Miso Sensitive

Bobby Parker speaks to AS

2012-01-12T21:59:00.000Z

You are someone who has engaged with a range of different forms of writing and art, did these elements develop separate from one other or have they always been complimentary?

My dad studied to be a cartoonist, so as a boy I emulated him and discovered I also had a basic talent for drawing. He used to throw newspapers across the room in disgust when he saw the satirical cartoons, convinced he could do better. He gave up. Now he works in a factory.

However, I was obsessed with horror books and horror movies, so I filled sketchbooks with the kind of stuff that frightened my teachers. They made my parents take me to a psychiatrist.

Reading and writing was something that came naturally to me as well, but I started writing seriously just before I left school. I filled notebooks and read as much as I could and made my first submission to a magazine about five years later. Charles Johnson, poet and editor of Obsessed with Pipework, published my first poems. He used to mark my work. He’d write things like ‘This is bullshit and you know it!’ in the margin of a particularly bad poem. Without his feedback and generosity it would’ve taken me a lot longer to get published.

Everything else just followed naturally, the experiments with painting, music, photography, film etc – I am an intensely creative person, and would be happy expressing myself with any medium. But I am better at writing than anything else, so that is what I focus most of my energy on for now.

You have a very prominent autobiographical tone in your writing, which particular writers have had an influence with regards to this?

The Beat Generation, Jim Carroll and Charles Bukowski to begin with, but Harvey Pekar and Richard Brautigan, along with my research into Outsider Art, changed everything for me. Something about turning myself into art seemed to make sense, even if my life isn’t particularly interesting, the challenge, as we all know, is to find deeper meaning in even the most mundane situations, or to inject imagination into an otherwise ordinary experience, like doing the washing up or walking to the shop – even though writers and artists will always feel the need to explore the same themes over and over again, we each have our own reality, and the world as we know it must pass through the filters of our own experience. To be honest, the truth interests me. Everybody has their own version of it.

How conscious are you of the confessional or transgressive nature in your poems? Do you see any limitations in the linking of the transgressive with the personal, in the sense that it may prove problematic for others to read or for you to live up to? I am thinking here of a number of interviews with Hunter S Thompson, in his post Fear & Loathingdays, where he speaks of the frustration of being expected to write exclusively in that Fear & Loathing mode, and to behave in that manner too.

Hunter S Thompson made a caricature of himself. I hope I never do that. I try to transmit what happens in my head onto the page. From the beginning, I have slowly been pushing my honesty to a point where it is uncomfortable to people. People, in my experience, are more receptive when they have been affected by something, even in a bad way. It leaves a mark. Ghost Town Music has been my most popular book so far because I didn’t hold back in any way. If I upset people, myself or my family included, I didn’t stop to think about that. I can’t, it would undermine what I am trying to achieve.

My chapbook Building Murder with a Smile (the red ceilings press) has been my first attempt to capture a mood without telling on myself or using autobiography. Although it was written using the main ingredients of my psyche: Fear and Anxiety – I hope that is what comes across when people read it. A friend of mine called it a dark, nightmarish soap opera, which I think is pretty accurate.

My next book, Comberton (the knives forks and spoons press), has pushed autobiography as far as I’m willing to go at the moment without getting myself locked up or ostracized. If I had to explain why I do it, why I reveal my deep, dark and dirty secrets, why I publish the things that people save for therapy or the closet, I’d say it’s because I wish people would be more open. They shouldn’t be made to feel so alone all the time.

Do you feel that the domestic takes quite a big role in your writing? There seems to be an overt tension between an exterior space and an interior one, particularly in poems like 'Do you feel an idiot when you dance at parties?'

Yes, or at least it has. I’m not sure if it will continue to do so. Maybe there’s no escaping it. We are all locked into domestic routines whether we like it or not. But rather than let them suffocate me, I prefer to tell you that when I’m stuck in a room worrying about the bills or why my wife is pissed off at me, I am also somewhere else. I suppose it’s that ‘somewhere else’ that I’m trying to articulate.

What projects are you currently working on?

At the moment I am plotting and researching my first novel, which is about a post-op transsexual going through a psychotic breakdown.

I am also putting together a book of ghostly images and words called Phantomland and slowly piecing together Freak Exorcism (the final part of the trilogy that started with Ghost Town Music and Comberton). Both of these will be published by the knives forks and spoons press.

Tiplady on Clarkson

2011-12-08T16:15:00.000Z

Jonty Tiplady has started a new blog, and it tells you more about the condition of the world than asking him about his favourite soup ever would. Highly recommended.

Get his excellent book too.

Sean Bonney - The Commons

2011-09-23T15:30:00.001+01:00

To mark the release of Sean Bonney's The Commons (Openned, 2011), Miso thought it would link to this excellent interview with SB himself. Highlights include the response given to the question of perceived 'difficulties' in poetry:

To answer your question, I don’t think of poetry, ‘difficult’ or otherwise, as elitist at all. Poetry is a very marginal artform, it’s true, and for all sorts of reasons – a lot of people don’t like it, and I’m certainly not one of those people who goes on about increasing its readership, and so on. But elitism – I’m not sure whether it’s something that’s restricted to the anglophone world, but in Britain at least there’s historically an anti-intellectualism that calls anything that’s complex, or a little difficult to understand on first hearing, elitism. In the Blair era, ‘elitism’ basically became a synonym for ‘criticising the government’. It’s so obviously repressive, that way of thinking, and ultimately very right wing. I read an article in a performance poetry magazine a few years back, where somebody or other was going on about how the simplistic crap they were writing was stuff that the ‘working class could understand’. That’s the same logic as The Sun newspaper, all the consumerist media really – clever, educated people talking down to people – they think proles are thick, basically, and they want to keep it that way. It’s stupid – especially when you think about how so many of the really important avant-garde artists Britain has produced, Tom Raworth and Derek Bailey, for example, have been from the working class.

Share & Enjoy.

Mark Burnhope speaks to Andy Spragg

2011-09-07T16:06:00.001+01:00

Mark Burnhope was born in 1982, and currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset. He studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His poems and reviews have appeared in print and online publications including Magma, Nth Position, Horizon Review, Stride and The Best British Poetry 2011. His debut pamphlet, The Snowboy, is available from Salt Publishing.

When did you start writing? Was it poetry in particular?

I remember being about fourteen, discovering Wordsworth and Blake, and writing little Romantic poems which I once put together with illustrations in a handmade book, because Blake did, sort of. I have a vague memory of reading ‘Daffodils’, noticing that Wordsworth described this field of daffodils as a ‘host’. I wrote a poem about a field of angels, thinking I was cleverly working with that idea. I wasn’t. I was actually undoing, sucking the life out of, a brilliant metaphor. I laugh about that now. But I started writing poems seriously during GCSE English. I wrote a poem for an assignment. My teacher, Mr. Matthews, had a contagious passion and excitement for poetry, and his enjoyment of Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and others rubbed off on me. That assignment was to write a Gothic Horror story. I told my teacher that I didn’t feel very confident in fiction, and asked if I could write a horrific poem instead. I also didn’t want to do horror, but the crucifixion was kind of bad, wasn’t it, so can I write about that? He let me off, and then gave me an A. I didn’t need much encouragement to get serious. That reluctance with fiction though has never really gone away, and although I’ve attempted a novel, it’s been stashed away in a drawer, two thirds finished, for years now. So yes, I’ve had a voracious, almost exclusive appetite for poetry all these years.

Which particular writers would you say have been an influence?

Lots, I read all over the place. I’m not a massive reader of prose, but C.S. Lewis, for his children’s stuff as well as for his satire, like The Screwtape Letters. Bunyan: I’m interested in allegory and symbol, probably over and above metaphor. Indra Sinha, D.B.C Pierre, Ali Smith. In terms of poetry, the Metaphysicals, particularly John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The metaphysicals have fallen in and out of favour in contemporary poetry for obvious reasons; we live in a society where, gladly, no belief is given more airtime than another. Readers can be put off by the mere mention of religious belief, and for good reason; but it can be to their detriment if they miss the linguistic leaps these writers were taking. I’ve tried to absorb and utilise elements from Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yeats, Hopkins, R.S. Thomas. These writers created a religious tradition which is multi-faceted, innovative, and far from embarrassing. I’m interested in the pastoral, nature/landscape, Romantic traditions: from Blake, John Clare, Robert Frost, to Norman MacCaig, Seamus Heany, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes. Lastly, I’m interested in satirical, anti-poetic treatment of difficult social and political subject-matter. Zibniew Herbert has been a big one there. Current poets like Andrew Philip, Tony Williams, Michael Symmons Roberts, Andy Brown, John Burnside, Sian Hughes, Angela Topping, A.B. Jackson, Tim Atkins, Ira Lightman, Bobby Parker and Steven Nelson have added something or other to my thinking about the part I might play. Oh, and Luke Kennard, who reminds me with linguistic skill and a good sprig of anarchy, never to take things too seriously, even when they are serious. Seriously; life is too short to read too many poems which don’t make you laugh.

In The Snowboy there seems to be a tension between a contemporary landscape and a more mythic or imaginative landscape, from the “parish town” of 'To My Restored Example, Pinnochio' to the mention of Ikea of “The Ideal Bed”. How aware were you of having these contrasts when collecting the poems together?

