Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 45
February 18, 2011
Interview with Paul Henry
Paul Henry is one of Wales's leading poets. The author of five collections of verse, he has read at festivals across the UK and Europe. Originally a songwriter, Henry has guest-edited Poetry Wales and is a popular Creative Writing tutor. He recently presented the 'Inspired' series of arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales. His Selected Poems, The Brittle Sea, was published by Seren in 2010.
SHEENAGH: The internal music of your poems is clear, but the way it's achieved varies quite a lot. On a first reading, it would be easy to assume you were solely a free-verse merchant, because your use of rhyme and half-rhyme tends to be subtle and buried. But actually you use form quite a lot, though more in some collections than others. There isn't much in Captive Audience, for instance, but The Slipped Leash is absolutely full of it. That suggests to me that we have something in common in that respect, because I go through phases where free verse seems to suit what I do, and then suddenly I'll feel there isn't enough music happening and have a reaction in favour of form. Is that how it is with you? Or is there some other factor that decides which it'll be? Does your own musical background have an effect here? I notice a couple of rondeaux or near-rondeaux in Ingrid's Husband, and that's arguably the most song-like form there is.
PAUL: My musical background informs everything, I suspect. I enjoy using traditional forms but arrive at them by accident, unless commissioned to write in one. An intuitive, musical approach to writing means that any form tends to evolve or make itself known. I never begin with the vessel waiting to be filled. I am more concerned that the inner-music is right. This perhaps explains my inconsistency in adopting various forms over the years. I do like to subvert them, or hide them. I hid a sestina in Ingrid's Husband, and I'm glad you found the rondeaux. I think longer, mainly free verse poems can benefit from formal cadences (and vice versa, of course). I've done this in poems like "Gestures", "The Hourglass" and "The Shell House".
I like the way Hardy used to invent forms. I used to copy some of them. There's a Hardy form in Captive Audience – a poem called "Winter Wedding".
Rhyme has become more and more important over the years, to the extent where I rarely write an unrhymed poem. But I do "bury" my rhymes, as you say, or half-bury them. I think the music has to be there, but as an orchestration of silence.
SHEENAGH: That's an answer that makes me wonder how the white space fits in; is the use of white space in a poem, for a musician, maybe equivalent to rests in music? I tend to think of it as the lead in the stained glass; you don't notice it but it holds the pattern together. I think an awful lot of folk have no understanding of the role of white space...
PAUL: I like your "lead in the stained glass" but I'd go further and say that the white space has its own panels. It's a crucial part of the effect. I appreciate the popularity of poets like Whitman and CK Williams who can range across the page and cover all the snow but, for all their brilliance on the ear, I'm not drawn in to their pages. There's a poem I'm not certain about, the second "Nightingale Ann" poem. It's about listening in to the white space, each "bar's rest", the place where the poem's heart resonates. My mother was a professional singer for many years. She sang as naturally as she spoke. What struck me after her death was the silence. How can we hear such silences if we talk over the white space?
Of course, I'm not suggesting that the manipulation of white space is the sole means of communicating silence in a poem. What draws me back, again and again, to the poetry of W.S. Graham is his brilliance at conveying sound through silence. He lets us hear his music by inviting us to eavesdrop on silence. His poems are listening back. He was a gifted singer as a child. His ear is perfect.
SHEENAGH: There's a poem in The Slipped Leash that was a bit of a favourite of mine, called "Heredity". You didn't include it in your Selected, The Brittle Sea - now obviously all sorts get left out of a Selected for sheer space reasons, but there's still a judgement call in there somewhere and poets' judgements on their own poems are always fascinating as a guide to how they work. So what was it that dissatisfied you about this one?
PAUL: As a poem, nothing. I left out at least fifteen poems I consider to be amongst my best. It was a difficult decision - most had appeared in The TLS - but I did so in the awareness that many readers, and even critics, completely buy into the first person. They read literally. As I tend to write out of my own experience it can lead to huge assumptions about my life. The truth of the poem is all that matters but I didn't want to upset people. I suppose this is one of the indulgences of a selected, being able to claw back, at least for a while, what you regretted publishing in the first instance.
SHEENAGH: Tell me about it! I think this tendency has got worse with the rise of "reality" entertainment; I've noticed that some readers expect it's all happened to you and that any person in a poem must either be you or someone you know - in fact they are sometimes disappointed when you tell them you used your imagination rather than a tape recorder. This reader failure to recognise that "I is a lie" is why, unlike you, I've almost given up using the first person. We all write to some degree from experience but it can be concealed if we want to, in personae or third-person narrative. I used to write first-person in personae; even the slowest reader generally grasps when you're pretending to be Guy Fawkes' girlfriend. These days I've gone more to third-person, probably in search of some kind of spurious universality. But you do neither; you go on using the I voice even though you know there's a danger that readers will over-interpret from it. So that's a technique choice that is clearly important to you: can you hazard a guess at why?
PAUL: Intimacy, I think. Although the second person would seem more conducive to intimacy. I normally try drafts in different personae but increasingly return to the first person because it seems to work for the lyric poetry I've been writing lately. Many of the poems are a first person addressing a second person.
SHEENAGH: Talking of that title, The Brittle Sea, the sea has always been important in your work but seems to be getting more and more central. It's a fact of course that you have lived much in two seaboard towns, Newport and Aberystwyth, but there seems more to it than just the physical. What does the sea mean to you, and how do you think living away from it, as you now do in Powys, will affect the way you see things in your work?
PAUL: Well, apart from four years in Exmouth, I've felt landlocked since the age of fifteen, when I left Aberystwyth for Breconshire. Newport never felt like it was near the sea. There was too much heavy industry in the way. Every now and then a seagull would yodel and remind me of the fact. I felt it was the river defined Newport with its amazing levitations and falls, in its turn defined by an off-stage sea. Newport's a big river town.
But the sea, I agree, has become a greater presence. I'm trying to get back to it, slowly. I'd say it's now metaphysical (in the incorporeal, supernatural sense of the word) for me. I don't fully understand why but it is partly my mother's singing voice and partly my cousin Helen, Brown Helen, who used to visit my Auntie Geta's house, Penllain, in New Quay.
SHEENAGH: The epigraph mentions the sea too, ""Round the corner is - sooner or later - the sea" and that's a quote from MacNeice, which is no surprise because both his musicality and his melancholy would seem likely to appeal to you. What other influences would you cite?
PAUL: A close second to MacNeice is W.S.Graham. But I'm all out of things to say about him, still recovering from making a radio programme on his work. It was a labour of love and got in the way of writing. Stevens is beginning to influence me, I think. He's there a bit in Ingrid's Husband. Others who put the writing spell on me, after reading them, include Keats, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell, R.S. Thomas, Patrick Kavanagh, (who set me writing songs again) and Muldoon. In translation, I return to Akhmatova, Brodsky and Elytis. Early on, I especially enjoyed Douglas Dunn. I suspect all of these have influenced my work in some way. I equally enjoy many others, but none has influenced my work so much.
SHEENAGH: All those iconic women from your past who haunt The Milk Thief and then recur in the new poems; how did your childhood come to be so inhabited by women?
PAUL: My grandmother, Edith Smart, was one of five girls (of whom Geta was one) and these five sisters all had girls. All my cousins were girls, including Brown Helen and Catrin Sands. I had one sister, Saint Julia. As an antidote, my exterior life was as wildly "male" as I could make it: football, fishing, shooting... . And as a child, I just wanted to get away from them. I'd fathered three boys of my own before I realised how precious and civilising they were, these women of my earliest years. I hope they keep visiting me.
SHEENAGH: I'm interested that you gave new names to all those women of your childhood, or rather added epithets to their names, as though you were partly reinventing them, which seems a very writerly thing to do. Was that something you did in your childhood, and were you already writing then? Did you make up imaginary worlds?
PAUL: The names I gave them reflected their personalities and appearance. My sister was very religious, one cousin had sandy hair, another was always brown, my Auntie Gwyneth had bright blue eyes, my grandmother, Edith Smart, was always dressed for chapel ... Some are simply named: Heather, Geta, Prydwen Jane... But I did "reinvent" them. I had to. They were ghosts by the time I wrote about them.
As for childhood inventions, I did write stories as a teenager but was always less interested in narrative than the lyric moment, Eliot's "distraction fit." I picked up a guitar at seventeen and started writing songs. This was my way towards poetry.
SHEENAGH: And why do you think these women returned to inhabit your poems at the point they did?
PAUL: By my mid-thirties I became desperate to get back to Cardiganshire. Family and work commitments prevented this so I went back there in my writing. And then there was this light I kept seeing, a sea light that had travelled inland. I try to explain it in an early poem, "Saline Helen". It's the only poem significantly rewritten for the The Brittle Sea ... . A weaker, earlier version appears in Time Pieces. It sets out my creative stall in many ways. It's about Brown Helen. She was the first "visitor" to inhabit this stray light, if you like. The others followed soon after. But Brown Helen is the one who won't leave me alone.
SHEENAGH: " A sea light that had travelled inland" – that would do very well for a description of the light in some of the poems of Elytis, whom you mentioned as an influence. I take it you've no truck with those who decry mentions of gulls and other sea references in poems as "too poetic", then!
PAUL: I can think of no bird less "poetic" than a seagull! And I'm not sure how we can escape reference to that which covers most of our planet. The sea is perhaps two-thirds of our subconscious. It's beneath us, as well as all around us. Eliot knew this. Landlocked or not, we're all "scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
SHEENAGH: You seem to be on an intuitive journey. Apart from the poems in the first section of Captive Audience, it's as if you've turned your back on current, post-modern trends which would have attracted more attention. You don't fit in easily – part-Romantic, part-Symbolist. Does this worry you?
PAUL: It reassures me. What was revelatory about the week with Joseph Brodsky at Hay, in '92, was the sense of time it gave me. By which I mean, the radar of history may well discriminate between a Post-modernist and a Symbolist but it will be more concerned about the approximate trajectory of that century's art and which memorable poems it can identify. I'm conscious that, increasingly, the diction and phrasing I use approximates the poem to the past fifty years, rather than fixing it to a current movement (if such a thing exists). An artist competes with the dead, not the living. That is what Joseph taught me. He told me he liked the way the poems "sang" and not to suppress this. He gave me a licence to be myself. I grew up with my mother's songs about the moon and the sea, about love and death, and with all the "bible-black" Welsh influences fewer and fewer critics understand. And if all this informs and shapes the verse, so be it.
Poems
(All the poems quoted can be found in The Brittle Sea)
Arcades
Already you're gone, fixing your eyes
on a road's darkening arcade.
What song do you sing as the light fades?
The music shop you work in has closed
but I have to believe it is not too late.
Is it your eyes or your laugh I miss most?
I'd buy you those boots or that braclet
your mother wore, or an amber ring
to prove it is not too late to sing,
to prove we are more than worn out ghosts.
Dream in arcades, love. Dream in arcades.
Catrin Sands
Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.
The sea was a long way below
the wooden room I found you inside,
pale and thin, in a white blouse.
You looked at me with your new eyes
like you never did as a child.
The sea was a long way below.
There was something you needed to say,
my ear to your lips as you tried
but the sea, forty years below,
drowned all I wanted to know.
So I held you close, in case we had died
with something you needed to say.
Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.
Violin Tide
And this is the sea, of course
scrawling by moonlight in its room,
not quite getting the line right
where it meets the shore.
The earliest hours still find me
thinking of you; somnolent tides
rise towards daylight.
Perhaps you have drowned in me.
A table lamp shines the grain
of an old violin in the grate
and down the slope from your dreams
the bay similarly shines.
Perhaps you are not so far away
from the moon or the violin
and the clock I should wind, to hear
the workings of the bay.
At least in your dreams
see how I can not get this line
to make sense of the sand,
and how I am running out of time
and how easily the night and the day
exchange places, the land and the sea.
Links to other poems and information
Paul Henry's website There are several more poems online here.
Paul reading "Daylight Robbery" and "The Black Guitar" on YouTube
Seren, publisher of The Brittle Sea
A review of The Brittle Sea from this blog
A previous discussion of Henry's long poem "Penllain" on this blog
Dodging the Waves
The gap between the railings was thirty-five years.
The boy's ghost held on as the high tide raged
and the girl beside him laughed when she too got drenched.
"Who turned all the fairy lights blue?" "Who cares?"
The sea slid back down its pebbly stairs.
"Here comes a big one! Don't let go!" "Never!
I'll never let go!"
                                And both held on to the white bar
before both let go, their laughter caught inside the wave.
SHEENAGH: The internal music of your poems is clear, but the way it's achieved varies quite a lot. On a first reading, it would be easy to assume you were solely a free-verse merchant, because your use of rhyme and half-rhyme tends to be subtle and buried. But actually you use form quite a lot, though more in some collections than others. There isn't much in Captive Audience, for instance, but The Slipped Leash is absolutely full of it. That suggests to me that we have something in common in that respect, because I go through phases where free verse seems to suit what I do, and then suddenly I'll feel there isn't enough music happening and have a reaction in favour of form. Is that how it is with you? Or is there some other factor that decides which it'll be? Does your own musical background have an effect here? I notice a couple of rondeaux or near-rondeaux in Ingrid's Husband, and that's arguably the most song-like form there is.
