Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 40
February 17, 2012
Girls 1, Ignoramuses 0
Please watch this vid. It's fun, uplifting and informative but more than that, whenever a new person watches, money goes towards the reopening in Pakistan of girls' schools closed down by Ignoramuses Ltd, aka the Taliban. As the video points out, they are terrified that their world will change if girls learn to read, write, earn money of their own and think for themselves - and the best of it is, they're quite right; it will, and the sooner the better. The vid doesn't actually need sound on either, if you're watching at work. The more new viewers, the more money for girls' schools, so do share if you can.
February 2, 2012
The Tweeting Poet
The Guardian, on a slow news day, recently reported a two-month-old lecture by the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill, in which he seemed to take issue with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy (the press is only ever interested in poetry if they can present it as a "spat between poets"). For the record, you could easily take issue with both. Duffy had said that poetry and texting had a lot in common, being both forms of condensed utterance, which is the sort of daft thing people my age say when they are trying to sound as if they totally get Da Yoof, man. Hill pointed out, very fairly, that textspeak was not condensed but truncated, and that there's an important difference. He then went on to ruin his case by comparing Duffy's own lexis to Mills & Boon, which it isn't, and by going to the other extreme, ie pretending to be a High Court judge who'd never heard of Da Yoof.
Silliness all round, but I do think it raises an interesting question, namely whether the new media of tweeting and texting, with their very restricted word limits, are potentially useful media for poets.
I must say, though, that from the examples I've read so far, I am unconvinced that either tweeting or texting has much to offer the poet as a medium. Teachers are always urging poetry students to condense their utterance, on the theory that the fewer words you use, the more effective they'll be, and mostly they're right. But I do think it possible to over-condense, to end up with a kind of gnomic utterance that doesn't in fact give itself enough space to accommodate nuance and meaning, let alone flex the imagination. For me, and I know this is heresy to some, most haiku fall into this category. I know they are meant to send the mind roaming beyond the words on the page, and I've read a few that do, but most leave me thinking "so what?"
Tweeting poets also face another peril. Tweets, with their 140-character limit, lend themselves to the aphorism, which is why comedians and politicians make great tweeters. Epigrammatic satirist poets could use it to great advantage too; Pope and von Logau would have tweeted brilliantly.
But that isn't how most poets use it. Some tweet as people rather than as poets, the same way everyone else does, ie for publicity and amusement, which is fine. But some do produce "poetic" tweets, which generally look like an image or a choice line taken out of the context of a poem and displayed in a glass case. And these really don't work for me, any more than a peacock stuffed in a museum resembles the same bird strutting and yawping on a castle lawn. Context matters. Reading "the land of spices, something understood" in the context of a George Herbert poem is transcendent; reading it as a stand-alone tweet would probably make me go "oh puh-leeze" and wince with embarrassment. The greatest line, decontextualised and tweeted, can look perilously like something by Hallmark. People are forever posting mystical quotes from Gibran or similar trite gurus online; you develop an automatic yuk response and it's easily set off.
What such tweets seem to be aiming for, in fact, is to get the effect Hemingway once called the wow at the end of the story without the tedious business of writing what leads up to it. Now I can sympathise with this to a degree, because it's an effect often aimed for, and achieved, in fan fiction. There it can be done because both writer and reader are using a shared canon; if you write a Romeo & Juliet fanfic, you are writing for an audience that already knows the end, and hence a great deal can be conveyed without being said. Shared canon fic is in fact well suited to this form, you could do some great fanfic tweets. But the Poetic Tweet, hauling some image or thought out of the context that made it seem inevitable to where it just looks like an attempt at Fine Language, hardly ever works for me. Where poets have done something readable with it, it's almost always by using a sequence of tweets, which gives far more scope, as do sequences of linked haiku. But both kind of miss the point of the medium.
Silliness all round, but I do think it raises an interesting question, namely whether the new media of tweeting and texting, with their very restricted word limits, are potentially useful media for poets.
I must say, though, that from the examples I've read so far, I am unconvinced that either tweeting or texting has much to offer the poet as a medium. Teachers are always urging poetry students to condense their utterance, on the theory that the fewer words you use, the more effective they'll be, and mostly they're right. But I do think it possible to over-condense, to end up with a kind of gnomic utterance that doesn't in fact give itself enough space to accommodate nuance and meaning, let alone flex the imagination. For me, and I know this is heresy to some, most haiku fall into this category. I know they are meant to send the mind roaming beyond the words on the page, and I've read a few that do, but most leave me thinking "so what?"
Tweeting poets also face another peril. Tweets, with their 140-character limit, lend themselves to the aphorism, which is why comedians and politicians make great tweeters. Epigrammatic satirist poets could use it to great advantage too; Pope and von Logau would have tweeted brilliantly.
But that isn't how most poets use it. Some tweet as people rather than as poets, the same way everyone else does, ie for publicity and amusement, which is fine. But some do produce "poetic" tweets, which generally look like an image or a choice line taken out of the context of a poem and displayed in a glass case. And these really don't work for me, any more than a peacock stuffed in a museum resembles the same bird strutting and yawping on a castle lawn. Context matters. Reading "the land of spices, something understood" in the context of a George Herbert poem is transcendent; reading it as a stand-alone tweet would probably make me go "oh puh-leeze" and wince with embarrassment. The greatest line, decontextualised and tweeted, can look perilously like something by Hallmark. People are forever posting mystical quotes from Gibran or similar trite gurus online; you develop an automatic yuk response and it's easily set off.
What such tweets seem to be aiming for, in fact, is to get the effect Hemingway once called the wow at the end of the story without the tedious business of writing what leads up to it. Now I can sympathise with this to a degree, because it's an effect often aimed for, and achieved, in fan fiction. There it can be done because both writer and reader are using a shared canon; if you write a Romeo & Juliet fanfic, you are writing for an audience that already knows the end, and hence a great deal can be conveyed without being said. Shared canon fic is in fact well suited to this form, you could do some great fanfic tweets. But the Poetic Tweet, hauling some image or thought out of the context that made it seem inevitable to where it just looks like an attempt at Fine Language, hardly ever works for me. Where poets have done something readable with it, it's almost always by using a sequence of tweets, which gives far more scope, as do sequences of linked haiku. But both kind of miss the point of the medium.
January 29, 2012
Good readers make good writers
O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
To wat their cork-heeled shoon,
But lang or ere the play was played,
They wat their hats abune.