Thanks for those insights. The problem of Cartesian dualism is a big deal to me, where mind and matter is separated in so much discourse. In religion, they’ve been pitted against one another and called ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Cartesian dualism has also helped define disabled people against an archetypal, ‘normal’ (or normative) able body. The naming of disabilities and conditions is useful for hospitals and surgeries, but it has the effect in society of supporting stereotype. In contrast, there’s the Social Model, which is inherently inclusive. It says that it’s society which disables individuals; regardless of physical condition, we all share experiences of ignorance, discrimination, lack of access to buildings, jobs, public services, and relationships in some cases. All that stuff creates our cultural ‘landscape’. I hope my poetry conjures a real sense of specific place, and my home town features. I’m grounded here; it’s my emotional centre. But on an exploratory level, some of my poems paint imaginative landscapes through which I can explore various issues in a less personalised way. Some of them are confused, doing both at the same time. The geography in ‘The Letting Tree’ is partly true, but most of it’s wrong. Urban Reef isn’t on Sea Road (its sister restaurant, Urban Beach, is). There’s a tree outside, lots actually, but they’re further away, not right outside (or are they?). My Hydrocephalus possibly comes into play here: short-term memory problems mean that I can travel somewhere a million times, and still not know how to direct someone there. I can find my own way to places if it’s been a habit, but there’s a complete mental block where specific detail is concerned. I can’t visualise it in my head to describe it to other people. I could have gone to Sea Road, wrote down details, but I didn’t, since this was my way of making disability part of the poem’s construction. To take the lines you’ve quoted: I do live in a Parish town, but I don’t go to church at the moment. I don’t know how many toyshops we have. ‘The Ideal Bed’ has IKEA in it, but also other fabricated details about the breakdown of my marriage. What begins as fairly straight retelling of memories turns into this almost ridiculous list of metaphorical ideas around the marriage bed. It’s helped along by the concept of ‘bedness’ from Plato’s Republic, which became a basis for ekphrastic poetry. Donne lends a hand too, with his bed as universe conceit. Like in ‘The Letting Tree’, I’m hoping that the fact I just can’t remember certain concrete details about time and space comes across, and that it almost drives the emotion in the poem. There is pain in not being able to remember, but desperately wanting to. Where I can’t, metaphor, metaphysics and sexual innuendo take over to inadvertently express stuff which the literal retelling could never do, however much I tried. After all that’s worked through, there are laughs, and a little insincerity. We’re insincere because pain is hard to admit, which is an admission in itself.

There seem to be several moments of self-identification with the subjects of certain poems, explicitly here, the opening lines and mirror titles of “To My Familiar, Queequeg” and “To My Best-kept, Quasimodo”. I wonder if you could comment further on this.

Those poems were written a while back, when I began thinking more seriously about how to incorporate the inevitable fact of my disability into my poems. I knew that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, make them narrowly confessional. I’m attracted to confessional poetry, for its caustic lack of regard for emotional subtlety (due in part to my similar leanings in music, and all the Seattle grunge and Metal that I’ve listened to over the years) but I don’t want the reader to feel like a voyeur into my personal baggage. They have to feel like they’re living it themselves, not that the writer is assuming the role of wise teacher, or Jeremy Kyle guest. So I had this idea of writing epistles to a set of fictional characters, since there were already a set of them I knew about whose stories deal with prejudice, exclusion, healing, the body; and those themes are embodied by them. Others didn’t make the cut this time, but these three – Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo – did. In all of their stories, I found symbolic material to do with prejudice, stereotype, the physical body and the social aspects which disable it. Moby Dick is a story in which, through their blossoming intimate friendship (possibly more, considering Ishmael’s expressed joy in holding Queequeg in bed), Ishmael’s prejudices gradually drop like flies. At first, he views Queequeg as a monster and a heathen; but eventually he reflects and reconfigures his morals, his beliefs, his sexuality, his love for his wife, his views about the body and its wild ‘geography’. It’s slowly transformed in his friendship with this tattooed savage. Aside from my distaste for whale hunting, the final defeat of that ‘white monster’ is a powerful end to Ishmael’s supremacy over what used to be, for him, the weaker race. In writing a letter to Queequeg, I suppose I’m acknowledging hurt, mistreatment, but also celebrating the dropping of differences. I identify with Queequeg (‘I too am tattooed’ is the one fact of the poem), but also Ishmael. Quasimodo, in a way, is a love poem. It begins by addressing the hunchback, but then gets shaky, starts talking about the woman, this ‘gypsy’ we are both in love with; so again, it’s wanting to talk to them both. The Disney film has always really angered me, in a funny way. Rather than being this beautifully tragic love story, Quasimodo ends up in the ‘Friend Zone’ with Esmaralda, with the frustration of being locked in a tower, unable to get his frigging fingers on her. He’s merely a helping hand to get to that inevitable ending, where she gets the perfectly able-bodied handsome Prince. That’s always pissed me off, and I see it time and again in life, literature and film. The body as a locked tower, the feeling that just because bones are mangled and you can’t imagine them having sex, it doesn’t mean a person is asexual. But I hope it celebrates love too, the cheeky ‘once-wasted bone’ pun mirroring the ‘ivory tower’ of Song of Songs, where the lover’s body as a ‘tower’ seems to be a, um, mistranslation (it’s a phallus).

With regards to your work and more general processes of identification, have you aligned yourself with particular schools of thought or aesthetics? How big an engagement do you have with contemporary poetry? Other than the actual making of it...

This pamphlet draws together separate streams: Confessional, religious, satirical, pastoral/nature/landscape. Rather than align myself with a single one, I’d rather put them out on the table, and collate them into something resembling a picture which reflects the way things are now. So, I’ve got Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Ai to thank for the seething, gritted-teeth frustration / regret / grief / anger bubbling beneath the surface. I’ve got Blake, Stevens, Hopkins, Donne, Yeats and Edna St. Vincent Millay (among others) to thank for a kaleidoscopic take on religious faith. I have John Clare and Zbigniew Herbert, as well as all of the above, to thank for their caustic wit and social criticism. I also love Heaney, Norman McCaig, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes. Poets like Donald Davie and R.S. Thomas fall into both camps: the religious and the pastoral / landscape. None of these are contemporary, sorry! But I’ve loved recent collections which take these traditions and work with them, more or less: off the top of my head (and I know I’ve forgotten some) I can think of A.B. Jackson’s Fire Stations, Tom Chivers’ How To Build A City, Andy Brown and John Burnside’s Goose Music, Luke Kennard’s Migraine Hotel, Tony Williams’ The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, and, for their tender and honest look at the grief in the loss of a child (which three poems in my pamphlet touch on, ‘The Snowboy’ most clearly) Sian Hughes’ The Missing, and Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box. But in my years of reading poetry closely, what’s missing in poetics, I’ve found, is the voice – or voices – of disability. I hope that I bring that. I’m hardly the only one doing it, and there are a few poets with disabilities – mostly in America – who’ve identified in the last twenty years or so with a ‘crip poetry’ movement. One of their aims is to shift disability poetry from the realms of ‘therapeutic writing’ to more serious engagement; to let it sit among other poetries, and throw off reactions of ‘Ah, that’s nice dear’. Some are more political than others, but all seek to take back, redefine and decriminalise language (‘Crip’ is an obvious abbreviation of ‘Cripple’ but, in the disabled context, more often than not, has become a term of endearment rather than abuse). I don’t want to be pigeon-holed. Larry Eigner – a Black Mountain poet who had Cerebral Palsy – got that treatment, where a headline once read something like (I’m paraphrasing): ‘Poet Writes From His Wheelchair’. That’s patronising, but more, it’s useless, banal information that says nothing about his poetry and everything about the journalist’s discomfort with the idea of a disabled person making poetry. On the other hand, these crip poets tend to love Larry Eigner for the same reasons I do; and my disability is an unavoidable fact, fuels some of my poems, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t stick my hand up and say yes, I’m a crip and I write poems. I’m a crip poet.

How wary were you of engaging with the religious within your poetry, given that we seem to currently live in a time that appears highly sceptical of any form of faith? Did you find yourself censoring the more religious aspects of your poems?

I’m not interested in ‘censoring’ language. If it’s well-crafted, it shouldn’t need censoring. I’m in good company as far as poetic religious tradition goes (and in terms of writers who have, more or less, written from or around it: Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, and now Michael Symmonds Roberts, Andrew Philip, Lisa Jarnot, Ira Lightman… ). But I try to come at religion from the right angle. I don’t think ‘I’m going to write a heartfelt and sincere poem,’ and then end up, by some logical conclusion, with a religious one. But I do see faith as a lens as good as any through which to see what I love, have to try and be content with, or hate. My faith is deeply ingrained, as well as often the last thing I want, the most unnatural and uncomfortable thing in the world. I try to be honest about that. If I stand back and look at religion – not God, but our little warring factions which try, and fail, to pin him down – I see the same good and evil that I’ve been told splits Christians from ‘the world’ (that Biblical term meaning outside the faith, ironically). I’m not interested in writing Contemporary Christian Worship, or preaching. ‘Censoring’ doesn’t come into it because poetry isn’t for that; there is a correlation between poetry and prayer, but they are different. I try not to patronise, belittle or undermine readers’ thoughts, beliefs and experiences. But that’s just because to do so would be awful, poetically, morally and ethically. That isn’t censorship; it’s related to accessibility and caring about the reader. Faith, ‘religion’ if you want, is just a tool in the box, and seemed like the right one for this pamphlet. Maybe not next time, who knows?

Amy De'Ath - Who am I a Poem?

2011-08-21T14:24:00.000+01:00

A fantastic mini-essay by Amy De'Ath has just appeared online. I shan't attempt to summarise it, as you can read the thing yourself here.

"If it’s possible that the other is a poem, and a poem-other that issues from me (that is, ‘my-self’, who is also born of you and any number of signifiers in the minds of others), what happens between me and a poem? "

Be good to one an' other.

Brian Catling speaks to Andy Spragg

2011-05-14T21:05:00.000+01:00

Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor and performance artist. He is professor of fine art at The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford.

Eight books of Catling’s poetry have been published and his work has been included in many anthologies, including . Etruscan Press produced a compilation of his poetry; A Court Of Miracles, published in 2009. Catling is currently in the process of writing his epic, surrealist prose work The Vorrh.

When did you start writing? Was there a point where you were aware that you wanted to write?

When I was at comprehensive school – I was in the gutter stream for most of it – and it was the people in the English department that saved me. I suddenly realised I was going towards the door rather rapidly at the end of the fourth year and I wanted to do something else. I was reading strange stuff. I was reading stuff that wasn't on the syllabus, stuff that people like me weren't supposed to read. If you were in the gutter stream you were supposed to be doing metal-work or wood-work and go straight out, and they {the English department} sort of recognised that and threw me a life-belt and I grabbed it. Even though the visual world, I knew, was what I wanted to go into, but I always had this other thing of getting very excited by words, poetry and writing, so I just read a lot. I never thought I would start writing. When I went to art school and there were things that couldn't be done by making signs, images or actions, I had to sit down with words. I started to write poetry then. It was all terrible stuff then of course, but it never stopped. When I was art school it was kind of uncool to write and read. We were being taught by abstract expressionists who believed in the artist as the dumb animal who just goes to the studio and does his art, and critical questions are thrown out. Totally different to now. Now it's driven by critical theory and critical response. This was the other way round, so it was easy to keep my writing quiet. I just did it and no-one ever asked.

You said about reading, were there particular people at the time you were reading who were an influence?

