Satyajit Sarna

Two drunk sailors sat
on the prow of the ship and sang
a long song of travel and adventure.
Jonah spoke of Natural History with aplomb.

Sucking on lemons,
Their voices were sharp and salty
Vibrating through the purple night.

It seemed to them that the ship was piloting itself,
Ploughing towards the horizon,
The sails neatly trimmed
And they waited and the ghost ship went on south.

Twenty years later, on an acre in Bruges,
Ploughing the dark soil,
I met Jonah, whose eyes were tired and needed rest
Before he knew where he would go next.

Riddle

So what do you say to a five-year-old
who’s realised that everything will die?
You fight it, but no matter how you try
you still repeat the lies that you were told.

It was last year in summer, the fields were gold,
etc. Had there been cotton, it would’ve been high.
His frame is retching with the question why.
But soon the old words work and he’s consoled.

And as the clever lies dispelled his fit,
arrived here with great speed, now at his back,
a towering black wave was about to hit.

I held his eye and the wave froze in the air.
He wandered off to play. The watery stack
remained for anyone who had a care.

______________

For Evan & Jonas, Brewers

…tant ilz me firent boire

1.
I remember a saucepan of such size
that you could boil a large-ish dog in it
with room to spare. I remember my surprise
at the copper element shaped to fit
its depth, on both ends garden hoses tightened
that slapped and slathered across the work top.
I remember how a two-year old recited
the recipe, how his father at the sink
smiled but corrected him with Cascade hop,
how snow was coming down (it was December),
how I said yes to all suggestions, the clink
of glass on glass on glass. I remember
little else, so much they made me drink.

2.
Next thing I’m lying on the soft hillside.
(White rugs have been spread out in my neighbourhood.)
I’m watching snowflakes in their millions glide
out of some origin in the space above.
I’ve moved from the cold edge of everything
to the centre, radiant, suddenly
at one with truth. I seem to hear it sing.
The night. The snow. The city. It’s all good.
Then I realise as yet more snow descends
that if I don’t get up eventually
I won’t get up at all, which seems profound.
But before I prise myself from the ground
and shake the snowdrifts off my cloak and shanks,
I make a note to set down these events
as fully as I can, by way of thanks.

______________

Justin Quinn’s latest collection is Close Quarters (Gallery). He lives in Prague.

Image Copyright: Ann Kristin Kåsin

Shivani Mutneja

Fashion dirt on my feet

———————-one night we will rob decades of memory

Clock-time conspires erasure

———————-the cars will run without fuel

Focal sex knuckles imagination

———————-we will kiss breaths out of each other

Cohen nudges it

———————-the skies will trickle down photographs of mobs

Towns spill over cities

———————-we will make love to vanishing landscapes and smother the roots.

Thoughts and a conversation

By and with Gareth Evans

Deborah Levy’s writing sits hothouse and unsettlingly, provocatively at odds with its British surroundings. Internationally lensed in its lineage, looking, longing and latitudes – her prose, play-scripts, performance texts (different), puppet pitches, broadcast dispatches, poems and pieces in general convey versions of otherness with a sensual, exploratory, even uncanny tone and insight that is virulently absent elsewhere on these almost benighted islands.

A woman – no doubt at all of this – who would be extremely pleased to find herself at table with the likes of Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Lee Miller, Francesca Woodman and Angela Carter, Levy has, since the 1980s, delivered a series of fissure fables, parables of a fertile withholding, that speak to – and of – the always unstable terrain between the skin, the worn, the spoken (the public surface) and the altogether more unknowing, unknowable and finally unsayable pits, caves, abysses and marshes (land or water, who can say) of the sub- and un-conscious.

A poet of instincts and the insight that comes from reading objects, moments, moods, gazes and gauzes with the full and fully eroticised (far from merely sexual) spectrum awareness of a singular encounter in the colonnades of evening, Levy wanders nomadically across and into forms, a tactile tunesmith with a razor for a pitching-fork.

Her novel Swimming Home, the first long form prose work in a decade and a half, draws on long years’ reflection on how the dysfunction of the domestic dramatic – the ambiguously indexed, constantly shifting and coded spaces that host both action and the passive-aggressive interior pause – informs the most profound urgencies of the contemporary human being as they seek, often desperately (and more or less evidently) to become. This book is a volume on the valency of yearning, in all its rainbow hues.

You’ll have to read it for its plot – it’s not spoken of here – and plumb its opening paragraph for a glitteringly precise convocation of Levy’s strategic intentions. Before and after you read the book, however, please raise your full glass to collaborative publishers And Other Stories for their proud backing of this most definitely ‘other’ story.