PAUL: My musical background informs everything, I suspect. I enjoy using traditional forms but arrive at them by accident, unless commissioned to write in one. An intuitive, musical approach to writing means that any form tends to evolve or make itself known. I never begin with the vessel waiting to be filled. I am more concerned that the inner-music is right. This perhaps explains my inconsistency in adopting various forms over the years. I do like to subvert them, or hide them. I hid a sestina in Ingrid's Husband, and I'm glad you found the rondeaux. I think longer, mainly free verse poems can benefit from formal cadences (and vice versa, of course). I've done this in poems like "Gestures", "The Hourglass" and "The Shell House".
I like the way Hardy used to invent forms. I used to copy some of them. There's a Hardy form in Captive Audience – a poem called "Winter Wedding".
Rhyme has become more and more important over the years, to the extent where I rarely write an unrhymed poem. But I do "bury" my rhymes, as you say, or half-bury them. I think the music has to be there, but as an orchestration of silence.
SHEENAGH: That's an answer that makes me wonder how the white space fits in; is the use of white space in a poem, for a musician, maybe equivalent to rests in music? I tend to think of it as the lead in the stained glass; you don't notice it but it holds the pattern together. I think an awful lot of folk have no understanding of the role of white space...
PAUL: I like your "lead in the stained glass" but I'd go further and say that the white space has its own panels. It's a crucial part of the effect. I appreciate the popularity of poets like Whitman and CK Williams who can range across the page and cover all the snow but, for all their brilliance on the ear, I'm not drawn in to their pages. There's a poem I'm not certain about, the second "Nightingale Ann" poem. It's about listening in to the white space, each "bar's rest", the place where the poem's heart resonates. My mother was a professional singer for many years. She sang as naturally as she spoke. What struck me after her death was the silence. How can we hear such silences if we talk over the white space?
Of course, I'm not suggesting that the manipulation of white space is the sole means of communicating silence in a poem. What draws me back, again and again, to the poetry of W.S. Graham is his brilliance at conveying sound through silence. He lets us hear his music by inviting us to eavesdrop on silence. His poems are listening back. He was a gifted singer as a child. His ear is perfect.
SHEENAGH: There's a poem in The Slipped Leash that was a bit of a favourite of mine, called "Heredity". You didn't include it in your Selected, The Brittle Sea - now obviously all sorts get left out of a Selected for sheer space reasons, but there's still a judgement call in there somewhere and poets' judgements on their own poems are always fascinating as a guide to how they work. So what was it that dissatisfied you about this one?
PAUL: As a poem, nothing. I left out at least fifteen poems I consider to be amongst my best. It was a difficult decision - most had appeared in The TLS - but I did so in the awareness that many readers, and even critics, completely buy into the first person. They read literally. As I tend to write out of my own experience it can lead to huge assumptions about my life. The truth of the poem is all that matters but I didn't want to upset people. I suppose this is one of the indulgences of a selected, being able to claw back, at least for a while, what you regretted publishing in the first instance.
SHEENAGH: Tell me about it! I think this tendency has got worse with the rise of "reality" entertainment; I've noticed that some readers expect it's all happened to you and that any person in a poem must either be you or someone you know - in fact they are sometimes disappointed when you tell them you used your imagination rather than a tape recorder. This reader failure to recognise that "I is a lie" is why, unlike you, I've almost given up using the first person. We all write to some degree from experience but it can be concealed if we want to, in personae or third-person narrative. I used to write first-person in personae; even the slowest reader generally grasps when you're pretending to be Guy Fawkes' girlfriend. These days I've gone more to third-person, probably in search of some kind of spurious universality. But you do neither; you go on using the I voice even though you know there's a danger that readers will over-interpret from it. So that's a technique choice that is clearly important to you: can you hazard a guess at why?
PAUL: Intimacy, I think. Although the second person would seem more conducive to intimacy. I normally try drafts in different personae but increasingly return to the first person because it seems to work for the lyric poetry I've been writing lately. Many of the poems are a first person addressing a second person.
SHEENAGH: Talking of that title, The Brittle Sea, the sea has always been important in your work but seems to be getting more and more central. It's a fact of course that you have lived much in two seaboard towns, Newport and Aberystwyth, but there seems more to it than just the physical. What does the sea mean to you, and how do you think living away from it, as you now do in Powys, will affect the way you see things in your work?
PAUL: Well, apart from four years in Exmouth, I've felt landlocked since the age of fifteen, when I left Aberystwyth for Breconshire. Newport never felt like it was near the sea. There was too much heavy industry in the way. Every now and then a seagull would yodel and remind me of the fact. I felt it was the river defined Newport with its amazing levitations and falls, in its turn defined by an off-stage sea. Newport's a big river town.
But the sea, I agree, has become a greater presence. I'm trying to get back to it, slowly. I'd say it's now metaphysical (in the incorporeal, supernatural sense of the word) for me. I don't fully understand why but it is partly my mother's singing voice and partly my cousin Helen, Brown Helen, who used to visit my Auntie Geta's house, Penllain, in New Quay.
SHEENAGH: The epigraph mentions the sea too, ""Round the corner is - sooner or later - the sea" and that's a quote from MacNeice, which is no surprise because both his musicality and his melancholy would seem likely to appeal to you. What other influences would you cite?
PAUL: A close second to MacNeice is W.S.Graham. But I'm all out of things to say about him, still recovering from making a radio programme on his work. It was a labour of love and got in the way of writing. Stevens is beginning to influence me, I think. He's there a bit in Ingrid's Husband. Others who put the writing spell on me, after reading them, include Keats, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell, R.S. Thomas, Patrick Kavanagh, (who set me writing songs again) and Muldoon. In translation, I return to Akhmatova, Brodsky and Elytis. Early on, I especially enjoyed Douglas Dunn. I suspect all of these have influenced my work in some way. I equally enjoy many others, but none has influenced my work so much.
SHEENAGH: All those iconic women from your past who haunt The Milk Thief and then recur in the new poems; how did your childhood come to be so inhabited by women?
PAUL: My grandmother, Edith Smart, was one of five girls (of whom Geta was one) and these five sisters all had girls. All my cousins were girls, including Brown Helen and Catrin Sands. I had one sister, Saint Julia. As an antidote, my exterior life was as wildly "male" as I could make it: football, fishing, shooting... . And as a child, I just wanted to get away from them. I'd fathered three boys of my own before I realised how precious and civilising they were, these women of my earliest years. I hope they keep visiting me.
SHEENAGH: I'm interested that you gave new names to all those women of your childhood, or rather added epithets to their names, as though you were partly reinventing them, which seems a very writerly thing to do. Was that something you did in your childhood, and were you already writing then? Did you make up imaginary worlds?
PAUL: The names I gave them reflected their personalities and appearance. My sister was very religious, one cousin had sandy hair, another was always brown, my Auntie Gwyneth had bright blue eyes, my grandmother, Edith Smart, was always dressed for chapel ... Some are simply named: Heather, Geta, Prydwen Jane... But I did "reinvent" them. I had to. They were ghosts by the time I wrote about them.
As for childhood inventions, I did write stories as a teenager but was always less interested in narrative than the lyric moment, Eliot's "distraction fit." I picked up a guitar at seventeen and started writing songs. This was my way towards poetry.
SHEENAGH: And why do you think these women returned to inhabit your poems at the point they did?
PAUL: By my mid-thirties I became desperate to get back to Cardiganshire. Family and work commitments prevented this so I went back there in my writing. And then there was this light I kept seeing, a sea light that had travelled inland. I try to explain it in an early poem, "Saline Helen". It's the only poem significantly rewritten for the The Brittle Sea ... . A weaker, earlier version appears in Time Pieces. It sets out my creative stall in many ways. It's about Brown Helen. She was the first "visitor" to inhabit this stray light, if you like. The others followed soon after. But Brown Helen is the one who won't leave me alone.
SHEENAGH: " A sea light that had travelled inland" – that would do very well for a description of the light in some of the poems of Elytis, whom you mentioned as an influence. I take it you've no truck with those who decry mentions of gulls and other sea references in poems as "too poetic", then!
PAUL: I can think of no bird less "poetic" than a seagull! And I'm not sure how we can escape reference to that which covers most of our planet. The sea is perhaps two-thirds of our subconscious. It's beneath us, as well as all around us. Eliot knew this. Landlocked or not, we're all "scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
SHEENAGH: You seem to be on an intuitive journey. Apart from the poems in the first section of Captive Audience, it's as if you've turned your back on current, post-modern trends which would have attracted more attention. You don't fit in easily – part-Romantic, part-Symbolist. Does this worry you?
PAUL: It reassures me. What was revelatory about the week with Joseph Brodsky at Hay, in '92, was the sense of time it gave me. By which I mean, the radar of history may well discriminate between a Post-modernist and a Symbolist but it will be more concerned about the approximate trajectory of that century's art and which memorable poems it can identify. I'm conscious that, increasingly, the diction and phrasing I use approximates the poem to the past fifty years, rather than fixing it to a current movement (if such a thing exists). An artist competes with the dead, not the living. That is what Joseph taught me. He told me he liked the way the poems "sang" and not to suppress this. He gave me a licence to be myself. I grew up with my mother's songs about the moon and the sea, about love and death, and with all the "bible-black" Welsh influences fewer and fewer critics understand. And if all this informs and shapes the verse, so be it.
Poems
(All the poems quoted can be found in The Brittle Sea)
Arcades
Already you're gone, fixing your eyes
on a road's darkening arcade.
What song do you sing as the light fades?
The music shop you work in has closed
but I have to believe it is not too late.
Is it your eyes or your laugh I miss most?
I'd buy you those boots or that braclet
your mother wore, or an amber ring
to prove it is not too late to sing,
to prove we are more than worn out ghosts.
Dream in arcades, love. Dream in arcades.
Catrin Sands
Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.
The sea was a long way below
the wooden room I found you inside,
pale and thin, in a white blouse.
You looked at me with your new eyes
like you never did as a child.
The sea was a long way below.
There was something you needed to say,
my ear to your lips as you tried
but the sea, forty years below,
drowned all I wanted to know.
So I held you close, in case we had died
with something you needed to say.
Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.
Violin Tide
And this is the sea, of course
scrawling by moonlight in its room,
not quite getting the line right
where it meets the shore.
The earliest hours still find me
thinking of you; somnolent tides
rise towards daylight.
Perhaps you have drowned in me.
A table lamp shines the grain
of an old violin in the grate
and down the slope from your dreams
the bay similarly shines.
Perhaps you are not so far away
from the moon or the violin
and the clock I should wind, to hear
the workings of the bay.
At least in your dreams
see how I can not get this line
to make sense of the sand,
and how I am running out of time
and how easily the night and the day
exchange places, the land and the sea.
Links to other poems and information
Paul Henry's website There are several more poems online here.
Paul reading "Daylight Robbery" and "The Black Guitar" on YouTube
Seren, publisher of The Brittle Sea
A review of The Brittle Sea from this blog
A previous discussion of Henry's long poem "Penllain" on this blog
January 25, 2011
Happy birthday, Mr Burns
- though sometimes I think it would make even better sense to celebrate on the day of his funeral, because it seems somehow very appropriate that his last child was born that very day - "John Barleycorn rose up again,
And sore surprsied them all".
Anyway Burns Night it is, so here's the poem where he promises he'll stick by Jean Armour when her baby comes. (For once in his life he was actually trying to do the right thing and marry her, but her father wouldn't have it.) The "creepie-chair" is the penitential stool in church, and groanin maut is whisky for the midwife. But the key line is "O wha will tell me how to ca't?" - who will give it a name?
O wha my babie-clouts will buy?
O wha will tent me when I cry?
Wha will kiss me where I lie?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
O wha will own he did the faut?
O wha will buy the groanin maut?
O wha will tell me how to ca't?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
When I mount the creepie-chair,
Wha will sit beside me there?
Gie me Rob, I'll seek nae mair,
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
Wha will crack to me my lane?
Wha will mak me fidgin' fain?
Wha will kiss me o'er again?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
And sore surprsied them all".
Anyway Burns Night it is, so here's the poem where he promises he'll stick by Jean Armour when her baby comes. (For once in his life he was actually trying to do the right thing and marry her, but her father wouldn't have it.) The "creepie-chair" is the penitential stool in church, and groanin maut is whisky for the midwife. But the key line is "O wha will tell me how to ca't?" - who will give it a name?
O wha my babie-clouts will buy?
O wha will tent me when I cry?
Wha will kiss me where I lie?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
O wha will own he did the faut?
O wha will buy the groanin maut?
O wha will tell me how to ca't?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
When I mount the creepie-chair,
Wha will sit beside me there?
Gie me Rob, I'll seek nae mair,
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
Wha will crack to me my lane?
Wha will mak me fidgin' fain?
Wha will kiss me o'er again?
The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
January 23, 2011
Interview with Frank Dullaghan
Frank Dullaghan's collection On the Back of the Wind was published by Cinnamon in 2008 and is soon to be republished in an Italian translation. Frank, born in Dundalk, currently lives and works in Dubai and is working on another collection.
Night
I pass hooded doorways, the opening mouth of the alley,
a slab of a wall with its back against the sky (the sky
with its fierce eyes). Here are passing places, portals,
touch-points, gaps in hedge or banked earth where the force
of the night is heavy.
                                        It is here I come on my father,
leaning over the wall of a bridge. I know him by the sweet smell
of his pipe, the smoke that softens the air between us.
He is listening, it seems, to the slap of the water
as if for some message, some resolution.
                                        He knows I am here but he says nothing,
keeps his back turned, as if to face me might change too much.