Very early on I was kind of in the dark, I was stumbling on things. School was shocked when they found out I was reading Victor Hugo and EdgarAllen Poe. There was a natural way of finding these things, for example I was obsessed by the Marat/Sade – the stage play – long before I knew about Samuel Beckett. I more or less know that play off by heart, because when I used to leave college and go home at night I used to play that obsessively. I had an LP set of the entire play, I used to paint to it. So I used to paint strange imaginary interiors while listening to this manic play. Also Kipling: not so much for the sentiment, but the vocabulary. I love the way he used words percussively. They are very sculptural, very physical. So between reading that and Samuel Beckett, it was a really weird combination of bits and pieces.

When I was at art school Iain Sinclair had a one-afternoon a week job teaching complimentary studies, which was a sort of 'civilizing technique' for the wielders and plumbers at the technical school across the road, and it was rumoured that this guy had a cupboard full of cameras that nobody wanted. This was an art school that had no cameras, so I found him out and found out he did have these things and we could get our hands on them. That started a big friendship and then of course when he found out what I did he encouraged it, and published the first poetry book.

It strikes me that there is a tremendous tactile quality to your writing, is that something you are aware of when you're writing?

No, I'm not. But it's something that's been pointed out to me, and that was part of why I wrote The Stumbling Block, to confront this head on. I said, rather perversely, {that} I was writing a sculpture, because the tactile...It's kind of divided into processes and materials, which is very much the way I think when I'm making things, so it's the same kind of thinking. Now I'm writing a lot more prose it may of changed, because ideally it's a lot more about people talking to one another than talking to materials and things. It's {the tactile} still there, that's embedded.

It's interesting you mention 'talking to' materials, do you see some aspects of your performance work as talking to materials as well?

I do, very much so. When I do a slide-show of my work I always say to my students, “look, if you take the things I do, like making installations and sculptures, writing poetry and performing, and you put it in a box and shake it, it comes out as film making.” because all those things stick together in a sort of natural way, and I knew that from very early on, but I didn't go that way, for one very simply reason: because I was too impatient. Film making takes forever, and it takes an enormous amount of people, and its expensive, and you wait, and you have to wait continually, and I don't have that patience, so I wanted a process I could have at my finger-tips, any time day or night, so I went that way. The fact I also ended up making films is coincidental, but I don't think I would have had the patience to follow that one through.

You went on to make a number of films with Tony Grisoni. Did you find you had more patience at that stage?

No, it's because I was doing other stuff anyway. I keep adding to what I do, and imagining that stuff will fall off the other end, but instead of that it just becomes just more of what I do. So when I started making more narrative forms with Tony Grisoni, they were other things and I was still going into the studio and working with paint, or words. There has never been any kind of boundary, only in other people's minds is there a boundary. I never had one. I just do different kinds of things.

You've commented in the past that you consider those various things as separate, or as a series of 'Jekyll and Hyde multiple-life-boltholes', is that still the case?

No, because what happened was that performance came up in-between. I was supposed to be doing a poetry reading at Whitechapel Gallery, and had stuff I was really unhappy about so I decided I wasn't going to read poetry, I was going to do something else. I don't think it was even called performance then, it was a physical action that took time, and that grew up in-between the studio, installations and sculpture; and the writing and reading the writing. The performance drew energy from both and it actually fused them; so rather than it being separated, all three were things I do, and still are. Now when I start off, even when people ask me to do something, sometimes I don't which way it's going to go, but it never goes into all three. It seems to go naturally into one or the other.

It's apparent that the Cyclops texts in Late Harping started off as performance and found their way to print. Was that the case with Bobby Awl as well?

Bobby Awl started off as a performance. I met the cast of his head in Edinburgh and didn't know what to do with it, so I put it on a back-burner. I was asked to make a piece for the new parliament and the two things just came together, so it became a performance text where he and I talked. I was on the train going up to perform it and I wrote it on the train, I didn't know it was going to be a text until I started it. He was just waiting to talk.

Do you have a particular process when writing?

No, but now because I'm writing prose, and I'm writing every day, it is quite different. I start the day – I live above the sculpture department – so before I come down to meet the students I do at least an hour. Sometimes I creep up at lunchtime and do some, and sometimes I do some in the evening before I start cooking, so I generally do some, but at the weekends and holidays I do a lot. It started up about the same time as I started to make some tiny egg tempera paintings, little portraits of Cyclops, but I told people I was very content that I had finally found a process where I was working on a lap-top and a table top, and I could do everything through these two things, so that if I ended up in a prison cell, or a hospital bed, or something like that I could still work, I didn't need workshops, studios, cutting desks, edit suites; I now had it at my finger tips, and it was a kind of joke saying that, but it stuck. I am working at it everyday and its completely and totally obsessive. When I was midway, and finished the second book of the trilogy, The Vorrh, I thought, “Oh shit, have I been doing the wrong thing all these years, because this is easy – This is just falling out.” It was like someone was talking in my ear. I've always said to people that sculpture is one of the dumbest things you can do, to take inert materials and use energy and effort and time to try to make it sing, when it actually just wants to be dead, inert material. You're banging your head against a brick wall. But something about that appeals to me as well.

You mentioned The Vorrh, could you outline the trilogy?

It's an unpublished work, partly because for the past two and a half years I've just been writing prose and it's grown. I do more and more {but} I've done nothing about publication, I've done nothing about hacking it down, because while it's pouring out I'm just letting it pour. I'm now sixty-one, I'm not in a rush to make a new career. I am in a rush to make the work. I am suddenly smelling the fuse burning, and that's never happened before neither. I'm becoming aware of mortality very rapidly and I think it may be tied in with the process in some way...I don't know. I've heard that said before.

The Vorrh is a trilogy, its title comes from Raymond Roussel's ground-breaking work Impressions of Africa, an incredibly influential surrealist work. He sets most of it in a forest in Africa called the Vorrh, which he never describes and has no interest in describing. He kind of forgets its even there. So I picked it up, and {Roussel} is actually a character in the first book. It's complete fiction, a surrealist fiction, which I knew would be difficult. It's not difficult in the sense that it's incredibly dense or complicated like other things I've done, in fact it's simpler.

I've been passing it out to people as I've gone along. What I did was select a group of five people I trusted, just to make sure that I wasn't writing 'Jack is a sad boy' over and over again, just to make sure I was actually doing something. they were very different people, with very different reading habits, and from very different backgrounds, and they've all said similar things. Some have been critical, some haven't, but one thing they've all said is it's a page-turner, and that they were surprised. I said, “You're surprised? You can't believe how surprised I am by this!” and as it's gone on I've recognised the first one's still a bit clunky, you can hear the gear changes, and I wanted that, but it's changed in the next two.

It's set between 10-30 years after the First World War, it takes place in an African forest, and there's a German township nearby. It's full of extraordinary people and creatures, and they do things to one another. Some of them really exist, so in the first one Muybridge, the photographer, is in it, along with Roussel. In the second one, {you have} Eugene Marais, the South African natural historian, poet and drug addict, another one, lesser known, is Leo Frobenius, who is claimed by some to be the father of ethnography. He's fallen from grace totally, he invented the word 'negritude', I think for a good reason, but his motivations were a bit peculiar, and he ended up with Nazi sympathies before Hitler came to power...so he didn't do too well in the end. But he had very interesting beginnings. These people are mixed in, everyone else is entirely fictional. I put it down and thought 'that's that, I've done it.' There was an immensely overpowering sensation that everything else is secondary, this is it. If I get run over by a bus tomorrow, that will be eventually what I'm known for. Not that was a motivating force, I don't think like that. It's just there were times I was writing it when my hands were moving and {I found myself} saying “Oh no, he doesn't, he doesn't!” It was unfolding before me. I've never had that sensation...actually that's not true. I've had it with sculpture. When you're making things you stop speaking to yourself. Your brain stops chattering sometimes, or if your painting it's engulfing. A day goes past and it's gone, you don't know where it's gone or what happened or how it got made. And with this {The Vorrh} it happens all the time. This is probably not that unusual for people who work like that, but for me it is a revelation.

I was going to ask, is that experience of getting lost not something you necessarily feel with poetry?

No, the poetry was really the opposite, it was really stubborn and had to be hacked out. I mean sometimes it sort of formed in front of you, but then you had to make the setting for it, and everything else around it. You know, one line isn't going to do it. Those were godsends, those one lines, but this {The Vorrh}...its plot, dialogue, characters: all just falling out the air. So I put away and I finished it, Sarah, my wife, and I went away. We hired somewhere in the mountains in Spain for a couple of weeks, in the middle of nowhere – no power, no electricity – so I didn't take a laptop with me, just took a notepad. Called to see a friend of mine on the way, and we were talking about books and he said, “have you ever thought about writing a Western?” He had been one of my readers for The Vorrh, and I said, “It's strange you should say that because yeah, and I always had the opening scene.” He gave me True Grit to read. I read it in a couple of days and really enjoyed it. Iain Sinclair has been pushing for years to write a novel, and one of the things he pushed my way and said could be a key was Blood Meridian; it wasn't, but it did do something else. I was sitting outside in Spain and started making a few notes. 37 pages later and I had begun the first of what is now a quartet of Westerns, I'm on the fourth one now. They come out at about two hundred pages each, and I've sent those to people and it's all come back with, “Don't stop, don't stop, just keep going.” I don't know, I'm just doing it while it's there, because you never know when it's going to dry out. Not that anything has dried up.

I can certainly recognise elements of that though, the excitement and simultaneous fear as you encounter a new idea as a writer, of things running forwards. In relation to that, there seems to be this real tension in your work between the moment, the temporary aspect of your work, and the sense of these things being preserved. For example you talked in the interview in Tending the Vortex of telling galleries to throw your work in the skip after exhibitions, and yet in your own work there are numerous references to museums, and ideas of things being preserved. Is it something you are very conscious of?

I am aware of it in a way that I make things, in the sense of that 10-15 year period where I made big installation sculptures that only existed as long as the show ran. But they were carefully made, it wasn't like they were made to look like they were waiting to be thrown away. So I over-made them, I don't really have much control in that, I get very involved in the way the thing it is. It's not skill, nor craft, nor any of that stuff; it's just got to be a certain way and it has to be worked at to make it that way. I think it is like that, the moment is still very powerful, it's still what I'm kind of looking for in that kind of work. The prose has narrowed it down, the prose is another world, it just goes instantly into its place and stays. It's like an obedient dog. Where as finding a home for the poetry, or the sculpture, I'm much more interested in the transitory, even though they are not necessarily made like that.