(Sir Patrick Spens, Anon)
At quarter to six the old cook came on deck,
Saying: fellows, it's too rough to feed you.
At seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in,
He said: fellows, it's been good to know you.
(The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot)
Moral? Not sure really - if it worked once it'll work again in a new setting? Or maybe: however contemporary you are, the more you read, and are aware of what's been done in the past, the more resonance you can create by using its echoes?
Great song, anyway.
January 26, 2012
Interview with Sue Rose
Sue Rose's first collection of poems, From the Dark Room was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011 and I reviewed it here. Sue Rose is a professional translator who lives in Herne Bay; she has been widely published in magazines and has won prizes in several competitions.
Hard Skin
She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.
I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.
She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.
On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
SHEENAGH: In my interview with Paul Henry , we talked about the problem of readers assuming that "I" is the poet and that any personal-sounding material is unadorned autobiography. Paul has actually left poems he liked out of his Selected because of this problem, and I react to it by hardly ever using the first person. As a poet who uses "I" a lot, what's your take on this question?
SUE: Interesting question – the first thing I did was go back to the book and check how many first person poems there were – roughly half of the poems are in the first person and quite a few others are written in the second or third person (who is really a thinly disguised first person). Only two of the poems in the book in the first person are dramatic monologues, and one of those is in my father's voice, so hardly fictional. I think this is because my writing stems from a personal response to the world and to events and it is important for me to put down faithfully what I feel. In a way, writing poetry for me is about ordering experience, making sense of it, and remembering it. And also maybe about transcending painful experience by setting it down, and thereby taking some of the sting out of it. Which is not to say I won't bend the truth to make a better poem, but the initial drive for a poem is all about getting my thoughts down as honestly as possible and the first person is my default setting. The shaping of it, and where it eventually ends up, can sometimes be far less personal – sometimes it stays with the personal experience and sometimes it heads off into surprising territory ('Globe' may be one example of this)…
I don't have a problem with readers assuming everything is autobiographical, because the poems often are in this book, and even if they are not, then I have no problem with them thinking they represent the unadulterated truth about my life. I think it does make readers connect with the poems in quite a direct way. I've lost track of the times, after a reading, that someone has come up to me and remarked how brave I am for putting my life out there… and they do seem to believe that everything in the poems is true and that is their prerogative. I do like my work to have an emotional charge, just as much as I like it to work formally – and I hate the thought of leaving the reader unmoved. If they then want to assume things about me from my work, that's fine. So long as the poem is good and does what it sets out to do.
Another factor is that this particular book, being dedicated to my father, and being my first collection, was conceived as an autobiographical project. Or rather, seeing how autobiographical it clearly was, when I put it together, I made the decision to run with that. This meant, unlike Paul Henry, I left out certain poems I liked, such as a first-person dramatic monologue in a male voice, for example, which was definitely not autobiographical, because it just wouldn't fit anywhere - it skewed the overarching structure of the collection. I also had to axe some poems I liked which were not autobiographical enough – they didn't fit either. Those are all for the next book, which may have fewer poems in the first person, although I'm not banking on it!
SHEENAGH: I find that quite fascinating, because I've read several writers, both prose and verse, talking about this autobiographical assumption lately and you are literally the only one who doesn't have a problem with it. In fact you see a potential advantage, in that this belief of theirs may heighten the "emotional charge" you want, and that may well be.
What though, if these folk who come up to talk after a reading, believing it's all happened to you, make it clear that their reaction would be different if it hadn't? I have seen readers disappointed to find some event or character came at least partly out of the writer's imagination rather than being "real", and that does worry me; it's as if they can't tell the difference between fiction and mis-mem. Are your fans perhaps more discriminating in this matter?
SUE: Perhaps I should have said 'audiences' rather than 'readers', because I think it is important to differentiate between the effect poems might have at a reading and the way a reader might respond to the poems on the page. For a public reading, I often intersperse less personal poems with autobiographical poems, ones that are perhaps more direct, more emotional, and that will communicate well. So when I read them with conviction, and often with a short intro that underlines the personal nature of an experience, then the audience tends to know when I'm proffering 'autobiography' and when I am not. I think, generally speaking, in this era of reality TV, many people want to believe that what they are reading or hearing is genuine, felt, emotion (unless it has a big label on it, saying FICTION!). Whether rightly or wrongly, people seem to think that poetry is more confessional, more personal, in nature. They connect and empathise with the emotion expressed, and perhaps sometimes feel they have been cheated in some way if it's later revealed that it's all a construct. Maybe they feel manipulated or misled. I have to say, though, that I don't really understand why readers have to believe that something really happened, or has really been felt in order to enjoy it. It's as though for them the emotion aroused is only valid if the impetus were true. But truth of emotion should have nothing to do with factual truth…
The book probably hasn't been out there long enough for me to get a great deal of feedback on how the poems feel on the page but what I have had is pretty equally divided. Either people pick the more impersonal poems as their favourites, poems in which the personal narrative takes a back seat or disappears, like 'Caravaggio's Virgin', or they favour poems which are more emotional, like 'Arrival'. It depends on personal taste and, I guess, personal experience…
SHEENAGH: - and following on from that, you often take potentially quite emotional material, like the old age and death of parents, as in 'Making a Gem', where the material could hardly be more personal, but in my view you avoid the great pitfall of such material, which is sentimentality or self-pity. In fact those poems are often quite hard-edged. Does being a translator perhaps help you to maintain a distance from the material, even when it is your own, or have you another method for keeping that distance?
SUE: I'm not sure that the distance I hope I manage to maintain is down to being a translator. I think it has much more to do with the fact that I have a real horror of being perceived as sentimental or self-pitying, so I work very hard to craft the poem in such a way as to avoid that. My first response to something emotionally challenging is to want to get it down as honestly as possible and then examine the feelings aroused. I make use of form a fair bit in poems that are intensely personal, as this allows me to maintain the required distance. Many of the poems I wrote about my father's death are formal in some way, and this helped me to control them. The act of writing about such experiences also has a distancing effect – the minute I want to shape a painful experience and put it down on paper for the world to see, it stops being a personal event and becomes more of a universal meditation on death or bereavement, say, and not so much a piece of writing about my own personal loss. Which is not to say that they aren't painful to re-read or to perform at readings, but I want them to work as pieces of good writing, first and foremost, with a definite emotional charge. I don't want to focus readers' attention on my own pain, asking them to appreciate how unhappy I am, but I do want readers to be able to connect with the experience and, as a result, feel a sense of kinship or understanding.
