Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 42
August 7, 2011
Your place, my place
I've been involved in a Facebook discussion about the naming and evoking of places in poems, and how the naming of places, while it can sometimes invite the reader in, can also sometimes exclude. At one point the poet and translator Peter Daniels, who's kindly given me permission to quote him, remarked 'There are poets that can evoke "my place" as a magic invitation to the reader (e.g. Yeats with Innisfree, Longley with Carrigskeewaun), and others (e.g. Brooke with Grantchester) that are too much of a private party - "you had to be there"'.
The more I think about it, the more I think it hinges on the fact that places, at least as far as people are concerned, exist in time and context. However much we may love a place for its landscape, its light, or anything else intrinsic, it will also, in our minds, be the place where we grew up, or fell in love, or were happy in our work. And while everyone's particular place-references will be different, the roles those places occupy in their history will be similar and can be evoked by a writer referring to a quite different place, provided he/she somehow finds the universal element that links them. As usual, example is easier. William Barnes has a poem called "The Wife a-Lost" (he wrote in Dorset dialect) in which a grieving widower spends all his time in a gloomy grove of beech, a place his wife disliked and never spent time in. The rationale is simple:
The example Peter gave, Innisfree, is an imagined paradise; it does exist in reality but its function in that poem is as an escapist's dream for a man who, standing on the grey pavements of an unnnamed city, fantasises going back to nature. Since nearly every urban dweller with a job of work has done the same (and would doubtless be as useless at growing beans and building wattle-and-daub huts as Yeats would have been), we can easily, while reading, substitute our personal paradise for his. Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge", which Peter also mentioned at some point in the discussion, works, I think, in the same way. It seems, at first sight, specifically located, and indeed for anyone who knows London and has stood in that spot, it would be. But when you look closely at it, there is nothing after the title to tie it irrevocably to London; it is a big city seen in the still of early morning. The man could be standing on a bridge in Prague, Rome, Paris or any number of cities, and no doubt for many readers that's exactly what he is doing.
Not that it's impossible to use place-names; often they can make a place-poem more 3-D, but you need to make sure they are acting as an invitation and not as a barrier, which means keeping your eye on the universal element. The usage we were discussing on FB was a reference to an Arvon writing centre, a place I'd never dare mention in a poem because I would fear it would be seen as an exclusive, luvvie poet-reference to a place non-writers simply do not know or go to. A prose example that recently annoyed me was in a short story (from a published and praised collection) which attempted to describe an area of Hamburg by saying "it was more Muswell Hill than Belgravia". This was irritating partly because, as description, it was (a) lazy and (b) useless to anyone, like me, who knows neither, but also because I sensed that she thought I ought to know them, and was indeed writing for those who did. If this sort of writing creates a magic garden, it's one we are invited only to peer in at from the outside - you had to be there... (ED: now I come to think, Muswell Hill and Belgravia may have been t'other way about, that's how useless the reference was to me.)
When it does work, it's an irresistible invitation. Sean O'Faolain has a description of Cork which comes so alive that when I finally went there, about 50 years after he wrote about it, I felt I already knew the streets. The same would be true of Konstantin Paustovsky's Odessa, if it hadn't unavoidably changed so much since the 1920s. But those guys were unusually good at the two things they did best, namely observing forensically everything they came across (Paustovsky is like a human sponge, soaking up every passing impression for dear life) and capturing the spirit of a place, the universal in the particular. O'Faolain reaches literally and metaphorically below the streets of Cork, to its subterranean rivers, to capture its essential watery quality. Paustovsky's Odessa is a place rooted in a moment; it's the place where he happened to be when the world was new, he was young and everything seemed possible. We've all been there, though we may not have called it Odessa.
I do have one poem where I consciously tried to pull off this trick, to fix experiences with specific references in the hope that readers would substitute their own. All the place-names in this poem come from my life, but the story does not; it is invented and grafted on to them, a sort of everyman-story, hopefully:
The more I think about it, the more I think it hinges on the fact that places, at least as far as people are concerned, exist in time and context. However much we may love a place for its landscape, its light, or anything else intrinsic, it will also, in our minds, be the place where we grew up, or fell in love, or were happy in our work. And while everyone's particular place-references will be different, the roles those places occupy in their history will be similar and can be evoked by a writer referring to a quite different place, provided he/she somehow finds the universal element that links them. As usual, example is easier. William Barnes has a poem called "The Wife a-Lost" (he wrote in Dorset dialect) in which a grieving widower spends all his time in a gloomy grove of beech, a place his wife disliked and never spent time in. The rationale is simple:
Below the beeches' bough, my love,- he feels some easing of his grief in this grove because it's the one place where he does not expect to see her at every turn. Now this particular place-association is specific to the poem's narrator, but almost any reader could empathise with the basic idea, and substitute his own place for the beech-grove.
Where you did never come,
An' I don't look to meet ye there,
As I do look at hwome.
The example Peter gave, Innisfree, is an imagined paradise; it does exist in reality but its function in that poem is as an escapist's dream for a man who, standing on the grey pavements of an unnnamed city, fantasises going back to nature. Since nearly every urban dweller with a job of work has done the same (and would doubtless be as useless at growing beans and building wattle-and-daub huts as Yeats would have been), we can easily, while reading, substitute our personal paradise for his. Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge", which Peter also mentioned at some point in the discussion, works, I think, in the same way. It seems, at first sight, specifically located, and indeed for anyone who knows London and has stood in that spot, it would be. But when you look closely at it, there is nothing after the title to tie it irrevocably to London; it is a big city seen in the still of early morning. The man could be standing on a bridge in Prague, Rome, Paris or any number of cities, and no doubt for many readers that's exactly what he is doing.
Not that it's impossible to use place-names; often they can make a place-poem more 3-D, but you need to make sure they are acting as an invitation and not as a barrier, which means keeping your eye on the universal element. The usage we were discussing on FB was a reference to an Arvon writing centre, a place I'd never dare mention in a poem because I would fear it would be seen as an exclusive, luvvie poet-reference to a place non-writers simply do not know or go to. A prose example that recently annoyed me was in a short story (from a published and praised collection) which attempted to describe an area of Hamburg by saying "it was more Muswell Hill than Belgravia". This was irritating partly because, as description, it was (a) lazy and (b) useless to anyone, like me, who knows neither, but also because I sensed that she thought I ought to know them, and was indeed writing for those who did. If this sort of writing creates a magic garden, it's one we are invited only to peer in at from the outside - you had to be there... (ED: now I come to think, Muswell Hill and Belgravia may have been t'other way about, that's how useless the reference was to me.)
When it does work, it's an irresistible invitation. Sean O'Faolain has a description of Cork which comes so alive that when I finally went there, about 50 years after he wrote about it, I felt I already knew the streets. The same would be true of Konstantin Paustovsky's Odessa, if it hadn't unavoidably changed so much since the 1920s. But those guys were unusually good at the two things they did best, namely observing forensically everything they came across (Paustovsky is like a human sponge, soaking up every passing impression for dear life) and capturing the spirit of a place, the universal in the particular. O'Faolain reaches literally and metaphorically below the streets of Cork, to its subterranean rivers, to capture its essential watery quality. Paustovsky's Odessa is a place rooted in a moment; it's the place where he happened to be when the world was new, he was young and everything seemed possible. We've all been there, though we may not have called it Odessa.
I do have one poem where I consciously tried to pull off this trick, to fix experiences with specific references in the hope that readers would substitute their own. All the place-names in this poem come from my life, but the story does not; it is invented and grafted on to them, a sort of everyman-story, hopefully:
Times Like Places
There are times like places: there is weather
the shape of moments. Dark afternoons
by a fire are Craster in the rain
and a pub they happened on, unlooked-for
and welcoming, while a North Sea gale
spat spume at the rattling windows.
And most August middays can take him
to the village in Sachsen-Anhalt,
its windows shuttered against the sun
and a hen sleeping in the dusty road,
the day they picked cherries in a garden
so quiet, they could hear each other breathe.
Nor can he ever be on a ferry,
looking back at a boat's wake, and not think
of the still, glassy morning off the Hook,
when it dawned on him they didn't talk
in sentences any more: didn't need to,
each knowing what the other would say.
The worst was Aberdeen, when they walked
the length of Union Street not speaking,
choking up, glancing sideways at each other,
but never at the same time. Black cats
and windy bridges bring it all back,
eyes stinging. Yet even this memory
is dear to him, now that no place or weather
or time of day can happen to them both.
On clear winter nights, he scans the sky
for Orion's three-starred belt, remembering
whose arms warmed him, the cold night
he first saw it, who told him its name.
August 4, 2011
Lies, lies...
One of the more fascinating things about writing is how you can, while doing it, assume not only another persona but opinions and feelings you never held, experiences that never befell you, etc. I can write about being widowed, though I never have been; one just steps into the skin of Lady Franklin and uses one's imagination.... I could, though an atheist, write from a religious viewpoint: I'd feel vaguely uncomfortable about it, which is probably why I have only ever done it when translating from others, but it's perfectly possible.
Hilaire Belloc was a religious man, or so he always claimed, a practising Catholic, but you wouldn't gather as much from this poem, one of his "The world's a stage" sonnets. Some of these are frivolous; this is not:
Now one could argue that the fact that the "author" - God, in the context of this extended metaphor - doesn't show up doesn't mean he doesn't exist. R S Thomas's God is similarly and discouragingly absent, and undoubtedly believed in. But this isn't usually how Belloc visualises his God. It's also possible that he was in an uncharacteristically gloomy mood at the time. I know very little about him biographically since he's a long way down my favourites list, either as a poet or a person, so I don't know if he was depressive or subject to metaphysical doubts. But I'd then expect that when his mood changed he might have been iffy about publishing this in its current form. I wonder therefore if he's consciously in persona here, trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who genuinely sees it as a pointless and unauthored sham. If that's so, I'd be impressed, because it doesn't usually work that way round; while atheists are fascinated by the thinking of the religious, most religious writers are supremely uninterested in the viewpoint of the other side and unconvincing when they attempt it (vide C S Lewis and his pantomimic villains). Whatever the impetus, this is one of Belloc's more impressive efforts; the extended metaphor is well sustained and the last line is terrific.
Hilaire Belloc was a religious man, or so he always claimed, a practising Catholic, but you wouldn't gather as much from this poem, one of his "The world's a stage" sonnets. Some of these are frivolous; this is not:
The world's a stage. The light is in one's eyes.
The auditorium is extremely dark.
The more dishonest get the larger rise;
The more offensive make the greater mark.
The women on it prosper by their shape,
Some few by their vivacity. The men,
By tailoring in breeches and in cape.
The world's a stage —I say it once again.
The scenery is very much the best
Of what the wretched drama has to show,
Also the prompter happens to be dumb.
We drink behind the scenes and pass a jest
On all our folly; then, before we go,
Loud cries for "Author"…but he doesn't come.
Now one could argue that the fact that the "author" - God, in the context of this extended metaphor - doesn't show up doesn't mean he doesn't exist. R S Thomas's God is similarly and discouragingly absent, and undoubtedly believed in. But this isn't usually how Belloc visualises his God. It's also possible that he was in an uncharacteristically gloomy mood at the time. I know very little about him biographically since he's a long way down my favourites list, either as a poet or a person, so I don't know if he was depressive or subject to metaphysical doubts. But I'd then expect that when his mood changed he might have been iffy about publishing this in its current form. I wonder therefore if he's consciously in persona here, trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who genuinely sees it as a pointless and unauthored sham. If that's so, I'd be impressed, because it doesn't usually work that way round; while atheists are fascinated by the thinking of the religious, most religious writers are supremely uninterested in the viewpoint of the other side and unconvincing when they attempt it (vide C S Lewis and his pantomimic villains). Whatever the impetus, this is one of Belloc's more impressive efforts; the extended metaphor is well sustained and the last line is terrific.