I've always been very interested in memory as a place of curation, which placed me in exact opposition to my colleagues at a time when the English market, the art world, became incredibly commercial, in a way that I didn't recognise any more. I don't have a problem with that, it's great, and it's done extraordinary things and it was much more healthy; it's about to not be any more, but it was healthy and I loved that. It wasn't my kind of thing though, I wasn't making things to be owned, sold or possessed, I wasn't into bartering. I was making them to stop people and arouse their curiosity, engage their thought, but the next time they wanted to see it, it wouldn't be there. I quite liked that. That's probably why I teach rather than have a proper art career, but it does give me a fantastic freedom. I always wanted that, I was never interested in being a sculptor or artist who returned to the same work over and over. That doesn't interest me at all. But I like to put things 'at each other', in opposition. As soon as I make something that has a quiet base, or perhaps someone says there's a calmness in this...I want to keep it unbalanced, I don't want to be settled into one seam of ideas or mode of things. There's a restlessness in my approach, but there's also something aggressive in it as well. I don't want to be set in a particular mode. If it looks like I'm being perceived in a certain mode, or I see myself going that way, then I will do something perverse in opposition to it.

Presumably that ties into performances like Mr. Rapehead?

Yeah, well that's a classic example {laughs}. I think I may have repeated that more than any other performance because it's so simple, so easy to do, and it produces the most alarming and astonishing effect. I mean, there's points when people know I'm going do it then I won't do it, but if they don't it's always really interesting.

I have fond memories of you telling us about your plans for performing Mr. Rapehead the day after you'd given a reading in Norwich, it was such a remarkable contrast from the poetry reading you'd given.

Yeah, that was the ICA, that really went. It's also working against my age and my position as an academic. I like playing with those.

Why do you think that is?

Oh, I'm just a troublemaker really {laughs}. I've never done it socially. I'm only ever that difficult and unpredictable creatively. I'm aware that sounds terribly pretentious, but I don't mean it to. I suppose what I mean is that I don't want to do {that sort of thing} in a pub, that happens every night of the week in every pub. Not interested. It's about placing it somewhere {different}. The poetry world, the art world, all of it can be very staid; performance less so, for a lot of performance that's still there, there's some of that slightly dangerous, unpredictable edge to it, but I went to performance quite late on really, and found it to be a natural habitat. It's enjoyable, I like seeing my elders in it who are still doing their thing, and still wanting to do it.

Its interesting you talk about the poetry as being quite staid because you got associated with a certain rebellious movement, partly through Sinclair, and partly through the people you were associated with. Did you feel a particular affinity to that movement?

No...I was quite pleased they were there really {laughs}. I mean I've never been part of any movement or ever wanted to be. Sometimes you read things and people say you are classed amongst certain things, but I've never thought like that. It's always been a one-off outsider incident for me, in the sense I can't really talk poetry...in the sense I can't really sit down and have a long chat with you about the structure and meaning of other people's work. I haven't got into that, I've kind of avoided it. The saving grace was, I think, never having done it in formal education about writing or critical appraisal. I'm far too late to pick it up now, and don't intend to. So I'm in state of innocence about that, and that serves me very well.

Have you got particular poets you're reading at the moment that interest you?

I haven't, it's terrible to stay, I haven't read anything in two years. It's part of the price of writing that {referring to the prose} that it is exactly the same time you would spend reading. I mean I've been reading research, things I need to know about the things I've been composing. So I know, I've got books piled up waiting, so I don't know. It's also the same with exhibitions, I'm starting to feel like those terrible old, bearded teachers that I had at art school, where you used to come in and go “There's this great exhibition in London, have you seen it?” and they'd reply, “oh yes.” and you knew they hadn't. You knew they never left the front door, I've turned into one of those. I don't really read a lot, or look at a lot any more, I've become selfish. I think the saving grace is my students, that you can't take that into their studios. They've always got things to talk about, other ideas and artists, so we do it that way. Of all the things, I've seen a lot of performances, which I am very interested in, but I'm not really reading a lot new.

Leading on from that, how long have you been teaching?

{Laughs} Man and boy! No, it's a long time. {At the age of} twenty-three I think I started, I mean odd days here and there.

You see the teaching as a stimulus for your own creative process?

No, that's not the way I'd say it. It keeps me sane, and it does me good, but I can detach myself from it. I've still got that objectivity, I will not allow my work to come into their studio with me, and I will not allow their work to come out of their studio with me. It stays where it is. So when I'm talking to people about their work, I'm talking to them about their work. There's a lot of artists who use the word 'I' a lot in every sentence when talking to students. I don't do that. I purposefully don't do it, because it's about them and it's important that it is. So I work as a reflector for what they want, or what they are. The only skills that I have that they haven't got yet is the ability to bend and flex the surface better so the reflection they get is always theirs and not mine. The same with taking things out, it's best to leave everything intact, accelerate it as a teacher, give it an articulation, give it a mechanism between its power source and its outcome. Allow them to see the mechanism, take the mechanism apart, but don't touch the power source or the outcome; then I don't have to think about whether they want to be the YBA's or anything else, that doesn't interest me. When it comes to their psychology I'm not trained to know and I don't want to know, but the bit in-between I can do...the mechanism, the articulation and the language. That keeps me sharp and it stops me being entirely self-centred. So when I leave the front door I leave me behind, mostly. That's what it gives me, its a way somewhere else. I use my skill and imagination for something else rather than entirely for my benefit. Does that sound pompous of me?

No at all, I think it's difficult, especially when you get to the stage you are at because the boundary between student and teacher breaks down, and I think both have to work towards not just becoming a dialogue between the two.

[…] Introducing Large Ghost in Norwich, you commented that the poem was an attempt at self-portraiture, something that you weren't a tremendous fan of. Why not and what lead to writing it?

Well, I think its more interesting to invent than to mirror myself. Of course, some of you gets through...actually the answer to one is the answer to the other one. It was never my intention to do that and I think I hardly every use 'I' in my writing, You'll find it's hardly ever there. I want the reader to be in a place where they've not got my hand in theirs, I'm not leading them through, I'm not attaching things to myself.

Large Ghost was different; it came about literally as it says. There was a series of peculiar events, hauntings if you would. Out there {indicates to the studio space outside his office}, over in the corner, it was incredibly uncomfortable place to work at night. It changed as it got later. It wasn't just me, everyone said something wasn't quite right in there. You kept turning around when you were doing things. I used to work really late at night, and that was where the band-saw was and things like that, so it was just something. This happened to everyone bit by bit. I was in Scotland doing Bobby Awl and we had a caretaker then who was an ex-traffic warden, he used to sit up with his feet on the desk reading the football results. He wasn't the type to be moved anything, but he was walking around here late at night and he heard keys rattling. Someone pushed in the small of the back and sent him flying. My wife found him outside sobbing. This is not a man who cries, and he said he could lose his job, he didn't care, he wasn't going back in there again. She told me this, and the one thing I found strange was the keys jingling because that's something I do at night, when I let students work late. I go round, “time to go home ladies and gentlemen,” and jingle my keys. So I thought wouldn't it be strange if a ghost got out, prior to being dead? What if got and had a separate life, what if it slipped its lead? So Large Ghost came out of that.

There was another thing that was so utterly remarkable I don't even know how to explain it. Have you got enough tape for this? {laughs} I was in Italy doing a fellowship with Tony Grisoni. We got a house out there. I get up one morning and walk to the bathroom and there's blood-spots all along the floor. Not smears, not a foot injury, but spots: plop,plop,plop. So I go back to Sarah and say, “are you okay?” and she's fine. Checked the kids and they are fine. Inexplicable. So we clean it up. Later that day we're in town working and Tony's got this box ladder. Me and my little son are there on the other side of the room and it slips out of his hand, comes crashing down and hits me on the head. I go flying, glasses off and I'm on the floor. I get up and they've gone white because I've got a head wound. I go to the bathroom to look in the mirror and it's a long cut but not deep. I look down at the floor: plop,plop,plop. I say to Tony, “have you seen this?” and he says, “yeah, you got any answers?” We went home and were around the table saying, “what was that? A physical premonition?” I mean I don't believe in every form of ghost story, I'm interested in those, but this was just matter of fact, the same thing existed in two places but they were not attached, and one had an immediate cause and the other had no cause. Those two things, that and the caretaker incident, lead to {writing}Large Ghost; I sat down and it just rattled out, and it'll be the only time I'll do anything that personal. And I guess I can only do it that personal because its about another me that got out {laughs}. It wasn't about my love life, or my academic career or anything like that, and the idea of writing anything like that just makes my blood runs cold.

A lot of your work seems to play with the tension between the rational and the irrational.

Yeah, it's very unusual for me to get inspired by something 'in the business', by a piece of writing or a critical idea. Generally I want to get something that has been left alone, forgotten or uncomfortable, I prefer to work with that.

{Interlude as Brian & I discuss various photographs: he talks about taking up watercolours, the Bowery boys, prosthetics and the Wild West}

Are there any plans to publish your Westerns?

No, I want to it happen. I want it all to happen. There's a suitcase being built up. I give up the job of running the school {Catling is currently acting head of department} in April, go back to my normal job. I have a sabbatical term coming up, and that sabbatical term I will put it all in the suitcase, literally and metaphorically, and go knocking on people's doors. I've never done that before, but there's nothing to lose. I've understood the small press world, that's enthusiasts, but this is something different. None of them normal, these are not normal Westerns, but I've got a good feeling that something will eventually give. I've put no energy into {publicising it}. Iain {Sinclair} wants to help promote it, as does Alan {Moore}. Iain thinks the Western's are commercial.

{Recently} Grisoni said he had some money to film on the Isle of Man. I said 'Why don't I write you a Western on the Isle of Man?' When we went there {to film Vanished!} in the village of Dalby, people kept on asking us whether we were there about the outrage. Turned out there was this thing called 'the Dalby Outrage': in the thirties, there had been a gunfight between two families. There was no research on this, so I decided I'd make it up: it's sort of a cross between Moon & the Sledgehammer and Straw Dogs, which is how I feel about the English countryside anyway – on the Isle of Man I certainly feel that way. They've still got laws for purging and hanging, you don't get more Wild West than that. And Norman Wisdom lived there, by choice. So I started and it's spun out, it's full of the most monstrous people, and Wisdom is one of them. Tony's very excited about turning it into a screenplay, so who knows? I'm just enjoying writing.