SHEENAGH: That's a statement that makes me want to cheer, both as a writer and as a reader! I agree very much that when using such material, we should be looking for the universal in the personal. But I've often found it easier said than done. One of my techniques for depersonalising/universalising experience these days is to write in persona, or in any but the first person. You're more like Paul Henry, I think, in being unwilling to give up the intimacy which lyric first-person can bring. Another technique for universalising the personal is to home in on little details which may be unique to this relationship, but which illustrate something deeper about it, which is true of all relationships, and hope your reader will substitute his particular details when reading. That sounds convoluted, but what I mean is what you do in "Hard Skin", where a mother and daughter tend each other's feet. This won't have happened between every mother and daughter among your readers, but they may well have had some other ritual that expressed the same mutual care and the hope is that reading A will remind them of B. Have you any other techniques that might be helpful for writers wishing to move the reader while avoiding any hint of "poor me"?
SUE: As you say, this is so very hard to do. I think it is important to stay true to the emotional impetus, because that's what moves a reader and makes them want to read about someone else's experiences, but then crafting is crucial. The use of formal constraint is a great way of preventing self-indulgence, whether you use an established form, like the sonnet (which I find myself using a great deal), or a particular rhyme scheme, or regular stanza patterning. Anything that prevents you from saying whatever you want, when you want, and makes you use the language as a material, focusing on texture and shape. Also, concrete detail: no ideas but in things. I always find it helpful to focus very closely on imagery and description, ensuring that the language is rich and satisfying, not mundane. By this, I don't mean reaching for images that are unusual for the sake of being unusual, or which call attention to themselves too much, but ones which earn their place by reason of their 'unusual rightness', so to speak. It is important to examine each phrase, each adjective, carefully to ensure that it is right on all levels (which perhaps is where translation process comes in for me) – the act of doing this means that you are less likely to drown the poem in a wash of emotion. Personas too, are a good device, as you say. Although, I, personally, often don't feel comfortable using the third person to write about something intensely personal. It sort of feels dishonest!
SHEENAGH: I think there's some incredibly helpful advice in there, particularly about using devices that stop you saying whatever you want, when you want! You spoke of the influence of translation; what effects, in fact, would you say your work as a translator has on your original work in general?
SUE: It is hard to know, really, which feeds into which… I became a translator because I love playing with words and finding the best combination of words and emotion in the target language that replicates the words and emotion in the source language. For both professions, writing and translating, you have to be very pernickety about words and meanings. I like to think that I weigh words very carefully and am very attentive to levels of meaning and word play as a result. But this is probably one of the reasons that I became a translator and why I write poetry – not a result of either pursuit. They are really very similar in terms of practice, since in many ways you are creating a new piece of writing in your own language that is meant to mimic or reproduce the effect and spirit of the original piece, (sometimes using different devices, different puns or jokes, and different cultural references) rather than just finding the literal translations of each word in a sentence. So there is a real need for creative choices to be made at all stages. I also read both my literary translations and my poems out loud at various stages of the drafting process, and this helps me create an internal music or iron out any aural spikes which offend my ear. In the case of a translation, I will often read out the original to see how it sounds and feels on the tongue, before trying to recreate the sound and feel in the target language. The negative effect of working as a translator is one of overkill… when I have spent a long day playing with words to recreate someone else's fictional world, I have absolutely no desire to work on my own writing… I am completely fed up with words and all I want to do is play tennis or watch bad TV – so my own writing suffers… The nice thing, of course, with translation is that you don't need to come up with a creative impetus! You have something pre-existing to work with, so there isn't the onus on you to come up with something exciting and original!
SHEENAGH: Yes, and some poets riff off that; for example Anne Berkeley in her collection The Men from Praga has a whole series of riffs called "Baudelaire's Pipe", which go from straight translation of the poem in question to serious reimagining. And Peter Finch has used the Google translator (or mistranslator) to remake famous poems. Are you tempted by that sort of re-creation? Or would it, for you, be too formal an impetus; would it lack the emotional charge you want?
SUE: I love what Anne Berkeley does with translation and with language – it's so clever and witty! I have never really attempted that kind of re-creation, and I'm not sure I could do it. Perhaps it's too close to my day job. I have to be so careful about faithfully translating the spirit of another author's creative mission, that I think I would find it hard to move away from that in order to create a version that might run counter to what they intended or might have nothing to do with their original concept. Having said that, I would like to do more translation of poetry, and play with versions, but it's hard enough to find enough time to do my work as a translator and write at the moment. Perhaps in the future… And, as to emotional charge, I would probably choose source works that had some kind of an emotional impetus that appealed to me and which I could somehow hijack!
SHEENAGH: I know you have friendly connections with several other writers; in that sense you're more a writer in a like-minded community than one who works in isolation. Has that always been so, and do you sense influences and cross-currents from the other writers you know well?
SUE: I think that input from other writers is incredibly important, certainly for me… Partly this may be due to the fact that both professions I have chosen are very isolated, so I welcome the sound of other voices. The danger, of course, is that you can be swayed from your original purpose by someone else's strong opinions, if you're not careful. I find workshopping with a group of peers I respect and whose work is very different from mine, very helpful indeed. It often enables me to crystallise my own feelings or reservations about a line or word, and helps me to turn up the volume on my own doubts. It is not that different from reading widely, which is also incredibly important. Being in a community of writers enables you to have a wider view about the issues that concern other people and you can draw on a wider range of reading and experience. As a result, I am obviously influenced by these other writers' concerns, and this can be profitable for my own work. For instance, I have been producing more ekphrastic poems in the last couple of years, and this is probably partly in response to my own need to move away from the personal or domestic vein, and partly in response to the sort of work being done by other members of the workshop I attend.
SHEENAGH: Ooh, are we perchance talking about influence from Tamar Yoseloff's recently published Jackson Pollock poems here? They seem very far from your own concerns and methods, but I know how the most unlikely influences can creep into one's work!
SUE: Tamar Yoseloff's work over the years has definitely been an influence and not just the Pollock sequence – her appreciation of art has been central to her life and work for years (see her very fruitful collaborations with Linda Karshan) and this is something that has interested me greatly. I like the idea of using external impetuses for poetry – after a while it feels a little boring—too predictable, and too navel-gazing—to keep mining your own childhood and emotional life for subjects. I do find, though, that I approach art, and using art in poetry, in a very emotional way. I find it hard to be 'disengaged' in anything I do, so even though a poem may start from a very impersonal impetus, it often ends up quite personal in approach. I also like the idea of bringing other forms of art into my work, such as music, which is a big part of my life. I think that, in general, the more external influences we allow to creep into our work, the richer and more interesting it will be!