July 26, 2011
At last!
- after godknows how long. For my seagoing friends, here's a nice little BBC vid of the Tall Ships leaving Lerwick.
July 23, 2011
It's a beautiful world, if people would just leave it alone
This is the Christian Radich of Norway, (also a veteran of The Onedin Line), at anchor in Lerwick harbour during the Tall Ships races. We were aboard her yesterday, like many other visitors; today of course all the Norwegian ships are closed to visitors and flying their flags at half mast (as are all the rest, in sympathy).
July 11, 2011
Review of "These Islands, We Sing", ed. Kevin MacNeil
I feel very iffy about reviewing this anthology, because I have some poems in it. But it seems to me to have a far more interesting organising principle than your average anthology of "poets under 30" or "women poets", who don't necessarily have a damn thing in common. This is an anthology of poets who came from, or live on, Scottish islands (not just visitors on holiday) and as the thoughtful intro makes clear, this liminality does give their writing traits in common. "The islander's sense of being removed from the heart of things relates, I think, to the writer's sense of being an observer as much as a participant". This is true, though it should not be taken to mean that island poets are unaware of what is going on at the heart of things, just that they can view it with a certain amount of detachment. Jim Mainland's scorching, careering satire "Prestidigitator", which I've blogged about before here, is as committed a modern political poem as you'll find:
Watch this, watch my hands, look in my eyes:
this is viral, this is fiending, this is Celebrity Smash Your Face In,
I'm spooling tissue from an ear, I'm sawing her in half, no, really,
I'm vanishing your dosh, I'm giving it makeover, giving it bonus,
palming it, see, nothing in the box, check out
your divorce hell text tease sex tape, whoops,
but the same writer, in "The Gunnister Man", is acutely conscious of the massive timeline, reaching back centuries, on which he is a point and which connects him to everyone else who has ever lived there. Those who live in small communities are more apt, I think, to have this sense of connectedness to the past; it appears in the poems by which George Mackay Brown and Sorley MacLean are represented here (MacLean's "Hallaig", in both the Gaelic original and the English translation, being a bright particular star).
It is in fact thought-provoking to consider the roll of famous names who fit this anthology's criteria: MacLean, Brown, Crichton Smith, Edwin Muir, MacDiarmuid, and in more contemporary times the recent T S Eliot winner Jen Hadfield. But there are many others less well known, like Jim Mainland, Laureen Johnson, William J ("Billy") Tait, Laurence Graham, who deserve to be more widely read than they are and who should come as a salty surprise to those who maybe picked up the anthology for other reasons but happen on something like James Andrew Sinclair's "Immigrant":
Fill my pockets with lochs
the wind will fit snug in my wallet.
I will weave a scarf of mackerel, haddock and trout
the good fit of sheep on my feet.
My jacket, knitted peat and heather
with a bottle of good humour for the journey.
Planks of fishing boat bound tight as a belt
the sails making dandy trousers.
My back-pack holds the entire ocean
and last but certainly not least
I will wear the sky beneath my hat.
These Islands, We Sing: An Anthology of Scottish Island Poetry is published by Polygon.
June 22, 2011
Interview with Christopher Meredith
Christopher Meredith is a novelist and poet from Wales. Though he works mainly in English, one of his books for children is in Welsh and he also translates from Welsh into English. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. His most recent collection of poems is The Meaning of Flight (Seren) and he has just completed a new novel, The Book of Idiots, which will be published in 2012. He is also involved with five artists in the project "Bog-Mawnog", responding to fire damage on a mountaintop in the Black Mountains in Powys. A booklet of Meredith's poems, Black Mountains, with images from the artists is being produced by Mulfran and there will also be an exhibition about the project in Brecknock Museum, 16th July to late September.
Toy Revolver
He loves its pointed symmetry
the lazy, opened hook of trigger
stock shaped to the palm
like a lover's hip,
opens it like unstoppering a flask
of magic that might spill.
He holds the chamber,
sectioned like fruit, close
to see each scoop and groove
each empty socket in the disc,
counts with a fingertip
six spaces for the dark seeds.
SHEENAGH: You're hard to pin down in several ways, and one is genre. You write both poetry and prose; can you do both at the same time(ish) or does it have to be either/or?
CHRIS:
I've found that writing a novel can often become all-consuming, and I do little other writing than that sometimes.
But with my second novel, Griffri, I was putting a collection of poems together at the same time as beginning work on the fiction. I was also writing full-time, which helped. What I did was at first to work on poems in the morning when I tend to be the closest I ever get to fully conscious, then have a break and do the background work for the novel in the afternoons. It's set in the 12th century so there was a lot of that to do. As the collection got more finished, so that I was tweaking, rewriting, organising, etc., and I got to the point where I was ready for the serious writing on Griffri, I swapped the pattern and worked on the novel in the mornings and worked on the poems in the afternoons. Later still the work on the poems was pretty much finished and I worked on the novel alone. It's the only time I've worked systematically like that, and I found that changing the task helped me get more out of the day. I had to go back to earning a living as a teacher and the last third of Griffri and its final redraft were written in those tough circumstances. The central character of Griffri is a poet and some scraps of poetry figure in the book. One of these, a free translation of a medieval Welsh poem in fact, made its way into the collection. And a piece of 'prose' from Griffri, reworked into lines, appeared as a poem in a later collection. So there is some interplay, and I'm sure that happens at a subtler level too.
But your question raises the puzzle of when it is that we're working. I think it's hard to be off duty as a writer, and with something as big as a novel, you may often have other projects floating in your mind while working on draft 2 page 180-something. Sometimes I have a piece or a phrase in my mind for years before it makes it on to paper. If it refuses to go away, eventually I'll write something. When my first novel came out I remember a journalist asking me what I was working on now (a standard question) and instead of talking about my next novel or the next book of poems, I remember saying, 'I've got this phrase, "sidereal time", going round in my head.' It was about eight years and two books later that I wrote the first words of the novel Sidereal Time.
SHEENAGH: Do you see yourself as a novelist who also writes poems, a poet who also writes novels and stories, a Man of Letters? And I know you have family connections with the theatre; have you ever written or wanted to write in that genre?
CHRIS: I wrote a not very good script of about 90 minutes for stage over 30 years ago. I never seriously tried to do anything with it - I think I knew it wasn't good enough, though it wasn't absolutely awful. I learned a lot in writing it, about pace and rhythm, and about patterning imagery. Later, in the middle of writing my first novel, I think, I wrote a short two-hander called The Carved Chair. I wrote it for radio. It never got broadcast, but it was staged in The Sherman in Cardiff and published in Planet. I've written a short commissioned historical play for children for radio. I'm proud of that one, a 20 minute script covering 25 years of medieval history with 3 actors for 7 to 11 year-olds, written in about 5 days. I'm specially proud of one sound-effect cue: 'Sound of Hereford Cathedral burning down.' A short story written from two points of view, called 'Averted Vision', was broadcast on radio using two voices, so it worked as a kind of play, though they only paid me the short story rate. That was all a long time ago. I don't regard myself as a playwright. Good playwrights are very rare, I think, and they fill me with admiration.
As for how I'd describe myself, I tend to put novelist first, then poet then translator, but in the case of the first two that's just because you have to put something first, and on the whole, people buy more novels than collections of poetry. I'll leave the choice of labels to others.
SHEENAGH: And as a translator, you are also on the border of two languages, as it were. Though English is your usual medium for original work, you've written a children's book in Welsh and translated Welsh books into English. What does being bilingual mean to you as a writer; do you notice one language having an effect on your use of the other?
CHRIS: I started to learn Welsh in a desultory way at the age of about 19. It's hard to believe now, but at the school I went to in Tredegar no Welsh was taught officially at all. Learning Welsh is one of the most important things I've ever done.
As far as writing is concerned this isn't only because of the contact it brings with my country/history/culture etc., though that of course is very significant, but also because of the linguistic-cultural insights it brings more generally, including into English-language culture. Welsh is syntactically very different from English, and in terms of power and influence the two are very nearly at opposite ends of the scale. To have a detailed grasp of this is very enriching. You're multi-lingual and a translator yourself, so you must know how this is. You'll know all those conceptual words in German that we have to explain at length and locute around in English. It's interesting that there's no easy translation for 'embarrassment' in Welsh, other than borrowing the English; that in Welsh we have a single verb for 'to compose poetry', and also a single verb for 'to take advantage' and also for 'to get drunk'; that we use the same word for 'learn' and 'teach'; that we use the same word for 'ladder' and 'school'; that the Welsh word for 'civilisation', unlike the Latin/English term, contains no root-idea of living in a city, but rather appeals to the idea of decency; that the two words for 'imagination' in Welsh contain nothing that suggests an image; that Welsh is much better at the future tense than English, though I'd say not as good at the present tense - and so on. Two languages alongside one another are like two mirrors in parallel. They reflect off into infinity.
There is interplay between the languages in my writing. (I always think it's ironic when people laugh at the use of English loan-words in Welsh, as English is almost entirely made of bits of other languages magpied together in one odd nest. And some people still think it's smart to borrow bits of French and German in their English; odd to find it comic that other languages borrow the other way.) As I write mainly in English, the seepage tends to be from Welsh into English. Recently, I've been commissioned to write some poems for a project based in the Black Mountains near where I live, and part of the brief is that some of it must be in Welsh. I've found it profoundly engaging and challenging to write some pieces in Welsh first and then translate them into English, and in one case to translate one of the pieces the other way. One of the poems plays with the fact that the word 'ffin' - Welsh for 'border' - occurs inside the word 'diffiniad' - 'definition', but I've written the poem in English, and it seems unlikely that it'll be one of the ones I also do in Welsh. The project is about burn-damage on the peat uplands of the mountains, and I've wanted to use plant names in the poems. One of the most common plants up there is bog cotton. The two Welsh names I know for this are 'plu'r gweunydd' and 'sidan y waun', which translate as 'meadow feathers' and 'meadow silk'. As you'll guess, there'll be some seepage there.
SHEENAGH: That resonates, because I've just written a poem based on the fact that the German word Strauss, quite apart from being the composer's name, means both an ostrich and a bouquet. And of course this suggested connections I would not have made otherwise; yet the poem itself is in English, where there's no obvious connection between them at all... It's obvious that someone whose first language is not English will have a different slant on English, a different way of using it, but I sometimes think that is true also of those who learn and use other languages later. Do you think maybe being used to dressing an idea or an object in more than one verbal set of clothes frees the mind in some way, so that it makes leaps and connections one might not expect?
CHRIS: I knew Strauss was ostrich but I didn't know about bouquet. The Welsh for ostrich is estrys, which is half way between the English and German, sort of.
I'm not sure about the 'clothes' metaphor for how language works, but I do think that knowing a couple of languages well is tremendously enriching in all sorts of ways. Often, art itself, and maybe especially literature, uncovers and works with unexpected echoes and patterns. Deep knowledge across a couple of languages I think can help with that, and as you suggest fire new connections.
It can also enrich and change what we make of big conceptual words, as I've already hinted. To go back to the Welsh words for 'imagination', one of them is 'crebwyll' (an 18th century coinage I think), which combines 'creu' (to create) and 'pwyll' (meaning something like sense). The whole word suggests something like 'creative intelligence' or 'creative sense'. It seems to me somehow more active but doesn't so obviously cntain the idea of picture-making that we have in the English word. It also, to me implies a connection between imagination and sanity, part of what makes us in our right mind, so to speak.
SHEENAGH: Following on from that, you've travelled abroad quite a bit in connection with writing, and of course interacted with translators of your work and that of others. Has that given you a different perspective; do you see writers in a European rather than a UK context?
