An interview with R.F. Langley: propos recueillis par R.F. Walker
There's a lot of 'tackle and trim' in this poetry - phonetically, in the technical agility, the rhythmic care, and the range of vocabulary: is Hopkins a conscious influence? Would you like to comment on influence in general?
Well, yes, Hopkins is, yes. Because by the time I left school and went to University I think Hopkins was my favourite poet. Partly because he took the outside world and got it into the poem in such a bright and immediate way. I was just impressed by that whole imitative affair. But then, I didn't, in my early poems, that got published ... they were not particularly Hopkinsian at all! - I thought of him as part of my academic life rather than part of my writing life.
I didn't start writing until I found out about American poetry. There was Donald Davie at Cambridge who talked about Pound. But Davie never talked about Olson. It was really Olson who convinced me that I might write something myself.
So that something like 'Matthew Glover' is a fairly naive attempt to do a minuscule Olson in an English setting. I'm not sure that I even thought that as I did it, but it so obviously is now: with willow warblers instead of kingfishers and an open verse system, a field verse system, moving in open paragraphs. Not much Hopkinsian tackle in that, is there, so far as I can remember? I used to respect so much that Olson remark about 'the dance of little syllables' and I used to think at that point that the Hopkins was rather heavy compared with that. So I was trying to watch little syllables that weren't particularly onomatopoeic or imitative in any particular way at all back at that stage, and think primarily about 'areal subject matter' as Dorn would say. I pretty soon ran out of that line of business, but that's really what got me off the ground.
So Hopkins, yes, to start with, and then a lot of Wordsworth I used to like enormously and then Shakespeare all the time. That sounds fairly ludicrous, but I suppose if there's a single person that's influenced me steadily all the way through, fed me, as it were, day by day, it's Shakespeare. Because I have to teach him every year again and again, the same plays, or the same small number of plays, and they get richer and richer in the whole way they ... that's influenced me more than anything else, I would think: pure Shakespeare: quoting from him, and image themes and basic ideas, yes, he cuts through and underlies the whole lot. But when you've said that, that's the major range, I would think. And it did start with Hopkins, yes. Pound, generations ago now, spoke of the need to 'break the iambic pentameter'. You seem to have mended it.
I've slumped back into it, that's what I've done. I'm absolutely conscious of that. As I've gone on and allowed more rhyme into the poetry again, and become more concerned with the structure of it, the body of it, I've been unable to use anything but the iambic pentameter. I've pushed it around and split the lines differently, but I feel rather an amateur actually at the whole business of the formal structure of the poem still. And the iambic pentameter is so insistent that I have just used that in the last four or five poems particularly, shoved around a bit, counterpointed with line endings, not corresponding to them, but I've allowed it to happen and actually felt quite uncomfortable when it hasn't happened. And I've constantly thought I ought to be breaking this and doing something more adventurous with it, but feeling that I wasn't ready to get out of it again yet. And that I rather desperately need it just at this moment, to give me an interwoven system.
I don't think I actually had it early on, did I? Right back at the beginning of things I wasn't particularly thinking of any sort of rhythmic ... I mean it was so much ... I used to have in my mind in those days those ideas about composing by the ... like Campion, you know, and Creeley, that you compose ... that's Pound as well isn't it? 'Not by the metronome but by the musical phrase.' So I wasn't feeling rhythm as an iambic anything in those days, but lately I have, I have.
I've got the feeling that I'm losing Modernism bit by bit where I shouldn't be. And falling back into more traditional modes. And I think the iambic pentameter has got to be the thing I fall back into at the moment.
I have been influenced in that by quite tangential things. I don't know whether to launch into that or not. But one of the things I've been thinking about over the last couple of years is an essay by Wollheim on art history, nothing to do with poetry at all. Because, you know, since the very beginning when I used to be interested in Pound, the days when I first got interested in Pound through Donald Davie when he came to give a talk to the Jesus College Literary Society, steadily, I got more interested in Adrian Stokes than in Pound. When I went round Italy I was looking at the things Adrian Stokes admired most, and he seemed to offer the first coherent aesthetic that I'd ever met. So I've been looking at him [Wollheim] and at Melanie Klein as well, and Bion. There've always been a string of people that I've found interesting since Adrian Stokes who have been, you might say, preoccupied with object-relations.
Anyway, there's the last chapter in his [Wollheim's] book Painting as Art where he talks about how a painting can become a body. He invents the word 'metaphorize', the painting metaphorizes a body, you see, and he says things like the skin of the paint becomes the skin of a body and what's inside the frame becomes a metaphor for the body. He admits that he's not prepared to explain why it should particularly, and that a lot of people won't go along with this, but he hopes they'll go along with him as far as they can, which is the sort of remark I rather like. And then he talks about how painting becomes a body. And it turns out not to be one coherent way in which it could, with one line of process in it, but lots of little ways in which it can become a body. Lots of the things that Stokes used to notice about [Agostino di] Duccio's carving, perspective distortions and flattenings out as well as the way in pictures you handle the colours and the paint in general: they all add up to the fact that the painting becomes a body. And the paintings he thinks do become a body are superb ones like Bellinis and De Koonings, pictures that I've always liked anyway. So it rings true. And it just occurred to me that - this is getting round to a simple point in a rather complicated way - that the poem might become much more of a body too. And that my poems weren't very body-like. And I might find... the things that would make the poem body would obviously be the small formal elements, wouldn't they? It's easy to talk about sound effects in terms of imitation and so on, but there are millions and millions of assonances and consonances and rhymes that have got nothing to do with imitation at all. They're not open to the subject matter in that sort of a way. And what they're doing, I suppose, some of them, is something like those little things that Wollheim talks about that make a picture into a body and pull it together as a structure and give it a head and a tail and make it exist.