***

Gareth Evans: I’m thinking first of the psycho-pathology of the swimming pool, and primarily in a filmic sense; your writing after all is inherently cinematic, where that means deep seeing, a rich mise-en-scene, the often unspoken, a precise point-of-view… So, Ozon’s Swimming Pool; The Swimmer (John Cheever’s story but, maybe even more, Frank Perry’s filmic adaptation; Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty; Lucrecia Martel’s stagnant drama La Cienaga; Deray’s La Piscine; Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated. What is your own sense of the importance of this primal (birthing) zone?

Deborah Levy: You are referring to the central metaphor in my book, which is set around a swimming pool in the south of France. Pools are a kind of theatre with exits and entrances. We do quite literally have ‘costumes’, but we are nearly naked too.

Pools are small societies and we are asked personally to define our place in them. We are streamed into lanes: slow, medium and fast. As it happens, I am quite a strong swimmer and belong in the fast lane, but I like to warm up in the slow lane and then cross over to the fast. Sometimes I can see that my fellow swimmers don’t approve of the kind of social mobility I have bestowed upon myself, especially in Britain, where the class system is very defined.

A pool is a public place but also a private place – we can always stick our head under water.  When I swim under water (as I do every day) my body stretches, muscles relax, and I find that random thoughts surface and drift as I do the lengths. Swimming helps me get in to a way of thinking that is useful for writing a novel. But the main conceptual design in Swimming Home is that a swimming pool, no matter how posh, is just a hole in the ground and so, of course, in my book Joe points out that a pool resembles a grave. My title, Swimming Home, refers to this; also in part to the way we start life in water.

And cinema, yes; Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (from the Cheever), with an incandescent performance from an athletic, ageing Burt Lancaster, was a major inspiration. It is a bleak story told in a cunningly light-hearted tone…“The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”

I noted the almost transcendental ways in which Cheever conceals and discreetly reveals Ned’s circumstances and state of mind as he tries to swim home through the glittering blue pools of suburban Connecticut. I wanted to have a go at this tone… Muriel Spark also has a breezy, light touch, but her heart of darkness casts a shadow across all her pages. It’s taken me a while to realize that Spark was a great writer.

I was also thinking about Godard’s Le Mépris / Contempt (1963), adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo , published in English as The Ghost at Noon. This was an indirect influence, but I was intrigued by how, in it, Brigitte Bardot is directed to be almost angry about her beauty. Here, I was thinking about my character Kitty Finch, who is always being stared at and scrutinized by every character in my book.

Some of Le Mépris is set in a villa in Capri and it is here that the Bardot character accelerates the contempt she feels for her writer husband, who is using her physical beauty as bait to get himself a job. So there is a bit of Joe’s wife Isabel in there, because she uses Kitty’s beauty to attempt to free herself from her philandering husband.

The other film that kept returning to me while I was writing was Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, centered as it is around the absurd rituals of a group of middle-class people. Along with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, all of these contributed to the kind of melancholy and gently accumulating panic in the sunshine that I wanted to create for Swimming Home.

GE: Can you then consider Swimming Home’s relationship to cinema, in terms of both narrative space and screenwriting form?

DL: When I began writing Swimming Home, its structure began to unfold like a film. I saw it cinematically. I experienced it cinematically. Actually I was quite worried about this because  some of the pleasures and challenges of writing fiction lie in playing around with time but, in Swimming Home, time is more or less chronological, except for one formal intervention it its design, which is when I repeat the moment of Kitty and Joe together in the car on a mountain road.

I certainly do have a cinematic, rather than literary, internal language when I am writing. I think in terms of close ups and wide shots; I construct scenes and light them, as it were. I arrange key objects in certain positions and return to them again for another view, but in the end I’m just a nerdy writer of fiction and want every sentence to do something exciting. I know how much it takes for a writer to snare my own attention and I am a brutal editor of my own work. I sometimes wonder if this is a gift or a fatal flaw.

As it happens, I have been commissioned to write my first feature film, and I find it is a language I can do very easily. I love it…and then, at the same time, I kind of miss language. Obviously, film is mostly a visual language, but that’s a whole other story.

GE: How much do you ventriloquise for, or are you are ventriloquised by, your characters?

DL: Characters. Their task is to think for me and to embody certain kinds of human behaviours. They are masks and, at the same time, there is a part of myself in all my characters in Swimming Home. I mean, I could write an academic essay on the ideas all my minor and major characters have to carry for me in a fiction, but that’s not what I have chosen to do.

On the other hand, there is some weird shamanistic stuff that goes on with writing characters and, I have to say, I don’t want to get too theoretical about this. Freud’s favourite quote was from the French neurologist Charcot, something like, “theory is good but it doesn’t stop things from happening.” I entirely agree.