Poems
Sample
I'm driving to the hospital
along a skein of water,
your DNA in my pocket-
two hundred million blueprints
motoring round a plastic pot
nested in a woollen sock
the tender blue of thrushes' eggs.
If this rain continues
and the world goes under again-
fields, churches and cities
roofed by a formless sea-
I'll still count as a pair
for the new ark. Bearing you
in my hand, I'd step aboard,
take to bed in the hold.
Scientists would come
to claim you as I lay curled
to keep you living. Supercooled
in liquid nitrogen, you'd be
cloned back to me, child
and husband, when the waters fell
and the dove returned.
This motile spoonful,
fertile as silt,
holds such power.
No more though
than a formula for a man
a cloudy fluid tilting
in its crucible, waiting
to become.
Making a Gem
I will measure out their ash
in the kitchen scales like gritty flour,
combining his and hers, light and dark
perhaps, agitating the urns gently
as the red needle edges to the black line-
exactly two hundred grams-
and pour the mixture into a bag
for the short drive to the post office,
pensioners' queue, special delivery.
Then a hot oven, three hundred centigrade,
relentless as the earth's core, baking
their captured carbon to pure graphite-
unique elements, sealed by steel forgings
in a crucible. Days of pressure will refine
them slowly, forcing change. Matter breaks
under such forces, atoms crystallise
and molecules bond to form stone,
fancy blue or yellow, octahedral, in the rough.
The Wreck of the Alba
after Alfred Wallis
Masts, decks, jetty, hills, dulled to old metal,
sunlessness, the mineral land, squalled wet.
Coal in the holds, iron in the stones, no light
from the lighthouse; the vessel is divided
by salt water churning like chyme.
It's a dirty drowning, thick water filling eyes,
ears, lungs, like off-milk, rancid curds blueing
the periphery. Thing lost flash by, dropping
into the depths. You cannot keep a hold-
they plummet through the water like dark boots.
Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf
Hard Skin
She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.
I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.
She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.
On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
SHEENAGH: In my interview with Paul Henry , we talked about the problem of readers assuming that "I" is the poet and that any personal-sounding material is unadorned autobiography. Paul has actually left poems he liked out of his Selected because of this problem, and I react to it by hardly ever using the first person. As a poet who uses "I" a lot, what's your take on this question?
SUE: Interesting question – the first thing I did was go back to the book and check how many first person poems there were – roughly half of the poems are in the first person and quite a few others are written in the second or third person (who is really a thinly disguised first person). Only two of the poems in the book in the first person are dramatic monologues, and one of those is in my father's voice, so hardly fictional. I think this is because my writing stems from a personal response to the world and to events and it is important for me to put down faithfully what I feel. In a way, writing poetry for me is about ordering experience, making sense of it, and remembering it. And also maybe about transcending painful experience by setting it down, and thereby taking some of the sting out of it. Which is not to say I won't bend the truth to make a better poem, but the initial drive for a poem is all about getting my thoughts down as honestly as possible and the first person is my default setting. The shaping of it, and where it eventually ends up, can sometimes be far less personal – sometimes it stays with the personal experience and sometimes it heads off into surprising territory ('Globe' may be one example of this)…
I don't have a problem with readers assuming everything is autobiographical, because the poems often are in this book, and even if they are not, then I have no problem with them thinking they represent the unadulterated truth about my life. I think it does make readers connect with the poems in quite a direct way. I've lost track of the times, after a reading, that someone has come up to me and remarked how brave I am for putting my life out there… and they do seem to believe that everything in the poems is true and that is their prerogative. I do like my work to have an emotional charge, just as much as I like it to work formally – and I hate the thought of leaving the reader unmoved. If they then want to assume things about me from my work, that's fine. So long as the poem is good and does what it sets out to do.
Another factor is that this particular book, being dedicated to my father, and being my first collection, was conceived as an autobiographical project. Or rather, seeing how autobiographical it clearly was, when I put it together, I made the decision to run with that. This meant, unlike Paul Henry, I left out certain poems I liked, such as a first-person dramatic monologue in a male voice, for example, which was definitely not autobiographical, because it just wouldn't fit anywhere - it skewed the overarching structure of the collection. I also had to axe some poems I liked which were not autobiographical enough – they didn't fit either. Those are all for the next book, which may have fewer poems in the first person, although I'm not banking on it!
SHEENAGH: I find that quite fascinating, because I've read several writers, both prose and verse, talking about this autobiographical assumption lately and you are literally the only one who doesn't have a problem with it. In fact you see a potential advantage, in that this belief of theirs may heighten the "emotional charge" you want, and that may well be.
What though, if these folk who come up to talk after a reading, believing it's all happened to you, make it clear that their reaction would be different if it hadn't? I have seen readers disappointed to find some event or character came at least partly out of the writer's imagination rather than being "real", and that does worry me; it's as if they can't tell the difference between fiction and mis-mem. Are your fans perhaps more discriminating in this matter?
SUE: Perhaps I should have said 'audiences' rather than 'readers', because I think it is important to differentiate between the effect poems might have at a reading and the way a reader might respond to the poems on the page. For a public reading, I often intersperse less personal poems with autobiographical poems, ones that are perhaps more direct, more emotional, and that will communicate well. So when I read them with conviction, and often with a short intro that underlines the personal nature of an experience, then the audience tends to know when I'm proffering 'autobiography' and when I am not. I think, generally speaking, in this era of reality TV, many people want to believe that what they are reading or hearing is genuine, felt, emotion (unless it has a big label on it, saying FICTION!). Whether rightly or wrongly, people seem to think that poetry is more confessional, more personal, in nature. They connect and empathise with the emotion expressed, and perhaps sometimes feel they have been cheated in some way if it's later revealed that it's all a construct. Maybe they feel manipulated or misled. I have to say, though, that I don't really understand why readers have to believe that something really happened, or has really been felt in order to enjoy it. It's as though for them the emotion aroused is only valid if the impetus were true. But truth of emotion should have nothing to do with factual truth…
The book probably hasn't been out there long enough for me to get a great deal of feedback on how the poems feel on the page but what I have had is pretty equally divided. Either people pick the more impersonal poems as their favourites, poems in which the personal narrative takes a back seat or disappears, like 'Caravaggio's Virgin', or they favour poems which are more emotional, like 'Arrival'. It depends on personal taste and, I guess, personal experience…
SHEENAGH: - and following on from that, you often take potentially quite emotional material, like the old age and death of parents, as in 'Making a Gem', where the material could hardly be more personal, but in my view you avoid the great pitfall of such material, which is sentimentality or self-pity. In fact those poems are often quite hard-edged. Does being a translator perhaps help you to maintain a distance from the material, even when it is your own, or have you another method for keeping that distance?