You see what I mean? So I thought I would start paying a lot more attention to those in their own right and play around formally to get a unit like that, something that exists within the frame of the poem in a body-like fashion. Does that make any sort of sense at all? What contemporary poets do you read and admire?
I read them with trepidation because I feel so out on a limb, rather than in the midst of them. But ah well, I admire Peter Riley often, for instance. And Douglas Oliver as well. And I've always admired Prynne, most particularly. Michael Haslam. I've liked W.S. Graham. He came along as a sort of post-Hopkinsian influence. Frank O'Hara, Spicer, Barbara Guest, some Dorn, some Creeley. There are a few people who amaze you and make you want to do things. Douglas Oliver, for example, when he was doing The Diagram Poems and he gave that little talk, called The Three Lilies, that was a moment when I felt there was someone who was personally engaged in the sort of way that was exciting. Yes.
Really, I suppose, I'd go back to the Objectivists, Oppen in particular, and to Carlos Williams and to people like that again and again. And Tom Clark [Thomas A. Clark]. Yes, I must say I like his readings especially. I would like to find a way to talk about the density and difficulty of these poems. Could I ask a series of questions with this in mind? The first about reference.
I rather hope that the reader could miss almost everything and still get something out of it. That's what I was aiming at, certainly. So that if you didn't know that the Mildenhall Dish had Hercules in the middle of it, simply the references to it in the poem would carry enough, to carry some sort of meaning along with them. 'Saxon Landings' is a particularly vulnerable example there. I think that is a pretty specific set of references. The general references in my poems tend to be towards autobiographical things, don't they? Places, and things that have happened to me. And they're quite often subsumed entirely into structures and themes. And that does make it slightly impossible for me to imagine how other people might be reading my poems. I'm never quite certain about that. If ever I get into explaining, I sense there's discomfiture around because I do this. So I think well, you know, this poem must've done something before I did all that explaining, and now I've either spoilt it or made it better.
But I don't like to give away too much. I don't like to surrender. But on the other hand I've never managed to go as far as, say Prynne goes when he is down 'the mallet path'. I've always thought that was pretty terrific: to have a 'mallet path', but I've never managed to get on one, a path where there isn't, I mean, you know the word 'mallet' there just hasn't got an immediately referential thing at all. I find that magnificent, justifiable and powerful, but I've never managed to go off down that path myself. It's always stayed tied to Mildenhall Dishes, where I could actually say what I was looking at and why I'd said that and it would be fairly simply referential, if you wanted it to be, if the threads were in your hands ...
[comment on low redundancy of poetry] ... Is this particularly true of post-modernist poetry? Is there a danger that there is so much collocational oddity that the text becomes wilfully meaningless?
I think by the time you'd read four of my poems you'd be able to fill in the holes in the fifth almost. And I'd say that that's probably one of my major weaknesses: that I keep reworking the same territory and finding the same contexts and the same words even, the same vocabulary quite distinctively coming round again and again. But I'm not sorry about that at all, because I think it's a strength too. So while I rather wish I was more unreadable - I mean I spend my time wishing I was more unreadable in precisely the sense that you're talking about, I'm also glad I'm not.
My poems are led by things extrinsic to the poem, I take it, though they are interested in not being so led. I mean I like them to be transparent and get the outside world in: fi rst of all from the stuff that goes into journals, the actual experiences that I've had. And if I haven't got one of those in the poem I feel that the poem runs the risk of being slack in some way. I feel that it ought to contact some sort of a reality in a simple Wordsworthian sort of a way. So that there's some feed-in coming from that. And I'm quite conscious of the fact that the poems where I don't do that are nothing like as good. Because they can't, to that extent, surprise me. There's got to be something to push against, something that gives you something more than you knew you were going to get, or can theorise that you could get, and biography is one of those areas: 'To break the loneliness of thinking'.
And the other way which is more germane to what you're talking about now is etymology, isn't it? because I never write a poem without having etymological dictionaries around and - I don't necessarily look up every word - but wherever I find myself at a point where I feel something else is there or I must expand in some way, etymology is one of the major places to look. Ever since I read Hopkins and ever since Skeat's etymological dictionary first came into my hands, I've found etymology important. And let it lead me. That in a way is a sort of answer to what you're saying, isn't it? Because the words I use are etymologically relevant. Always. So I don't take risks beyond the etymology. The etymology sometimes takes you a hell of a long way, into mournivals and gleeks, I mean into fairly obscure areas, but not actually untraceable areas. That's what I don't dare do somehow. I stick within those parameters. Because, I don't know, I don't want it to feel any more subjective than that. In addition to the virtue of direct experience, I want to feel, to some extent, authorized by etymology.