I haven't written any poetry in two years, but I know it's there because there's things that are not going into these books. It all comes out, but how it works in the real world, I've not been concerned about that. I've never been concerned with that.

It strikes me as fascinating, as someone at the beginning of things, that with someone such as yourself who has been making and writing for a period of time now, there must be a tension between the activities and being engaged but still having the financial constraints.

Yeah, it has been a nightmare. I mean it's no longer a nightmare because I've got a steady job, but I've always known that I would need a day job. I never expected...I've always been interested in the obscure and the stuff on the edge, so I had no belief it was ever going to pay anything back to keep me going. I did a lot of different kinds of jobs, so half my life's been difficult, sometimes not having enough to eat, and with two families to support it don't get easier. But I've been lucky, people have responded to the work. I think if you do it, and it still keeps going, then sooner or later it cuts holes into something. The world's changed, it's coming back to something I recognise now. There was a long time when there was a lot of money around, and a lot of very slick stuff was being made, and a lot of hype. The tautness – and the tension – seems to be coming back, its just like being back in Thatcherite Britain. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm happy with that – I think it's appalling – but I know my way round it, and I also know that it'll have no sympathy for what I do at all, but that'll make {my work} stronger. That's one thing about poetry and performance: because it is so completely under-funded and under-recognised it actually thrives more when everything else goes down, because it just carries on.

A lot of the other things are living on a false promise. That whole generation of YBA's is still affecting my students now. They still believe they can walk into that kind of market and that kind of support. At the time it just seemed ridiculous, and it was just a moment, it couldn't have lasted and a lot of the work that came out was the same. There's a lot of trivia in the world. A lot of diamond encrusted trivia. And that'll probably go.

I'm dangerous when I'm successful and I think things are going well. I'm more creative and more original when things bite. It probably comes from a history of being like that, it's not a moralistic position and it's certainly not a Spartan sort of thing. It's just that I won't be a-feared of those things, because sometimes the most important work comes from them.

Do you ever find that you put yourself in deliberately uncomfortable positions to respond to that?

I suppose I do it all the time, in the sense that when something is successful I tend to then go in the opposite direction, rather than following things up by making another one almost identical. I mean, I recognise that as a useful tactic – you see people who have the same piece of sculpture in every museum in the world, but it doesn't appeal to me. I want to do something else; there is a gnostic kind of thing in it, looking for a different way of saying things, {a way} of stretching my imagination. That's what I'm really interested in, more than anything else; not knowing what it's going to be next, even though when you look back across the work you recognise the course of these things. The boundaries of one's own imagination is always there, but they're worth testing. I don't seek to be uncomfortable, I'm too much of a coward for that, but I am less of a coward in invention and in imaginative work. I'm prepared to take the chance there. And enjoy it {laughs}.

I suppose it's a funny thing to sit in Oxford university and say that, it could be seen to be a contradiction. It's not for me at all. Most of the people here have had some dealings with it before, as research graduates or students, but having come to it from outside and not knowing how it worked has given me an enormous separation from it. It is very powerful, it is very potent and has some great things – libraries and museums – but you don't have to sign up for it all.

That sense of being outside of things, did you get a similar sense with the poetry world?

It's been all my life. But I've always wanted it, it's not been something I've moaned about. It's the same of the art world. I've chosen to step away from it. I suppose the easiest thing to say was that I was adopted and I've never been on the journey to discover who my parents were. I've never felt the need. I am an incredibly curious person, but the one thing I should have been curious about I never have been. Perhaps everything is a surrogate, everything else I'm doing is in some way using that curiosity to reinvent things, and not be part of things which I should be part of. There may be something irrationally perverse in that which...well, I mean it's serving me very well. I never sought things I could be party to, clubs I could join. I don't like clubs. Here I can be anonymous.

That's funny, because at the same time there's this need to get the work out.

Oh yeah, but that's the work. The easiest thing would have been for me to attach my personality to the work, but I made a point trying to make work that didn't look or behave like me. It has a different, animal presence. I didn't want to join that cult thing, which always works, but the price is...well, I say to my students, “if you want to have success you can have it, but there's a price.” And the price is you never...you are on tap. You are on tap and that's what it costs. There ain't going to be a time you can step aside and go into your studio and think, “wouldn't it be great to try something different?” It's not going to be like that, because you are letting go – and all those guys are looking over their shoulder, terrified that the next person will take their position. And that's what I walked away from, I thought I've got a longer time than that. I want to enjoy it, and I want to enjoy it like that, and I am.

How do you reconcile it with Sinclair's inclusion of you within his writing?

Well, you tell me. That's his business, not mine. That's always happened...and I've always known about it afterwards. I don't know what to say about that. He's a friend you know, but I've never quite understood it. It's been useful, it's been incredibly helpful.

Do you recognise yourself in it?

Yeah, yeah of course. I mean a lot of it is fiction, but that's what he does and it's not just me {laughs}. I think he's got bored of me being in it now. He's been fantastic support though, a wonderful friend.

Sam Riviere speaks to Andy Spragg

2011-05-06T21:37:00.003+01:00

Sam Riviere co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and was a recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award. His first poetry pamphlet was published by Faber in 2010 under the Faber New Poets scheme.

http://austerities.tumblr.com
http://www.stopsharpeningyourknives.co.uk

When did you start writing? Were you conscious of a point where you started writing poetry in particular?

I went to New Zealand then Australia for a couple of years in my teens/early twenties and spent a lot of time keeping a sort of journal/scrapbook thing that remorselessly documented my experiences. I'm not really sure why. When I stopped moving around so much over there I kept writing, but the it became...weirder, more speculative or something, and less about me. I went to art school when I came back to the UK and started writing and reading poems, mainly because of the people I met there. I think the brevity of the form appealed to me.

You're someone who has followed the academic line in terms of writing -- and engaging with writing -- right through to your PhD; what do you feel these experiences have given you in particular?

I find it quite difficult to imagine doing anything else. I tried for a while to follow other kinds of work, but I didn't really get along there. I think 'academia' might be misunderstood by some of people (perhaps wilfully), in a literature context it more or less means having the opportunity of doing what you want to do. I don't understand why you would want to turn it down. Obviously your work has to be justified, somehow put in context, but 'academia' isn't really going to force you to compromise your position. If anything it helps you create a position, which you may not have realised was something you didn't consciously have. But isn't that part of why you do it (write) anyway? Any arts institution should welcome challenges to the definition of what it does, and in practice you are dealing with individuals who are interested and involved in that whole process anyway. It has given me time I guess, and let me hope that doing stuff like this is worth it, viable even. Plus the option not to get to work a crappy job all week. (for now)

It's interesting you talk about 'academia' not forcing you to compromise your position, do you think that is becoming increasingly less likely with the current political climate?

I remember talking to Steven Fowler last year [http://www.maintenant.co.uk] about how it wasn't difficult to imagine a world where what a lot of people are currently doing wouldn't be possible... that world does seem to have at least partially materialised with the emergence of the details of the cuts etc. It's difficult for me to tell what is actually happening on the level of infrastructure or what have you, as the information and its variables seem almost infinitely open to interpretation. There's a sense that some of this is 'for show' I think, that it is not in reality a decisive move either way. I really don't know. It's clear that it will be harder to get funding for stuff, and there's a sort of defensive, severe mood in which it sounds churlish to complain about anything like that, when health services etc are being cut. But that sort of dismissal probably shouldn't be accepted. There's the argument too that periods like this are 'good' for art... but this also comes at it from a weird pov, saying that 'good art' can only come out of overtly oppressive/deprived situations, when surely the challenge is to respond to that, and maybe question how those relations/economic truths might be being disguised. Perhaps to be in a self-described period of 'austerity' means that the decision to make art, knowing that it is going to be financially non-viable, is a more overtly political one. Perhaps it's even easier to find the necessary friction any art needs to have with the situation of its production. That's kind of the subject of some of the more recent poems, the perverse notion that 'squeezing' the arts is in fact productive, as it will incite work that is more relevant or something. But in fact this atmosphere probably allows for more lazy categorisations of art, and gives an audience permission to view everything alongside that spectrum. It would seem like a good idea, wouldn't it, for a society to support art, which it depends on to some extent in order to market itself globally, and makes life bearable for its population. Those countries, especially in Scandinavia, that really support things in this way seem to generate work/viewpoints that are both more critical and sophisticated that what's generally represented here. It's about 5-10 years ahead. Art in any case is not about to deny its relation to capital, and in fact it seems it is by examining this relationship that much contemporary art finds its 'friction'. The fact that art can only exist to the extent it has capital behind it, shows the relationship between money and meaning is, well, more than a relationship. I think there's potential for gestures in that direction within the notoriously 'deprived' poetry market, and a sense of other solutions emerging, probably using the internet, where poetry production and consumption is thriving, incorporating other mediums into itself, embracing the arbitrariness of how we encounter text in this domain.

Which writers do you see as an influence?

Isn't everything you read/encounter an influence? I mean you just react in different ways. I'd have answered this more directly a couple of years ago. There are obviously poets who were really important to me when I started writing poems. I basically stole their machines, the mechanisms of their poems, their bicycles, and put my own stuff on them. I still love these guys, Hugo Williams, Michael Hofmann, especially. Then the NY school was a big deal too, discovering that being spontaneous, trusting your associations, declaring certain things or feelings outright, was in some ways more interesting (not to mention fun) than continuing the sort of discreet post-Movement thing that still more or less predominates here. I remember Tim Cockburn and me writing these shapeless extravagant poems full of exclamation marks and calling it Dolce Stil Novo. I'd say I'm more concerned now with being influenced against styles, to try and find some kind of no-style. A lot of poems you see seem to be going round on other people's bicycles. People whose bicycles you recognise. Once you spot the bicycle, you're less bothered about who's riding it... I mean some of these bikes are pretty old. Which is fine. But it would be sweet to see a new bicycle sometimes.

When you say 'no-style' do you mean something that actively resists 'style'? It seems that you work still seems guided by a degree of aesthetic restriction, rather than, say, a wilful excess of language or content.