SHEENAGH: Something that interests me quite a lot is the ordering of poems in collections. In your collection On the Back of the Wind there are several poems about your father, and in particular about the state of affairs after someone's dead when you feel a great need to somehow establish communication with them, perhaps in a way that never happened during their lifetime. I'm thinking of poems like "Expurgatory", "How It Could Happen", "Man on the Moon", "One Frozen Winter", above all "Night", a personal favourite of mine. You chose to group a lot of these at the end of the book, which to me suggests something ongoing, whereas had they been near the start, it might have indicated something resolved, from which you'd moved on. But the one you chose to end on is "My Father's Suitcase", and this is a bit different from the ones I've mentioned, set during his lifetime, and it ends with the words
we would turn, start the slow walk home,
the heavy case in his hand.
Now this walk home is in fact a sort of failure, the result of a missed train, but the image of father and son walking home together, for all its hint of emotional as well as physical "baggage", is somehow a positive one. Can you say something about why you chose this one to end on?
FRANK:The poems in this first collection were written over a long period so I always knew that there would be a lot of poems about my father. In fact, the working title of the collection was originally 'Carrying My Father'. The poems you have mentioned, however, came in a rush in the 3 months prior to submitting the collection for publication. There did seem to be this need to take the poems beyond memories, beyond the physical, to explore what I was still carrying inside of me.
Although he was affectionate, my father was a private person and I never talked to him the way I talk to my adult sons. I believe now that he lacked self esteem, that he considered himself a failure, and was probably deeply unhappy towards the end - increasingly finding that the religious convictions he leaned upon no longer fully supported him. So there was a sort of communication gap and I suppose some of these poems were a way to try to bridge that gap. In many ways the poems just happened and I'm still reading them myself to fully understand their message.
In the poem "Night" I've tapped into my interest in the idea of doors, windows, gaps, passing places, cross-roads - places which seem to hold the potential for change, portals if entered may lead to unexpected places and no going back. It ties in with Irish mythology and folk tales too - the fairy forts untouched in the centre of fields, the ability to pass between the land of here and now and Tir na nOg.
As for the placing of the poems, they were originally going to sit at the beginning of the collection in a sort of family montage. But as the last poems came they were strongly different and I did have the sense of them not being quite closed down, not sufficiently done and dusted to sit at the start of the collection. Not that there was a lot of conscious thought to this. They just felt better at the close of the book. I chose the last poem "My Father's Suitcase" as a way to bring the poems back to the actual world, to anchor them somehow. And I suppose, I was trying in a way to find a way to close down that exploration and move on to other things. But of course that hasn't happened. I've found that I'm still exploring this area. Probably always will.
That last image in "My Father's Suitcase" that you quote, did feel right to me too, as a closing point. Certainly, it was to do with failure but a sort of shared failure. Perhaps it is part of that communication gap, I mentioned. It's as if this remembered image holds a non-verbal communication that was there but not fully understood at the time. I think a lot of the images of my father in these poems hold that kind of potential.
SHEENAGH Of course you were born in Ireland and I'm interested to know whether the enormously strong Irish literary tradition is a blessing or a curse - how does a new Irish poet carve out a territory without being immediately compared with this or that luminary, Heaney in particular? Or doesn't that worry you?
FRANK: This is a big difficulty. Trying to find your own voice in such a strong choir, particularly when many of your preoccupations are the same, is very hard. There were many strong 'Irish' poems that I left out of my first collection for this very reason. If they were the sort of thing that Heaney would do and do better, I'd have been inviting the wrong kinds of comparison. Nevertheless, my voice is still distinctly Irish, I believe, and I am grateful for the richness in language and imagery I've inherited. It was reading Yeats and Kavanagh that first brought me into the world of poetry and those are influences that are still there.
SHEENAGH: You live now in Dubai, which isn't a place I have seen chronicled much in poetry and would therefore seem like a bit of a gift as a subject. But it doesn't always work that way; Robert Louis Stevenson, in Samoa, wrote a great deal about Edinburgh. Have you in fact used your current locale much in your writing, or have you done an RLS and found that when in foreign parts you "see" your former home more clearly?
FRANK: I think that living in Dubai has certainly influenced my writing but the place itself hasn't featured (in much the same way that working in financial services hasn't featured). I always thought that these would be rich sources of material and I'm not sure why they are not. Of course, I have written poems on both. But they generally just don't stand up. Perhaps when this phase of my life is over, I'll come back and make sense of it all. I do think that being removed (by distance or time) does add clarity.
SHEENAGH I think you're right that this will probably happen later; in fact even RLS did eventually start writing about Samoa, presumably when it had osmosed through his system enough. One thing that's very present in your work is Irish and British weather; there's a fair amount of sleety, windy dampness in there! The climate in Dubai must be startlingly different and so must the quality of light; has it seeped through to any of your newer poems yet?
Talking of Dubai, again, what's its own literary life like? I don't mean expats like you, writing in other tongues, but its own native scene? Is there any way for folk like you to connect with that or is the linguistic/cultural barrier too daunting?
FRANK: That's an interesting thought about the weather. I'll have to look. I have written some poems based in Afghanistan that I may not have written if I had not been based here - some in a female voice too (for some unknown reason).
Dubai, like a lot of the Gulf states, has a strong poetic tradition and a vibrant poetry writing culture. But this is just for the classical models written in high Arabic. There are prizes of AED1,000,000 on TV for the annual best poet (that's about 180,000 pounds!). There are very few Arabs writing contemporary poetry. There's a vibrant performance poetry scene here in English though, with a lot of young Arabs. It's certainly as good as the performance scene in London or elsewhere. I'm now a standard part of this (there being little else). I'm hoping to break into some of the more local poetry groups but not speaking Arabic makes this difficult. I have had an indication that a reading at Zayed University women's campus may be in the offing later this year (there will be difficulty with some of my poems where sex is touched on "Fisherman's Tale", "The Morning After", "Drenched", "Secrets" etc - so that could lead to interesting debates on selling my book there). I have also read at the Fringe to the Dubai Literary Festival for the last two years and this year will be on the main ticket as part of the performance group ("Poeticians" - not my choice of name). I'm also a member of the Emirates Literary Group where I have started to introduce the idea of work-shopping and am in touch with the British Council who may be able to assist with the translation of some of my work into Arabic by introducing me to some translators who are interested - you never know.
SHEENAGH: How does it feel to know your collection is to be translated into Italian? Are you involved with it in any way and have you any Italian yourself - if not, is there a sense of helplessness, of having to let go of the poems in order to let them be re-created in other words?
FRANK: I sort of feel that once the poems have been published in English they are out there, public property, almost. I still care about them but I am not a linguist so will have to trust the translators. I have been told that they are good but I have no idea myself. My soon to be daughter-in-law is fluent in Italian, so I'll get some useful feedback that way.
It's also very early days, so I have no idea yet how the process will work. I expect that they will just do it all themselves. Some of the poems in my first collection were translated into Russian and published in a magazine in Siberia. I have a copy but as it is printed in Cyrillic, I just have no way of knowing. I'm just happy that the audience for my work has been expanded. The source is the English version and it will always come back to that, so I don't worry too much about it.
SHEENAGH: You've been an editor (of the magazine Seam) as well as a poet. That's the other side of the fence, and though we as poets know editors have a hard job too, it's hard to keep it in mind when you're waiting for a reply! How did it affect the way you saw things?
FRANK: In many ways the job of an editor is a thankless task so I have a lot of respect for editors. Choosing poems for an edition can be a very arbitrary affair - of course the writing first needs to be at a good level. After that, though, it can depend on the editors mood on the day, how the work fits with other poems accepted etc. I did always try to respond, however, within a reasonable timeframe - usually 1 month. I still find that there are very good journals that don't even bother to respond at all, despite the enclosed SAE. That is infuriating. I don't mind being rejected, that par for the course, but I do feel that responses should not take more than 3 months anywhere and certainly if you include an SAE you should not be ignored.
SHEENAGH: Yes, you did always respond promptly, and Seam was actually much better than most in that respect. Sometimes one sees newspaper commentators complaining that poets don't tackle the burning questions of the moment, don't respond to events as they happen, and it always occurs to me that if you're talking of paid publication, there's no way to do that, because unless you can talk a daily paper into publishing a topical poem, which you usually can't unless you're very well known, it won't be topical any more by the time it appears! On the day the Chilean miners were rescued, I wanted to write a poem about it, and I published it on my blog because I couldn't think how else to respond immediately to the event. I'd quite like poets to blog-publish more, but of course if you do, no editor will then consider it for a print mag, so you can't blame them for holding back. Have you ever considered blogging, either for the publicity or as a way of getting stuff out there more quickly?
FRANK: I have considered blogging but the truth is, I don't have the time. I generally work a 45 to 50 hour week, sometimes more. Keeping a blog would become a chore and that would be bad. I had hoped to have made enough money by 2010 to take early retirement and turn to full time writing, blog included, but my business failed and most of my savings with it (the other side of capitalist accumulation is capitalist loss - there's always risk). Now I need to work for at least the next 5 years if Marie and I are going to have a comfortable pension. So my writing has to fit in around work if it's going to happen. This means everything is slower. I have a novel completed but finding an agent is going to take time - and longer than usual as it will be snatched here and there as I can manage it. That too is life.
SHEENAGH: You work in a very different milieu from most poets I know. Poets have a distinct tendency to work in academia, or at least the public sector, and I sometimes think we tend to assume the whole world, or at least that part of it we can hope for as an audience, is like the folk we mostly mix with: liberal-minded, probably left-leaning in politics, more into arts than sciences and certainly not much into business. The world you work in must be very different from that; how has it influenced your writing?
FRANK: Well as you know, I'm not left-leaning though I do, generally, have liberal views. And, I suppose, the world of business and my successes in business (and my failures) have certainly informed my writing and will have given it a different set of reference points from which to develop. But there are pluses and minuses with this. On the positive side, I have access to a different world view, the skills and experience I have developed are non academic, pragmatic, pressured and, no doubt, spill over into my writing. Certainly, I find that I can write in very short, pressured, sessions because this is often the only writing time I have. There is also a level of drive, confidence, work-ethic that is probably different.
On the negative side, I don't mix that much with fellow poets and writers, I'm not in the "in crowd" or, indeed, much of a poetry crowd at all and, in fact, not really that well known as a poet. I do believe that this has meant that I have not been picked up in any of the anthologies or considered in any of the various groupings. Of course that is also because I'm not in the UK any more. But even when I was, this was the case. I do feel like a bit of an outsider and, as with any walk of life, networking is important if you want to be "in". So that is a big disadvantage. There is also a lack of critical feedback (unless you can find a good workshop group) and less ongoing reference points for many of the things that are important in a writer's life - critical essays, reviews, visiting writers, publishers, book fairs, the ability to meet some of the decision makers and become known to them etc.
I can do stuff to redress this balance, of course, and I'm not stating this as a complaint of any kind - it's just how life works. If I had been in academia, I would have had more time and opportunities. But I would probably have been writing a different kind of poetry too. We each have our own lives to live.
SHEENAGH: Yes, it seems to me that networking is more and more important for all writers, now that they're more or less expected to be their publisher's sales dept as well, and I suspect that this is all the harder because, in fact, "feeling like an outsider", as you put it, is the norm for writers. Don't we all hang about on the fringes of groups jotting down notes, rather than participating? Writers are observers, even voyeurs, by nature, yet these days they need to be, or pretend to be, the life and soul of the party in order to market their image and work. A recent post on my blog started a debate about this, in which the writer and publisher Adele Ward said some interesting things - see here.
Have you any theories on how we can do the marketing publishers want, yet still maintain that necessary distance from what we observe and record?
FRANK: Re authors being involved in marketing, I think it's inevitable. Most writing pays very little so publishers will commit little funds to marketing each book. The author needs to build his or her own brand. Some authors are very good at this but, I suspect, many of the better ones won't be. I do believe however, that it is now part of being a full time writer. Perhaps it should form part of what is covered in M Phil programs - how to write a press release; how to build press contacts; how to find an angle for a press story; setting up and maintaining a blog; using social network sites; how to get radio and TV interviews; how to handle interviews etc etc. It's tough though. Most writers just want to write. The thought of also having to market their wares may be too much. I guess, as in many endeavours, writers need to be able to split out the various aspects of their work - marketing is one part, feeding the kids and taking care of parents may be another. But that's life. Writers need to be able to find those quiet times to be creative, despite whatever other pressures there are.
The Silence
You can wear your silence like a room.
It will not stop you feeling lonely.
Look how your moon has cracked its head,
its light is pooling in the lake.
Your sky has lost all sense of where it's going,
its stars are overheating fast.
The fence that you have built to keep him out
throws shadows on your garden.
He walks street by street away, is destitute.
You can feel the silence harden.
The Interview
This is where the money's made - Wall Street, Broad Street,
New York Plaza. The buildings tilt your head back.
I've come to be interviewed for a job in London.
Flown in for the day, as if the people here have some gift,
of knowledge or benediction, that is worth the cost.
I'd lifted off at Heathrow, watched
as the airport shrank to a microchip.
The cloud top was a white cauliflower forest that darkened
as the night came on and the full moon gaped
above its fuzzy image, could not drop through.
Perhaps when you're that high, it's hard
to reflect upon the ground. I take the elevator up.
Offices with space and an unequalled view - Liberty, Ellis Island.
Here it is - opportunity, a figure rising from behind a desk.
Halloween
We are coming into that time
when things are not fully themselves –
sky improperly dresses in glint and shadow,
buildings slant from the vertical,
birds toss themselves from bare branch to branch.