These poems are for the most part a very long way from accounts of daily experience ... Even where there is direct speech it is rarely clear who this is coming from. Where is the writer in all this?
Although it may mean that some readers are disorientated, there are objections to positing the self as the primary organising feature of the writing. And I am necessarily aware of and implicated in this debate. The poems are not straight memories. There is a lot in them of 'sounding language from the inside'. Only the kind of resonance I'm after is quite often just an old fashioned matter of what you might call punning. 'Folds pack away', for example, when you've been talking about clothing and cupboards and wolves and sheep, and how things might be arranged so that they will keep for ever, because someone has died. Very serious punning: 'where a ghost took a breather'.
As for human extremism and the lyric ... Hmm. I was at the cinema the other night watching The Piano and I thought 'Why don't I like this film very much?' at the end of it. I find something like that exhausting because because from moment to moment one went through these extraordinary climaxes and there was not a moment that wasn't full of suspense and emphasis and I couldn't take that. I spend my life trying to avoid that extremism and I just felt I'd rather watch a film of enormous quietness where there wasn't that exposure of human intensity and distressed voices coming over all the time, even in apparent silence.
Marion Milner used to make her diary at the end of day and put down what had happened to her, and she always found that it wasn't the dramatic bits that mattered at all. It was just some small item that she wouldn't otherwise have remembered that she'd written down. And she collected that over months, didn't she? And decided that she ought to redirect her life, because, obviously, the importance of her life was in areas she'd not suspected.
In my case, it might just be pure escapism, and I want to avoid the tensions. That could be it. But I'm quite sure, I know because I keep a journal, that the things that would go into the journal as being important would definitely not be moments of confrontation and extreme dramatic voicings of that sort. They would be objects and situations which spoke very very quietly and implied things but didn't ... There is a lot of wonder in these poems. Is this wonder an important part of the inspiration for the poems or of the moral value of poetry as you see it?
Yes. Oh yes. It's the chief thing, isn't it? The thing I value. Marvellous. Yes, wonder is quite a good word for it. Joy, Wordsworth might have called it. It's ... let's think of one or two, go back to the obvious example, Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good: where she talks about how Goodness and Beauty might be the same thing, because they strike you with wonder, because they take you out of yourself. She's got a passage about a kestrel, which would take you back to Hopkins again, wouldn't it? You're wrapped up in your own affairs, you're screwed up by your own subjective feelings, and you know that you're colouring the world with your own thoughts and resentments, and you see a kestrel outside the window hovering and it - what does it say? 'The world becomes all kestrel' or something. And so you forget yourself and ... she's making the straightforward case that's central to her thinking too, isn't it, that at a moment like that, what is beautiful is also good because it takes your selfishness away, removes your self. And that's really what this wonder would be. She quotes: 'Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.' It's the opposite of existential nausea, isn't it? Instead of being sick that it exists like that, it suddenly becomes extraordinarily wonderful that it exists like that.
Ever since I read Wordsworth I thought that it might do that and it does do that from time to time, yes. Particularly in those quiet moments, things do shine like that. If there's nothing there, then I'm misdirected, really. That is where I want to fi nd it and that's where it seems to be. Yes. I know 'Matthew Glover' is almost a youthful poem among the ones collected here. It seems more obvious at a superficial reading what this poem is about. Do you see this as a development or a loss?
Yes. That's right. And I think I see it as both. Yes, I would like to do that sort of poem again, It very much came to me as an extension of Olson and areal Dorn poetry to start with, and I needed a fairly fixed scenario to operate in, because I wanted very much to tackle something on a large scale with wider interests. So I just assimilated the whole thing. Without knowing that I was doing it quite so naively as that.
But yes, I like it myself. I like it because it was the first poem of mine that anybody listened to and took vaguely seriously. And I would like still to able to ... well, I do find my range limited and one way of widening it would be to go back, because you can include wide issues there, obviously, political and social issues.
So I have got quite a lot of material like that where I know that I'm interested in the past, usually in pretty obscure people: like Edmund Bohun, who lived in Westhall and got into trouble licensing pamphlets when William and Mary came to the throne. And yet lived in this extremely remote place and was a very irascible and unpleasant person who lived by words almost entirely, so that his whole life was obsessed by definitions. He argued in the market place about definitions every day and he hardly 'saw' anything in his whole life. And he got himself into enormous political trouble. And he was deaf. And I've got extracts from his journals, and I know where he lived, and I've looked at the place. I do feel tempted to go back and work on the implications of his story.
And of course, Mrs Coke herself, in 'The Ecstasy Inventories', comes from an inventory, and the poem was largely stimulated by knowing everything about her, everything she'd got in her house, on her tables, in her presses, the clothes she wore ... And coming to terms with her, not by writing a dramatic monologue, but in a dramatic monologue-like sort of a way was a major notion. Yeah. But I do think the things I've written since have been a good deal subtler and if you can sink that kind of subject matter deeper into the texture, as it were, and yet it's still around somewhere, that's certainly what I've preferred in recent years. There seems little of what many poetry readers might think of as imagery in these poems. Would it be true to say that your poetry does not operate in this kind of way at all?