People always say that content (should) determines style, but a lot of content seems more or less arbitrary or interchangeable, once we can point to the poem's model. In a way, it becomes about choices to do with content, how discreet you are about what you mean or feel. This process of selection from easily available materials is something I'm quite interested in. Some blogs etc demonstrate really that this approach (of making choices about inclusion and aggregation) rather than being dilution of a genuinely 'creative' work, actually reveal what is really going on. Accepting that basic sense of incompletion feels honest to me. To try and accept it when writing a poem means that style becomes an inevitable result of composition rather than something deliberate.

At the moment your showcasing a couple of new poems at readings that you say are part of an 'austerity' series, I wonder if you could expand a bit on the thought process surrounding them?

Yep. I started a series or project late last year called 'Austerities' or '81 Austerities'. I had been reading a lot of poetry online that seemed to be doing something new, pretty detached from the tradition I'm most familiar with. Flat, sometimes overtly 'personal', often completely devoid of metaphor. I started to think about how personal experience could *be* a metaphor, which is something everyone is instinctively aware of probably, and I suppose why 'confessional' stuff works if it does. Some of this work seemed to have more in common with conceptual art than the avant garde in poetry ...Kind of sly, contrary, but never simply sarcastic or smart, or even ironic, though arguably it creates/permits the possibility of that reading. More a suspended ambivalence about everything, which seemed to tie in to other things I had been thinking about to do with personal experience generally and responding to/being implicated in broader situations. That hesitation could be the only appropriate reaction, and could be somehow potent as well. I thought I could see a way to use what I like about 'straight' British poetry (which is often overtly/implicitly autobiographical), in a far more open field that would constantly undermine all those 'normal' assumptions you make when reading 1st person poems. Anyway I wrote the first 20 or so mainly amusing myself, thinking that would be it, but the difference in my attitude or intention made all sorts of things possible I wouldn't have attempted usually. For some reason it helped having them all in one document, feeling I could take or leave them as I liked, or have two or three goes at an idea one after the other. I guess the assumption at the outset was to write from a basically counter-'poetic' standpoint, about things you don't write poems about -- arts funding, poetry, private jokes, porno, the pure anecdote. But the whole 'austerity measures' correlation crept in quite quickly, giving it something maybe more genuine to orientate itself around, and that's how I've been prefacing the poems at readings - 'the cuts' applied to actual poems on the level of subject matter/sentiment. It’s a passive/aggressive kind of logic, but maybe a valid response. Exactly what the response might be isn’t really straightforward and is constantly deferred or contradicted via the other stories/characters in the poems. I had a list of themes, a working order -- I like the idea of writing by numbers, like a production line, and for this methodology to permeate on every level of the poems, too -- so the line breaks are arbitrary to the extent they simply organise the lines visually rather than for rhythm/sense. Often they work against that in fact, at its 'expense'. After a while it became about celebrating the surface of poems, depriving them of depth, or to point out that illusion -- explicitly denying there's anything else, and kind of proving that ‘reduction’ by having the surfaces resist and ride against each other. You are always being invited/commanded to pull in other texts through reference or allusion to lay a poem on anyway, so why not be upfront or even aggressive about that, so a reader's aware of having to do it. I didn't write about 15% of the material that makes up the series, but all choosing to do that did was make me appreciate the extent to which I didn't really write any of it, but organised it. I kind of want to see the poems as advertisements for a product that will never really come into being. I guess this might be a perverse sort of identification with the culture that poetry is traditionally pitted against, maybe drawing attention to/criticising those modes of communication while simultaneously enjoying using them, quite a lot. Hence making the video trailers and so on. In some way the fact a poem exists at all is proof that it is 'autobiographical' on an absolute level. Like when Linh Dinh says 'how can a poem / Not be confessional, similar to Bruce Lee // In a house of mirrors?' It seemed important to take that risk seriously, despite the playfulness, to make every statement totally earnest as well. I suppose the effect should at least be faintly discomfiting. The series appears in nine instalments of nine poems here from May: http://austerities.tumblr.com/

A number of poems ('Poems', 'Observation of a Neanderthal Colony', 'Myself Included') in your Faber pamphlet seem explicitly engaged with ideas of the recording or capturing a moment, do you see parallels with your own writing? And if yes, then do you see your work as autobiography?

The pieces you pick out (esp. 'Myself Included') are probably the most obvious precursors for what I'm attempting now, in that they are quite self-aware about documenting experience, and anxious about the always relative success/failure of trying to do that. Also they're about spotting moments in life that have a familiarity about them from fiction, that declare themselves 'ripe' for a poem. And then of course simultaneously bringing in doubts about whether it ever happened like that, if there's any value in such a feeling anyway, or if it indicates a stagnant type of perception, an experiential backwater. And if there's anything else one can do other than admit an awareness of fictional/narrative models results in a kind of 'impoverishment', or sensation of life being vaguely unoriginal, or if those limits can be appropriated and widened/altered perceptibly. I think it's normal now to be interested in the fallibility of memory and how certain things are emphasised to give the illusion of coherence. For anyone who has been to art school/studied language anyway. I guess language is probably the act of doing this. There doesn't seem to be a way around that, so why not be an agent of the construction, its author, much in the way a company actively constructs an identity/brand. I feel that there's a risk there. Maybe I would want to move away from limiting that material to what is ostensibly part of an individual experience, to something more plural and inclusive, using whatever writing and images I am drawn to, that might be seen, like personal experience, as simply the closest material to hand. When I was growing up my Dad worked as a photographer, and he had a darkroom in a lean-to on the side of the house. I was pretty fascinated by that space, its dim red bulb, the enlarger which would lay out black and white images below it, the primordial smell of chemicals, the prints slopping around in trays. It seemed kind of like the backstage of everyday reality, where the whole thing was manufactured.

This bit interests me “I think it's normal now to be interested in the fallibility of memory and how certain things are emphasised to give the illusion of coherence. ” - I think people tend to be a lot more comfortable with this as a concept in contemporary culture. That plurality of meaning seems to exist in a much more immediate sense through things like the internet, and the sheer diversity of how our information comes to us now. It strikes me that some of what you are expressing within 'austerities' is about disrupting traditional modes of rigid and definitive interpretation with regards to the poem. Do you think that's the case?

Yeah.

In terms of the writing process and re-drafting, do you find yourself using a certain formula or does it vary?

I really try not to think about it. I sometimes write it out in one go, sometimes from notes, but I guess it would have been gestating for a while in either case. Then I leave it for a bit and look at it again, and change it however much I feel it needs/I want it to change. They may sometimes take a while to happen, but adjustments are normally made.

Tom Raworth speaks to Andy Spragg

2011-01-21T22:25:00.006Z

Tom Raworth's involvement with poetry extends far beyond the business of just writing poems. He's written over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966, and published individuals such as Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson through the magazine Outburst in the early 60's.

Raworth's work should be read by anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry; it is playful and inventive in a way that attests to his commitment to – in his own words – 'keep it fun, not drudgery'. For an appropriate overview of his work I'd recommend the two books out by Carcanet, Collected Poems and Windmills in Flames.

There are a few recordings of him reading available to listen to here.

{This interview was conducted by e-mail, thanks goes to Tom Raworth for his time}

Did you engage much with poetry when growing up?

I wrote a poem, or rather rhyme, when I was four and a half (old story). There were always books around. Battered furniture, bare linoleum, a copper to boil clothes in the kitchen, but bookshelves ﬂoor to ceiling. Before my father went off to the war he made me a handwritten and bound book of poems.... things like Tennyson's 'The Revenge', Southey's 'How Does the Water Come Down at Lodore'. I used to look at that. But I can't remember any particular interest during junior and then grammar school. Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' for GCE... nothing much sticks. When I was around 16 and dropping out of school I ran across (via a boy named Higgins who was "literary") some Dylan Thomas that I liked. By then, mid-1950s, I was much more interested in clothes and modern jazz. The "San Francisco Scene" issue (1957?) of Evergreen Review, bought in Charing Cross Road for the jazz article, led me into contemporary (then) American poetry and its various sub-divisions collected in the Allen anthology (1960). A lot of that work seemed to have some connection to my life, whereas the "poetry" I then scanned from here was as alien as the students with long scarves ﬂailing about "dancing" in Cy Laurie's Jazz club were to my friends and me, cool in our Italian suits and Fred Perrys, at 3am in The Flamingo. Around that time I also got interested in Surrealism and Dada..... Jarry and Schwitters. Rimbaud and Apollinaire too.

What inﬂuenced your decision to set up your own press?

I was following threads of people I liked in the Allen.... Dorn, O'Hara, Creeley, Ginsberg and so on..... hard to do then in London (though Better Books and Zwemmers in Charing Cross Road were occasional sources) and I got used to having to write to the US for books. It crossed my mind that if I liked this stuff there might be a few others who would too. Around then, late 1959 early 1960, my father-in-law gave us a delayed wedding present of £100. I can't remember how I'd got interested in letterpress printing: it might be genetic.... years later I discovered my father had wanted to be a printer, and that an ancestor, Ruth Raworth, had printed one of Milton's early books in the 17th C. Anyway, I got a small Adana press ﬁrst and then a larger treadle press. Offset printing was slowly taking over and letterpress equipment and type was not too expensive then. By late 1960/early 1961 I was in correspondence with Dorn, Creeley and others in the US and had met Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Pete Brown and others here. I printed the ﬁrst small booklet (a couple of tiny poems by Pete Brown) on the Adana. I was working then in the Euston Road, at Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturing pharmacists, and a photographer friend there, Steve Fletcher, had a brother who was an engraver and shared a workshop just off Oxford Street with a letterpress printer. They let me move the treadle press there so they could use it for small jobs and in return I could have access whenever I wanted. I'd met, and become good friends with, David Ball and Piero Heliczer (also a letter-press printer with his Dead Language in Paris). So I did small books of Dorn, Ball and Heliczer. And two and a half issues of the magazine Outburst. I had to set two pages at a time (only enough type for that) on the ﬂoor at night after work, carry it into town the next day, print the pages on the press with whatever colour ink was in use, go home, sort the type back into the case and start again. In I think 1964 I met Barry Hall, one of the only two people I've ever been able to work with, and we decided to start Goliard. We got a larger press, a guillotine, a variety of type and set up in a cobble-ﬂoored stable off the Finchley Road. We worked together for a few years, then when Jonathan Cape wanted to get involved, I left. Barry went on with them, as Cape Goliard, for a few years until he got bored.

Was there a particular point where you felt you had shifted in your own (or other's) perception from 'some-one who writes' to a 'writer'?