CHRIS: I wish I'd travelled more. Any more invitations out there? I've loved my times in places like the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. They've been intense experiences and I've invariably met extremely bright, linguistically very sophisticated people. One thing you glean from these encounters is that outside the bubble of the English language, bi- and multi-lingualism are ordinary. It's a relief, sometimes, not to have to be explaining the complex cultural-linguistic context I come out of, because I'm often speaking to people who are in positions that are in some way similar, whether it's a Slovenian writer living in France or an Icelandic writer living in Berlin, or a Palestinian Druze poet writing in Arabic and living in Haifa. They get it because, oddly we have a lot in common. It's like coming home. I very much see writing in an international context.
SHEENAGH: I like the way you use humour in serious contexts; it strikes me as a great technique for avoiding sentimentality, introducing a sense of proportion and, very often, throwing the serious point into relief, amongst other virtues. But as a writer, it sometimes drives me mad that readers, including critics, don't always "get" what's going on when writers do this. I've read reviewers, of your books and others, who seem genuinely obtuse about it and who take in earnest what seems fairly clearly intended in jest. Do you worry about that sort of possible miscommunication or is it a danger we just have to live with and ignore?
CHRIS: That's a great list of the virtues of the comic in writing. I think you have to live with obtuse responses sometimes. If nobody on earth gets it, maybe you've got a problem. Otherwise keep going. The old cliche that nothing is so serious as comedy has some truth in it, and the corollary that serious work can have a comic edge is also true. Some of the funniest bits of Shakespeare are in Richard III and King Lear, I'd say.
Can't think of reviewers not getting some joke in my work, though there are other things missed.
SHEENAGH: I think I might have been thinking not exactly of a joke but of a tone of voice. There's a poem in The Meaning of Flight called "Toy Revolver", which I've printed here, in which a little boy is enchanted by a toy gun, and I recall some reviewer complaining that the authorial voice doesn't intervene to tell us how mistaken a view of guns this is. Quite apart from the fact that most readers would surely prefer to be credited with a bit of intelligence - and there's another poem, "Homecoming", which is in many way the companion-piece to this and which shows a whole different reaction - I thought this was to miss the word "toy" and the fact that whatever the implications of a gun to a knowing adult, to the child it really is a piece of play. For all the sombre implications of the "dark seeds", there's a lighter side to it, just as in Griffri, for all the terrible, violent events, there is a vein of comedy in the way poor Griffri bumbles through the dirty politics of his day without a clue what's really going on.
CHRIS: Ah, yes. All the humour there's in the misreading. That poor reviewer really missed the point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's enough there without tagging a moralising epilogue to the piece. (Though maybe that really would be funny, like the Jerry Springer show. 'Y' know, folks, we may have learned something today; guns are actually quite dangerous...') He ended up comparing me with the Italian Futurists, who got so excited by violence and machines that most of them rushed off to the First World War and got killed. I can testify that to the best of my knowledge I have never been either Italian or a futurist.
SHEENAGH: Both as a poet and a novelist, you seem to be very interested in form and structure. Your novel Sidereal Time has a very rigid time-frame and in your poems you often both use and invent forms. Is this a challenge, a help or both?
CHRIS: One of the reasons I admire good stage and radio playwrights is their skill with the structures and strictures of their forms.
In all my novels to date the time structure has been important, and is quite different in each case. Shifts covers about nine months, Griffri about forty years, and Sidereal Time five days. The new one is different again. I'm interested in the way time works in fiction, how it can be stretched, compressed, folded, also in how the text exists outside real, 'objective' time, unlike a performance of a play or a piece of music, and how this relates to the fictional time running in the narrative. It makes the reader much more active in how the piece is paced. The reader in a sense performs the piece in his or her head. As fictions, and especially novels, are concerned with the dynamics of life - how we change or don't through time - the odd relationship between fictional structures and time is puzzling and rich.
In the case of Sidereal Time , the five days form a working week and give a sort of five act structure, though it's not like a conventional five-act play story-shape. The book is partly about the drudgery of earning a living so the working week fits that. I give the name of each day of the week in Welsh at the head of each section. More transparently than in English these week-day names represent five 'planets' - the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. The book has a strand that connects with astronomy and the great insight of Copernicus into the structure of the solar system, and these planets provide some of the image system for the novel.
Some of my poems with more of a narrative feel deal with time in this sort of way too, like 'My mother missed the beautiful and doomed'.
I think more often than not the form the thing takes arises out of the whole material. Very occasionally I've tried following a poetic form as an exercise and it's been a means of releasing something that works. Like you, Sheenagh, I spent a long time thinking that the villanelle was a form I'd never use, until of course something came along that wanted to be that shape. I found that in each repetition I modified the refrain lines to make the thing more argument-like, more cerebral, and I've found I've written a couple more of these modified villanelles.
SHEENAGH: I don't see myself ever writing a villanelle, but I'd wanted for years to write sestinas without ever finding a theme that really wanted to be one. Lately I did, but like you with the villanelle, I was writing a modified version - I'd been reading the sestinas of Paul Henry, which he disguises by playing around with the lineation, so you don't get the tell-tale six-line stanzas with their obvious end-words, and that fitted what I was doing, which was chronicling the lives of spies. Is this coincidence, or is playing around with old forms the best way to give them a new life?
CHRIS: I 'm looking forward to seeing that sestina. There's something oddly obsessive about some writers' use of these forms. Yet they do provoke you, and sometimes they seem to offer themselves as right for the piece you want to make, or surprise you as they start to develop from the material, at which point you have to work out whether you keep working in that direction. I think playing with and developing forms is just what we do. I think you're right that it's what can make them live sometimes. I also have the notion that working with a form can have other useful effects. It can help anchor your effort in the material rather than in the self. It makes the text the thing. Because the forms are sort of public property, it can make the work somehow more out there too. And the form gives a sort of artificial stiffening to language, so that it resists you as you work with it. Imagine the different levels of stiffness you may get with clay, for instance, according to what you want to make with it. I assume you'd arrange its density, viscosity, cohesiveness and so on to suit your temperament and the kind of pot you want to make. maybe something like that happens with language. We forget the weight, thinginess of language when we use it every day speaking and sending emails. Poetry often restores that and going for a well-established form can do that.
My poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu', in an invented form that borrows from foreign and ancient ways of writing, treats words as if they're the bricks of the tower of Babel that have to be lifted into the sky by concerted human effort. It took me a long time to realise what shape the poem should be - I think this was one of those pieces that had itched in my mind for years - and odd as the form was when I found it, it was irresistible. I've written about it in an essay called 'Miller's Answer'. In the case of another formally odd poem, 'At Colonus', which hasn't appeared in a collection yet but was in Poetry Wales a while ago, I was bugged by a single, four-word sentence repeated from a short story by Dorothy Edwards so much that I built the whole piece out of it. I used only the letters in the short sentence so that the poem has a very limited range of sounds and a sense of effort and continual echo. It was right for the piece, I think, which resolves into the original sentence at the end.
Occasionally there's a sense of challenge, but more often it's an exploration, an effort to discover the shapes that have a feel of always having been there waiting for you to catch up, even though they weren't, and have the feel of being somehow inevitable and indestructible. I don't think it comes off all that often.
Poems
The Message
- no secrets which appeared to require concealment were revealed.
                - Anthony Storr, Solitude
she hid her notebooks underneath a board.
All her secret years were what she'd written
And the message - oh, the message was in code.
The Lonely Child, Creative, Bright, Ignored
Kept diaries according to the pattern
And hid her notebooks underneath a board.
Years later, experts come upon the hoard
- Keys to the great writer's motivation -
But the message, ah, the message is in code.
They clap their hands. So much to be explored
Deciphering the secret heart of a woman
Who hid her notebooks underneath a board.
And that unlocking lets light on what's stored -
Eventless commonplaces. An empty room. The burden
Is no message is the message in the code.
She knows the cipher's greater than the word.
What's on display's the fact that all is hidden
So she hides her notebooks underneath a board
And the message is the message is in code.
My mother missed the beautiful and doomed
My mother missed the beautiful and doomed
by a few years.
Where Waugh, hot for some pious ormolu,
dreamed Brideshead
she swept carpets, cleaned grates.
Sepia expects a tear
but none comes. She holds
the yellowed postcard of the House
at arm's length, beyond her two dead children,
two atom bombs ago.
'It was like that film. You know. Rebecca.'
She smokes.
Echo of casual elegance in the wrist, the gesture,
masks slow scorching of the fuse.
The drag of air
accelerates a hundred small ignitions.
'The drive and all. They had a maze.'
Ash hardens into brightness
small flames eat the paper
worming back along tobacco galleries.
She frowns and jewels, salvers gleam the harder.
'Her Ladyship 'ould doll up to the nines
come dinner, like a filmstar.'
The mind drags air through fifty years of fading
burns off the filmdream, comes to other stuff,
makes it glow again.
Through half open doors
down perspectives of the glassy rooms
she hears them.
Iw. Mmn. Yiss. Tongues all twangs and daggers.
The Foreign Secretary stands in the hall
his collar of vermiculated astrakhan
flawed with sparkling rain.
She kneels by the scuttle with
an egg of coal in either hand.
His chauffeur in doublebreasted rig
loiters, one glove removed, ruffles her hair,
sets her neat white cap awry.
'Little Cinderella' he says.
She frowns to brighten memory's fuse,
looks down the maze of galleries where
her people cut the coal.
The hand had rained a blow or a flirtation,
the words half flattered her
and kept her down.
She glances sideways at the tight black boot,
the echo of the bentarmed cross.
Krupp's bombs rain now on undefended children
glimmer through smoking Barcelona.
Unwilled complicity can hurt so much.
She clutches at the deaths of millions.
'A skivvy all my life' she says
and strikes another match.
Links to other poems and information
Breaking Wood - Christopher Meredith reading his own poem on YouTube.
What flight meant - a poem of Chris's featured on Jo Preston's writing blog.
Christopher Meredith's website
Seren, Christopher Meredith's publisher
Christopher Meredith's page on the Contemporary Writers website
A Woollen Line - the blog of Pip Woolf, who is involved with Meredith in the Bog-Mawnog project.
Toy Revolver
He loves its pointed symmetry
the lazy, opened hook of trigger
stock shaped to the palm
like a lover's hip,
opens it like unstoppering a flask
of magic that might spill.
He holds the chamber,
sectioned like fruit, close
to see each scoop and groove
each empty socket in the disc,
counts with a fingertip
six spaces for the dark seeds.
SHEENAGH: You're hard to pin down in several ways, and one is genre. You write both poetry and prose; can you do both at the same time(ish) or does it have to be either/or?
CHRIS:
I've found that writing a novel can often become all-consuming, and I do little other writing than that sometimes.
But with my second novel, Griffri, I was putting a collection of poems together at the same time as beginning work on the fiction. I was also writing full-time, which helped. What I did was at first to work on poems in the morning when I tend to be the closest I ever get to fully conscious, then have a break and do the background work for the novel in the afternoons. It's set in the 12th century so there was a lot of that to do. As the collection got more finished, so that I was tweaking, rewriting, organising, etc., and I got to the point where I was ready for the serious writing on Griffri, I swapped the pattern and worked on the novel in the mornings and worked on the poems in the afternoons. Later still the work on the poems was pretty much finished and I worked on the novel alone. It's the only time I've worked systematically like that, and I found that changing the task helped me get more out of the day. I had to go back to earning a living as a teacher and the last third of Griffri and its final redraft were written in those tough circumstances. The central character of Griffri is a poet and some scraps of poetry figure in the book. One of these, a free translation of a medieval Welsh poem in fact, made its way into the collection. And a piece of 'prose' from Griffri, reworked into lines, appeared as a poem in a later collection. So there is some interplay, and I'm sure that happens at a subtler level too.
But your question raises the puzzle of when it is that we're working. I think it's hard to be off duty as a writer, and with something as big as a novel, you may often have other projects floating in your mind while working on draft 2 page 180-something. Sometimes I have a piece or a phrase in my mind for years before it makes it on to paper. If it refuses to go away, eventually I'll write something. When my first novel came out I remember a journalist asking me what I was working on now (a standard question) and instead of talking about my next novel or the next book of poems, I remember saying, 'I've got this phrase, "sidereal time", going round in my head.' It was about eight years and two books later that I wrote the first words of the novel Sidereal Time.