SUE: I'm not sure that the distance I hope I manage to maintain is down to being a translator. I think it has much more to do with the fact that I have a real horror of being perceived as sentimental or self-pitying, so I work very hard to craft the poem in such a way as to avoid that. My first response to something emotionally challenging is to want to get it down as honestly as possible and then examine the feelings aroused. I make use of form a fair bit in poems that are intensely personal, as this allows me to maintain the required distance. Many of the poems I wrote about my father's death are formal in some way, and this helped me to control them. The act of writing about such experiences also has a distancing effect – the minute I want to shape a painful experience and put it down on paper for the world to see, it stops being a personal event and becomes more of a universal meditation on death or bereavement, say, and not so much a piece of writing about my own personal loss. Which is not to say that they aren't painful to re-read or to perform at readings, but I want them to work as pieces of good writing, first and foremost, with a definite emotional charge. I don't want to focus readers' attention on my own pain, asking them to appreciate how unhappy I am, but I do want readers to be able to connect with the experience and, as a result, feel a sense of kinship or understanding.
SHEENAGH: That's a statement that makes me want to cheer, both as a writer and as a reader! I agree very much that when using such material, we should be looking for the universal in the personal. But I've often found it easier said than done. One of my techniques for depersonalising/universalising experience these days is to write in persona, or in any but the first person. You're more like Paul Henry, I think, in being unwilling to give up the intimacy which lyric first-person can bring. Another technique for universalising the personal is to home in on little details which may be unique to this relationship, but which illustrate something deeper about it, which is true of all relationships, and hope your reader will substitute his particular details when reading. That sounds convoluted, but what I mean is what you do in "Hard Skin", where a mother and daughter tend each other's feet. This won't have happened between every mother and daughter among your readers, but they may well have had some other ritual that expressed the same mutual care and the hope is that reading A will remind them of B. Have you any other techniques that might be helpful for writers wishing to move the reader while avoiding any hint of "poor me"?
SUE: As you say, this is so very hard to do. I think it is important to stay true to the emotional impetus, because that's what moves a reader and makes them want to read about someone else's experiences, but then crafting is crucial. The use of formal constraint is a great way of preventing self-indulgence, whether you use an established form, like the sonnet (which I find myself using a great deal), or a particular rhyme scheme, or regular stanza patterning. Anything that prevents you from saying whatever you want, when you want, and makes you use the language as a material, focusing on texture and shape. Also, concrete detail: no ideas but in things. I always find it helpful to focus very closely on imagery and description, ensuring that the language is rich and satisfying, not mundane. By this, I don't mean reaching for images that are unusual for the sake of being unusual, or which call attention to themselves too much, but ones which earn their place by reason of their 'unusual rightness', so to speak. It is important to examine each phrase, each adjective, carefully to ensure that it is right on all levels (which perhaps is where translation process comes in for me) – the act of doing this means that you are less likely to drown the poem in a wash of emotion. Personas too, are a good device, as you say. Although, I, personally, often don't feel comfortable using the third person to write about something intensely personal. It sort of feels dishonest!
SHEENAGH: I think there's some incredibly helpful advice in there, particularly about using devices that stop you saying whatever you want, when you want! You spoke of the influence of translation; what effects, in fact, would you say your work as a translator has on your original work in general?
SUE: It is hard to know, really, which feeds into which… I became a translator because I love playing with words and finding the best combination of words and emotion in the target language that replicates the words and emotion in the source language. For both professions, writing and translating, you have to be very pernickety about words and meanings. I like to think that I weigh words very carefully and am very attentive to levels of meaning and word play as a result. But this is probably one of the reasons that I became a translator and why I write poetry – not a result of either pursuit. They are really very similar in terms of practice, since in many ways you are creating a new piece of writing in your own language that is meant to mimic or reproduce the effect and spirit of the original piece, (sometimes using different devices, different puns or jokes, and different cultural references) rather than just finding the literal translations of each word in a sentence. So there is a real need for creative choices to be made at all stages. I also read both my literary translations and my poems out loud at various stages of the drafting process, and this helps me create an internal music or iron out any aural spikes which offend my ear. In the case of a translation, I will often read out the original to see how it sounds and feels on the tongue, before trying to recreate the sound and feel in the target language. The negative effect of working as a translator is one of overkill… when I have spent a long day playing with words to recreate someone else's fictional world, I have absolutely no desire to work on my own writing… I am completely fed up with words and all I want to do is play tennis or watch bad TV – so my own writing suffers… The nice thing, of course, with translation is that you don't need to come up with a creative impetus! You have something pre-existing to work with, so there isn't the onus on you to come up with something exciting and original!
SHEENAGH: Yes, and some poets riff off that; for example Anne Berkeley in her collection The Men from Praga has a whole series of riffs called "Baudelaire's Pipe", which go from straight translation of the poem in question to serious reimagining. And Peter Finch has used the Google translator (or mistranslator) to remake famous poems. Are you tempted by that sort of re-creation? Or would it, for you, be too formal an impetus; would it lack the emotional charge you want?
SUE: I love what Anne Berkeley does with translation and with language – it's so clever and witty! I have never really attempted that kind of re-creation, and I'm not sure I could do it. Perhaps it's too close to my day job. I have to be so careful about faithfully translating the spirit of another author's creative mission, that I think I would find it hard to move away from that in order to create a version that might run counter to what they intended or might have nothing to do with their original concept. Having said that, I would like to do more translation of poetry, and play with versions, but it's hard enough to find enough time to do my work as a translator and write at the moment. Perhaps in the future… And, as to emotional charge, I would probably choose source works that had some kind of an emotional impetus that appealed to me and which I could somehow hijack!
SHEENAGH: I know you have friendly connections with several other writers; in that sense you're more a writer in a like-minded community than one who works in isolation. Has that always been so, and do you sense influences and cross-currents from the other writers you know well?