Well, if by imagery you mean a concern for the visual, I'd like to feel my poetry had it all the time. And I do also think that I am very aware of the metaphorical, metaphysical aspect, which wouldn't be surprising, bearing in mind when I was at college and what sort of things were admired. And the people I used to talk to at that time. So that I wouldn't be at all surprised to find myself taking knucklebones and making a throw of dibs, or whatever they call that game, and turning the world inside out and upside down in some sort of an emblematic metaphorical form. I would do that. But I wouldn't find that the best part of what I did. And I'd rather try probably not to do just that on the whole. I would tend to prefer 'The Red Wheelbarrow' sort of imagery where there isn't that sort of metaphorical foisting. There's just an opening up to what is there in front. With things mattering about it.
[Interviewer asks for a 'thread outside the labyrinth to each poem'.]
So in 'Man Jack', the most recent one, it is the telephone call that Barbara, in fact, made to Jane from a telephone box at night with an owl sitting on the telephone pole watching us doing it. To find out if Jane had had the baby. And in fact we couldn't get through. Jane couldn't hear us, but we could hear her. So that there was this peculiar - Jane's voice actually in the air, in Suffolk, in the dusk, with an owl sitting looking and Jane unable to hear what we were saying. It didn't occur to me really, at that moment that the situation in a telephone box making a call would be a central sort of thing. Peter Riley. Isolated telephone boxes. The 'conduit theory of communication'.
Anyway. And the first half of it is something I'd had hanging around for four or five years. Maybe the poem falls in two. I mean the bit about Jack himself. One inspiration for that is simply the dozens of columns in the Oxford Dictionary on the word 'Jack'. And everything you can do with Jack, a sort of commonality of humanity that Jack might represent. And all the different combinations he's been in: the names of flowers, Jacks and Jills, and Jack in the Beanstalks, and jack in the boxes and how Jack turns into Tom and all the rest of it. You know who Jack is don't you? he's that little figure you see running along beside the train jumping over the hedges and swinging from the telegraph poles.
Then 'Mariana' is called after the Tennyson poem, because she's a woman inside. I like Tennyson's 'Mariana', a nice symboliste sort of poem. Mine is the opposite of symboliste. It's about a bedroom that I've been in often, which has really got exactly what it says: it's got martins, well, it did have in those years, that nest under the guttering outside the window. So that every time they fly up to the window their shadows shoot across the floor of the room and up the far wall and then back across the ceiling and then meet them at the top of the window. So much happens inside the room at an immense speed perfectly synchronised with this little body arriving at the guttering outside. And I've lain in bed watching it happen again and again. That isn't in the poem at all, actually, but it might have been!
I often count things, don't I? There are 13 trees, or 8 bench ends. Because the Sanskrit root 'pu', from which we also get our word 'pure', means 'compute' and counting things is the purest way you've got of knowing things. Just to put them into numbers. And it's either adequate or it's not adequate. So I quite often strip things down to just counting. And then see what the opposite of counting might be. The search for certainties. That's what it's about. As usual. That's the major biographical bit of that.
The next one is 'The Upshot' and that stemmed from a sentence in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu: 'We leave unachieved in the summer dusk'. And that sentence in itself appeared to me so excellent - because it's so unassertive and yet it's got such fine syllabic things going quietly in it and it's also so sad: to leave without any sense of achievement and at a time when you wouldn't expect to leave, like a nice relaxed time, like a summer dusk. The absurdity and horror of life is so deep in that.
And also 'unachieved' is such a splendid sort of word because etymologically it'll give you 'chief', which'll give you 'head', which'll give you 'captain', 'caput', which'll give you innumerable things, the point of life, the chief of life, bringing life to a point, understanding it.
That line itself seemed so excellent that I just played it into a biographical situation where I went to Westhall church in Suffolk with Kate and Nigel Wheale and they were looking around the outside of the church and I went inside alone. And being extremely patient people they didn't obtrude on me, and Kate walked past the door which was open, a little Norman round-headed door, through the dusk outside, in the halflight, without even looking in, after I'd been standing silently inside for about half an hour.
And so everything in that poem is really about the inside of Westhall church. It's about the bench ends. The number of bench ends sticking up. And, as I say, I don't like to think that I have to say that, particularly in this poem, because I'd like to think that the notion of 'captains' would do, without knowing that they were bench ends. Though I do call them 'poppy-cock' at one point, which is cocked-up poppy heads etc., so I practically say so. But I feel slightly disappointed if I have to explain what they are. But that feels unfair, because I myself enjoy the poem because I do know what they are, precisely, and how close every detail is to what was really there. Like that strange little creaking noise which your sleeve sometimes makes when it rubs on wood if you're leaning on it, which sometimes sounds like a seagull making a noise a long way off. You know I love things when they're incredibly precise, and yet move off all over the place as well. The tighter the wider. So that's, yes, the bench ends inside Westhall church.
And, oh yes, that little bit of a Gombrich article on art and the difference between pictures and maps. So when the poem says 'there are no maps of moonlight', that's another of those phrases I knew I'd have to get in a poem somewhere, because it was going to be pretty significant. 'Maps of moon-light', - what a marvellous notion that you can't do that. So I was waiting for that to crop up as well.