Even the voice smokes from the mouth
without its coat.
                                                       My mother
(remembered here from that photograph)
pegs a sheet to a line, the pebble-dashed wall
of the shed catching and breaking
the white light of morning behind her,
her mouth open but silent, her eyes
trying to hold what is already leaving.
Days not fully themselves.
                                     Neither now nor then.
When do we ever close the face of the past,
lay copper suns on its eyelids,
bind its bony fingers with rosary beads?
Nothing dies completely. On nights
like this even death
finds it hard to retain its certainty.
Links
Cinnamon Press, who publish On the Back of the Wind
Frank reading two poems on YouTube
Frank's poem "Fairy Tales", online at the Ink, Sweat & Tears website.
"Seeing the Light", online at the Poeticians website.
"Flying in a pink leotard", online at the Glasgow review website.
Interview on Kurt Frenier's blog
Interview with Securities & Investment - don't worry, it's about poetry, not finance!
Review of On the Back of the Wind on Todd Swift's "Eyewear" blog.
Night
I pass hooded doorways, the opening mouth of the alley,
a slab of a wall with its back against the sky (the sky
with its fierce eyes). Here are passing places, portals,
touch-points, gaps in hedge or banked earth where the force
of the night is heavy.
                                        It is here I come on my father,
leaning over the wall of a bridge. I know him by the sweet smell
of his pipe, the smoke that softens the air between us.
He is listening, it seems, to the slap of the water
as if for some message, some resolution.
                                        He knows I am here but he says nothing,
keeps his back turned, as if to face me might change too much.
SHEENAGH: Something that interests me quite a lot is the ordering of poems in collections. In your collection On the Back of the Wind there are several poems about your father, and in particular about the state of affairs after someone's dead when you feel a great need to somehow establish communication with them, perhaps in a way that never happened during their lifetime. I'm thinking of poems like "Expurgatory", "How It Could Happen", "Man on the Moon", "One Frozen Winter", above all "Night", a personal favourite of mine. You chose to group a lot of these at the end of the book, which to me suggests something ongoing, whereas had they been near the start, it might have indicated something resolved, from which you'd moved on. But the one you chose to end on is "My Father's Suitcase", and this is a bit different from the ones I've mentioned, set during his lifetime, and it ends with the words
we would turn, start the slow walk home,
the heavy case in his hand.
Now this walk home is in fact a sort of failure, the result of a missed train, but the image of father and son walking home together, for all its hint of emotional as well as physical "baggage", is somehow a positive one. Can you say something about why you chose this one to end on?
FRANK:The poems in this first collection were written over a long period so I always knew that there would be a lot of poems about my father. In fact, the working title of the collection was originally 'Carrying My Father'. The poems you have mentioned, however, came in a rush in the 3 months prior to submitting the collection for publication. There did seem to be this need to take the poems beyond memories, beyond the physical, to explore what I was still carrying inside of me.
Although he was affectionate, my father was a private person and I never talked to him the way I talk to my adult sons. I believe now that he lacked self esteem, that he considered himself a failure, and was probably deeply unhappy towards the end - increasingly finding that the religious convictions he leaned upon no longer fully supported him. So there was a sort of communication gap and I suppose some of these poems were a way to try to bridge that gap. In many ways the poems just happened and I'm still reading them myself to fully understand their message.
In the poem "Night" I've tapped into my interest in the idea of doors, windows, gaps, passing places, cross-roads - places which seem to hold the potential for change, portals if entered may lead to unexpected places and no going back. It ties in with Irish mythology and folk tales too - the fairy forts untouched in the centre of fields, the ability to pass between the land of here and now and Tir na nOg.
As for the placing of the poems, they were originally going to sit at the beginning of the collection in a sort of family montage. But as the last poems came they were strongly different and I did have the sense of them not being quite closed down, not sufficiently done and dusted to sit at the start of the collection. Not that there was a lot of conscious thought to this. They just felt better at the close of the book. I chose the last poem "My Father's Suitcase" as a way to bring the poems back to the actual world, to anchor them somehow. And I suppose, I was trying in a way to find a way to close down that exploration and move on to other things. But of course that hasn't happened. I've found that I'm still exploring this area. Probably always will.
That last image in "My Father's Suitcase" that you quote, did feel right to me too, as a closing point. Certainly, it was to do with failure but a sort of shared failure. Perhaps it is part of that communication gap, I mentioned. It's as if this remembered image holds a non-verbal communication that was there but not fully understood at the time. I think a lot of the images of my father in these poems hold that kind of potential.
SHEENAGH Of course you were born in Ireland and I'm interested to know whether the enormously strong Irish literary tradition is a blessing or a curse - how does a new Irish poet carve out a territory without being immediately compared with this or that luminary, Heaney in particular? Or doesn't that worry you?
FRANK: This is a big difficulty. Trying to find your own voice in such a strong choir, particularly when many of your preoccupations are the same, is very hard. There were many strong 'Irish' poems that I left out of my first collection for this very reason. If they were the sort of thing that Heaney would do and do better, I'd have been inviting the wrong kinds of comparison. Nevertheless, my voice is still distinctly Irish, I believe, and I am grateful for the richness in language and imagery I've inherited. It was reading Yeats and Kavanagh that first brought me into the world of poetry and those are influences that are still there.
SHEENAGH: You live now in Dubai, which isn't a place I have seen chronicled much in poetry and would therefore seem like a bit of a gift as a subject. But it doesn't always work that way; Robert Louis Stevenson, in Samoa, wrote a great deal about Edinburgh. Have you in fact used your current locale much in your writing, or have you done an RLS and found that when in foreign parts you "see" your former home more clearly?
FRANK: I think that living in Dubai has certainly influenced my writing but the place itself hasn't featured (in much the same way that working in financial services hasn't featured). I always thought that these would be rich sources of material and I'm not sure why they are not. Of course, I have written poems on both. But they generally just don't stand up. Perhaps when this phase of my life is over, I'll come back and make sense of it all. I do think that being removed (by distance or time) does add clarity.
SHEENAGH I think you're right that this will probably happen later; in fact even RLS did eventually start writing about Samoa, presumably when it had osmosed through his system enough. One thing that's very present in your work is Irish and British weather; there's a fair amount of sleety, windy dampness in there! The climate in Dubai must be startlingly different and so must the quality of light; has it seeped through to any of your newer poems yet?
Talking of Dubai, again, what's its own literary life like? I don't mean expats like you, writing in other tongues, but its own native scene? Is there any way for folk like you to connect with that or is the linguistic/cultural barrier too daunting?
FRANK: That's an interesting thought about the weather. I'll have to look. I have written some poems based in Afghanistan that I may not have written if I had not been based here - some in a female voice too (for some unknown reason).
Dubai, like a lot of the Gulf states, has a strong poetic tradition and a vibrant poetry writing culture. But this is just for the classical models written in high Arabic. There are prizes of AED1,000,000 on TV for the annual best poet (that's about 180,000 pounds!). There are very few Arabs writing contemporary poetry. There's a vibrant performance poetry scene here in English though, with a lot of young Arabs. It's certainly as good as the performance scene in London or elsewhere. I'm now a standard part of this (there being little else). I'm hoping to break into some of the more local poetry groups but not speaking Arabic makes this difficult. I have had an indication that a reading at Zayed University women's campus may be in the offing later this year (there will be difficulty with some of my poems where sex is touched on "Fisherman's Tale", "The Morning After", "Drenched", "Secrets" etc - so that could lead to interesting debates on selling my book there). I have also read at the Fringe to the Dubai Literary Festival for the last two years and this year will be on the main ticket as part of the performance group ("Poeticians" - not my choice of name). I'm also a member of the Emirates Literary Group where I have started to introduce the idea of work-shopping and am in touch with the British Council who may be able to assist with the translation of some of my work into Arabic by introducing me to some translators who are interested - you never know.
SHEENAGH: How does it feel to know your collection is to be translated into Italian? Are you involved with it in any way and have you any Italian yourself - if not, is there a sense of helplessness, of having to let go of the poems in order to let them be re-created in other words?
FRANK: I sort of feel that once the poems have been published in English they are out there, public property, almost. I still care about them but I am not a linguist so will have to trust the translators. I have been told that they are good but I have no idea myself. My soon to be daughter-in-law is fluent in Italian, so I'll get some useful feedback that way.
It's also very early days, so I have no idea yet how the process will work. I expect that they will just do it all themselves. Some of the poems in my first collection were translated into Russian and published in a magazine in Siberia. I have a copy but as it is printed in Cyrillic, I just have no way of knowing. I'm just happy that the audience for my work has been expanded. The source is the English version and it will always come back to that, so I don't worry too much about it.
SHEENAGH: You've been an editor (of the magazine Seam) as well as a poet. That's the other side of the fence, and though we as poets know editors have a hard job too, it's hard to keep it in mind when you're waiting for a reply! How did it affect the way you saw things?
FRANK: In many ways the job of an editor is a thankless task so I have a lot of respect for editors. Choosing poems for an edition can be a very arbitrary affair - of course the writing first needs to be at a good level. After that, though, it can depend on the editors mood on the day, how the work fits with other poems accepted etc. I did always try to respond, however, within a reasonable timeframe - usually 1 month. I still find that there are very good journals that don't even bother to respond at all, despite the enclosed SAE. That is infuriating. I don't mind being rejected, that par for the course, but I do feel that responses should not take more than 3 months anywhere and certainly if you include an SAE you should not be ignored.
SHEENAGH: Yes, you did always respond promptly, and Seam was actually much better than most in that respect. Sometimes one sees newspaper commentators complaining that poets don't tackle the burning questions of the moment, don't respond to events as they happen, and it always occurs to me that if you're talking of paid publication, there's no way to do that, because unless you can talk a daily paper into publishing a topical poem, which you usually can't unless you're very well known, it won't be topical any more by the time it appears! On the day the Chilean miners were rescued, I wanted to write a poem about it, and I published it on my blog because I couldn't think how else to respond immediately to the event. I'd quite like poets to blog-publish more, but of course if you do, no editor will then consider it for a print mag, so you can't blame them for holding back. Have you ever considered blogging, either for the publicity or as a way of getting stuff out there more quickly?
FRANK: I have considered blogging but the truth is, I don't have the time. I generally work a 45 to 50 hour week, sometimes more. Keeping a blog would become a chore and that would be bad. I had hoped to have made enough money by 2010 to take early retirement and turn to full time writing, blog included, but my business failed and most of my savings with it (the other side of capitalist accumulation is capitalist loss - there's always risk). Now I need to work for at least the next 5 years if Marie and I are going to have a comfortable pension. So my writing has to fit in around work if it's going to happen. This means everything is slower. I have a novel completed but finding an agent is going to take time - and longer than usual as it will be snatched here and there as I can manage it. That too is life.
SHEENAGH: You work in a very different milieu from most poets I know. Poets have a distinct tendency to work in academia, or at least the public sector, and I sometimes think we tend to assume the whole world, or at least that part of it we can hope for as an audience, is like the folk we mostly mix with: liberal-minded, probably left-leaning in politics, more into arts than sciences and certainly not much into business. The world you work in must be very different from that; how has it influenced your writing?
FRANK: Well as you know, I'm not left-leaning though I do, generally, have liberal views. And, I suppose, the world of business and my successes in business (and my failures) have certainly informed my writing and will have given it a different set of reference points from which to develop. But there are pluses and minuses with this. On the positive side, I have access to a different world view, the skills and experience I have developed are non academic, pragmatic, pressured and, no doubt, spill over into my writing. Certainly, I find that I can write in very short, pressured, sessions because this is often the only writing time I have. There is also a level of drive, confidence, work-ethic that is probably different.
On the negative side, I don't mix that much with fellow poets and writers, I'm not in the "in crowd" or, indeed, much of a poetry crowd at all and, in fact, not really that well known as a poet. I do believe that this has meant that I have not been picked up in any of the anthologies or considered in any of the various groupings. Of course that is also because I'm not in the UK any more. But even when I was, this was the case. I do feel like a bit of an outsider and, as with any walk of life, networking is important if you want to be "in". So that is a big disadvantage. There is also a lack of critical feedback (unless you can find a good workshop group) and less ongoing reference points for many of the things that are important in a writer's life - critical essays, reviews, visiting writers, publishers, book fairs, the ability to meet some of the decision makers and become known to them etc.
I can do stuff to redress this balance, of course, and I'm not stating this as a complaint of any kind - it's just how life works. If I had been in academia, I would have had more time and opportunities. But I would probably have been writing a different kind of poetry too. We each have our own lives to live.
SHEENAGH: Yes, it seems to me that networking is more and more important for all writers, now that they're more or less expected to be their publisher's sales dept as well, and I suspect that this is all the harder because, in fact, "feeling like an outsider", as you put it, is the norm for writers. Don't we all hang about on the fringes of groups jotting down notes, rather than participating? Writers are observers, even voyeurs, by nature, yet these days they need to be, or pretend to be, the life and soul of the party in order to market their image and work. A recent post on my blog started a debate about this, in which the writer and publisher Adele Ward said some interesting things - see here.
Have you any theories on how we can do the marketing publishers want, yet still maintain that necessary distance from what we observe and record?