SUE: I think that input from other writers is incredibly important, certainly for me… Partly this may be due to the fact that both professions I have chosen are very isolated, so I welcome the sound of other voices. The danger, of course, is that you can be swayed from your original purpose by someone else's strong opinions, if you're not careful. I find workshopping with a group of peers I respect and whose work is very different from mine, very helpful indeed. It often enables me to crystallise my own feelings or reservations about a line or word, and helps me to turn up the volume on my own doubts. It is not that different from reading widely, which is also incredibly important. Being in a community of writers enables you to have a wider view about the issues that concern other people and you can draw on a wider range of reading and experience. As a result, I am obviously influenced by these other writers' concerns, and this can be profitable for my own work. For instance, I have been producing more ekphrastic poems in the last couple of years, and this is probably partly in response to my own need to move away from the personal or domestic vein, and partly in response to the sort of work being done by other members of the workshop I attend.
SHEENAGH: Ooh, are we perchance talking about influence from Tamar Yoseloff's recently published Jackson Pollock poems here? They seem very far from your own concerns and methods, but I know how the most unlikely influences can creep into one's work!
SUE: Tamar Yoseloff's work over the years has definitely been an influence and not just the Pollock sequence – her appreciation of art has been central to her life and work for years (see her very fruitful collaborations with Linda Karshan) and this is something that has interested me greatly. I like the idea of using external impetuses for poetry – after a while it feels a little boring—too predictable, and too navel-gazing—to keep mining your own childhood and emotional life for subjects. I do find, though, that I approach art, and using art in poetry, in a very emotional way. I find it hard to be 'disengaged' in anything I do, so even though a poem may start from a very impersonal impetus, it often ends up quite personal in approach. I also like the idea of bringing other forms of art into my work, such as music, which is a big part of my life. I think that, in general, the more external influences we allow to creep into our work, the richer and more interesting it will be!
Poems
Sample
I'm driving to the hospital
along a skein of water,
your DNA in my pocket-
two hundred million blueprints
motoring round a plastic pot
nested in a woollen sock
the tender blue of thrushes' eggs.
If this rain continues
and the world goes under again-
fields, churches and cities
roofed by a formless sea-
I'll still count as a pair
for the new ark. Bearing you
in my hand, I'd step aboard,
take to bed in the hold.
Scientists would come
to claim you as I lay curled
to keep you living. Supercooled
in liquid nitrogen, you'd be
cloned back to me, child
and husband, when the waters fell
and the dove returned.
This motile spoonful,
fertile as silt,
holds such power.
No more though
than a formula for a man
a cloudy fluid tilting
in its crucible, waiting
to become.
Making a Gem
I will measure out their ash
in the kitchen scales like gritty flour,
combining his and hers, light and dark
perhaps, agitating the urns gently
as the red needle edges to the black line-
exactly two hundred grams-
and pour the mixture into a bag
for the short drive to the post office,
pensioners' queue, special delivery.
Then a hot oven, three hundred centigrade,
relentless as the earth's core, baking
their captured carbon to pure graphite-
unique elements, sealed by steel forgings
in a crucible. Days of pressure will refine
them slowly, forcing change. Matter breaks
under such forces, atoms crystallise
and molecules bond to form stone,
fancy blue or yellow, octahedral, in the rough.
The Wreck of the Alba
after Alfred Wallis
Masts, decks, jetty, hills, dulled to old metal,
sunlessness, the mineral land, squalled wet.
Coal in the holds, iron in the stones, no light
from the lighthouse; the vessel is divided
by salt water churning like chyme.
It's a dirty drowning, thick water filling eyes,
ears, lungs, like off-milk, rancid curds blueing
the periphery. Thing lost flash by, dropping
into the depths. You cannot keep a hold-
they plummet through the water like dark boots.
Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf
January 23, 2012
Agent 160
Agent 160 is a new theatre company led by female writers and trying to rectify an appalling statistic - only 17% of produced theatre work in the UK is written by women. They are launching their first productions this February in Cardiff, Glasgow and London -
CARDIFF: Chapter Arts Centre, February 17 and 18 at 7.30pm.
LONDON: Theatre503, February 19 and 20 at 7.45pm.
GLASGOW: The Arches, February 22 and 23 at 7.30pm. and their web page gives booking links.
They also have a blog which is running interviews with the writers, and the first one, with Sam Burns, is here. The said Sam is my daughter, as it happens....
CARDIFF: Chapter Arts Centre, February 17 and 18 at 7.30pm.
LONDON: Theatre503, February 19 and 20 at 7.45pm.
GLASGOW: The Arches, February 22 and 23 at 7.30pm. and their web page gives booking links.
They also have a blog which is running interviews with the writers, and the first one, with Sam Burns, is here. The said Sam is my daughter, as it happens....
January 14, 2012
Why do (some) people hate and resent writers?
The immediate cause of this post is that, as you can see here, the government has a consultation underway on proposals, basically, to put their hand in authors' pockets and filch the small sums some of them get when their work is copied and used for educational purposes. Those of us who are authors ought certainly to support ALCS's efforts to maintain the principle that writers deserve to be paid for their work.
But there's more, as Mr Carson used to say; when I saw this, I could predict with some certainty what the reactions of many Joe Publics on newspaper forums would be, namely the folk who honestly seem to hate and resent any artists, but especially writers, actually earning anything from their work. Whenever any writer complains online about people nicking their work, someone commenting below the line is sure to protest that authors should think it an incredible privilege to be published and read at all; if they were "real artists" they wouldn't have filthy mercenary motives like making a living (I've seen it, in more or less those words, more than once). Others will suggest they ought only to be paid once, after which it should be in the public domain and copyright shouldn't exist at all. This principle would certainly make a considerable difference in the price of medicines and commercial inventions, but no one ever seems to suggest applying it there.
Nor is it just Joe Public. A while ago on Facebook, a writer complained that having done some freelance work at a university, for an agreed fee, a year had passed and she hadn't seen the colour of their money. Some snooty academic commented that it was the ethos in academia to share one's knowledge for free and if professional writers couldn't live with that, they should avoid working in an academic environment. Ooh, get him, who like all these academics nobly sharing their knowledge for free has a permanent, secure, full-time job - unlike many writers. Anyway, since when does one apply this "ethos" to people coming in from outside? If the University of Wherever find they need the services of a plumber or electrician, do they expect these obliging fellows to supply their expertise free? Not if they've any sense, they don't!