And then 'The Ecstasy Inventories'. That great Nicholas Stone statue inside Bramfield church. When I came back from Italy thinking that I'd never see any good statues again, because I'd been looking at Donatello, I then found Nicholas Stone was a good sculptor. An excellent one. So Bramfield became a particular place for me because of his statue of Mrs Coke, which is one of his very best. So I was interested in her as a work of art and as a person. Although the church records were missing for the years when the Cokes were there, Nigel Wheale found for me, in Suffolk Archaeological Society records, the inventory left when Mr Coke died - so that I had an account of his house and every room in it and all the objects that were on the tables. And objects in a way take you close to people, I suppose, and yet they don't as well, of course. So that was the stimulus for that. All the things mentioned in the poem, like 'paragon' and 'scarlet gown' and habits and costumes and a lot of the vocabulary comes from the actual 17th-century inventory. Petticoats, waistcoats, spots like pinks: she really did have gowns with spots like pinks on them. 'Worked with eyes' means, in one sense, it'd got little eyes sewn on it. There was really a picture in the house of, the inventory says, An Moore on horseback, and you can't tell now whether that means a black man on horseback or a woman called An Moore on horseback. A footnote suggests it might be Anne Moore of Stansted, who later lived in Bury St Edmunds. She was around at the right time: 1561. The inventory gave me a lot of the poem.
And then that connects up with the beginning of Adam Bede when a carpenter is carving a mantelpiece singing a hymn. Kermode writes about how you read a book and what details you pay attention to when you read it. And what you don't. How you just dismiss some of them as background realism, but you pay close attention to others, because they're going to be character and plot. And that again is the basic question of what you pay attention to, and what sort of an interpretation you make. And that's very much the question of an inventory and how much you could understand from one.
So those two locked together and they led to the Phaedrus, where Phaedrus supports poetry, but Socrates says frankly Boreas and the rest are only myths: Boreas never carried Orithyia off, she was just blown off a cliff. He suggests rational explanations. So it went out from having the inventory through all the other things I was reading at the time. That's one where for about seven or eight weeks everything I read seemed wonderfully pertinent to what I was doing, and although I was in the middle of a school term teaching at the same time, nevertheless in the evenings I came home thinking 'I've got some more, this is the next verse'. Even a Scientific American article about wolves protecting their pack areas from the next pack of wolves so assiduously that around the boundary that they don't have time to hunt the deer around the boundary. They only hunt the deer in the middle of their territory where they feel safe. So the deer survive precisely because the wolves can't pay any attention to them where the wolf packs intermingle round the edges. You know I really think you're going well when everything you read like that suddenly pops into place and you feel that your life's making sense for once.
Then there's 'Juan Fernandez'. That's the island where the original of Robinson Crusoe was wrecked. He took the idea of a man isolated on an island, making sense of the island, coming to terms with the things around him. So that's why it's called that. And that's what it's about again. It draws on Heidegger. The Jug, the Earth, Sky, Man and Divinities are in a lecture given by Heidegger on 'The Thing'. That's what I'd been immediately reading when I started doing that.
It's a denser sort of thing altogether. Biographical bits are about the bench ends in Westhall with the little spiders' webs on. That have been there for 30 years now, to my knowledge. They can't really be the same ones, but they look as if they were blowing, 'A mite of quicksilver rousing in the threads'. And then little birds again. A spotted flycatcher that came into Gislingham church and nested in its roof there when it was practically a ruin. Bringing in beakfuls of wriggling legs. And flickering to its deep nest. And then connecting up with Iris Murdoch's kestrel which suddenly takes you out of yourself: 'The brooding self with all its vanity disappears'.
So these things are merely bits of reading in one way, but extremely close personal experience in another. And that's when it gets good. So that's 'Juan Fernandez'.
Then Matthew Glover, yes, is the man who didn't know whether to vote for the Open Field system, or for redistribution of the fields in 1800 in one particular parish near here. So he's a man who didn't know, which seemed to me at the time to be a crucial frame of mind to be in: not to know. But to gather together ways of looking at it. So we needn't say too much more about that. That's got actual descriptions of the parish, of course, and it's got some more birds in, fizzing and so on. I can remember the evening when I saw those, they were in some willow bushes on the edge of the parish in the dusk. On the boundary. Then it's got Clare in it. Quotations from Clare, as he was objecting to the enclosure movement. But that's more open and obvious than most of the poems, so much for that.
'Saxon Landings' as you know is about the Mildenhall Dish. I mean quite simply about the Mildenhall Dish. And possibly a play about the Romans having to pull out of England under Saxon pressure, The Long Sunset by (R.C.) Sherriff. I think it was just having listened to that play on the radio that made me suddenly feel the trauma of throwing away a structured existence, bonfires going off at the bottom of the garden, and pagan shadows playing against them, and the likelihood of being massacred at any moment. And that's what got that going.
'Arbor Low' is about the stone circle in Derbyshire and is just a little postcard piece, really. I was fooling around with a way of writing it rather than anything else. Though again Arbor Low's a pretty sacred sort of place, I must admit. And the birds fart because they're wheatears, of course, which means 'white arse'. Yes. Yes.
