you could grab a bigger or a smaller handful, but there’s no end to the stuff you could pull up, and one of the things the poem asks of you (the writer) is how to deal with the necessary stopping, whether to make that stillness formal or intimate, how to signal that there’s always more to say, whether a more formal closure might imply endless ramification, or a more intimate, spoken voice creates a better echo … So eventually, of course, you have to start a new poem.

Jana Prikryl’s fourth book of poems, The Channel, will be published in summer 2026 by Faber & Faber in the UK and in fall 2026 by Norton in the U.S.