But writers are different. Perhaps this is a hangover from the irritating Romantic image of the writer starving in a garret, but I don't think that is the whole of the reason. I suspect that very, very many people want to be published writers so desperately that they resent bitterly those who are, and feel these writers should be more grateful for what they themselves want - as if getting published were purely a matter of luck and in no way down to talent and hard work. You'd think, in these days, folk who want to be published and can't find an outlet could just do it themselves; self-publication has never been either so cheap or so easy, but maybe that doesn't give them the seal of approval they need.
That's my guess, but has anyone else any theories on why so many people seem to want writers to prove their authenticity by starving in garrets?
But there's more, as Mr Carson used to say; when I saw this, I could predict with some certainty what the reactions of many Joe Publics on newspaper forums would be, namely the folk who honestly seem to hate and resent any artists, but especially writers, actually earning anything from their work. Whenever any writer complains online about people nicking their work, someone commenting below the line is sure to protest that authors should think it an incredible privilege to be published and read at all; if they were "real artists" they wouldn't have filthy mercenary motives like making a living (I've seen it, in more or less those words, more than once). Others will suggest they ought only to be paid once, after which it should be in the public domain and copyright shouldn't exist at all. This principle would certainly make a considerable difference in the price of medicines and commercial inventions, but no one ever seems to suggest applying it there.
Nor is it just Joe Public. A while ago on Facebook, a writer complained that having done some freelance work at a university, for an agreed fee, a year had passed and she hadn't seen the colour of their money. Some snooty academic commented that it was the ethos in academia to share one's knowledge for free and if professional writers couldn't live with that, they should avoid working in an academic environment. Ooh, get him, who like all these academics nobly sharing their knowledge for free has a permanent, secure, full-time job - unlike many writers. Anyway, since when does one apply this "ethos" to people coming in from outside? If the University of Wherever find they need the services of a plumber or electrician, do they expect these obliging fellows to supply their expertise free? Not if they've any sense, they don't!
But writers are different. Perhaps this is a hangover from the irritating Romantic image of the writer starving in a garret, but I don't think that is the whole of the reason. I suspect that very, very many people want to be published writers so desperately that they resent bitterly those who are, and feel these writers should be more grateful for what they themselves want - as if getting published were purely a matter of luck and in no way down to talent and hard work. You'd think, in these days, folk who want to be published and can't find an outlet could just do it themselves; self-publication has never been either so cheap or so easy, but maybe that doesn't give them the seal of approval they need.
That's my guess, but has anyone else any theories on why so many people seem to want writers to prove their authenticity by starving in garrets?
January 3, 2012
Things I read last year (and want to recall). And one for this year
Seems to be a wot-I-read-last-year meme going around. I'm not including re-reads which would take forever, only ones read for the first time. I read quite a lot of new books, because I'm on the Amazon Vine programme which means I get stuff free providing I review it. But a lot of that, I don't especially want to read again. Books I shall re-read include:
Poetry
From the Dark Room by Sue Rose, which I reviewed here
The anthology of Scottish island poetry, These Islands, We Sing ed. Kevin Macneil, which I reviewed here
The City with Horns by Tamar Yoseloff, reviewed here
The Suitable Girl by Michelle McGrane, reviewed here
Other
Sixty-Six Books: 21st-century writers speak to the King James Bible. I couldn't really review this because my daughter Sam Burns is one of the playwrights in it. But it's a great read; the text of the Bush Theatre's mammoth performance of playlets, one engaging with each book of the Bible.
Arctic Convoys 1941-45 by Richard Woodman. This was published in 2007; it's a subject I'm reading my way through out of personal interest (my late father was very proud of his medal from Mr Gorbachev's Russia; his own country never did get around to striking a medal for those involved in one of the most arduous and dangerous of sea campaigns).
The book I'm most looking forward to reading in 2012 (apart from anything by Louise Gluck) is The Book of Idiots by Christopher Meredith. Apart from the fact that the title intrigues, it's promised to be "both serious and blackly comic" and knowing the author, it'll deliver.
Poetry
From the Dark Room by Sue Rose, which I reviewed here
The anthology of Scottish island poetry, These Islands, We Sing ed. Kevin Macneil, which I reviewed here
The City with Horns by Tamar Yoseloff, reviewed here
The Suitable Girl by Michelle McGrane, reviewed here
Other
Sixty-Six Books: 21st-century writers speak to the King James Bible. I couldn't really review this because my daughter Sam Burns is one of the playwrights in it. But it's a great read; the text of the Bush Theatre's mammoth performance of playlets, one engaging with each book of the Bible.
Arctic Convoys 1941-45 by Richard Woodman. This was published in 2007; it's a subject I'm reading my way through out of personal interest (my late father was very proud of his medal from Mr Gorbachev's Russia; his own country never did get around to striking a medal for those involved in one of the most arduous and dangerous of sea campaigns).
The book I'm most looking forward to reading in 2012 (apart from anything by Louise Gluck) is The Book of Idiots by Christopher Meredith. Apart from the fact that the title intrigues, it's promised to be "both serious and blackly comic" and knowing the author, it'll deliver.
December 30, 2011
Two book blogs to note
Here is a new blog on cult fiction by the poet and novelist Matthew Francis, and on the strength of the first entry it looks like being very interesting. I'd never heard of either this book, The Man on a Donkey, nor of the author, HFM Prescott, and the summary's fascinating. I especially like Matthew's observation "We read historical fiction not just to get a story, but to know what life must have been like for people in a remote time" which seems to me very true.
I like literary blogs on specific themes, and this looks like being a welcome addition - I'm looking forward to his next entry, on Riddley Walker. My other fave in this line is Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry, which ranges very widely and is never afraid to say just what it thinks.
I like literary blogs on specific themes, and this looks like being a welcome addition - I'm looking forward to his next entry, on Riddley Walker. My other fave in this line is Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry, which ranges very widely and is never afraid to say just what it thinks.
December 24, 2011
Nuts to originality
There's an article by Marjorie Perloff in the current PN Review (vol 38 no 3) which it's taken me a week to get around to reading, purely because the title, "Towards a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context" was so off-puttingly reminiscent of the most boring type of academic dissertation. But as often happens, it concealed a riveting and thought-provoking article, on what a lot of people nowadays think poetry is, why they're wrong, and why this misconception leads to such truly awful poetry.