SHEENAGH: Do you see yourself as a novelist who also writes poems, a poet who also writes novels and stories, a Man of Letters? And I know you have family connections with the theatre; have you ever written or wanted to write in that genre?
CHRIS: I wrote a not very good script of about 90 minutes for stage over 30 years ago. I never seriously tried to do anything with it - I think I knew it wasn't good enough, though it wasn't absolutely awful. I learned a lot in writing it, about pace and rhythm, and about patterning imagery. Later, in the middle of writing my first novel, I think, I wrote a short two-hander called The Carved Chair. I wrote it for radio. It never got broadcast, but it was staged in The Sherman in Cardiff and published in Planet. I've written a short commissioned historical play for children for radio. I'm proud of that one, a 20 minute script covering 25 years of medieval history with 3 actors for 7 to 11 year-olds, written in about 5 days. I'm specially proud of one sound-effect cue: 'Sound of Hereford Cathedral burning down.' A short story written from two points of view, called 'Averted Vision', was broadcast on radio using two voices, so it worked as a kind of play, though they only paid me the short story rate. That was all a long time ago. I don't regard myself as a playwright. Good playwrights are very rare, I think, and they fill me with admiration.
As for how I'd describe myself, I tend to put novelist first, then poet then translator, but in the case of the first two that's just because you have to put something first, and on the whole, people buy more novels than collections of poetry. I'll leave the choice of labels to others.
SHEENAGH: And as a translator, you are also on the border of two languages, as it were. Though English is your usual medium for original work, you've written a children's book in Welsh and translated Welsh books into English. What does being bilingual mean to you as a writer; do you notice one language having an effect on your use of the other?
CHRIS: I started to learn Welsh in a desultory way at the age of about 19. It's hard to believe now, but at the school I went to in Tredegar no Welsh was taught officially at all. Learning Welsh is one of the most important things I've ever done.
As far as writing is concerned this isn't only because of the contact it brings with my country/history/culture etc., though that of course is very significant, but also because of the linguistic-cultural insights it brings more generally, including into English-language culture. Welsh is syntactically very different from English, and in terms of power and influence the two are very nearly at opposite ends of the scale. To have a detailed grasp of this is very enriching. You're multi-lingual and a translator yourself, so you must know how this is. You'll know all those conceptual words in German that we have to explain at length and locute around in English. It's interesting that there's no easy translation for 'embarrassment' in Welsh, other than borrowing the English; that in Welsh we have a single verb for 'to compose poetry', and also a single verb for 'to take advantage' and also for 'to get drunk'; that we use the same word for 'learn' and 'teach'; that we use the same word for 'ladder' and 'school'; that the Welsh word for 'civilisation', unlike the Latin/English term, contains no root-idea of living in a city, but rather appeals to the idea of decency; that the two words for 'imagination' in Welsh contain nothing that suggests an image; that Welsh is much better at the future tense than English, though I'd say not as good at the present tense - and so on. Two languages alongside one another are like two mirrors in parallel. They reflect off into infinity.
There is interplay between the languages in my writing. (I always think it's ironic when people laugh at the use of English loan-words in Welsh, as English is almost entirely made of bits of other languages magpied together in one odd nest. And some people still think it's smart to borrow bits of French and German in their English; odd to find it comic that other languages borrow the other way.) As I write mainly in English, the seepage tends to be from Welsh into English. Recently, I've been commissioned to write some poems for a project based in the Black Mountains near where I live, and part of the brief is that some of it must be in Welsh. I've found it profoundly engaging and challenging to write some pieces in Welsh first and then translate them into English, and in one case to translate one of the pieces the other way. One of the poems plays with the fact that the word 'ffin' - Welsh for 'border' - occurs inside the word 'diffiniad' - 'definition', but I've written the poem in English, and it seems unlikely that it'll be one of the ones I also do in Welsh. The project is about burn-damage on the peat uplands of the mountains, and I've wanted to use plant names in the poems. One of the most common plants up there is bog cotton. The two Welsh names I know for this are 'plu'r gweunydd' and 'sidan y waun', which translate as 'meadow feathers' and 'meadow silk'. As you'll guess, there'll be some seepage there.
SHEENAGH: That resonates, because I've just written a poem based on the fact that the German word Strauss, quite apart from being the composer's name, means both an ostrich and a bouquet. And of course this suggested connections I would not have made otherwise; yet the poem itself is in English, where there's no obvious connection between them at all... It's obvious that someone whose first language is not English will have a different slant on English, a different way of using it, but I sometimes think that is true also of those who learn and use other languages later. Do you think maybe being used to dressing an idea or an object in more than one verbal set of clothes frees the mind in some way, so that it makes leaps and connections one might not expect?
CHRIS: I knew Strauss was ostrich but I didn't know about bouquet. The Welsh for ostrich is estrys, which is half way between the English and German, sort of.
I'm not sure about the 'clothes' metaphor for how language works, but I do think that knowing a couple of languages well is tremendously enriching in all sorts of ways. Often, art itself, and maybe especially literature, uncovers and works with unexpected echoes and patterns. Deep knowledge across a couple of languages I think can help with that, and as you suggest fire new connections.
It can also enrich and change what we make of big conceptual words, as I've already hinted. To go back to the Welsh words for 'imagination', one of them is 'crebwyll' (an 18th century coinage I think), which combines 'creu' (to create) and 'pwyll' (meaning something like sense). The whole word suggests something like 'creative intelligence' or 'creative sense'. It seems to me somehow more active but doesn't so obviously cntain the idea of picture-making that we have in the English word. It also, to me implies a connection between imagination and sanity, part of what makes us in our right mind, so to speak.
SHEENAGH: Following on from that, you've travelled abroad quite a bit in connection with writing, and of course interacted with translators of your work and that of others. Has that given you a different perspective; do you see writers in a European rather than a UK context?
CHRIS: I wish I'd travelled more. Any more invitations out there? I've loved my times in places like the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. They've been intense experiences and I've invariably met extremely bright, linguistically very sophisticated people. One thing you glean from these encounters is that outside the bubble of the English language, bi- and multi-lingualism are ordinary. It's a relief, sometimes, not to have to be explaining the complex cultural-linguistic context I come out of, because I'm often speaking to people who are in positions that are in some way similar, whether it's a Slovenian writer living in France or an Icelandic writer living in Berlin, or a Palestinian Druze poet writing in Arabic and living in Haifa. They get it because, oddly we have a lot in common. It's like coming home. I very much see writing in an international context.
SHEENAGH: I like the way you use humour in serious contexts; it strikes me as a great technique for avoiding sentimentality, introducing a sense of proportion and, very often, throwing the serious point into relief, amongst other virtues. But as a writer, it sometimes drives me mad that readers, including critics, don't always "get" what's going on when writers do this. I've read reviewers, of your books and others, who seem genuinely obtuse about it and who take in earnest what seems fairly clearly intended in jest. Do you worry about that sort of possible miscommunication or is it a danger we just have to live with and ignore?
CHRIS: That's a great list of the virtues of the comic in writing. I think you have to live with obtuse responses sometimes. If nobody on earth gets it, maybe you've got a problem. Otherwise keep going. The old cliche that nothing is so serious as comedy has some truth in it, and the corollary that serious work can have a comic edge is also true. Some of the funniest bits of Shakespeare are in Richard III and King Lear, I'd say.
Can't think of reviewers not getting some joke in my work, though there are other things missed.
SHEENAGH: I think I might have been thinking not exactly of a joke but of a tone of voice. There's a poem in The Meaning of Flight called "Toy Revolver", which I've printed here, in which a little boy is enchanted by a toy gun, and I recall some reviewer complaining that the authorial voice doesn't intervene to tell us how mistaken a view of guns this is. Quite apart from the fact that most readers would surely prefer to be credited with a bit of intelligence - and there's another poem, "Homecoming", which is in many way the companion-piece to this and which shows a whole different reaction - I thought this was to miss the word "toy" and the fact that whatever the implications of a gun to a knowing adult, to the child it really is a piece of play. For all the sombre implications of the "dark seeds", there's a lighter side to it, just as in Griffri, for all the terrible, violent events, there is a vein of comedy in the way poor Griffri bumbles through the dirty politics of his day without a clue what's really going on.
CHRIS: Ah, yes. All the humour there's in the misreading. That poor reviewer really missed the point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's enough there without tagging a moralising epilogue to the piece. (Though maybe that really would be funny, like the Jerry Springer show. 'Y' know, folks, we may have learned something today; guns are actually quite dangerous...') He ended up comparing me with the Italian Futurists, who got so excited by violence and machines that most of them rushed off to the First World War and got killed. I can testify that to the best of my knowledge I have never been either Italian or a futurist.
SHEENAGH: Both as a poet and a novelist, you seem to be very interested in form and structure. Your novel Sidereal Time has a very rigid time-frame and in your poems you often both use and invent forms. Is this a challenge, a help or both?
CHRIS: One of the reasons I admire good stage and radio playwrights is their skill with the structures and strictures of their forms.
In all my novels to date the time structure has been important, and is quite different in each case. Shifts covers about nine months, Griffri about forty years, and Sidereal Time five days. The new one is different again. I'm interested in the way time works in fiction, how it can be stretched, compressed, folded, also in how the text exists outside real, 'objective' time, unlike a performance of a play or a piece of music, and how this relates to the fictional time running in the narrative. It makes the reader much more active in how the piece is paced. The reader in a sense performs the piece in his or her head. As fictions, and especially novels, are concerned with the dynamics of life - how we change or don't through time - the odd relationship between fictional structures and time is puzzling and rich.
In the case of Sidereal Time , the five days form a working week and give a sort of five act structure, though it's not like a conventional five-act play story-shape. The book is partly about the drudgery of earning a living so the working week fits that. I give the name of each day of the week in Welsh at the head of each section. More transparently than in English these week-day names represent five 'planets' - the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. The book has a strand that connects with astronomy and the great insight of Copernicus into the structure of the solar system, and these planets provide some of the image system for the novel.
Some of my poems with more of a narrative feel deal with time in this sort of way too, like 'My mother missed the beautiful and doomed'.
I think more often than not the form the thing takes arises out of the whole material. Very occasionally I've tried following a poetic form as an exercise and it's been a means of releasing something that works. Like you, Sheenagh, I spent a long time thinking that the villanelle was a form I'd never use, until of course something came along that wanted to be that shape. I found that in each repetition I modified the refrain lines to make the thing more argument-like, more cerebral, and I've found I've written a couple more of these modified villanelles.
SHEENAGH: I don't see myself ever writing a villanelle, but I'd wanted for years to write sestinas without ever finding a theme that really wanted to be one. Lately I did, but like you with the villanelle, I was writing a modified version - I'd been reading the sestinas of Paul Henry, which he disguises by playing around with the lineation, so you don't get the tell-tale six-line stanzas with their obvious end-words, and that fitted what I was doing, which was chronicling the lives of spies. Is this coincidence, or is playing around with old forms the best way to give them a new life?
CHRIS: I 'm looking forward to seeing that sestina. There's something oddly obsessive about some writers' use of these forms. Yet they do provoke you, and sometimes they seem to offer themselves as right for the piece you want to make, or surprise you as they start to develop from the material, at which point you have to work out whether you keep working in that direction. I think playing with and developing forms is just what we do. I think you're right that it's what can make them live sometimes. I also have the notion that working with a form can have other useful effects. It can help anchor your effort in the material rather than in the self. It makes the text the thing. Because the forms are sort of public property, it can make the work somehow more out there too. And the form gives a sort of artificial stiffening to language, so that it resists you as you work with it. Imagine the different levels of stiffness you may get with clay, for instance, according to what you want to make with it. I assume you'd arrange its density, viscosity, cohesiveness and so on to suit your temperament and the kind of pot you want to make. maybe something like that happens with language. We forget the weight, thinginess of language when we use it every day speaking and sending emails. Poetry often restores that and going for a well-established form can do that.
My poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu', in an invented form that borrows from foreign and ancient ways of writing, treats words as if they're the bricks of the tower of Babel that have to be lifted into the sky by concerted human effort. It took me a long time to realise what shape the poem should be - I think this was one of those pieces that had itched in my mind for years - and odd as the form was when I found it, it was irresistible. I've written about it in an essay called 'Miller's Answer'. In the case of another formally odd poem, 'At Colonus', which hasn't appeared in a collection yet but was in Poetry Wales a while ago, I was bugged by a single, four-word sentence repeated from a short story by Dorothy Edwards so much that I built the whole piece out of it. I used only the letters in the short sentence so that the poem has a very limited range of sounds and a sense of effort and continual echo. It was right for the piece, I think, which resolves into the original sentence at the end.
Occasionally there's a sense of challenge, but more often it's an exploration, an effort to discover the shapes that have a feel of always having been there waiting for you to catch up, even though they weren't, and have the feel of being somehow inevitable and indestructible. I don't think it comes off all that often.
Poems
The Message
- no secrets which appeared to require concealment were revealed.
                - Anthony Storr, Solitude
she hid her notebooks underneath a board.
All her secret years were what she'd written
And the message - oh, the message was in code.
The Lonely Child, Creative, Bright, Ignored
Kept diaries according to the pattern
And hid her notebooks underneath a board.
Years later, experts come upon the hoard
- Keys to the great writer's motivation -
But the message, ah, the message is in code.
They clap their hands. So much to be explored
Deciphering the secret heart of a woman
Who hid her notebooks underneath a board.
And that unlocking lets light on what's stored -
Eventless commonplaces. An empty room. The burden
Is no message is the message in the code.
She knows the cipher's greater than the word.
What's on display's the fact that all is hidden
So she hides her notebooks underneath a board
And the message is the message is in code.
My mother missed the beautiful and doomed
My mother missed the beautiful and doomed
by a few years.
Where Waugh, hot for some pious ormolu,
dreamed Brideshead
she swept carpets, cleaned grates.
Sepia expects a tear
but none comes. She holds
the yellowed postcard of the House
at arm's length, beyond her two dead children,
two atom bombs ago.
'It was like that film. You know. Rebecca.'
She smokes.
Echo of casual elegance in the wrist, the gesture,
masks slow scorching of the fuse.
The drag of air
accelerates a hundred small ignitions.
'The drive and all. They had a maze.'
Ash hardens into brightness
small flames eat the paper
worming back along tobacco galleries.
She frowns and jewels, salvers gleam the harder.
'Her Ladyship 'ould doll up to the nines
come dinner, like a filmstar.'
The mind drags air through fifty years of fading
burns off the filmdream, comes to other stuff,
makes it glow again.
Through half open doors
down perspectives of the glassy rooms
she hears them.
Iw. Mmn. Yiss. Tongues all twangs and daggers.
The Foreign Secretary stands in the hall
his collar of vermiculated astrakhan
flawed with sparkling rain.
She kneels by the scuttle with
an egg of coal in either hand.
His chauffeur in doublebreasted rig
loiters, one glove removed, ruffles her hair,
sets her neat white cap awry.
'Little Cinderella' he says.
She frowns to brighten memory's fuse,
looks down the maze of galleries where
her people cut the coal.
The hand had rained a blow or a flirtation,
the words half flattered her
and kept her down.
She glances sideways at the tight black boot,
the echo of the bentarmed cross.
Krupp's bombs rain now on undefended children
glimmer through smoking Barcelona.
Unwilled complicity can hurt so much.
She clutches at the deaths of millions.
'A skivvy all my life' she says
and strikes another match.
Links to other poems and information
Breaking Wood - Christopher Meredith reading his own poem on YouTube.
What flight meant - a poem of Chris's featured on Jo Preston's writing blog.
Christopher Meredith's website
Seren, Christopher Meredith's publisher
Christopher Meredith's page on the Contemporary Writers website
A Woollen Line - the blog of Pip Woolf, who is involved with Meredith in the Bog-Mawnog project.
June 20, 2011
Review of "Melog" by Mihangel Morgan, trs. Christopher Meredith
Review of Melog by Mihangel Morgan, translated by Christopher Meredith (Seren 2005)
Melog is a novel with a rich cast of characters, but the only two who really matter are Melog himself, an avatar of that perennial literary type, the Mysterious Stranger Who Changes Lives, and "Dr" Jones, the hapless protagonist whose life is changed. Dr Jones is a failed academic on the dole, devoting his middle years to somewhat nebulous study of the vast 19th-century tome, The Welsh Encyclopedia. At least, however, this is a real book, whereas the one for which Melog spends most of the novel searching, The Imalic, may well exist only in his imagination, as may several other things like his country and his history.
Melog is a young man, emaciated, with striking blue eyes and unusually white skin and hair, whom Dr Jones first sees theatening to throw himself off a high building. He's thus in an accidentally rather angelic pose (he is also stark naked) and Dr Jones' first impression, indeed, is that Melog is extra-terrestrial. True, the first request an angel makes is not usually to be taken to the nearest chip shop, nor are they generally portrayed as habitual liars, thieves and fantasists.
But an "angel" is a messenger, and the function of these characters in literature tends to be to bring people news of themselves. In this, Melog is in a long tradition indeed; quite apart from his Welsh antecedents, in English literature he is very reminiscent of at least two Melville characters, the Confidence Man and Bartleby, while David, the protagonist from Robert Alan Jamieson's Da Happie Laand (Luath, 2010) is proof that the tradition of the Mysterious Stranger carries on after him. There's a lot more to be said about this aspect, which I rather fancy doing in a later and more lit-critty post, but examining literary precedents and successors, for all its interest, doesn't really tell you whether you're likely to enjoy the book at hand, which is after all what reviews are for.
Basically Melog is an exasperating if engaging character who leads the timid doctor out of his habits and on quests which look almost, but infuriatingly not quite, certain to be wild goose chases. This book is very concerned with the fluid boundary between truth and fiction, which it crosses and recrosses with alarming ease. Since, like Dr Jones, we can never be entirely certain of what is going on, it is easy to enter into his combined excitement, bewilderment and fear. This cocktail can sometimes be fiercely comical; Melog is both deeply serious and sometimes very funny, as when Melog turns up in a car and invites Dr Jones for a spin:
Dr Jones pressed a little black button like a round sweet and the car flooded with lovely music. Unfortunately, because he was worried that he might soon be dead, Dr Jones could not relax into the luxurious leather seat or gaze at the landscape or listen to the entrancing songs. Trying to settle his nerves, he said –
I didn't know that you liked the songs of Schumann.
Is that what this stuff is? Melog said.
What do you mean? Dr Jones said. He felt the sweat on his forehead grow cold.
I haven't heard this music before, Melog said, overtaking a lorry at terrifying speed.
So what's the disc doing in your car? Dr Jones asked. He sneaked a look at the speedometer and saw the needle touching one hundred and ten miles an hour.
It's not my car, Melog said.
Melog. Whose car is it?
I don't know.
What? You've stolen this car?
I don't look on it as theft, Melog said, slowing to 90 miles an hour to take a corner. I look on it as a loan. (The wheels went over a hedgehog.) All property is theft, as they say.
In his extreme terror Dr Jones gripped the soft deep sides of his seat with all his strength.
Pity I didn't pick an automatic though, isn't it? Melog said. Bet it's a lot easier than having to change gears.
When did you pass your test?
Oh, I haven't taken the test.
Melog, Dr Jones said, his face white as Melog's hair, how many driving lessons have you had?
In some ways this terrifying drive, with each bit of revealed information increasing the anxiety, is a microcosm for the novel. But unlike Dr Jones, we do have time to study, and become fascinated by, the landscape of shifting fact, fiction and imagination. Mihangel Morgan has written an erudite novel of intricate concerns and questions – its epigraphs are all concerned with the nature of truth - but he never forgets, in his quest, the need to create convincing characters and places and tell a good story. I love this novel; if it has taken me years to get around to reviewing it, that is partly because it is one you see more in, each time you come back to re-read it.
June 19, 2011
sheenaghpugh @ 2011-06-19T10:38:00
Christopher Meredith is a novelist and poet from Wales. Though he works mainly in English, one of his books for children is in Welsh and he also translates from Welsh into English. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. His most recent collection of poems is The Meaning of Flight (Seren) and he has just completed a new novel which should be published in 2011.
SHEENAGH: You're hard to pin down in several ways, and one is genre. You write both poetry and prose; can you do both at the same time(ish) or does it have to be either/or?
CHRIS:
I've found that writing a novel can often become all-consuming, and I do little other writing than that sometimes.
But with my second novel, Griffri, I was putting a collection of poems together at the same time as beginning work on the fiction. I was also writing full-time, which helped. What I did was at first to work on poems in the morning when I tend to be the closest I ever get to fully conscious, then have a break and do the background work for the novel in the afternoons. It's set in the 12th century so there was a lot of that to do. As the collection got more finished, so that I was tweaking, rewriting, organising, etc., and I got to the point where I was ready for the serious writing on Griffri, I swapped the pattern and worked on the novel in the mornings and worked on the poems in the afternoons. Later still the work on the poems was pretty much finished and I worked on the novel alone. It's the only time I've worked systematically like that, and I found that changing the task helped me get more out of the day. I had to go back to earning a living as a teacher and the last third of Griffri and its final redraft were written in those tough circumstances. The central character of Griffri is a poet and some scraps of poetry figure in the book. One of these, a free translation of a medieval Welsh poem in fact, made its way into the collection. And a piece of 'prose' from Griffri, reworked into lines, appeared as a poem in a later collection. So there is some interplay, and I'm sure that happens at a subtler level too.
But your question raises the puzzle of when it is that we're working. I think it's hard to be off duty as a writer, and with something as big as a novel, you may often have other projects floating in your mind while working on draft 2 page 180-something. Sometimes I have a piece or a phrase in my mind for years before it makes it on to paper. If it refuses to go away, eventually I'll write something. When my first novel came out I remember a journalist asking me what I was working on now (a standard question) and instead of talking about my next novel or the next book of poems, I remember saying, 'I've got this phrase, "sidereal time", going round in my head.' It was about eight years and two books later that I wrote the first words of the novel Sidereal Time.
SHEENAGH: Do you see yourself as a novelist who also writes poems, a poet who also writes novels and stories, a Man of Letters? And I know you have family connections with the theatre; have you ever written or wanted to write in that genre?
CHRIS: I wrote a not very good script of about 90 minutes for stage over 30 years ago. I never seriously tried to do anything with it - I think I knew it wasn't good enough, though it wasn't absolutely awful. I learned a lot in writing it, about pace and rhythm, and about patterning imagery. Later, in the middle of writing my first novel, I think, I wrote a short two-hander called The Carved Chair. I wrote it for radio. It never got broadcast, but it was staged in The Sherman in Cardiff and published in Planet. I've written a short commissioned historical play for children for radio. I'm proud of that one, a 20 minute script covering 25 years of medieval history with 3 actors for 7 to 11 year-olds, written in about 5 days. I'm specially proud of one sound-effect cue: 'Sound of Hereford Cathedral burning down.' A short story written from two points of view, called 'Averted Vision', was broadcast on radio using two voices, so it worked as a kind of play, though they only paid me the short story rate. That was all a long time ago. I don't regard myself as a playwright. Good playwrights are very rare, I think, and they fill me with admiration.
As for how I'd describe myself, I tend to put novelist first, then poet then translator, but in the case of the first two that's just because you have to put something first, and on the whole, people buy more novels than collections of poetry. I'll leave the choice of labels to others.