And then 'The Long History of Heresy'. It's long. When I wrote it I was pleased with it. There are bits of Levi-Strauss on Totemism, I remember. He cites Bergson saying that the creative energy stops, and the stops become the appearances of living things and places, comparing this to the beliefs of the Sioux Indians: "Everything as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes stops." The god stops. The sun is one place where he stopped. It's a footprint. Thousands of grains pressed into a pattern. So are all other things. I'm back with Man Friday without saying so here. I'm particularly fond of the last bit involving Ford Madox Brown when he was painting his landscape 'Gathering Corn'. It's in the Tate and it's a very small, wonderful landscape of a field full of stubble and carts on the other side, in the afternoon light, meticulously painted. And he left a journal at that time about how he was trying day after day to catch that, but the weather conditions kept altering. 'I can make nothing of the small screen of trees'. And he said it would be better to be a poet rather than a painter, because poets didn't have to possess things. He obviously did feel that he'd got to get the truth of what was out there and hold on to it. And he couldn't because the weather conditions altered, and because they cut the corn and took it away when he was halfway through painting it. 'Found the turnips too difficult to do anything with'. It's an attitude which I sympathise with, but can see is hopeless. So the poem ends up at that moment: 'the warmth of the uncut grass, in impossible furrows, in tufts, near green, dove grey, an unusual rosy pink in the unmade hay.' Those are parts of his journal worked in there.
And some of the rest of it comes from a Kurosawa film (Kagemusha). The image of a prince-figure who could do practically anything. He's the opposite of Ford Madox Brown. He's the guy who could make anything mean anything; ride straight through and give it the significance he wants, put his footprint where he wanted it. It was just simply an image from the film of him on horseback followed by his retinue going past an enormous stone wall. And the sheer confidence of the man. Isn't there something about him substituting for somebody else as well? So that he's not really the man they think he is? So he's being played off against... well, they're two types of knowing, really. Zen versus Thomas Hardy.
And sitting under a tree in Suffolk again, with lights going through the leaves. Oh yes: standing under a tree for an hour and a half. One peculiar evening, that's the biographical centre of it: I walked out of the village at dusk and, as is extremely unusual nowadays, I stood for an hour and a half by a track and no-one came anywhere near me. And it just occurred to me that I ought to stand without moving at all for that length of time and see what happened. Not even turning my head. A lot of rabbits came up and sat on my feet. And moths whipping about within inches of me. A feeling that you might get through to what was really there if you stripped off enough.
I thought that was an interesting experience: to be alone and perfectly still. As soon as you move things take on meaning, don't they? because things becomes things that you've got to step round or walk over or something. They instantly become part of your map, as it were. Whereas if you stand absolutely still, then they might not be part of any map at all. You 'see' the place when you haven't got any designs on it... 'coolly', as something independent, as Stokes says. I just found it interesting to strip it down and see if there was a way through. Although knowing that there wouldn't be, of course. So that's 'The Long History of Heresy'. The title comes from Bion's Attention and Interpretation. Then Blything is the name of the area in Suffolk. The Blything Hundred. With Blythburgh Church at its centre, which is a splendid place. It's just a little bitty poem, which again I like because it's short and spikey and sort of opens you up a bit. Like Carlos Williams writing Kora in Hell, to open things up a little bit occasionally. So that's full of different fragments. There are bits of Darwin reporting from The Voyage of the Beagle, which got in there, since he made quite a lot of the things around him. Yeah.
And then 'Rough Silk' is about drinking in The White Horse garden in Westleton in the evening during our holidays. One particular time, again, stimulates it: where there were particular light conditions, and the poplars were opening and closing themselves gently. My brother had just bought a complete edition of the works of Dryden, I remember, so a lot of books got into it. 'Rough Silk'. That's a sort of quiet drinking session, that is, which didn't turn into an orgy. In fact it's one of my very controlled orgies on the whole.
'The Gorgoneion', the last one, that's another heavily worked up one, which is either too worked up or rather good. I'm not quite certain about that. That's done in Wales. I had the experience of going somewhere where I hadn't been for thirty years and seeing it again. It had been altered a bit, but not a lot. And I knew that I would never come back again too - in another thirty years I'll be dead, obviously, so you can't have an interval like that again. So 'The Gorgoneion' is actually about waking up in that cottage in the morning, and seeing the things again and coming to terms with them, or trying to: the fact that they're going to be of no importance afterwards, the absurdity of them as usual in that existential sort of a way. And what patterns you might fit them into. That's enough. I'm a driver who enjoys being talked to too much. Would you be prepared to be more open about how you actually write these poems?
Yes. How do I write these poems? I try to snatch some solitude to start with at a time when I'm feeling that my practical life is going quite well. That's pretty essential. I don't like writing out of a moment of stress. Well, I can't. I've got to be reasonably relaxed. Which means it doesn't happen very often. That's absolutely necessary. Then, I've usually got bits and pieces lying around, and sometimes over a period of 10 years or more, say a line or two, which got thrown aside from a previous piece, or an alternative start. Something that something might be made of. Sooner or later. And I pick these up and keep reading them. It's that Valery business: that the poet is the reader of his own first line. You only need a first line and you read it again and you react to it like a reader would react to it and then that - it's a composite business between you and the first line then. And it doesn't really matter if it's the first line of the poem or if it comes halfway through, obviously. So long as you've got a little nugget to start from. That can be like that one in 'The Upshot': 'We leave unachieved in the summer dusk.' There'd just be sufficient feeling and sound in it to make me want to go on, and connect it with other things.