The trigger was a workshop for high school poets, held at the White House under the auspices of Michelle Obama and attended by four practising poets, of whom more anon. The introductory remarks, by Mrs Obama and others, stressed the importance of poetry as a teenage escape from real life – "whenever I didn't want to deal with the nonsense of the neighbourhood I would write and write" – and preparation for more important, real-life, adult activities –"it was my writing that prepared me for what I've had to do in my life as an adult". Despite the presence of published poets, it isn't seen as a career in itself; it isn't even for itself. What it is for is self-expression; Rita Dove tells the group "Only you can tell your own story". Some of the students then get to read their own poems. Not surprisingly, given these criteria, they are truly dire. No doubt they were good therapy, and useful as such, but as poems they are quite unredeemed by any sense of rhythm, structure or even feeling for words (witness the one which uses "exceeded" for "succeeded"). All they do have going for them are originality and authenticity, which are clearly seen as cardinal virtues when trying to write a poem.
They aren't, of course, and Dove's "only you can tell your own story" is not just wrong but laughable. So if Richard II, languishing in the Tower, had thought to set down his memoirs, he'd have shown sharper insight, more profound analysis of his situation, given himself better words, than Shakespeare did? "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" – yeah, right… Not only are you not the only one who can tell your own story; it's extremely likely that someone with a better command of words will in fact do it better, just as someone with artistic flair and training can paint a better portrait of you than you can yourself.
Another of the invited poets, Kenneth Goldsmith, pretty much says this, in a way that apparently didn't go down too well with the students. Far from lauding original voice and authenticity, he tells them (tongue in cheek, but you can see how he'd have enjoyed their aghast reaction to this hyperbole) that his own students are penalised for any display of originality – "instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, stealing and plundering". More, he would have them simply copy out pages of writing by classic authors, as apprentice painters would copy masterworks. To quote Perloff, "copying, cutting and pasting, downloading, recycling, Goldsmith maintains, will actually teach students more about literature than the seeming 'originality' of self-expression".
I don't go all the way with Goldsmith; to my mind, copying typescript is not quite analagous to copying a painting because it doesn't teach technique in the same way (though you will absorb a certain amount just from reading as you do it). I'd rather get students writing pastiche, tackling a set theme "in the style of" such and such a writer, as opposed to their own voice, which is as yet undeveloped and always will be unless they form it the way we all do, by exposure to the work of others. In many ways, of course, his advice is a variant on what we all urge students to do, ie read more, but his teaching methods would mean they actually had to do so, rather than ignoring their hapless lecturers the way they usually do. It's also a hell of a welcome change from extolling the virtues of self-expression, telling one's own story and that hugely over-rated quality, originality.
I don't go all the way with Perloff either; at one point she has the obligatory intellectual side-swipe at Billy Collins. I really don't think most academics get what he is about, but her point is particularly misconceived; when she objects to a line of his that the metaphor is forced – "where is the fishing village today that has no phones?" she is thinking in purely American terms; outside the developed world I'm sure I could find her plenty such, and nowhere in the poem does Collins specify where this village should be. But the article as a whole is most interesting, especially for those of us who still think poetry is basically not made of feelings or ideas, but words.
The trigger was a workshop for high school poets, held at the White House under the auspices of Michelle Obama and attended by four practising poets, of whom more anon. The introductory remarks, by Mrs Obama and others, stressed the importance of poetry as a teenage escape from real life – "whenever I didn't want to deal with the nonsense of the neighbourhood I would write and write" – and preparation for more important, real-life, adult activities –"it was my writing that prepared me for what I've had to do in my life as an adult". Despite the presence of published poets, it isn't seen as a career in itself; it isn't even for itself. What it is for is self-expression; Rita Dove tells the group "Only you can tell your own story". Some of the students then get to read their own poems. Not surprisingly, given these criteria, they are truly dire. No doubt they were good therapy, and useful as such, but as poems they are quite unredeemed by any sense of rhythm, structure or even feeling for words (witness the one which uses "exceeded" for "succeeded"). All they do have going for them are originality and authenticity, which are clearly seen as cardinal virtues when trying to write a poem.
They aren't, of course, and Dove's "only you can tell your own story" is not just wrong but laughable. So if Richard II, languishing in the Tower, had thought to set down his memoirs, he'd have shown sharper insight, more profound analysis of his situation, given himself better words, than Shakespeare did? "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" – yeah, right… Not only are you not the only one who can tell your own story; it's extremely likely that someone with a better command of words will in fact do it better, just as someone with artistic flair and training can paint a better portrait of you than you can yourself.
Another of the invited poets, Kenneth Goldsmith, pretty much says this, in a way that apparently didn't go down too well with the students. Far from lauding original voice and authenticity, he tells them (tongue in cheek, but you can see how he'd have enjoyed their aghast reaction to this hyperbole) that his own students are penalised for any display of originality – "instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, stealing and plundering". More, he would have them simply copy out pages of writing by classic authors, as apprentice painters would copy masterworks. To quote Perloff, "copying, cutting and pasting, downloading, recycling, Goldsmith maintains, will actually teach students more about literature than the seeming 'originality' of self-expression".
I don't go all the way with Goldsmith; to my mind, copying typescript is not quite analagous to copying a painting because it doesn't teach technique in the same way (though you will absorb a certain amount just from reading as you do it). I'd rather get students writing pastiche, tackling a set theme "in the style of" such and such a writer, as opposed to their own voice, which is as yet undeveloped and always will be unless they form it the way we all do, by exposure to the work of others. In many ways, of course, his advice is a variant on what we all urge students to do, ie read more, but his teaching methods would mean they actually had to do so, rather than ignoring their hapless lecturers the way they usually do. It's also a hell of a welcome change from extolling the virtues of self-expression, telling one's own story and that hugely over-rated quality, originality.
I don't go all the way with Perloff either; at one point she has the obligatory intellectual side-swipe at Billy Collins. I really don't think most academics get what he is about, but her point is particularly misconceived; when she objects to a line of his that the metaphor is forced – "where is the fishing village today that has no phones?" she is thinking in purely American terms; outside the developed world I'm sure I could find her plenty such, and nowhere in the poem does Collins specify where this village should be. But the article as a whole is most interesting, especially for those of us who still think poetry is basically not made of feelings or ideas, but words.
December 14, 2011
Oh bugger
I was shocked to hear how old Russell Hoban was when he died - 86 - because Riddley Walker always sounds as if it had been written yesterday. Bloody brilliant book. If there were any justice it would have won the sort of literary prizes the likes of Amis and Co do, but of course it's futuristic so the sort of people who judge those prizes don't count it as litfic. More fool them.