SHEENAGH: And as a translator, you are also on the border of two languages, as it were. Though English is your usual medium for original work, you've written a children's book in Welsh and translated Welsh books into English. What does being bilingual mean to you as a writer; do you notice one language having an effect on your use of the other?
CHRIS: I started to learn Welsh in a desultory way at the age of about 19. It's hard to believe now, but at the school I went to in Tredegar no Welsh was taught officially at all. Learning Welsh is one of the most important things I've ever done.
As far as writing is concerned this isn't only because of the contact it brings with my country/history/culture etc., though that of course is very significant, but also because of the linguistic-cultural insights it brings more generally, including into English-language culture. Welsh is syntactically very different from English, and in terms of power and influence the two are very nearly at opposite ends of the scale. To have a detailed grasp of this is very enriching. You're multi-lingual and a translator yourself, so you must know how this is. You'll know all those conceptual words in German that we have to explain at length and locute around in English. It's interesting that there's no easy Welsh translation for 'embarrassment', other than borrowing the English; that in Welsh we have a single verb for 'to compose poetry', and also a single verb for 'to take advantage' and for 'to get drunk'; that we use the same word for 'learn' and 'teach'; that we use the same word for 'ladder' and 'school'; that the Welsh word for 'civilisation', unlike the Latin/English term, contains no root-idea of living in a city, but rather appeals to the idea of decency; that the two words for 'imagination' in Welsh contain nothing that suggests an image; that Welsh is much better at the future tense than English, though I'd say not as good at the present tense - and so on. Two languages alongside one another are like two mirrors in parallel. They reflect off into infinity.
There is interplay between the languages in my writing. (I always think it's ironic when people laugh at the use of English loan-words in Welsh, as English is almost entirely made of bits of other languages magpied together in one odd nest. And some people still think it's smart to borrow bits of French and German in their English; odd to find it comic that other languages borrow the other way.) As I write mainly in English, the seepage tends to be from Welsh into English. Recently, I've been commissioned to write some poems for a project based in the Black Mountains near where I live, and part of the brief is that some of it must be in Welsh. I've found it profoundly engaging and challenging to write some pieces in Welsh first and then translate them into English, and in one case to translate one of the pieces the other way. One of the poems plays with the fact that the word 'ffin' - Welsh for 'border' - occurs inside the word 'diffiniad' - 'definition', but I've written the poem in English, and it seems unlikely that it'll be one of the ones I also do in Welsh. The project is about burn-damage on the peat uplands of the mountains, and I've wanted to use plant names in the poems. One of the most common plants up there is bog cotton. The two Welsh names I know for this are 'plu'r gweunydd' and 'sidan y waun', which translate as 'meadow feathers' and 'meadow silk'. As you'll guess, there'll be some seepage there.
SHEENAGH: That resonates, because I've just written a poem based on the fact that the German word Strauss, quite apart from being the composer's name, means both an ostrich and a bouquet. And of course this suggested connections I would not have made otherwise; yet the poem itself is in English, where there's no obvious connection between them at all... It's obvious that someone whose first language is not English will have a different slant on English, a different way of using it, but I sometimes think that is true also of those who learn and use other languages later. Do you think maybe being used to dressing an idea or an object in more than one verbal set of clothes frees the mind in some way, so that it makes leaps and connections one might not expect?
CHRIS: I knew Strauss was ostrich but I didn't know about bouquet. The Welsh for ostrich is estrys, which is half way between the English and German, sort of.
I'm not sure about the 'clothes' metaphor for how language works, but I do think that knowing a couple of languages well is tremendously enriching in all sorts of ways. Often, art itself, and maybe especially literature, uncovers and works with unexpected echoes and patterns. Deep knowledge across a couple of languages I think can help with that, and as you suggest fire new connections.
It can also enrich and change what we make of big conceptual words, as I've already hinted. To go back to the Welsh words for 'imagination', one of them is 'crebwyll' (an 18th century coinage I think), which combines 'creu' (to create) and 'pwyll' (meaning something like sense). The whole word suggests something like 'creative intelligence' or 'creative sense'. It seems to me somehow more active but doesn't so obviously cntain the idea of picture-making that we have in the English word. It also, to me implies a connection between imagination and sanity, part of what makes us in our right mind, so to speak.
SHEENAGH: Following on from that, you've travelled abroad quite a bit in connection with writing, and of course interacted with translators of your work and that of others. Has that given you a different perspective; do you see writers in a European rather than a UK context?
CHRIS: I wish I'd travelled more. Any more invitations out there? I've loved my times in places like the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. They've been intense experiences and I've invariably met extremely bright, linguistically very sophisticated people. One thing you glean from these encounters is that outside the bubble of the English language, bi- and multi-lingualism are ordinary. It's a relief, sometimes, not to have to be explaining the complex cultural-linguistic context I come out of, because I'm often speaking to people who are in positions that are in some way similar, whether it's a Slovenian writer living in France or an Icelandic writer living in Berlin, or a Palestinian Druze poet writing in Arabic and living in Haifa. They get it because, oddly we have a lot in common. It's like coming home. I very much see writing in an international context.
SHEENAGH: I like the way you use humour in serious contexts; it strikes me as a great technique for avoiding sentimentality, introducing a sense of proportion and, very often, throwing the serious point into relief, amongst other virtues. But as a writer, it sometimes drives me mad that readers, including critics, don't always "get" what's going on when writers do this. I've read reviewers, of your books and others, who seem genuinely obtuse about it and who take in earnest what seems fairly clearly intended in jest. Do you worry about that sort of possible miscommunication or is it a danger we just have to live with and ignore?
CHRIS: That's a great list of the virtues of the comic in writing. I think you have to live with obtuse responses sometimes. If nobody on earth gets it, maybe you've got a problem. Otherwise keep going. The old cliche that nothing is so serious as comedy has some truth in it, and the corollary that serious work can have a comic edge is also true. Some of the funniest bits of Shakespeare are in Richard III and King Lear, I'd say.
Can't think of reviewers not getting some joke in my work, though there are other things missed.
SHEENAGH: I think I might have been thinking not exactly of a joke but of a tone of voice. There's a poem in The Meaning of Flight called "Toy Revolver" in which a little boy is enchanted by a toy gun, and I recall some reviewer complaining that the authorial voice doesn't intervene to tell us how mistaken a view of guns this is. Quite apart from the fact that most readers would surely prefer to be credited with a bit of intelligence - and there's another poem, "Homecoming", which is in many way the companion-piece to this and which shows a whole different reaction - I thought this was to miss the word "toy" and the fact that whatever the implications of a gun to a knowing adult, to the child it really is a piece of play. For all the sombre implications of the "dark seeds", there's a lighter side to it, just as in Griffri, for all the terrible, violent events, there is a vein of comedy in the way poor Griffri bumbles through the dirty politics of his day without a clue what's really going on.
CHRIS: Ah, yes. All the humour there's in the misreading. That poor reviewer really missed the point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's enough there without tagging a moralising epilogue to the piece. (Though maybe that really would be funny, like the Jerry Springer show. 'Y' know, folks, we may have learned something today; guns are actually quite dangerous...') He ended up comparing me with the Italian Futurists, who got so excited by violence and machines that most of them rushed off to the First World War and got killed. I can testify that to the best of my knowledge I have never been either Italian or a futurist.
SHEENAGH: Both as a poet and a novelist, you seem to be very interested in form and structure. Your novel Sidereal Time has a very rigid time-frame and in your poems you often both use and invent forms. Is this a challenge, a help or both?
CHRIS: One of the reasons I admire good stage and radio playwrights is their skill with the structures and strictures of their forms.
In all my novels to date the time structure has been important, and is quite different in each case. Shifts covers about nine months, Griffri about forty years, and Sidereal Time five days. The new one is different again. I'm interested in the way time works in fiction, how it can be stretched, compressed, folded, also in how the text exists outside real, 'objective' time, unlike a performance of a play or a piece of music, and how this relates to the fictional time running in the narrative. It makes the reader much more active in how the piece is paced. The reader in a sense performs the piece in his or her head. As fictions, and especially novels, are concerned with the dynamics of life - how we change or don't through time - the odd relationship between fictional structures and time is puzzling and rich.
In the case of Sidereal Time, the five days form a working week and give a sort of five act structure, though it's not like a conventional five-act play story-shape. The book is partly about the drudgery of earning a living so the working week fits that. I give the name of each day of the week in Welsh at the head of each section. More transparently than in English these week-day names represent five 'planets' - the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. The book has a strand that connects with astronomy and the great insight of Copernicus into the structure of the solar system, and these planets provide some of the image system for the novel.
Some of my poems with more of a narrative feel deal with time in this sort of way too, like 'My mother missed the beautiful and doomed'.
I think more often than not the form the thing takes arises out of the whole material. Very occasionally I've tried following a poetic form as an exercise and it's been a means of releasing something that works. Like you, Sheenagh, I spent a long time thinking that the villanelle was a form I'd never use, until of course something came along that wanted to be that shape. I found that in each repetition I modified the refrain lines to make the thing more argument-like, more cerebral, and I've found I've written a couple more of these modified villanelles.
SHEENAGH: I don't see myself ever writing a villanelle, but I'd wanted for years to write sestinas without ever finding a theme that really wanted to be one. Lately I did, but like you with the villanelle, I was writing a modified version - I'd been reading the sestinas of Paul Henry, which he disguises by playing around with the lineation, so you don't get the tell-tale six-line stanzas with their obvious end-words, and that fitted what I was doing, which was chronicling the lives of spies. Is this coincidence, or is playing around with old forms the best way to give them a new life?
CHRIS: I'm looking forward to seeing that sestina. There's something oddly obsessive about some writers' use of these forms. Yet they do provoke you, and sometimes they seem to offer themselves as right for the piece you want to make, or surprise you as they start to develop from the material, at which point you have to work out whether you keep working in that direction. I think playing with and developing forms is just what we do. I think you're right that it's what can make them live sometimes. I also have the notion that working with a form can have other useful effects. It can help anchor your effort in the material rather than in the self. It makes the text the thing. Because the forms are sort of public property, it can make the work somehow more out there too. And the form gives a sort of artificial stiffening to language, so that it resists you as you work with it. Imagine the different levels of stiffness you may get with clay, for instance, according to what you want to make with it. I assume you'd arrange its density, viscosity, cohesiveness and so on to suit your temperament and the kind of pot you want to make. maybe something like that happens with language. We forget the weight, thinginess of language when we use it every day speaking and sending emails. Poetry often restores that and going for a well-established form can do that.
My poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu', in an invented form that borrows from foreign and ancient ways of writing, treats words as if they're the bricks of the tower of Babel that have to be lifted into the sky by concerted human effort. It took me a long time to realise what shape the poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu' should be - I think this was one of those pieces that had itched in my mind for years - and odd as the form was when I found it, it was irresistible. I've written about it in an essay called 'Miller's Answer'. In the case of another formally odd poem, 'At Colonus', which hasn't appeared in a collection yet but was in Poetry Wales a while ago, I was bugged by a single, four-word sentence repeated from a short story by Dorothy Edwards so much that I built the whole piece out of it. I used only the letters in the short sentence so that the poem has a very limited range of sounds and a sense of effort and continual echo. It was right for the piece, I think, which resolves into the original sentence at the end.
Occasionally there's a sense of challenge, but more often it's an exploration, an effort to discover the shapes that have a feel of always having been there waiting for you to catch up, even though they weren't, and have the feel of being somehow inevitable and indestructible. I don't think it comes off all that often.
Poems
Links to other poems and information
Christopher Meredith's website
Seren, Christopher Meredith's publisher
SHEENAGH: You're hard to pin down in several ways, and one is genre. You write both poetry and prose; can you do both at the same time(ish) or does it have to be either/or?