And then, as a system of discovery I'd use an etymological dictionary, obviously, to help sometimes, and I sometimes reread my journals: though I can't just pick chunks out of them and put them across. But I keep getting reminded of bits and then I might read the whole journal again by accident and unexpected bits come in which I'd previously not thought I was going to use at all. Ford Madox Brown in spite of all. But caught up in a process. Could you offer some broad manifesto as to how you see the role of poetry in history, society, the life of the mind?
'So much depends on a red wheelbarrow...' still I think that's true: the sheer opening you up to the outside world. Like this: 'From the earliest period of my recollection, when I can just remember tugging ineffectually with all my infant strength at the tough stalks of the wild succory on the chalky hills above Norwich, I have found the study of nature an increasing source of unalloyed pleasure, and a consolation and a refuge under every pain.' That's Sir Jasper Smith, the founder of the Linnaean Society, quoted in the Rev. John's Flowers of the Field, 1890, the 27th edition, under the entry for chicory. That tugging at the fact, absolutely typical and deep-rooted, hung up in the wind... suspended after samphire. This poetry is very English. I find it difficult to imagine in translation. Do you find foreign poetry interesting or accessible?
Oh yes. I have an interest in Rimbaud, for example. But I would at the same time be pretty sad if I thought my poetry would translate without considerable loss. What is it like to be bringing out your first collection in your fifties?
Well, I'm just delighted, that's all: that feeling that anything that's private to one could interweave into a larger scenario, that life might cohere on a larger plane. I don't ever expect there'd be more than a few readers, really. Was it Peter Riley who said there won't be more than twenty or something. And I expect that's right. But I don't mind that at all. I like the poems to be available in case, that's all. That's why I've collected them together. I didn't want to call it 'Collected Poems', because that would suggest that I wasn't going to do too many more, to me it would anyway. And I'd like to think that I might do quite a lot more. What can we expect from you next?
Well, I don't know. It's difficult to predict. That would spoil it if I could. I might say I might go back to writing something with a larger body of subject matter again of the Matthew Glover sort. I have got the material ready. But I honestly can't find a way of doing it.
Some references
Donald Davie fogey-ogre and failed Pope. Propagandist and agitator for The Movement. Wrote a book in 1988 to prove that nothing had happened in English poetry since the 1950s. Dislikes poets who do not follow his instructions.
Ed Dorn, Charles Olson, WC Williams, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, Jack Spicer norteamericano poets of various makes.
Areal: pretentious word for writing about an area; areal poet, poet who differs from usual Tour Guide Poet by saying 'yo! I'm not a topographical poet!' and wearing a T-shirt saying 'Tour Guide'.
Objectivists American school of the thirties. Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen. mostly Marxists; continued some Imagist principles. no relationship either to objectivity or to object relations; 'objective' refers to the view of a lens.
Paul Valery French poet. 'Je deteste les oeuvres, ce n'est que la theorie de la poesie qui m'interesse.' The same reminiscences report him as saying 'Des livres de technologie. C'est c m'interesse', in a rather R.F. Langley-like way. Completely uninfluenced by philosopher Henri Bergson (L'evolution creatrice).
Haslam, Michael goshwowfabulous poet who lives in Calderdale. See AE Eight, Ten, and Twelve, and Contributors.
Wheale, Nigel poet, and the other half of Wolverhampton's avant-garde scene. see AE Eight and Twelve, and Contributors.
Kate one of the MacAskills.
Douglas Oliver, Peter Riley poets britanniques. See A Various Art (ed. Crozier and Longville). Riley's prose piece about a phone box in Derbyshire is in Tracts and Mineshafts.
Ernst Gombrich art historian at the Courtauld Institute
W.S. Graham poet from Greenock. published by Faber. Wrote rather well on ships and shipyards.
Thomas A. Clark poet from Greenock, see AE Ten.
Bion, Wilfred British psychoanalyst but not a Kleinian. Tried to reform psychoanalysis by rebuilding the theoretical vocabulary from scratch. Applied cybernetics to group dynamics and the aetiology of schizophrenia, inspiring Bateson and Laing. Possibly a great thinker, anyway terribly hard to read. Dandled the infant John Wilkinson on his knee.
Melanie Klein founder of British School of Psychoanalysis and one of main theorists of object relations; author of Love, Guilt, and Reparation; trained Marion Milner, who talks about her journal in On being unable to paint. Treated (1930-37) Adrian Stokes, an inveterate system-builder who at last came to roost in hers and published a number of books on art history from the infantile fantasy point of view. He wrote, between 1968 and 1972, some poems, which are very good and were then published by Carcanet (With All the Views).
'The Red Wheelbarrow' is a poem by William Carlos Williams. (Claude) Levi-Strauss oh God, we can't gloss everything. is it all a superbly enunciated mixture of selfreferentiality, overelaborate metaphor, and self-contradiction? an Amazonian origami maze? I don't know.