No. I remember when passports had "occupation" that immigration would always read "PRINTER" as "PAINTER" and "WRITER" as "WAITER" and hang me up.

Josh Jones, in his interview, said:

"I think the main difﬁculty is the sheer number of other poets, both young and old, all of us trying to sell our couple of hundred copies to a largely absent audience. It's so hard to stand out."

Do you feel this is the case? (I suppose leading on from that question would be: do you feel that's particularly the case now, as opposed to 10/20/30 years ago?)

To me this is pretty irrelevant. As no-one but a relentless academic could read all the material that's now available, what does it matter? And why should you want to "stand out"? What's so important about one's writing? I don't know if there were fewer writers (I suppose statistically there must have been) around 45 years ago. They perhaps weren't so instantly visible. I've never found (except in the depressing "literary scene" sense) poetry to be a competition. Don't you, if you ﬁnd someone's work interesting, recommend it to your friends? Organic (or perhaps now viral) growth. There's no tape you break after which you can relax. When we were doing Goliard Press we sold (not immediately) between 400 and 700 copies of each book. At that time the "real" publishers printed at most 250 copies. But we were the "small press". I always remember something Val said around that time: "It seems to me fame is just a load of arseholes thinking you're all right."

At the risk of sounding trite, what advice would you give younger poets?

Write for yourself as reader. Read your own writing as I is another.

What is your favourite soup?

I like home-made vegetable soup with a lot of black pepper and a couple of good shots of Jonkanoo sauce.

Andy Spragg speaks to Joshua Jones

2010-12-07T21:50:00.000Z

Thoughtful, passionate and occasionally provocative, Joshua Jones has recently had his debut collection 'Thought Disorder' published by the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. He is also the editor of Etcetera. Josh has an enthusiasm that stands as testament to his commitment, not just to his own poetry, but that of others too. He recently answered a few questions for Misosensitive --

When did you start writing?

I started writing poetry when I was about 17/18, and it stopped being terrible rhyming Dylan-aping crap a year or two after that. I was lucky enough to workshop a lot with a more experienced writer-friend, Jos Smith, whose poetry and feedback helped me to, y'know, learn that editing might actually be a good thing.

You mentioned about work-shopping - what value do you place in Creative Writing courses and the workshop experience? Do you think the two tend to be mutually exclusive? I appreciate you had an informal workshop experience, but I get a sense that it tends to be fairly rare for writers of that age - hence the popularity of Creative Writing courses at university level.

On a personal level, I place very little value on the entire CW experience. I have had a singularly negative experience of it, and have no desire to ever engage with any CW course again. I think to properly discuss some of the failings of workshopping in CW at an undergrad level would require massive diversions into the British educational system as a whole, which we obviously have no desire to do here. But yes, I think to an extent they are mutually exclusive -- it's difficult for people to engage in in-depth critique in large classes, with not enough time to properly read through the piles of poetry you're given, coupled with generally poor structuring by tutors. At the same time, the majority of the work I read was pretty poor, and the majority of students I 'CWed' with had very little conception of how to read a poem and very little confidence in their own ability to speak and express. Not a single person in my second-year poetry class even read poetry. And if they did it was at best Modernist stuff they'd been taught to read in their first year. I think a lot of people enter a CW BA thinking they're going to be taught, that they're going to learn, be told. It's quite embarrassing. But hey, their money.

I'm sorry this has become a rant. I'm still on my BA and have yet to geographically or mentally distance myself from the infuriatingly poor course I unwittingly became involved in, and as you can gather I still feel a degree of bitterness. I can, of course, accept that a lot of people have positive experiences work-shopping on CW degrees and possibly even learn something vital on them. Perhaps they have better organisers than UEA's. But, very generally speaking, I see them as being a bit of a waste of time. They are helping fuel the culture we have now in which there are tons of decent, schooled, polished writers, far fewer plain bad ones, and not that many good or great ones. Though it's not like I haven't worked with some good people at UEA -- Stephen Benson, with whom I'm completing a poetry dissertation, has been an excellent supervisor and immaculate critic, Andrew Cowan has repeatedly helped me with the logistical stuff of having a book and needing to promote it, and through meeting her I discovered Agnes Lehoczky's poetry (Budapest to Babel), which is genuinely innovative, and I wish I'd had the chance to work with Andrea Holland and Meghan Purvis.

Who do you feel has had an influence on your writing?

Well, Jos aside, there are a few writers I'm conscious of having a big influence on my work. Luke Kennard is the most obvious. Reading him forced me to not write like him - which I was naturally inclined to do - as there was no way I'd ever be able to produce anything in that style worth reading that wasn't derivative. Edward Hirsch too, notably the way he manages to balance a grounded profundity with imagery that often veers towards melodrama. Other than that, Jorie Graham is a writer I admire endlessly, as is John Burnside, and, more recently, the absurdly unread Tim Lilburn, who is doing things with language that make me quiver with jealous awe.

What was it specifically about Kennard's writing that you recognised in your own?

I think it was just the surreality of the whole thing, the distinctly contemporary deadpan irony, the sheer pleasure of linguistic play. The negation of needing to really mean anything. Which obviously I can see now as being not quite an accurate reading. I hadn't really read much at all poetry-wise when I first encountered Kennard's work. I had no way of relating it back through the New York school to the Surrealists and Dadaists, couldn't compare him to Voltaire, didn't even know what post-structuralism was. By which I mean to say his poetry embodied so much of so much without me even knowing quite what it embodied. And these approaches to writing, to the world, are and were ones I seemed to share with his work, ones that were fairly newly being established in myself and thus in my poetry.

You mentioned melodrama - it seems to be an aspect your writing as well - I mean that not in it's negative sense, but in a very deliberate use of melodrama. Do you feel that to be the case?

Definitely. My favourite Hirsch collection, the one in which I think his melodramatic tendencies are most evident, most unschooled and, for me, most effective, is For The Sleepwalkers. I acquired the collection from a friend familiar with the poetry of my 19-year-old self who had been browsing some obscure charity shop, found it, read a few lines and immediately connected it with my stuff.

I think, perhaps, it is worth clarifying what I mean or understand by melodrama, at least in relation to my own work. It's something I'm yet to master, but am developing, especially in some of my newer pieces: the contrast between a control of form, an understanding of (for brevity's sake) 'projective verse', and the honing of diction, mixed with a wild, flailing subject matter, an imagery veering into otherness and out of logic but held together by the structure, however idiosyncratic or personalised that structure is. I think 'Glimpse' and 'Face' in Thought Disorder are apt early examples of this, as well as some of the more experimental pieces about eyes and dreams and whatever else I'm liable to ramble on about.

One of the Hirsch pieces that most influenced me, with which I still very much connect, is 'Dusk', which I'd like to copy out in full:

DUSK

The sun is going down tonight

like a wounded stag staggering through the brush

with an enormous spike in its heart

and a single moan in its lungs. There

is a light the colour of tarnished metal

galloping at its side, and fresh blood

is streaming through its throat. Listen!

The waves, too, sound like the plunging

of hooves, or a wild hart simply

crumpling on the ground. I imagine

there are hunters beating through the woods

with their scythes and their tired dogs

chasing the wounded scent, and I suppose

there are mothers crying out for their children

in the fog. Because it is dusk. Yes,

dusk with its desperate colours of erasure,

its secrets of renunciation, and its long

nightmares beyond. And now here is the night

with its false promise of sleep, its wind

leafing through the grass, its vacant

spaces between stars, its endless memory

of a world going down like a stag.

I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, or a key to what I am doing and would like to do with my work. Just that the earnest melodrama of the piece, coupled with Rimbaud's ghost clearly swimming through the lines and spaces, is, for me, irresistible.

What do you feel are the challenges for a young writer such as yourself?

I think the main difficulty is the sheer number of other poets, both young and old, all of us trying to sell our couple of hundred copies to a largely absent audience. It's so hard to stand out. The major problem I have with British poetry, generally speaking, is the aversion to 'experimental' or 'innovative' or 'whatever you want to call it' poetics. I'm embarrassed that boring poets like Paterson and Heaney are so worshipped. It's ridiculous that our only major movement has been the Movement, and that so much of the poetry being published seems unconcerned with exploring the possibilities of language in the way that, say, the poets who were tagged as Ellipticists were/are, and all the other post-avant stuff going on in America. I was reading Norton's American Hybrid anthology the other day and thinking of how few British poets, off the top of my head, are doing anything similar. I'm not saying interesting British poetry doesn't exist, not at all, just that the dominant poetry over here is fairly bland, and that poets that are trying to do something different generally won't get as much recognition or promotion

An interesting stance - do you not think it's the nature of the 'experimental' to be on the fringes though? Genesis P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle, Coil etc.) talks about ideas of being a cultural engineer - unleashing a concept like a virus into culture to see it returning years later in a mutated form. I think I'm thinking specifically here of Kennard, who, for me, draws reference to surrealist poetry without deriving a whole aesthetic from it.

Principally I agree with you -- of course the experimental will always be a minority interest in any discipline, occasionally banging on the fence of the mainstream. I think my issue is with British poetry culture compared with American. And yes, the Americans have the Billy Collins/Sharon Olds/bland confessional lyric with obligatory epiphany poetry. They have polite reams of it. But they also have - very present - weird, experimental poetry incorporating Mallarme and Ashbery and Olson and, recently, Jorie Graham et al. And this poetry isn't sidelined, isn't ignored the way, say, the Cambridge School largely is over here. Which is a loss for British poetry, and a pain in the arse for a reader looking for something different, something interesting, something other.

I'm not familiar with Throbbing Gristle (love that sentence!), but I think that's a wonderful idea. There's a selfless kind of interconnectivity to it, and as revolutionary a personal approach it is, it is also admirably pragmatic. With a nice token of idealism. It works with Kennard's stuff to an extent, I think, but I can't help but see it as somehow limiting: a nice cultural-narrative entry point into what he's doing and a validation of the importance of, in this case, the surrealist movement, but a reduction of the text itself to a position in the history of experimental poetics. I don't know. Perhaps that really is the best and only way the revolutionary will enter the mainstream, or the more popular, consciousness. There just seems to me to be something passive about it, a knowing acceptance that these 'other' ideas and works will never be accepted as they are, when they are.

A lot of the poems within 'Thought Disorder' use the 'You' and 'I' pronoun's - how far would you say you see your poetry as an active dialogue with its reader?