CHRIS:
I've found that writing a novel can often become all-consuming, and I do little other writing than that sometimes.
But with my second novel, Griffri, I was putting a collection of poems together at the same time as beginning work on the fiction. I was also writing full-time, which helped. What I did was at first to work on poems in the morning when I tend to be the closest I ever get to fully conscious, then have a break and do the background work for the novel in the afternoons. It's set in the 12th century so there was a lot of that to do. As the collection got more finished, so that I was tweaking, rewriting, organising, etc., and I got to the point where I was ready for the serious writing on Griffri, I swapped the pattern and worked on the novel in the mornings and worked on the poems in the afternoons. Later still the work on the poems was pretty much finished and I worked on the novel alone. It's the only time I've worked systematically like that, and I found that changing the task helped me get more out of the day. I had to go back to earning a living as a teacher and the last third of Griffri and its final redraft were written in those tough circumstances. The central character of Griffri is a poet and some scraps of poetry figure in the book. One of these, a free translation of a medieval Welsh poem in fact, made its way into the collection. And a piece of 'prose' from Griffri, reworked into lines, appeared as a poem in a later collection. So there is some interplay, and I'm sure that happens at a subtler level too.
But your question raises the puzzle of when it is that we're working. I think it's hard to be off duty as a writer, and with something as big as a novel, you may often have other projects floating in your mind while working on draft 2 page 180-something. Sometimes I have a piece or a phrase in my mind for years before it makes it on to paper. If it refuses to go away, eventually I'll write something. When my first novel came out I remember a journalist asking me what I was working on now (a standard question) and instead of talking about my next novel or the next book of poems, I remember saying, 'I've got this phrase, "sidereal time", going round in my head.' It was about eight years and two books later that I wrote the first words of the novel Sidereal Time.
SHEENAGH: Do you see yourself as a novelist who also writes poems, a poet who also writes novels and stories, a Man of Letters? And I know you have family connections with the theatre; have you ever written or wanted to write in that genre?
CHRIS: I wrote a not very good script of about 90 minutes for stage over 30 years ago. I never seriously tried to do anything with it - I think I knew it wasn't good enough, though it wasn't absolutely awful. I learned a lot in writing it, about pace and rhythm, and about patterning imagery. Later, in the middle of writing my first novel, I think, I wrote a short two-hander called The Carved Chair. I wrote it for radio. It never got broadcast, but it was staged in The Sherman in Cardiff and published in Planet. I've written a short commissioned historical play for children for radio. I'm proud of that one, a 20 minute script covering 25 years of medieval history with 3 actors for 7 to 11 year-olds, written in about 5 days. I'm specially proud of one sound-effect cue: 'Sound of Hereford Cathedral burning down.' A short story written from two points of view, called 'Averted Vision', was broadcast on radio using two voices, so it worked as a kind of play, though they only paid me the short story rate. That was all a long time ago. I don't regard myself as a playwright. Good playwrights are very rare, I think, and they fill me with admiration.
As for how I'd describe myself, I tend to put novelist first, then poet then translator, but in the case of the first two that's just because you have to put something first, and on the whole, people buy more novels than collections of poetry. I'll leave the choice of labels to others.
SHEENAGH: And as a translator, you are also on the border of two languages, as it were. Though English is your usual medium for original work, you've written a children's book in Welsh and translated Welsh books into English. What does being bilingual mean to you as a writer; do you notice one language having an effect on your use of the other?
CHRIS: I started to learn Welsh in a desultory way at the age of about 19. It's hard to believe now, but at the school I went to in Tredegar no Welsh was taught officially at all. Learning Welsh is one of the most important things I've ever done.
As far as writing is concerned this isn't only because of the contact it brings with my country/history/culture etc., though that of course is very significant, but also because of the linguistic-cultural insights it brings more generally, including into English-language culture. Welsh is syntactically very different from English, and in terms of power and influence the two are very nearly at opposite ends of the scale. To have a detailed grasp of this is very enriching. You're multi-lingual and a translator yourself, so you must know how this is. You'll know all those conceptual words in German that we have to explain at length and locute around in English. It's interesting that there's no easy Welsh translation for 'embarrassment', other than borrowing the English; that in Welsh we have a single verb for 'to compose poetry', and also a single verb for 'to take advantage' and for 'to get drunk'; that we use the same word for 'learn' and 'teach'; that we use the same word for 'ladder' and 'school'; that the Welsh word for 'civilisation', unlike the Latin/English term, contains no root-idea of living in a city, but rather appeals to the idea of decency; that the two words for 'imagination' in Welsh contain nothing that suggests an image; that Welsh is much better at the future tense than English, though I'd say not as good at the present tense - and so on. Two languages alongside one another are like two mirrors in parallel. They reflect off into infinity.
There is interplay between the languages in my writing. (I always think it's ironic when people laugh at the use of English loan-words in Welsh, as English is almost entirely made of bits of other languages magpied together in one odd nest. And some people still think it's smart to borrow bits of French and German in their English; odd to find it comic that other languages borrow the other way.) As I write mainly in English, the seepage tends to be from Welsh into English. Recently, I've been commissioned to write some poems for a project based in the Black Mountains near where I live, and part of the brief is that some of it must be in Welsh. I've found it profoundly engaging and challenging to write some pieces in Welsh first and then translate them into English, and in one case to translate one of the pieces the other way. One of the poems plays with the fact that the word 'ffin' - Welsh for 'border' - occurs inside the word 'diffiniad' - 'definition', but I've written the poem in English, and it seems unlikely that it'll be one of the ones I also do in Welsh. The project is about burn-damage on the peat uplands of the mountains, and I've wanted to use plant names in the poems. One of the most common plants up there is bog cotton. The two Welsh names I know for this are 'plu'r gweunydd' and 'sidan y waun', which translate as 'meadow feathers' and 'meadow silk'. As you'll guess, there'll be some seepage there.
SHEENAGH: That resonates, because I've just written a poem based on the fact that the German word Strauss, quite apart from being the composer's name, means both an ostrich and a bouquet. And of course this suggested connections I would not have made otherwise; yet the poem itself is in English, where there's no obvious connection between them at all... It's obvious that someone whose first language is not English will have a different slant on English, a different way of using it, but I sometimes think that is true also of those who learn and use other languages later. Do you think maybe being used to dressing an idea or an object in more than one verbal set of clothes frees the mind in some way, so that it makes leaps and connections one might not expect?
CHRIS: I knew Strauss was ostrich but I didn't know about bouquet. The Welsh for ostrich is estrys, which is half way between the English and German, sort of.
I'm not sure about the 'clothes' metaphor for how language works, but I do think that knowing a couple of languages well is tremendously enriching in all sorts of ways. Often, art itself, and maybe especially literature, uncovers and works with unexpected echoes and patterns. Deep knowledge across a couple of languages I think can help with that, and as you suggest fire new connections.
It can also enrich and change what we make of big conceptual words, as I've already hinted. To go back to the Welsh words for 'imagination', one of them is 'crebwyll' (an 18th century coinage I think), which combines 'creu' (to create) and 'pwyll' (meaning something like sense). The whole word suggests something like 'creative intelligence' or 'creative sense'. It seems to me somehow more active but doesn't so obviously cntain the idea of picture-making that we have in the English word. It also, to me implies a connection between imagination and sanity, part of what makes us in our right mind, so to speak.
SHEENAGH: Following on from that, you've travelled abroad quite a bit in connection with writing, and of course interacted with translators of your work and that of others. Has that given you a different perspective; do you see writers in a European rather than a UK context?
CHRIS: I wish I'd travelled more. Any more invitations out there? I've loved my times in places like the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. They've been intense experiences and I've invariably met extremely bright, linguistically very sophisticated people. One thing you glean from these encounters is that outside the bubble of the English language, bi- and multi-lingualism are ordinary. It's a relief, sometimes, not to have to be explaining the complex cultural-linguistic context I come out of, because I'm often speaking to people who are in positions that are in some way similar, whether it's a Slovenian writer living in France or an Icelandic writer living in Berlin, or a Palestinian Druze poet writing in Arabic and living in Haifa. They get it because, oddly we have a lot in common. It's like coming home. I very much see writing in an international context.
SHEENAGH: I like the way you use humour in serious contexts; it strikes me as a great technique for avoiding sentimentality, introducing a sense of proportion and, very often, throwing the serious point into relief, amongst other virtues. But as a writer, it sometimes drives me mad that readers, including critics, don't always "get" what's going on when writers do this. I've read reviewers, of your books and others, who seem genuinely obtuse about it and who take in earnest what seems fairly clearly intended in jest. Do you worry about that sort of possible miscommunication or is it a danger we just have to live with and ignore?
CHRIS: That's a great list of the virtues of the comic in writing. I think you have to live with obtuse responses sometimes. If nobody on earth gets it, maybe you've got a problem. Otherwise keep going. The old cliche that nothing is so serious as comedy has some truth in it, and the corollary that serious work can have a comic edge is also true. Some of the funniest bits of Shakespeare are in Richard III and King Lear, I'd say.
Can't think of reviewers not getting some joke in my work, though there are other things missed.
SHEENAGH: I think I might have been thinking not exactly of a joke but of a tone of voice. There's a poem in The Meaning of Flight called "Toy Revolver" in which a little boy is enchanted by a toy gun, and I recall some reviewer complaining that the authorial voice doesn't intervene to tell us how mistaken a view of guns this is. Quite apart from the fact that most readers would surely prefer to be credited with a bit of intelligence - and there's another poem, "Homecoming", which is in many way the companion-piece to this and which shows a whole different reaction - I thought this was to miss the word "toy" and the fact that whatever the implications of a gun to a knowing adult, to the child it really is a piece of play. For all the sombre implications of the "dark seeds", there's a lighter side to it, just as in Griffri, for all the terrible, violent events, there is a vein of comedy in the way poor Griffri bumbles through the dirty politics of his day without a clue what's really going on.
CHRIS: Ah, yes. All the humour there's in the misreading. That poor reviewer really missed the point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's enough there without tagging a moralising epilogue to the piece. (Though maybe that really would be funny, like the Jerry Springer show. 'Y' know, folks, we may have learned something today; guns are actually quite dangerous...') He ended up comparing me with the Italian Futurists, who got so excited by violence and machines that most of them rushed off to the First World War and got killed. I can testify that to the best of my knowledge I have never been either Italian or a futurist.
SHEENAGH: Both as a poet and a novelist, you seem to be very interested in form and structure. Your novel Sidereal Time has a very rigid time-frame and in your poems you often both use and invent forms. Is this a challenge, a help or both?
CHRIS: One of the reasons I admire good stage and radio playwrights is their skill with the structures and strictures of their forms.
In all my novels to date the time structure has been important, and is quite different in each case. Shifts covers about nine months, Griffri about forty years, and Sidereal Time five days. The new one is different again. I'm interested in the way time works in fiction, how it can be stretched, compressed, folded, also in how the text exists outside real, 'objective' time, unlike a performance of a play or a piece of music, and how this relates to the fictional time running in the narrative. It makes the reader much more active in how the piece is paced. The reader in a sense performs the piece in his or her head. As fictions, and especially novels, are concerned with the dynamics of life - how we change or don't through time - the odd relationship between fictional structures and time is puzzling and rich.
In the case of Sidereal Time, the five days form a working week and give a sort of five act structure, though it's not like a conventional five-act play story-shape. The book is partly about the drudgery of earning a living so the working week fits that. I give the name of each day of the week in Welsh at the head of each section. More transparently than in English these week-day names represent five 'planets' - the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. The book has a strand that connects with astronomy and the great insight of Copernicus into the structure of the solar system, and these planets provide some of the image system for the novel.
Some of my poems with more of a narrative feel deal with time in this sort of way too, like 'My mother missed the beautiful and doomed'.