FRANK: Re authors being involved in marketing, I think it's inevitable. Most writing pays very little so publishers will commit little funds to marketing each book. The author needs to build his or her own brand. Some authors are very good at this but, I suspect, many of the better ones won't be. I do believe however, that it is now part of being a full time writer. Perhaps it should form part of what is covered in M Phil programs - how to write a press release; how to build press contacts; how to find an angle for a press story; setting up and maintaining a blog; using social network sites; how to get radio and TV interviews; how to handle interviews etc etc. It's tough though. Most writers just want to write. The thought of also having to market their wares may be too much. I guess, as in many endeavours, writers need to be able to split out the various aspects of their work - marketing is one part, feeding the kids and taking care of parents may be another. But that's life. Writers need to be able to find those quiet times to be creative, despite whatever other pressures there are.
The Silence
You can wear your silence like a room.
It will not stop you feeling lonely.
Look how your moon has cracked its head,
its light is pooling in the lake.
Your sky has lost all sense of where it's going,
its stars are overheating fast.
The fence that you have built to keep him out
throws shadows on your garden.
He walks street by street away, is destitute.
You can feel the silence harden.
The Interview
This is where the money's made - Wall Street, Broad Street,
New York Plaza. The buildings tilt your head back.
I've come to be interviewed for a job in London.
Flown in for the day, as if the people here have some gift,
of knowledge or benediction, that is worth the cost.
I'd lifted off at Heathrow, watched
as the airport shrank to a microchip.
The cloud top was a white cauliflower forest that darkened
as the night came on and the full moon gaped
above its fuzzy image, could not drop through.
Perhaps when you're that high, it's hard
to reflect upon the ground. I take the elevator up.
Offices with space and an unequalled view - Liberty, Ellis Island.
Here it is - opportunity, a figure rising from behind a desk.
Halloween
We are coming into that time
when things are not fully themselves –
sky improperly dresses in glint and shadow,
buildings slant from the vertical,
birds toss themselves from bare branch to branch.
Even the voice smokes from the mouth
without its coat.
                                                       My mother
(remembered here from that photograph)
pegs a sheet to a line, the pebble-dashed wall
of the shed catching and breaking
the white light of morning behind her,
her mouth open but silent, her eyes
trying to hold what is already leaving.
Days not fully themselves.
                                     Neither now nor then.
When do we ever close the face of the past,
lay copper suns on its eyelids,
bind its bony fingers with rosary beads?
Nothing dies completely. On nights
like this even death
finds it hard to retain its certainty.
Links
Cinnamon Press, who publish On the Back of the Wind
Frank reading two poems on YouTube
Frank's poem "Fairy Tales", online at the Ink, Sweat & Tears website.
"Seeing the Light", online at the Poeticians website.
"Flying in a pink leotard", online at the Glasgow review website.
Interview on Kurt Frenier's blog
Interview with Securities & Investment - don't worry, it's about poetry, not finance!
Review of On the Back of the Wind on Todd Swift's "Eyewear" blog.
January 18, 2011
Interview with Geraldine Paine
Geraldine Paine's collection The Go-Away Bird is available from the publisher, Lapwing Press of Belfast, at lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com and I reviewed it here. It contains her sequence "Leaden Hearts" , partly-found poems derived from convict tokens - these men and women, leaving their homes and families for transportation to the other side of the world, left tokens with last messages for loved ones:
There could be no flowers,
no grave, just this voice
left behind, barely heard.
Did he guess
family shame
would gouge out his name?
                                                       When
                                                       this you
                                                       see remember
                                                       me and bear me
                                                       in your mind Let
                                                       all the world say
                                                       what they whill
                                                       Don't prove To
                                                       me un kind
SHEENAGH: When I read about some 20-year-old poetic genius being "staggeringly inventive" I think, well, yes, he'd have to be, because he has no experience to speak of. You write a lot from your experience and it comes from several different places, including travel, art and an unusually diverse work background. I'm interested in how you reinterpret and reinvent this experience.
GERALDINE: I suppose I have led a varied life, and yet it's always been anchored to home. Maybe that's what has informed all my choices, the need to be anchored. I spent my early years with the uncertainty of war, the presence of sudden death, separation from people I loved, being evacuated to unwelcoming places, coming home to a changed landscape. Of course I accepted the circumstances as children do but I've always been aware of the fragility of things. And the awfulness of leaving possibly never to return. It was an unspoken thing. To a small child on one level it meant having to leave your dog behind every time a siren went while you were taken to the safety of the communal air-raid shelter, or at a deeper level perhaps realising your parents were somewhere else, or finally going from the familiarity of London to damp fields and the homes of strangers. I put down how it felt. The smell of burning, the silences, the bombsites. A child's view. Odd things: a field of cowslips, shining underground rails and a scene is recreated. Occasionally I wrote in prose to get the memory down and reshaped it, picking the strongest images to develop into a poem that conveyed the feeling, the time. Some I wrote as poems straight away.
I'm aware fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes and will do so subconsciously, maybe the better for it. Which leads me to question whether experience is not partly behind the poems about convict tokens too? I'm no psychologist but looking back I'm acutely aware of interrupted lives, the randomness of things. And what life does to good people who for one reason or another can't make it work for them.
SHEENAGH: Your poems about the tokens left for their families by convicts about to be transported are not just found poems, as they might be if you'd just reproduced their texts; you add your own words to them. And two things strike me about your contributions. First, the sense of frustration that comes from these illiterate people having to trust others - not always particularly literate themselves - with their most important messages. I get the impression that really gets through to you. Secondly, there's a softness, a sympathy, that nearly always appears in your work when young people are involved and it intrigues me because as a magistrate you must have come across a lot of young people who, if they didn't make you cynical, at least must have often annoyed and disappointed you. How have you managed to maintain that sympathy, and were you conscious, when looking at the tokens, of that part of your background?
GERALDINE: I was. The inequality of things was brought home to me very young. And I grew up realizing that someone could live their whole life for and through others because of initial poverty. How for many people there was so little choice, so little control then. In some places, third world Zimbabwe for example, it's still so, only now there is corruption and terror too. And maybe there we have it. The reason for as you say, my frustration at illiterate and semi-literate people having to trust others to be their voice. I am acutely aware of it. How important it is to be independent, to be allowed dignity, your own voice heard.
I became a magistrate because power needs to be used sparingly. And I wanted to be there. And it turned out I could be. So many of the accused are young, inadequate, their lives blighted by poor education and the lack of security, drugs featured heavily too – old lags seemed to be in the minority but I watched the young grow older as they returned, very often repeating the family history of petty crime.
I can't claim to have their experience but my upbringing was not conventional, and I may, only may, have understood them better than some on the Bench: farmers, landowners, small business men, wives of the above, plus the occasional teacher, fireman, postman etc. That doesn't mean to say I was always right, sympathy can lead to disappointment, but there was the odd occasion when I felt I was on the wrong side of the Bench! I wrote very few poems based round my experience then but certain memories stay with me and may emerge.
SHEENAGH: In another part of the forest, you were an actress, and performance is a recurring theme in your work - eg the poem dedicated to Michael Donaghy, whom I once saw perform too, and he was certainly unusually memorable. It's also something you have done as a poet, in the performance group Scatterlings. Many poets don't have this experience of their own poems as something other than flat on a page. How does this part of your work affect your writing - when you write, are you already thinking how it'll sound in performance? And does performing the poems ever alter your way of seeing them, even suggest revisions?
GERALDINE: No I never think how a poem will sound in performance as I write it but certain poems lend themselves more to being read aloud. I know what will work best. Having said that it's a moot point whether page poetry does always work in performance. I'm uncomfortable with actor-ly interpretations but equally a dull reading is unhelpful and makes a long evening. It helps to be aware of the pitfalls!
Scatterlings has always had some musical input – guitar, piano, for contrast.
My paternal grandparents were Variety artistes, my dad was originally a Song and Dance man. As a child I was taken to see him in Jack Buchanan musicals. Happily I've inherited his sense of humour, in life if not in poetry! I find humorous poems tricky, wish I didn't, they could enliven many a reading! He met my mother, who wrote too, on a film set. So, in the blood you could say. I loved it, still do, and admire many of the doughty, talented, risk-taking performers, legit or illegit.
I haven't really thought about it before but it's interesting how it affects my writing, not so much the performance side but in the relating of and to the characters or story within the poem. I'm 'there' as I write because not all the poems relate directly to experience of course. In a way I become what I'm writing about if that isn't too fanciful and I enjoy the dramatic monologue. I do listen to myself reading each poem as I write it, to hear the rhythm, but I think most poets do that, don't they? Certainly revisions are prompted by any jarring note. I need to hear a certain music although, despite my background, while I can sing in tune, music doesn't play a big part of my life. Finally I aim for a balance in the poem, an accuracy, no unnecessary padding, a cleanness if you like. The best performances try for that too. And again I suppose my acting experience of playing different characters allows me to imagine other lives, to put myself in their shoes a little more easily than some. That helps the empathy.
My acting days were not long, four years in all, give or take, before I became a teacher of profoundly deaf children etc. ( an actress's face an ideal prop!)
SHEENAGH: So basically all your life you've been a sort of professional speaking-tube, the voice for both your own thoughts and those of others, and I can see how that informs all you do – as with your Zimbabwe poems. And in the poems about your own past as an evacuee child, when you say, "fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes", that would be a concern not only to record that personal experience but to depersonalise it, to find the universal in it so that you can speak for and to anyone who's been in a similar situation?
GERALDINE: I do aim for that. Of my Zimbabwean poems the one that most Zimbabweans mention is "Harare Song", and the image of the 'blood umbrellas not trees' but "The Man Who Knows Flowers" is my favourite because it is a celebration of an individual and a relationship that challenges perceived opinion. I wrote "A Patient Man" for the same reason in a way, a white African in love with his land, bereft. I'd have probably extended it if I were writing it today. And the poem, "The Go-Away-Bird" is how it was and still is for a generation of people bewildered by the country they were born and bred in, no longer recognizing the place they see. I was a witness to the leaving and was glad I could tell it as it was.
SHEENAGH: Your Zimbabwe poems are very striking and clearly deeply felt. I'm particularly struck by how they manage not to harp only on the negative, as they well might have, given the current state of affairs there. In fact a lot of vibrancy and beauty comes through them too. How did this country come to be part of your work?
GERALDINE: I came to know it because my second husband is a third generation Zimbabwean. His grandparents went there at the turn of the Twentieth Century, his parents were born there; his mother has lived to see the country destroyed by a despot and her family's life's work with it. They were essentially farmers. We returned every second year for sixteen years to visit her and watched the country turn from a prosperous fertile land to one where the people were starving. It is so beautiful, the people open and friendly, full of initiative and gentleness. I was beginning to know them, tentatively learnt a little Shona (one of the African languages) from Chenga, the old gardener. I'd climbed a sacred mountain in the tribal lands past small boys herding cattle up near perpendicular hills, seen rare cave paintings, held (only just) a wriggling, amazingly strong baby crocodile, been rowed round a dam, walked through a game reserve at dawn with a guard with a gun at the ready, heard elephants rumble in the night as I slept under a mosquito net, watched an African carve a perfect elephant from a single piece of wood ( I still have it); picked, smelt and tasted fresh guavas and avocados from trees in my mother-in-law's garden. All this and more, the colour, the generosity, the sun. The vibrancy you speak of had to come through despite everything. And yet I didn't miss the signs. I wrote what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced but unlike some I was able to leave to come home. Several of my husband's extended family lost their farms, their businesses and everything they owned, but they are alive. Many black Zimbabweans, and a few whites, are not, tortured and killed by Mugabe's thugs. There are young, black Zimbabweans being published at the moment. Their poetry is powerful, often very political and angry. Some of it will survive. We are all witnesses.
You ask how I re-interpret and re-invent my various experiences of work, art, travel. I suppose through people, set in a specific, recognizable time or place. Perhaps through a sound, a smell, a taste – "The Pink Shop" was prompted by my first taste of oysters but it was also an imaginary take on Whitstable. Often in observing the moment, just snapshots often - the girl with dirty nails in "Brief Encounters". In recording the commonplace, or elevating it in some way; relating to it, often obliquely. Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship. And in the case of art often through dramatising what's before me, interpreting or re-interpreting the painting's mood. I wrote "Once Seen" after seeing a Poussin painting, it turned into a poem about Warhol's perceived influence on Edie Sedgwick! It is people I want to celebrate, those still here and those long-gone. And the loss of them. One of the reasons I love Cavafy is just that. The ache that is left.
SHEENAGH: "Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship."
That very much makes me think of your poem "Hopper's Window" (which follows this interview). I'm not normally much for ekphrastic poems, because I feel they often repeat rather inadequately in words what the painter has expressed better in paint. But in that poem you totally reinterpret the still-life of objects and create a rather creepy, disturbing relationship between two people, centred around power and control at a distance. If I recall rightly, that poem came from a period when your work seemed to me to be getting quite suddenly more adventurous and bold; in poems like "Hopper's Window" and "The Pink Shop" you were doing things with language and ideas that surprised; it was as if a window had been opened and a blast of air had come in. I think writers do have turns like this, when maybe something suddenly clicks or they find a new way of seeing, and something is permanently added to the voice. Were you conscious of anything around then that "turned" your work in that way?