That's a really good question. One of the aims in compiling the collection was to try and not write from a place of certainty regarding the speaking self, the poetic I. With that in mind, the interaction in the poems between the various I's and you's are, I'd like to think, dialogues about what the actual poems and what poetry in general can do. This is obviously more apparent in some than in others, but on the whole I don't think any of the pieces are simple addresses to established addressees. Subject matter, the multiplicity of representation and the limitations of language are being written and unwritten in the poems, and this 'unwrittenness' seems to be where the dialogue occurs, and is I guess an apt place for the reader to come in: the reader engages with these conceptual I's and you's that are focussed on language - the only tangible bond I as writer have with you as reader - and fleshes out, humanises, brings the commonalities of thought and experience that are (I hope) in the poems to the fore. Completes them. In that sense, you could say there is an active dialogue embodied in the act of reading the poems and the necessary reconstruction they require.

I love the sometimes seemingly random procession of pronouns in Ashbery's poetry. The way I becomes you and he and she etc. The way that, while initially appearing other in comparison to more conventional writing, this sprawling, perhaps inter-subjective depiction of self reduces the otherness and the absence inherent in any conversation or text when it is spoken or read or whatever.

What guided the decision to split the book into four sections?

The four parts thing is fairly simple -- it just breaks the poems up thematically. Since finishing it and rereading the MS in book form, there are four or five poems I really shouldn't have included in this collection. Maybe that's not true. I guess it's easier to criticise your own work when it's 'finished'. But yes, the parts: all of the poems, aside perhaps from the four or five I just mentioned, are related to each other in terms of subject matter. They're all full of eyes and acts of looking or recording, at the same time as questioning the truth-content of these acts and picking apart the binary between self and other. I'd say there are three types of poem in the collection: the chopped-up philosopoems ('Size', for example), the lightly absurdist pieces ('They tend to come at night') and the tactile, sometimes deconstructed lyrics ('Glimpse', 'Face'). The structuring of the collection through four different parts allowed me to incorporate these slightly differing styles as opposed to isolating them, which I think would have been a bit boring and too authorially forceful. The structuring and the part-breaks allow the poems to better play off each other, engenders them with a more compelling relationship to and with each other. Well, that's what I intended at least.

{Editor's note - You'll notice we dropped the soup premise. There wasn't time and this interview was done over a new thing called e-mail.}

Andy Spragg meets Andrew Spragg to make Red Cabbage Soup

2010-04-16T11:34:00.002+01:00

Andy Spragg is p’haps destined to be a foot-note on the path of others’ greatness. Some say he flew too close to the sun, others suspect he just never really tried, and others are fix’d ‘pon the idea that he was indeed too beautiful for the simple pleasure of accolades and awards. Certainly he presents as a humble man, more commit’d in truth by the prospect of making Red Cabbage soup than discussing his writing. Indeed, he is quick to have the ipod on, and quick to change the music according to mood or measure. It seems that we are off to an awkward start – however he gradually warms to me.

Q: How did you get started?

A: You mean with making soup?

Q: No, writing.

A: I was fortunate to have an excellent primary school teacher called David Purcell, he really encouraged me to write and encouraged my parents in helping me write. Since then, I’ve writing a broad spread of different things. Poetry was something I started writing as I got older – first in my teens, that sort of agonising, traumatic stuff that you hide your face from in later years. I came back to poetry largely through the efforts of Daniel Kane in my final year of university. He made poetry sound like something enigmatic and fun, which could contain the power to change…well, anything it set its mind to.

Q: In what sense?

A: There’s a wonderful notion about the word – and its ability to change and shape our understanding. After all, we use language as a package of associations primarily, a sort of short-hand for what we perceive and have perceived - For example, when I say “Chair” or “Sex” a series of concepts pop into your head. You define so much of your everyday experience around these concepts and language acts as that intermediary. It’s the bridge between how things are, and how we perceive them to be. Without wishing to sound too much like some hippy self-help guru, it’s so easy to adjust experience by using language. A thing becomes something else entirely once it’s put into words, it becomes malleable and multi-form. You have right there a grand transformative act. It’s no accident that the first words of the bible are “In the beginning was the word…”

Q: Ah, you talk there about the bible. Do you have a particularly religious outlook?

A: Not so much in practice, more in the way I’ve been raised. My mother is Catholic and I went to a very liberal and open church school. I would say it’s been a very positive influence in my life. It’s funny, because people rush to decry religion and faith. Given the choice between an uncertain but largely joyful sense of enigma, and Richard Dawkins’ peculiarly dogmatic atheism, I have to say I’d side with God every time.

Q: You’re a creationist?

A: No. Don’t be so hysterical.

Q: But surely…

A: I’m bored of this line of enquiry. All I mean to say is that there is nothing wrong principally with faith. Religion, even if you view it as a human construct, has had such an impressive scope and impact on everything we have as a species. We have told our stories by it, we’ve comforted each other with it, and we’ve massacred one another in the name of it. We have managed to contain so many experiences and narratives collectively, as communities and civilisations, and even now the world remains largely unknowable and mysterious. I feel fundamentally that Thomas Pynchon sums it up best when he says in Gravity’s Rainbow – “There was no difference between the behaviour of a god and the operations of pure chance.”

Q: You need to stir the onions a little.

A: Are you sure?

Q: I think so. Tell me, how would you describe your writing?

A: In development mainly. I like the process of writing a lot. It makes the most interesting structures I think. I’ve just read The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas by Gertrude Stein and there’s a bit in there where Alice B (or Stein writing as Alice B) describes Stein walking around just thinking about sentences. It seems so delicately contained, like she’s playing a game with herself.

Q: You seem to suggest it’s largely an act of onanism?

A: Don’t be so stupid. This is Gertrude Stein we’re talking about.

Q: But surely writing to some degree is always an act of indulgence.

A: Well, you would know.

Q: Shall we try again? What are your influences?

A: In terms of poetry, the New York School – Ashberry, O’Hara. I like Ginsberg when he’s fluent enough, and Whitman all the time. Egg Box has produced some remarkable poetry books in recent years, especially Agnes Lehoczky – who I have the pleasure of knowing, and Daniel Kane - who we’ve already covered. I feel like I’m still finding my way with reading poetry – some of it I adore straight away, some I have to think about. I tend to lean towards the things that uplift the everyday, or alternatively turn the sacred into something we can all grasp. I dunno, really.

Q: You’re not a confident poetry reader?

A: I’m an enthusiastic reader. I suffer from a secondary school education that paid little heed to poetry outside World War I and Carol Ann Duffy. Consequently I feel I am playing catch-up a lot at the moment. I like Blake and Brian Catling too. I forgot them.

Q: Any other influences?

A: Gosh, yes.

Q: You perform a bit don’t you?

A: Not so much at the moment. I’m on a private retainer from Issac Brindley, but I can’t discuss that really. I used to perform a lot.

Q: You consider performance an important part of writing.

A: I consider it of importance, but not always necessary. I write mostly for the page, but I love performance as an act in itself. I find the pieces where something is built more to performance than just being “reading at an open mic” tend to be the ones that stick and engage people. Something like ‘Echo &The Rush’ which was a piece I developed with a dear friend, Julie Groves, has had a lasting and memorable effect on those involved. The last open mic I did has not. I see performance as part of process – not necessarily the result or conclusion of it. ‘Shoebox’ which has just been staged by the Effort is an example of this – something where an adaptation of work serves to impact later work. This is not something that begins and ends in performance.

Q: You seem set to a very internal logic where these things are concerned.

A: I am a massive fan of the kind of auteur you see in people like Sun Ra or Moondog – where they function within their own logic. You suspect that the outside world only really touches them when it adheres to their own private understanding. Quixotic, I suppose. I like that sense of, “Well, why have you done this?” and the only reasonable answer being, “well, why ever not?” Of course, all these people died penniless, so maybe there’s a lesson there.

Q: You like the sense of enigma in other words.

A: Adore it.

Q: How would you perceive the change in your writing as you’ve developed?

A: Interesting that. I have this conflict at the moment, between work that I consider as referencing ‘high modernism’ or pertaining to a degree of craft, and stuff that I find to be more throw-away – like those recent pieces I did for the Etcetera blog.

Q: You consider them throw-away?

A: I did, at the time. It’s funny because I recently completed a poem that I thought would be this great exploration of the bog-people – those men and women that have been perfectly preserved in swamps and recovered years later. I saw it as some form of metaphor for the position any young writer with a grasp on literary theory finds themselves in. That sense of static terror brought about by the sense that a landscape exists, and works to overwhelm and envelop you. Ironic really, because I was speaking to Nathan Hamilton about it, and he pointed out that Seamus Heaney had already ‘done’ the bog-people. I didn’t know whether to feel vindicated or cheated.

Q: Sorry, how does this relate to the Etcetera poems?

A: Oh, in the sense that these grand eloquent plans you make tend to have been covered. As reaction you turn towards the seemingly banal and everyday, hoping that it may offer some sort of revelation.

Q: Back on the biblical again I see.

A: Is this water meant to be blue? I’m not sure it’s meant to be blue.

Q: Red cabbage does that to water. Stick with it.

A: Jesus, it’s not very appetising is it?

Q: Stick with it. Tell me more about the everyday.

A: Well, I think to some extent it’s about unlearning what you’ve been taught. We become conditioned to find meaning by our education. In actuality there is little meaning there other than what we make for ourselves.

Q: Back to this internal logic again.

A: Very much. I mean I perceive myself as successful in the sense that I get up each day and work hard at the things I love. Nothing more need be said. Poetry tends to be very one-sided, but it opens itself up to countless readings and interpretations. That’s a real interesting thing about writing as a whole.

Q: We’re reaching the blending stage of the soup and nearing some sort of conclusion. Have you any advice to other writers?

A: Something Phil Langeskov said to me recently – it’s my current favourite bit of advice – We were having one of those conversations people should have, about art and the whole shebang, and what it meant to be a writer at this point of time. He looked at me very frankly and said, “I just write.” I think that’s the best solution to any enquiry that may cause a writer to hesitate. When you’re there thinking, “am I sufficient? Am I good enough?” it’s best to remember – “I just write.” Of course, if you are Phil you write well enough to make the rest of us feel quite shamed. But that’s something he has to live with.

Q: That’s you advice? “Write”? Seriously?

A: Well, you know. It makes me feel tender.

And so dear reader, it is done. Th’ soup, though in hue resembling something Prince might have for lunch, actually tastes pretty good.