I think more often than not the form the thing takes arises out of the whole material. Very occasionally I've tried following a poetic form as an exercise and it's been a means of releasing something that works. Like you, Sheenagh, I spent a long time thinking that the villanelle was a form I'd never use, until of course something came along that wanted to be that shape. I found that in each repetition I modified the refrain lines to make the thing more argument-like, more cerebral, and I've found I've written a couple more of these modified villanelles.
SHEENAGH: I don't see myself ever writing a villanelle, but I'd wanted for years to write sestinas without ever finding a theme that really wanted to be one. Lately I did, but like you with the villanelle, I was writing a modified version - I'd been reading the sestinas of Paul Henry, which he disguises by playing around with the lineation, so you don't get the tell-tale six-line stanzas with their obvious end-words, and that fitted what I was doing, which was chronicling the lives of spies. Is this coincidence, or is playing around with old forms the best way to give them a new life?
CHRIS: I'm looking forward to seeing that sestina. There's something oddly obsessive about some writers' use of these forms. Yet they do provoke you, and sometimes they seem to offer themselves as right for the piece you want to make, or surprise you as they start to develop from the material, at which point you have to work out whether you keep working in that direction. I think playing with and developing forms is just what we do. I think you're right that it's what can make them live sometimes. I also have the notion that working with a form can have other useful effects. It can help anchor your effort in the material rather than in the self. It makes the text the thing. Because the forms are sort of public property, it can make the work somehow more out there too. And the form gives a sort of artificial stiffening to language, so that it resists you as you work with it. Imagine the different levels of stiffness you may get with clay, for instance, according to what you want to make with it. I assume you'd arrange its density, viscosity, cohesiveness and so on to suit your temperament and the kind of pot you want to make. maybe something like that happens with language. We forget the weight, thinginess of language when we use it every day speaking and sending emails. Poetry often restores that and going for a well-established form can do that.
My poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu', in an invented form that borrows from foreign and ancient ways of writing, treats words as if they're the bricks of the tower of Babel that have to be lifted into the sky by concerted human effort. It took me a long time to realise what shape the poem 'Builders of Bab-ilu' should be - I think this was one of those pieces that had itched in my mind for years - and odd as the form was when I found it, it was irresistible. I've written about it in an essay called 'Miller's Answer'. In the case of another formally odd poem, 'At Colonus', which hasn't appeared in a collection yet but was in Poetry Wales a while ago, I was bugged by a single, four-word sentence repeated from a short story by Dorothy Edwards so much that I built the whole piece out of it. I used only the letters in the short sentence so that the poem has a very limited range of sounds and a sense of effort and continual echo. It was right for the piece, I think, which resolves into the original sentence at the end.
Occasionally there's a sense of challenge, but more often it's an exploration, an effort to discover the shapes that have a feel of always having been there waiting for you to catch up, even though they weren't, and have the feel of being somehow inevitable and indestructible. I don't think it comes off all that often.
Poems
Links to other poems and information
Christopher Meredith's website
Seren, Christopher Meredith's publisher
June 2, 2011
The joys of referential shorthand
(a concept possibly more familiar in fan fiction than in litfic.) You know what I mean, that way a writer can casually drop a shared cultural reference which not only conveys in one or two words a huge cargo of meaning and information to his/her readers, but does it more powerfully than by any other method, both because of the weight of emotion and memory it already carries and because the reader has pretty much arrived at the meaning independently rather than being led there. It's extremely common in fan fiction because that relies on shared cultural references, but one good litfic example is Francis Lauderdale Adams' poem "Hagar", where by giving this title to a poem about an outcast unmarried mother, he conveys to anyone acquainted with the book of Genesis that not only is the girl in this condition, the man who caused it was almost certainly some patriarch, some pillar of the community (think master and housemaid).
It's harder to do in litfic these days, precisely because you can't rely on readers having heard of Abraham, Circe or various other mythological/historical personages whose names and stories were once common currency. And as soon as you have to add footnotes, much of the effect is gone. Nonetheless, one of my favourite poems is an 8-liner from 9th-century China which takes this technique to such extremes that when A C Graham translated it in his Poems of the Late T'ang (Penguin 1965) he had to paraphrase it for Western readers. Obviously these references wouldn't have been anything like as arcane to a T'ang Chinese reader as they are to us, and one can only guess at the way the meaning would have insinuated itself, trailing all the emotions and associations he's haunted it with. In the vague hope of re-creating something of that effect, the background info first:
The lovely and dissolute Queen of Wei once gave audience to Confucius behind a brocade curtain.
Prince O, out in a boat with his lover, piled embroidered quilts above her for warmth.
In the dance Drooping Hands, girls wear jade waist-pendants; in the dance Snapping Waists, they wear saffron skirts.
Shih Chung cooked a banquet over the flames of massed candles.
Hsun Yu exuded a natural perfume which lingered where he had been.
The poet Chiang Yen dreamed that a poet's ghost visited him to take back his brush of many colours; when he woke, he found he had lost his ability to write.
A goddess slept with King Huai in a dream; when she left he asked her name and she said "At dawn, I am the clouds of morning; at sunset the driving rain."
I never tried this on students, because some were ready enough to cry "elitist" if any poet used a reference they hadn't come across. But even without being able to experience it as a T'ang Chinese would have done, I still find its technique utterly enchanting. What interests me is that I can't think of any Western work, offhand, that uses this technique in the same intense, concentrated way as this one (unless indeed it would be certain fan fiction stories). I suppose Eliot is the obvious candidate, yet no poem of his works quite the way this does for me. It surely could be done, though, even with the decayed state of our cultural currency, and it'd be interesting to try.
It's harder to do in litfic these days, precisely because you can't rely on readers having heard of Abraham, Circe or various other mythological/historical personages whose names and stories were once common currency. And as soon as you have to add footnotes, much of the effect is gone. Nonetheless, one of my favourite poems is an 8-liner from 9th-century China which takes this technique to such extremes that when A C Graham translated it in his Poems of the Late T'ang (Penguin 1965) he had to paraphrase it for Western readers. Obviously these references wouldn't have been anything like as arcane to a T'ang Chinese reader as they are to us, and one can only guess at the way the meaning would have insinuated itself, trailing all the emotions and associations he's haunted it with. In the vague hope of re-creating something of that effect, the background info first:
The lovely and dissolute Queen of Wei once gave audience to Confucius behind a brocade curtain.
Prince O, out in a boat with his lover, piled embroidered quilts above her for warmth.
In the dance Drooping Hands, girls wear jade waist-pendants; in the dance Snapping Waists, they wear saffron skirts.
Shih Chung cooked a banquet over the flames of massed candles.
Hsun Yu exuded a natural perfume which lingered where he had been.
The poet Chiang Yen dreamed that a poet's ghost visited him to take back his brush of many colours; when he woke, he found he had lost his ability to write.
A goddess slept with King Huai in a dream; when she left he asked her name and she said "At dawn, I am the clouds of morning; at sunset the driving rain."
PEONIES
(Li Shang-yin, translated and paraphrased by A C Graham)
The brocade curtains have just rolled back. Behold the Queen of Wei.
Still he piles up the embroidered quilts, Prince O in Yüeh.
Drooping hands disturb, tip over, pendants of carved jade:
Snapping waists compete in the dance, fluttering saffron skirts.
Shih Ch'ung's candles — but who would clip them?
Hsün Yü's braziers, where no incense fumes.
I who was given in a dream the brush of many colours
Wish to write on petals a message to the clouds of the morning.
Paraphrase
The peonies have burst their buds, like the Queen of Wei rolling back her brocade curtain. New leaves grow above the flowers like the embroidered quilts Prince O piled over his lover in the boat. In light wind, the flowers dip like the sleeves of girls in the slow dance Drooping Hands, upsetting dewdrops like the carved waist-pendants on the dancers' girdles; in high winds, the stalks bend like girls in the fast dance Snapping Waists, fluttering their saffron petals like the dancers' skirts. They blaze like Shih Chung's massed candles, but their splendour is natural; candles burn only if their wicks are trimmed and who would cut the peonies? Their scent too is natural, like that of Hsun Yu. I, who dream that I have the gift of poetry which Chiang Yen dreamed of losing, send you this message, figuring your beauty in that of the peony, and asking you to favour me as the goddess did King Huai.
I never tried this on students, because some were ready enough to cry "elitist" if any poet used a reference they hadn't come across. But even without being able to experience it as a T'ang Chinese would have done, I still find its technique utterly enchanting. What interests me is that I can't think of any Western work, offhand, that uses this technique in the same intense, concentrated way as this one (unless indeed it would be certain fan fiction stories). I suppose Eliot is the obvious candidate, yet no poem of his works quite the way this does for me. It surely could be done, though, even with the decayed state of our cultural currency, and it'd be interesting to try.
May 20, 2011
Review of Tamar Yoseloff's "The City With Horns"
Tamar Yoseloff has long been interested in urban landscapes, particularly ruined or decaying urban landscapes, and the first section of this new collection blends the often exhilarating feel of a modern city (not always the same one) with a consciousness of its past and its detritus.
brine, bladderwrack, the green rot
of the ocean floor
while in "Wish you were", two people in modern-day London are divided by their different sense of its past. Places, or versions of them, are anchored also to times, to periods in a person's life; the speaker of "London Particular" experiences the city differently for being the same age as her father was when he first arrived there:
The ghost of my father
emerges from a doorway at noon on Piccadilly,
his hair just turning grey, like the London day
he's sailing through in his double-breasted suit.
No more than smoke and mirrors-
that's what the city does
with its alleys, its burnished brown wood pubs,
scrappy parks towerblocks toppled to leave
a legacy of empty lots.
Yoseloff's outsider's-eye for London has always been sharp; of the poems in this first section, the only one that doesn't cut it for me is "Concrete", which keeps making assertions I don't really go along with - "It refrains from statement" - dunno, I've seen plenty of concrete buildings that didn't. As for "it is not charming/like daffodils or a pink tutu", I wouldn't use that word for either; daffodils are inspiring, a pink tutu is nauseating... Odd poem altogether, and I wish it weren't the first in the book, for I find it atypically weak.
The mid-section, which gives the book its title, consists of poems about, and sometimes in the voices of, Jackson Pollock and his circle. They aren't, mostly, ekphrastic in the sense of trying to re-create a single painting in words, rather a verbal re-imagining of a whole life's work. If the idea of imitating a splat of colour in words sounds daunting, it can be done with some bold juxtaposition of words and concepts; in the title poem, the god-in-disguise bull who carries off Europa is conflated with the half-man, half-bull Minotaur from a different legend altogether, while in "Singing Woman", we get the portmanteau word "tremulo", presumably a compound of tremulous and tremolo, with a hint of that other, sterile, compound, the "mule". "Connected" articulates the chaotic but not quite inchoate variousness of those splats:
Trees construct themselves into a solid mass
as the horse picks up speed
see, everything's knotted
                                   together
the way notes on a staff spell music, a factory
churns out things, each thing
itself, but also a component.
How easy it is when density
unlaces, and you find holes you can
crawl through-
The way verbal echoes lead on slantwise here, via unexpected leaps - "staff", for the more usual "stave", suggesting the "factory" where another kind of staff would work, "density" practically inviting the compositor to commit the misprint "destiny" - is reminiscent of MacNeice's notes like little fishes, suggested by the (piano) "scales" of the line before.
In the third section we are suddenly in more rural surroundings: a field, lemon groves, the sea. Yet here too we end up, in the last poem, "Indian Summer in the Old City", back in an urban setting, though this time a more gracious version of a city, reminding us what the word "urbanity" actually means:
Sun finds my face, so long in shadow,
drapes me in gold.
Brick softens to flesh, columns that framed our serious lives
are light enough to carry.
Yoseloff's last collection, the taut, tension-building Fetch, made more immediate impact on me, but I think this one might show more technical development. I'd certainly recommend it.
The City With Horns is published by Salt Publishing