GERALDINE: I get fired up by the company of creative people, not necessarily writers, often artists. It's the buzzing energy of it. Rightly or wrongly I soak an atmosphere up like a sponge, absorbing and developing ideas at a pace, it's probably the acting gene! A course with Ruth Padel was memorable; the idea that you can mix the senses, reverse the normal association of an image, say the opposite of what is expected, be specific but preposterous at the same time, I suppose that was a turning point of sorts at the time, though not the only one, it's a cumulative thing with me. A successful outcome to a poem works wonders. I'm by instinct a poet of experience, (it doesn't have to be true but I have to filter it somehow through experience), this showed me I could play more. Having said that, the Hopper painting spoke of obsession and control straight away. I imagined the scene played by Harold Pinter's first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, who could use her whole body as well as her mind to portray his work as a precise, sexual, ritualistic game. So we have a poem from a painting using the memory of a performance in a play! Ekphrastic or what?! The story came quickly, what was exciting was finding the right words, and that's the really terrific thing about poetry, you can make the language speak. The challenge is in making it surprising and fresh.
Some things can be comforting, not only because of the connections, the relationships they evoke but also because of the continuity they represent. And yet one can also be trapped by them. When I was between homes and my possessions were in store I was happy enough with the bare essentials, felt a certain freedom. So what comforts can also shackle. I wonder if it is the same with poetry. I do see the need to break out sometimes, to abandon the familiar, believe that what I've written is still a poem – that's where the young have it easier, they may know less obedience. I've just read a poem, "springcuts", by Carol Watts, where she's punctuated quite promiscuously – and only if you remove the punctuation does the sense of what she's saying return. Now why did she choose to do that, it seems so self-consciously different? And yet it did give this reader an awareness of fractured light, so I thought well, well. Was I being fanciful? Would I have done it? No. It wouldn't have occurred to me any more than ending a line on the word 'of'. Is that the equivalent of a tidy room?! Is her work and others like her the equivalent of some modern art, there to shock and shake perceived complacency? (Although Tracey Emin's drawings can be heartbreaking so that's not all.) I want a poem that resonates, that can't be date-stamped.
SHEENAGH: You mention Cavafy, who's always been an obsession of mine too, and the sense of loss in him, "the ache that is left". But there's a great sense of celebration in him too, and you also use that word of what you are trying to do in poetry. Celebration and commemoration have always seemed to me to be important roles of poetry, yet to judge by the reaction to some of the present Laureate's efforts in
that direction, it's very hard to do without attracting criticism from people who think poetry isn't being cutting-edge unless it's overtly attacking something. How would you defend celebratory poetry to such folk?
GERALDINE: To me celebration has always been one of the main purposes of poetry. You're right when you say that Cavafy had a great sense of celebration in him. What I love most is his celebration of the fleeting moment. I find it so moving, it should be celebrated or it is lost, along with the feeling it once engendered, which mattered very much. That's how I'd defend it – to celebrate is to give a permanence to experience. The celebration of a person, especially those who may never make their mark, or never did, is important to me. I want somehow to value them, to dignify them. Edward Thomas is pretty good at that. He can make the passing moment memorable. He loved names, of people, of places, but also of birds, trees, flowers to hold them in the memory, to commemorate them. Les Murray celebrates more rumbustiously but he can certainly celebrate and all "to the glory of God". I think, how lucky to be so unselfconsciously, so creatively rumbustious!
"How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action"
Ted Hughes wrote that. Interesting. Does that hold us unless we deliberately deny it? Noticing, appreciating, being aware of who we are, ours and others' place in the world. It's a recognition. And it's timeless. Attacking things in order to be cutting edge is short-lived surely. Rather like a cartoon it can lose relevance very quickly as time and targets move on. It belongs more to journalism or politics. Compare Shaw to Chekhov. What's the difference? To me one playwright lectures, the other shows us the human condition. Isn't that what poetry does? And isn't celebration part of that?
More poems
HOPPER'S WINDOW
She remembers his words. First: step into the shoes -
black patents, shining. Slip them on. Slowly.
Red toenails touching inner lining of calf.
Left foot, then right, balancing,
swaying, holding on. Fur next, fox
trickling down her neck to where the dead
seals hang,her skin smooth on theirs, stroking them
into life each time she moves. Last, the long gloves
shaded to the colour of jet. Watered silk
flowing. Thre items of clothing,
he'd said. You choose. He's out there
somewhere, staring through binoculars, hidden
by a line of windows. She draws up the chair.
Patches of steamed glass appear, his name
in mirror writing. Noise is disturbing her,
legs scraping across the wooden floor.
Three days she's been here, waiting. The first
day's pose, arranging the flowers. They had
to be centrally placed, white, in a white vase:
lilies, roses and one flag. They had to catch
the morning sun. She'd done that. Surrendering
her body in the bare room, sleeping curled till morning
and no rules broken. The second day was furniture.
The Windsor chair opposite the table. The chest behind
covered with red cloth. Black, red, white.
She'd chosen as he said. Today, the third day,
he would come for her.
THE MAN WHO KNOWS FLOWERS
And Chenga came through the door...
Chenga, of the broad hat and the slow smile,
the man who knows flowers and cares for the old lady
who loves him.
Chenga, who has asthma and wears a mask
while spraying the blooms of the old lady's garden
where the mimosa sways among hibiscus
and blue convolvulus vie with the sky.
Chenga, who for twenty-five years
would rather sow seeds that survive
than learn to read, be a part of the world
that's changing beyond the high wall.
Chenga, tending his guavas, his roses,
his lady who grows old beside him,
who keeps him well with her potions,
whom he loves.
NO-ONE EXPLAINS
There are the lines, silver, dazzling. Danger lines.
There are the spaces between. As deep as me standing,
the depth from the rails to the floor. There are the strangers
picking a path to a place among friends, the people
huddled in blankets,. sleeping in bunks,
the smell of their bodies overflowing the platform.
There are the children packed with the thermos,
the pillow, the belongings in cases. A bag falls
onto the track, someone jumps down and I'm
screaming. No-one explains there are no trains.
Links to more poems and information
Geraldine's page on the PoetryPF site - some poems and biographical information.
Amazon UK's page for The Go-Away Bird
The Basil Bunting Poetry Award - here you can listen to Geraldine's commended poem "The Creek"
There could be no flowers,
no grave, just this voice
left behind, barely heard.
Did he guess
family shame
would gouge out his name?
                                                       When
                                                       this you
                                                       see remember
                                                       me and bear me
                                                       in your mind Let
                                                       all the world say
                                                       what they whill
                                                       Don't prove To
                                                       me un kind
SHEENAGH: When I read about some 20-year-old poetic genius being "staggeringly inventive" I think, well, yes, he'd have to be, because he has no experience to speak of. You write a lot from your experience and it comes from several different places, including travel, art and an unusually diverse work background. I'm interested in how you reinterpret and reinvent this experience.
GERALDINE: I suppose I have led a varied life, and yet it's always been anchored to home. Maybe that's what has informed all my choices, the need to be anchored. I spent my early years with the uncertainty of war, the presence of sudden death, separation from people I loved, being evacuated to unwelcoming places, coming home to a changed landscape. Of course I accepted the circumstances as children do but I've always been aware of the fragility of things. And the awfulness of leaving possibly never to return. It was an unspoken thing. To a small child on one level it meant having to leave your dog behind every time a siren went while you were taken to the safety of the communal air-raid shelter, or at a deeper level perhaps realising your parents were somewhere else, or finally going from the familiarity of London to damp fields and the homes of strangers. I put down how it felt. The smell of burning, the silences, the bombsites. A child's view. Odd things: a field of cowslips, shining underground rails and a scene is recreated. Occasionally I wrote in prose to get the memory down and reshaped it, picking the strongest images to develop into a poem that conveyed the feeling, the time. Some I wrote as poems straight away.
I'm aware fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes and will do so subconsciously, maybe the better for it. Which leads me to question whether experience is not partly behind the poems about convict tokens too? I'm no psychologist but looking back I'm acutely aware of interrupted lives, the randomness of things. And what life does to good people who for one reason or another can't make it work for them.
SHEENAGH: Your poems about the tokens left for their families by convicts about to be transported are not just found poems, as they might be if you'd just reproduced their texts; you add your own words to them. And two things strike me about your contributions. First, the sense of frustration that comes from these illiterate people having to trust others - not always particularly literate themselves - with their most important messages. I get the impression that really gets through to you. Secondly, there's a softness, a sympathy, that nearly always appears in your work when young people are involved and it intrigues me because as a magistrate you must have come across a lot of young people who, if they didn't make you cynical, at least must have often annoyed and disappointed you. How have you managed to maintain that sympathy, and were you conscious, when looking at the tokens, of that part of your background?
GERALDINE: I was. The inequality of things was brought home to me very young. And I grew up realizing that someone could live their whole life for and through others because of initial poverty. How for many people there was so little choice, so little control then. In some places, third world Zimbabwe for example, it's still so, only now there is corruption and terror too. And maybe there we have it. The reason for as you say, my frustration at illiterate and semi-literate people having to trust others to be their voice. I am acutely aware of it. How important it is to be independent, to be allowed dignity, your own voice heard.
I became a magistrate because power needs to be used sparingly. And I wanted to be there. And it turned out I could be. So many of the accused are young, inadequate, their lives blighted by poor education and the lack of security, drugs featured heavily too – old lags seemed to be in the minority but I watched the young grow older as they returned, very often repeating the family history of petty crime.
I can't claim to have their experience but my upbringing was not conventional, and I may, only may, have understood them better than some on the Bench: farmers, landowners, small business men, wives of the above, plus the occasional teacher, fireman, postman etc. That doesn't mean to say I was always right, sympathy can lead to disappointment, but there was the odd occasion when I felt I was on the wrong side of the Bench! I wrote very few poems based round my experience then but certain memories stay with me and may emerge.
SHEENAGH: In another part of the forest, you were an actress, and performance is a recurring theme in your work - eg the poem dedicated to Michael Donaghy, whom I once saw perform too, and he was certainly unusually memorable. It's also something you have done as a poet, in the performance group Scatterlings. Many poets don't have this experience of their own poems as something other than flat on a page. How does this part of your work affect your writing - when you write, are you already thinking how it'll sound in performance? And does performing the poems ever alter your way of seeing them, even suggest revisions?
GERALDINE: No I never think how a poem will sound in performance as I write it but certain poems lend themselves more to being read aloud. I know what will work best. Having said that it's a moot point whether page poetry does always work in performance. I'm uncomfortable with actor-ly interpretations but equally a dull reading is unhelpful and makes a long evening. It helps to be aware of the pitfalls!
Scatterlings has always had some musical input – guitar, piano, for contrast.
My paternal grandparents were Variety artistes, my dad was originally a Song and Dance man. As a child I was taken to see him in Jack Buchanan musicals. Happily I've inherited his sense of humour, in life if not in poetry! I find humorous poems tricky, wish I didn't, they could enliven many a reading! He met my mother, who wrote too, on a film set. So, in the blood you could say. I loved it, still do, and admire many of the doughty, talented, risk-taking performers, legit or illegit.
I haven't really thought about it before but it's interesting how it affects my writing, not so much the performance side but in the relating of and to the characters or story within the poem. I'm 'there' as I write because not all the poems relate directly to experience of course. In a way I become what I'm writing about if that isn't too fanciful and I enjoy the dramatic monologue. I do listen to myself reading each poem as I write it, to hear the rhythm, but I think most poets do that, don't they? Certainly revisions are prompted by any jarring note. I need to hear a certain music although, despite my background, while I can sing in tune, music doesn't play a big part of my life. Finally I aim for a balance in the poem, an accuracy, no unnecessary padding, a cleanness if you like. The best performances try for that too. And again I suppose my acting experience of playing different characters allows me to imagine other lives, to put myself in their shoes a little more easily than some. That helps the empathy.
My acting days were not long, four years in all, give or take, before I became a teacher of profoundly deaf children etc. ( an actress's face an ideal prop!)
SHEENAGH: So basically all your life you've been a sort of professional speaking-tube, the voice for both your own thoughts and those of others, and I can see how that informs all you do – as with your Zimbabwe poems. And in the poems about your own past as an evacuee child, when you say, "fear and confusion need not be place or time specific, that they can permeate other scenes", that would be a concern not only to record that personal experience but to depersonalise it, to find the universal in it so that you can speak for and to anyone who's been in a similar situation?
GERALDINE: I do aim for that. Of my Zimbabwean poems the one that most Zimbabweans mention is "Harare Song", and the image of the 'blood umbrellas not trees' but "The Man Who Knows Flowers" is my favourite because it is a celebration of an individual and a relationship that challenges perceived opinion. I wrote "A Patient Man" for the same reason in a way, a white African in love with his land, bereft. I'd have probably extended it if I were writing it today. And the poem, "The Go-Away-Bird" is how it was and still is for a generation of people bewildered by the country they were born and bred in, no longer recognizing the place they see. I was a witness to the leaving and was glad I could tell it as it was.
SHEENAGH: Your Zimbabwe poems are very striking and clearly deeply felt. I'm particularly struck by how they manage not to harp only on the negative, as they well might have, given the current state of affairs there. In fact a lot of vibrancy and beauty comes through them too. How did this country come to be part of your work?