Footnote on the presence of the body in art
Interesting as Wollheim's idea is, AE has to observe that this is a minefield. Once you start out saying that poetic rhythm is somatic, you can't avoid a slide to put a wiggle in your walk. The concept 'looking at a woman's body' is too highly loaded in our society to be brought into poetry without a major rede fi nition. If the poem is a presentation of the body, then it is a by-form of narcissistic display; being a female poet is like being an actress or a nightclub singer. This puts power into the hands of the reader: if he dislikes the poem, the poet is unattractive, and the question of intellectual debate or bad reading falls out. When the poet reaches 40, or 45, a poetic crisis follows, because the body, which is now the 'signified' of the poem, is altering in its social status; as film actresses' salaries crash when they reach 45, according to Delphine Seyrig. I do not think this mere punctiliousness; the careers of two of the most brilliant British poets of the past 50 years, Rosemary Tonks and Lynette Roberts, were ended by religious conversions, and I suspect that this catastrophe was conditioned partly by the pressure placed on girls and women to be charming and alluring, etc., inducing shame, and partly by the pressure on women to be mute and meek, which prevented them from emerging as religious poets, allowed to wield moral authority. This whole chain of identifications, equivocations, needs to be torn link from link; the idea of the body in art needs to be intensely analysed so that we can develop a theory of display, adornment, appropriation, admiring and being attracted which is far more complicated and more abstract. The hot spectrum between narcissism and shame accounts for a disproportionate share of failure in poetry.
If Mr Ted Hughes writes numerous poems about large powerful animals, we guess that he wishes to dominate within the household. The proof status of this supposition is very tenuous; but also, the power in question cannot be merely physical, and does not allow us to suppose that the merely-physical exists. Is it ever meaningful to say that words are physical, and non-psychological? doesn't the domain of the symbolic start where the physical stops; even in a Duccio painting? A firm separation of mind and body ends up either with pornography or with Christianity. It would be acceptable to state that works of art are sometimes projections of the self, provided this is taken to mean a mental-physical whole.
Footnote on Object Relations
A number of impinging references bring up psychoanalysis as an ideological source of British poetry; and especially the British School of Psychoanalysis and object relations. Thus we had John Wilkinson's dogmatically Kleinian account of Barry MacSweeney in issue Eleven; Haslam and O'Sullivan soused in Jungian ideas; Martin Thom's citation of Lou Andreas-Salome; citations of Guattari; other events yet. I am not given to theory, being content with minutiae; but one occasionally looks up to find a complete betrayal on the part of theorists, supposedly privy to a higher truth. I don't see how people can go on using Freud and Marx any more; they are exploded fictions. In the new world-view with its expectation of heterogeneity, the drift is to choose ideas for their aesthetic appeal. If you choose something attractive which is based on something attractive which is based on something attractive which is based on something paranoid and totalitarian and posing itself as revelation, are you not saying goodbye to your intelligence? Is this more than a miroir a alouettes, a shiny thing which dazzles birds? Could it be that the distrust of abstract thought in England comes from a habitual engagement with intellectual systems which we know to be untrue, so that argument terrifies with the prospect of uncovering and losing cherished and embedded fantasy-investments after the first two or three steps? Comrades! untruth is a starvation diet. The intellectual wealth which discourages new research often seems to be little more solid than pre-war shares in the Shanghai Railway.
I am concerned by the medical metaphor which is pervading writing about literature. I am afflicted by doubts whether literati know either what makes people unhappy or what different behaviour could make that unhappiness end. Because literature is about behaviour, and you do a PhD in literature, you assume that you are an expert on human behaviour; you know how people should behave, and even how to make them behave in that way. This expert status is based on an anatomical view of the psyche, where every psyche is of the same design; and this design is taken from Freud, through whatever intermediaries. This is incompatible with any modern theory of the epigenesis of behaviour. What if the psyche is pliant and indeterminate and mutable, and willing to emit any shaped messages which the other person wishes to hear? what if the assumption of human predictability was made in order to elevate 'knowledge of character' to the status of practical technology, in order to justify the tenure within organizations and institutions of an educated middle class, whose education consisted of that knowledge, and the imperious imperative was only to maintain that tenure?
We have a government which ignores liberal and humane opinion in the formulation of policy. Perhaps the precondition of being taken seriously in the world of power would be the jettison of infantile fantasies of omniscience, in the form of Marx, Freud, and congeners. Evidence-based theories are so much more hard work.
Denise Riley's War in the Nursery details the influence of Bowlby and Winnicott, psychoanalysts, on public policy on childrearing, and even on the attitudes of the public; exposing them as ignorant and excessive. But these are the same theories on which Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes, and recently Peter Fuller, were operating. How can they be wrong when dealing with real babies and right when dealing with the 'infantile part-selves' of artists and enjoyers of art?
This issue is sensitive because the magazine is on the point of emerging from a Fullerian position, which has done very well for three years, and going over to a cleaner one: no Marx, no Freud. This leaves us without a cultural policy. One is faced with the prospect of either vanishing into a state of rigour which is silence because it has erased all mediations, or an accumulative philological positivism where texts are stacked and inventoried with no central policy at all.