GERALDINE: I came to know it because my second husband is a third generation Zimbabwean. His grandparents went there at the turn of the Twentieth Century, his parents were born there; his mother has lived to see the country destroyed by a despot and her family's life's work with it. They were essentially farmers. We returned every second year for sixteen years to visit her and watched the country turn from a prosperous fertile land to one where the people were starving. It is so beautiful, the people open and friendly, full of initiative and gentleness. I was beginning to know them, tentatively learnt a little Shona (one of the African languages) from Chenga, the old gardener. I'd climbed a sacred mountain in the tribal lands past small boys herding cattle up near perpendicular hills, seen rare cave paintings, held (only just) a wriggling, amazingly strong baby crocodile, been rowed round a dam, walked through a game reserve at dawn with a guard with a gun at the ready, heard elephants rumble in the night as I slept under a mosquito net, watched an African carve a perfect elephant from a single piece of wood ( I still have it); picked, smelt and tasted fresh guavas and avocados from trees in my mother-in-law's garden. All this and more, the colour, the generosity, the sun. The vibrancy you speak of had to come through despite everything. And yet I didn't miss the signs. I wrote what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced but unlike some I was able to leave to come home. Several of my husband's extended family lost their farms, their businesses and everything they owned, but they are alive. Many black Zimbabweans, and a few whites, are not, tortured and killed by Mugabe's thugs. There are young, black Zimbabweans being published at the moment. Their poetry is powerful, often very political and angry. Some of it will survive. We are all witnesses.
You ask how I re-interpret and re-invent my various experiences of work, art, travel. I suppose through people, set in a specific, recognizable time or place. Perhaps through a sound, a smell, a taste – "The Pink Shop" was prompted by my first taste of oysters but it was also an imaginary take on Whitstable. Often in observing the moment, just snapshots often - the girl with dirty nails in "Brief Encounters". In recording the commonplace, or elevating it in some way; relating to it, often obliquely. Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship. And in the case of art often through dramatising what's before me, interpreting or re-interpreting the painting's mood. I wrote "Once Seen" after seeing a Poussin painting, it turned into a poem about Warhol's perceived influence on Edie Sedgwick! It is people I want to celebrate, those still here and those long-gone. And the loss of them. One of the reasons I love Cavafy is just that. The ache that is left.
SHEENAGH: "Objects, clothes, furniture, may suggest a whole relationship."
That very much makes me think of your poem "Hopper's Window" (which follows this interview). I'm not normally much for ekphrastic poems, because I feel they often repeat rather inadequately in words what the painter has expressed better in paint. But in that poem you totally reinterpret the still-life of objects and create a rather creepy, disturbing relationship between two people, centred around power and control at a distance. If I recall rightly, that poem came from a period when your work seemed to me to be getting quite suddenly more adventurous and bold; in poems like "Hopper's Window" and "The Pink Shop" you were doing things with language and ideas that surprised; it was as if a window had been opened and a blast of air had come in. I think writers do have turns like this, when maybe something suddenly clicks or they find a new way of seeing, and something is permanently added to the voice. Were you conscious of anything around then that "turned" your work in that way?
GERALDINE: I get fired up by the company of creative people, not necessarily writers, often artists. It's the buzzing energy of it. Rightly or wrongly I soak an atmosphere up like a sponge, absorbing and developing ideas at a pace, it's probably the acting gene! A course with Ruth Padel was memorable; the idea that you can mix the senses, reverse the normal association of an image, say the opposite of what is expected, be specific but preposterous at the same time, I suppose that was a turning point of sorts at the time, though not the only one, it's a cumulative thing with me. A successful outcome to a poem works wonders. I'm by instinct a poet of experience, (it doesn't have to be true but I have to filter it somehow through experience), this showed me I could play more. Having said that, the Hopper painting spoke of obsession and control straight away. I imagined the scene played by Harold Pinter's first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, who could use her whole body as well as her mind to portray his work as a precise, sexual, ritualistic game. So we have a poem from a painting using the memory of a performance in a play! Ekphrastic or what?! The story came quickly, what was exciting was finding the right words, and that's the really terrific thing about poetry, you can make the language speak. The challenge is in making it surprising and fresh.
Some things can be comforting, not only because of the connections, the relationships they evoke but also because of the continuity they represent. And yet one can also be trapped by them. When I was between homes and my possessions were in store I was happy enough with the bare essentials, felt a certain freedom. So what comforts can also shackle. I wonder if it is the same with poetry. I do see the need to break out sometimes, to abandon the familiar, believe that what I've written is still a poem – that's where the young have it easier, they may know less obedience. I've just read a poem, "springcuts", by Carol Watts, where she's punctuated quite promiscuously – and only if you remove the punctuation does the sense of what she's saying return. Now why did she choose to do that, it seems so self-consciously different? And yet it did give this reader an awareness of fractured light, so I thought well, well. Was I being fanciful? Would I have done it? No. It wouldn't have occurred to me any more than ending a line on the word 'of'. Is that the equivalent of a tidy room?! Is her work and others like her the equivalent of some modern art, there to shock and shake perceived complacency? (Although Tracey Emin's drawings can be heartbreaking so that's not all.) I want a poem that resonates, that can't be date-stamped.
SHEENAGH: You mention Cavafy, who's always been an obsession of mine too, and the sense of loss in him, "the ache that is left". But there's a great sense of celebration in him too, and you also use that word of what you are trying to do in poetry. Celebration and commemoration have always seemed to me to be important roles of poetry, yet to judge by the reaction to some of the present Laureate's efforts in
that direction, it's very hard to do without attracting criticism from people who think poetry isn't being cutting-edge unless it's overtly attacking something. How would you defend celebratory poetry to such folk?
GERALDINE: To me celebration has always been one of the main purposes of poetry. You're right when you say that Cavafy had a great sense of celebration in him. What I love most is his celebration of the fleeting moment. I find it so moving, it should be celebrated or it is lost, along with the feeling it once engendered, which mattered very much. That's how I'd defend it – to celebrate is to give a permanence to experience. The celebration of a person, especially those who may never make their mark, or never did, is important to me. I want somehow to value them, to dignify them. Edward Thomas is pretty good at that. He can make the passing moment memorable. He loved names, of people, of places, but also of birds, trees, flowers to hold them in the memory, to commemorate them. Les Murray celebrates more rumbustiously but he can certainly celebrate and all "to the glory of God". I think, how lucky to be so unselfconsciously, so creatively rumbustious!
"How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action"
Ted Hughes wrote that. Interesting. Does that hold us unless we deliberately deny it? Noticing, appreciating, being aware of who we are, ours and others' place in the world. It's a recognition. And it's timeless. Attacking things in order to be cutting edge is short-lived surely. Rather like a cartoon it can lose relevance very quickly as time and targets move on. It belongs more to journalism or politics. Compare Shaw to Chekhov. What's the difference? To me one playwright lectures, the other shows us the human condition. Isn't that what poetry does? And isn't celebration part of that?
More poems
HOPPER'S WINDOW
She remembers his words. First: step into the shoes -
black patents, shining. Slip them on. Slowly.
Red toenails touching inner lining of calf.
Left foot, then right, balancing,
swaying, holding on. Fur next, fox
trickling down her neck to where the dead
seals hang,her skin smooth on theirs, stroking them
into life each time she moves. Last, the long gloves
shaded to the colour of jet. Watered silk
flowing. Thre items of clothing,
he'd said. You choose. He's out there
somewhere, staring through binoculars, hidden
by a line of windows. She draws up the chair.
Patches of steamed glass appear, his name
in mirror writing. Noise is disturbing her,
legs scraping across the wooden floor.
Three days she's been here, waiting. The first
day's pose, arranging the flowers. They had
to be centrally placed, white, in a white vase:
lilies, roses and one flag. They had to catch
the morning sun. She'd done that. Surrendering
her body in the bare room, sleeping curled till morning
and no rules broken. The second day was furniture.
The Windsor chair opposite the table. The chest behind
covered with red cloth. Black, red, white.
She'd chosen as he said. Today, the third day,
he would come for her.
THE MAN WHO KNOWS FLOWERS
And Chenga came through the door...
Chenga, of the broad hat and the slow smile,
the man who knows flowers and cares for the old lady
who loves him.
Chenga, who has asthma and wears a mask
while spraying the blooms of the old lady's garden
where the mimosa sways among hibiscus
and blue convolvulus vie with the sky.
Chenga, who for twenty-five years
would rather sow seeds that survive
than learn to read, be a part of the world
that's changing beyond the high wall.
Chenga, tending his guavas, his roses,
his lady who grows old beside him,
who keeps him well with her potions,
whom he loves.
NO-ONE EXPLAINS
There are the lines, silver, dazzling. Danger lines.
There are the spaces between. As deep as me standing,
the depth from the rails to the floor. There are the strangers
picking a path to a place among friends, the people
huddled in blankets,. sleeping in bunks,
the smell of their bodies overflowing the platform.
There are the children packed with the thermos,
the pillow, the belongings in cases. A bag falls
onto the track, someone jumps down and I'm
screaming. No-one explains there are no trains.
Links to more poems and information
Geraldine's page on the PoetryPF site - some poems and biographical information.
Amazon UK's page for The Go-Away Bird
The Basil Bunting Poetry Award - here you can listen to Geraldine's commended poem "The Creek"
January 1, 2011
Big vs little publishers
I've often heard novelists debating whether it's better to be with a big publisher or a small one. The big guys have more clout with people like Waterstones, and bigger budgets to spend on publicity, but if you're a first-time or midlist writer, that may not help you much, because they spend the budget on their big names and ignore the small fry, whereas with a small publisher you may be a big fish in a small pool. Leastways, that's the theory; in practice I suspect most writers, certainly first-timers, go gratefully with the first and often the only outfit to make them an offer.
But this interview on Helen Caldwell's writing blog shows an interesting example of a far from first-timer author switching publishers from Hodder to the small (and to me unknown) operation Plash Mill Press. David Wishart has been writing his Marcus Corvinus ancient Roman murder mysteries for 15 years; I know because I'm addicted to the things and devour them as soon as they come out. He says that "being a small fish" at Hodder, there was little money for marketing his books and describes his frustration at seeing them disappear into a "publishing black hole". That surprises me because he was always easy to find in Waterstones, got lots of Amazon reviews, and the last few Corvinus books had started to come out in hardback before the paperback, which I always thought indicated success. Yet here he is switching in hopes of more publicity. Whether it'll work just because PlashMill have a blog, I'm not sure. I only found out about the new book via googling him and finding this interview, but to be fair, it's only been around for a month.
I'd be interested to hear what my novelist friends feel about the big vs little debate. And my publisher friends, come to that...
But this interview on Helen Caldwell's writing blog shows an interesting example of a far from first-timer author switching publishers from Hodder to the small (and to me unknown) operation Plash Mill Press. David Wishart has been writing his Marcus Corvinus ancient Roman murder mysteries for 15 years; I know because I'm addicted to the things and devour them as soon as they come out. He says that "being a small fish" at Hodder, there was little money for marketing his books and describes his frustration at seeing them disappear into a "publishing black hole". That surprises me because he was always easy to find in Waterstones, got lots of Amazon reviews, and the last few Corvinus books had started to come out in hardback before the paperback, which I always thought indicated success. Yet here he is switching in hopes of more publicity. Whether it'll work just because PlashMill have a blog, I'm not sure. I only found out about the new book via googling him and finding this interview, but to be fair, it's only been around for a month.
I'd be interested to hear what my novelist friends feel about the big vs little debate. And my publisher friends, come to that...
December 30, 2010
Sequels and Spin-offs
Here's the link to the US radio programme I did an interview for (To the Best of our Knowledge: Wisconsin Public Radio). I think my segment starts at about 38 mins in, but the whole programme sounds likely to interest anyone who's into This Sort of Thing...
December 20, 2010
A brilliant short story
The Guardian's latest short story podcast has Helen Dunmore reading Frank O'Connor's My Oedipus Complex, which draws on his own experience, as a small boy, of a father he hardly knew returning from war. This has to be not only one of the wryest and most endearing short stories I know, but one of the best uses of a child narrator. The boy's total lack of sentimentality is vital for a story that, told from an adult viewpoint, might easily turn schmaltzy. I used it with students a lot and I don't think I ever had a class who couldn't relate to it.
December 13, 2010
Good news on Incarceron
I've blogged before about Catherine Fisher's YA novels, in particular Incarceron and
Sapphique
. There's been a film option on Incarceron for a while but now they've signed Taylor Lautner to play Finn. I'm assured that if I were a teenage girl I would know who Mr Lautner was, because he's been wasting his time making Twilight films. But he's clearly capable of Better Things because apparently he'd read Incarceron and was keen to be in it; also it seems unlikely they'd sign up someone like him unless they really meant to move on it.
December 2, 2010
Never too late...
I've just done a radio interview about fan fiction and in particular The Democratic Genre, nearly 6 years post-publication! That was a bit of a surprise. The radio station is Wisconsin Public Radio and the programme's called To the Best of our Knowledge. It's nationally syndicated and sounds Radio 4-ish. The interviewer is one Anne Strainchamps, who I think had read the book far more recently than I had; we recorded about 30 mins for editing down to 10. The programme will air on 2nd Jan 2011 and will also be online; they're sending me more details later.
November 20, 2010
The Irony Font
The Irony Font
It's many years now since an exasperated student of mine demanded how she was meant to guess that a sentence in the piece of prose we were reading was meant ironically, and suggested that authors should use a special "irony font" when saying things they didn't mean. It came back to my mind lately because someone mentioned how easy it is to have this mode of writing misunderstood online.
Before I was a teacher, I'd have found it very difficult to understand how anyone could suggest the Irony Font, which would completely defeat the point of irony. But I was already beginning to see by then that irony is a habit of thinking that many people just don't have. There are people, and I think they may be more numerous than writers imagine, who literally never, or hardly ever, speak in ironic mode, and who are slightly baffled when others say the opposite of what they mean. There are even whole communities like that. I don't think this has anything to do with intrinsic intelligence and it isn't always connected to education either. Irony is a sophisticated mode of utterance and it may be true that the more educated, the more likely one is to be in the habit, but it doesn't always follow. Music-hall songs, at least those intended for a London working-class audience, used irony extensively; songs like "The 'Ouses In Between" and "Knocked 'Em In The Old Kent Road" are ironic very nearly throughout, and their audiences clearly revelled in them. They might have had little more than elementary formal education, but they were a linguistically sophisticated audience; they were used to adapting their mode of speech to different company, and to the idea of different trades and social (or criminal) circles having their separate and sometimes impenetrable argots. It was notorious that music-hall performers who did well in London usually bombed in the provinces and vice versa, and if you look at songs like Joe Wilson's, which were popular in the Newcastle halls at the time (late 19th and early 20th-century), it's clear they were funny in a whole different way; they were droll, they were wry, but they were almost never ironic. Wilson uses quite elaborate narrative techniques, particularly unaware narrators, but those narrators, and his characters, tend to say what they mean.
Writers, by nature, are more like the London audience. They are in the habit of reading and listening below the surface, of not assuming that any particular narrative voice is "telling the truth", whatever that is. And they tend to assume others are too – or at least, mostly they do, for it is possible, if you don't assume this, to write for two audiences at once, which is what many critics think Euripides was up to. The theory being that most any Euripidean play can be read (or, in its day, heard) on two levels: straight, which is how most of his audience saw and were intended to see it, and the way he expected his small circle of friends to see it, namely listening below the surface and grasping that when he makes some conventionally heroic character utter conventional platitudes about war, the gods or the nature of women, Euripides himself does not necessarily either agree with him or see him as heroic. He writes gods, indeed, as a convinced sceptic might, recording without comment the deeds and motives that Greek myth of his day ascribed to them and trusting, one assumes, that any intelligent reader would go away thinking "why would anyone believe in, let alone worship, such a vicious, quarrelsome bunch of ne'er-do-wells?"
If this theory is correct, Euripides not only accepted that most of his audience would not "get" his deeper message but would just see an exciting play, he relied on this happening, for reasons the trial of Socrates makes clear. These days, writers are more liable to complain that too few of their audience are getting the point. Irony is particularly apt to go astray online and the usual explanation is that tone of voice and facial expression, which are clues to a person's intentions, are missing. Indeed this is one reason people use the appalling "smiley", to try to replicate both.
I'm not sure, though, that this explanation is really the right one. People using irony in conversation do not usually signal what they are doing with exaggerated tone or mugging; they are likelier to cultivate a deadpan tone and face, which is funnier. Though tone and expression are clues, I think there are far more important ones, of which the first is personal acquaintance. When you know someone personally, or know of him by repute, it is far easier to gauge whether he is in earnest or not. If someone in your personal circle of friends (who are liable to have the same outlook as you on most things that matter) says something outrageously reactionary or bigoted, you know he is speaking ironically, and if he is a writer or performer whose work you already know, you can also make a pretty good estimate. One problem in online interaction, eg on discussion boards, is that participants don't know each other from Adam and so cannot use this clue.
Writers, who aim to appeal to an audience many of whom don't know them from Adam either, have another possible clue they can trail. If what they are saying is outrageous enough, an apparently earnest tone will only deceive for a short while before readers realise the writer can't be serious. Few intelligent readers get very far with Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) before realising that the Dean cannot possibly be advocating the eating of children in earnest. I have, in fact, had a student in doubt about it, but only because she knew little of history and thought it possible that people in the "olden days" really were more robust in such matters. One would hope that in most cases the title would be enough of a clue… But this clue also doesn't work on internet discussion boards, because of the rich variety of nutcases posting on them; there is almost nothing so outrageous that it could not be posted in earnest by someone.
Having irony misunderstood is nothing new; Daniel Defoe notoriously ended up in the pillory for advocating, tongue-in-cheek, the execution of Dissenters in his The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters (1702). But this case is not quite what it seems, because Defoe, like Swift, was publishing anonymously and thus removed the best clue to his intentions while, unlike Swift, leaving no other. Defoe's Dissenter sympathies were well known; had it been published under his own name its tone would have been clear to any informed reader. By anonymising it, he in fact made it possible to suppose it had been written by the opposition, especially as the views it expresses, though extreme and unacceptable to most people, certainly to liberal-minded ones, were not positively unimaginable in the way that the Modest Proposal is. Swift's work, though it begins in very serious and deadpan mode, does eventually announce its real intent to most readers via its sheer outrageousness; Defoe sustains a credible High Church impersonation throughout and is essentially putting words into the mouths of his enemies in much the same way that Robert Burns does in "Holy Willie's Prayer", but not quite so honestly. It's a genuine irony, if you like, that once he was known as the author, Defoe was charged and convicted of seditious libel, on the ground that whether he meant the pamphlet in earnest or not, readers might have thought he did and have been incited to rebellion thereby.
Both writers and comics have, indeed, often been taken aback by audiences taking in earnest what they meant in jest. In the early 20th century Will Hay, annoyed by a bigoted audience (I think in either Halifax or Hull, though I'm not sure) delivered them what he thought was an obviously satirical xenophobic monologue and was horrified when they lapped it up, much as Johnny Speight was later mortified to find that Alf Garnett, though he might be a monstrous figure of fun at the BBC, was a hero to London dockers (who by then were presumably less linguistically sophisticated than their ancestors from the music-hall audience had been). I don't think, again, that this necessarily happened because Hay's and Speight's audiences were less intelligent or educated than they were. They were less in the habit of irony, and they also didn't share the beliefs which were normal in the kind of people Hay and Speight mixed with, and which they may have assumed and hoped were normal everywhere.
Irony is in fact a bloody dangerous mode of communication outside a circle of people you know well (so that you can judge their reaction) and who know you well, either personally or by repute (so that they can judge your intent). For writers, it still works pretty well in poetry or literary fiction, possibly because the audience for both is small and homogenous. Comics, who have a larger and more diffuse audience, sometimes cause confusion and worry; we know that when the likes of Bernard Manning said something bigoted, they meant it just the way it sounded, but when we hear alternative comedians saying similar things and are assured they are actually being ironic, it isn't always easy to convince ourselves of that. Popular fiction tends to use irony very sparingly if at all, for the same reason it doesn't use unreliable narrators: the readership prefers to know exactly where it is (which, IMO, is a terrible loss to them, but there you are). And in most online contexts it's more trouble than it's worth. I love both reading and using irony, but in the absence of the Irony Font have more or less given it up online.
It's many years now since an exasperated student of mine demanded how she was meant to guess that a sentence in the piece of prose we were reading was meant ironically, and suggested that authors should use a special "irony font" when saying things they didn't mean. It came back to my mind lately because someone mentioned how easy it is to have this mode of writing misunderstood online.
Before I was a teacher, I'd have found it very difficult to understand how anyone could suggest the Irony Font, which would completely defeat the point of irony. But I was already beginning to see by then that irony is a habit of thinking that many people just don't have. There are people, and I think they may be more numerous than writers imagine, who literally never, or hardly ever, speak in ironic mode, and who are slightly baffled when others say the opposite of what they mean. There are even whole communities like that. I don't think this has anything to do with intrinsic intelligence and it isn't always connected to education either. Irony is a sophisticated mode of utterance and it may be true that the more educated, the more likely one is to be in the habit, but it doesn't always follow. Music-hall songs, at least those intended for a London working-class audience, used irony extensively; songs like "The 'Ouses In Between" and "Knocked 'Em In The Old Kent Road" are ironic very nearly throughout, and their audiences clearly revelled in them. They might have had little more than elementary formal education, but they were a linguistically sophisticated audience; they were used to adapting their mode of speech to different company, and to the idea of different trades and social (or criminal) circles having their separate and sometimes impenetrable argots. It was notorious that music-hall performers who did well in London usually bombed in the provinces and vice versa, and if you look at songs like Joe Wilson's, which were popular in the Newcastle halls at the time (late 19th and early 20th-century), it's clear they were funny in a whole different way; they were droll, they were wry, but they were almost never ironic. Wilson uses quite elaborate narrative techniques, particularly unaware narrators, but those narrators, and his characters, tend to say what they mean.
Writers, by nature, are more like the London audience. They are in the habit of reading and listening below the surface, of not assuming that any particular narrative voice is "telling the truth", whatever that is. And they tend to assume others are too – or at least, mostly they do, for it is possible, if you don't assume this, to write for two audiences at once, which is what many critics think Euripides was up to. The theory being that most any Euripidean play can be read (or, in its day, heard) on two levels: straight, which is how most of his audience saw and were intended to see it, and the way he expected his small circle of friends to see it, namely listening below the surface and grasping that when he makes some conventionally heroic character utter conventional platitudes about war, the gods or the nature of women, Euripides himself does not necessarily either agree with him or see him as heroic. He writes gods, indeed, as a convinced sceptic might, recording without comment the deeds and motives that Greek myth of his day ascribed to them and trusting, one assumes, that any intelligent reader would go away thinking "why would anyone believe in, let alone worship, such a vicious, quarrelsome bunch of ne'er-do-wells?"
If this theory is correct, Euripides not only accepted that most of his audience would not "get" his deeper message but would just see an exciting play, he relied on this happening, for reasons the trial of Socrates makes clear. These days, writers are more liable to complain that too few of their audience are getting the point. Irony is particularly apt to go astray online and the usual explanation is that tone of voice and facial expression, which are clues to a person's intentions, are missing. Indeed this is one reason people use the appalling "smiley", to try to replicate both.
I'm not sure, though, that this explanation is really the right one. People using irony in conversation do not usually signal what they are doing with exaggerated tone or mugging; they are likelier to cultivate a deadpan tone and face, which is funnier. Though tone and expression are clues, I think there are far more important ones, of which the first is personal acquaintance. When you know someone personally, or know of him by repute, it is far easier to gauge whether he is in earnest or not. If someone in your personal circle of friends (who are liable to have the same outlook as you on most things that matter) says something outrageously reactionary or bigoted, you know he is speaking ironically, and if he is a writer or performer whose work you already know, you can also make a pretty good estimate. One problem in online interaction, eg on discussion boards, is that participants don't know each other from Adam and so cannot use this clue.
Writers, who aim to appeal to an audience many of whom don't know them from Adam either, have another possible clue they can trail. If what they are saying is outrageous enough, an apparently earnest tone will only deceive for a short while before readers realise the writer can't be serious. Few intelligent readers get very far with Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) before realising that the Dean cannot possibly be advocating the eating of children in earnest. I have, in fact, had a student in doubt about it, but only because she knew little of history and thought it possible that people in the "olden days" really were more robust in such matters. One would hope that in most cases the title would be enough of a clue… But this clue also doesn't work on internet discussion boards, because of the rich variety of nutcases posting on them; there is almost nothing so outrageous that it could not be posted in earnest by someone.
Having irony misunderstood is nothing new; Daniel Defoe notoriously ended up in the pillory for advocating, tongue-in-cheek, the execution of Dissenters in his The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters (1702). But this case is not quite what it seems, because Defoe, like Swift, was publishing anonymously and thus removed the best clue to his intentions while, unlike Swift, leaving no other. Defoe's Dissenter sympathies were well known; had it been published under his own name its tone would have been clear to any informed reader. By anonymising it, he in fact made it possible to suppose it had been written by the opposition, especially as the views it expresses, though extreme and unacceptable to most people, certainly to liberal-minded ones, were not positively unimaginable in the way that the Modest Proposal is. Swift's work, though it begins in very serious and deadpan mode, does eventually announce its real intent to most readers via its sheer outrageousness; Defoe sustains a credible High Church impersonation throughout and is essentially putting words into the mouths of his enemies in much the same way that Robert Burns does in "Holy Willie's Prayer", but not quite so honestly. It's a genuine irony, if you like, that once he was known as the author, Defoe was charged and convicted of seditious libel, on the ground that whether he meant the pamphlet in earnest or not, readers might have thought he did and have been incited to rebellion thereby.
Both writers and comics have, indeed, often been taken aback by audiences taking in earnest what they meant in jest. In the early 20th century Will Hay, annoyed by a bigoted audience (I think in either Halifax or Hull, though I'm not sure) delivered them what he thought was an obviously satirical xenophobic monologue and was horrified when they lapped it up, much as Johnny Speight was later mortified to find that Alf Garnett, though he might be a monstrous figure of fun at the BBC, was a hero to London dockers (who by then were presumably less linguistically sophisticated than their ancestors from the music-hall audience had been). I don't think, again, that this necessarily happened because Hay's and Speight's audiences were less intelligent or educated than they were. They were less in the habit of irony, and they also didn't share the beliefs which were normal in the kind of people Hay and Speight mixed with, and which they may have assumed and hoped were normal everywhere.
Irony is in fact a bloody dangerous mode of communication outside a circle of people you know well (so that you can judge their reaction) and who know you well, either personally or by repute (so that they can judge your intent). For writers, it still works pretty well in poetry or literary fiction, possibly because the audience for both is small and homogenous. Comics, who have a larger and more diffuse audience, sometimes cause confusion and worry; we know that when the likes of Bernard Manning said something bigoted, they meant it just the way it sounded, but when we hear alternative comedians saying similar things and are assured they are actually being ironic, it isn't always easy to convince ourselves of that. Popular fiction tends to use irony very sparingly if at all, for the same reason it doesn't use unreliable narrators: the readership prefers to know exactly where it is (which, IMO, is a terrible loss to them, but there you are). And in most online contexts it's more trouble than it's worth. I love both reading and using irony, but in the absence of the Irony Font have more or less given it up online.