Just to get some reality levels organized here; I am aware that my characters are doing and saying things for the plot and for poetry and comedy and politics; but God, it’s so exciting when they reveal something I did not know that I knew.

For example, when I first started to write Swimming Home, Kitty Finch was noisily a bit mad but I began to realize the old cliché was true. It’s the quiet ones we watch…and I began to understand that one of the central characters was too quiet about the things that hurt him most. It was his silence that kind of gave me the story.

You know, I quite miss hanging out with the characters in Swimming Home. I haven’t really separated from them yet. There are days I wake up and worry that there is more to do with Kitty Finch for example, and sometimes I wonder if there is a sequel…but then I think, no Deborah, you don’t write sequels. And then I wonder why I have cast myself in this way. Why not write a sequel?

I have stern conversations with myself about this and they go something like, well, if you think there’s more to do with Kitty Finch, why didn’t you do it; perhaps she is not explored sufficiently in the original? And then I understand, all over again, that she does what she needs to do in Swimming Home. If there were more for her to do, she would have done it. So there we go…you can hear me ventriloquising all over the place.

GE: In light of this, the qualities, possibilities and limits of ‘performance’ run through all your work. How do you think about this in Swimming Home?

DL: Well, I had theatre training, and avant-garde theatre training to boot (although I did not know it at the time) at Dartington College of Arts. I was a very bookish sort of young woman but, as well as reading Jane Austen in my first year, I was reading Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and his rhapsodic, furious essays, in particular Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, which is one of the most bruising and truthful stretches of writing ever produced.

Anyway, it was pretty strange that, for someone who wanted to be a writer, I was taught by the leading exponents of postmodern dance, Steve Paxton and Mary Faulkerson. I was just a lumpen know-nothing, a vaguely punkish 18 year old from West Finchley (punk singer Poly Styrene, whose real name was Marion Elliot Said, was my total heroine) but I was asked questions I had never considered before, and which I still regard as the most subversive  of questions for a writer to consider;  how is the human skeleton aligned; what are the mechanisms involved in standing and sitting and falling; is it possible to have a ‘neutral’ body; what is our relationship with gravity; how do we breathe; where are we looking; how are we looking; why are we looking; what part of the body do we lead with when we walk?

All of this was very useful when I was teaching animation script-writing at the Royal College of Art; and it is a useful forensic tool to look at how certain kinds of political values and psychologies are embodied too. There is that phrase for feeling superior: she had her ‘nose in the air.’ Well, it comes from somewhere concrete and real.

So, in a way, perhaps I do approach all my work ‘performatively’. That is to say, I am interested in behaviour, and writing is always a kind of behaviour.

GE: Do you feel you have a ‘project’, across all the media you work in?

DL: No, not really; I have no comfort-zone as a writer. Perhaps I should settle into one and have an easier life? Ok; I do have a project across all the media I work in, these being fiction, theatre, film, poetry. One of the things writers are supposed cleverly to chase is coherence. Coherence is the bloody mauled fox, the trophy the author proudly brings to the table for her readers.

And yet we do not have coherent desires, and our most confronting thoughts do not come out in articulate, clever sentences. We say things we do not mean, do things we do not understand, slam doors for reasons we do not entirely comprehend. We love things that are not good for us. As a writer, when I get near to the things I cannot articulate, and then a bit closer, the work starts to roar. It might be that my project is to find a language that does not sanitize and flatten and fix the more fragile, strange, incomprehensible ways in which we experience being alive, or half dead, or whatever.

GE; Indeed, in that regard, I was struck by an observation made about your book by Laura Elkin. She wrote that “the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears” (read the full assessment at http://maitresse.typepad.com/maitresse/2012/01/swimming-home-by-deborah-levy.html).

DL:Yes, the story is about all of this. And at the same time is a highly plotted story.

GE: What then do you feel your creative ‘purpose’ is? I don’t mean message, but perhaps your own ‘desire’…

DL: My creative purpose is to be alert to the things that interest me and to work out how to link one thing to another in mind-blowing ways. How things connect with other things is what I want to know more about, and that’s most of the pleasure of writing and reading.

My desire in Swimming Home was to give all the characters existential equality. That is not a very English thing to say, but what I mean is that there is not much sly moral judging going on in Swimming Home. I am not encouraging the reader to hate the hyper-realism of Madeleine Sheridan and love Kitty Finch, who has to put up a fight for the way she exists in the world, well documented by R.D. Laing for example.

More generally, my desire is not to have a writing mind that is ‘made up’, which is not to pretend that I don’t have opinions and affinities and arguments to chase. I think most people would agree that it is sometimes agonising to feel things; and we spend quite a lot of energy trying not to feel things. Well, I am interested in what we replace not feeling things with. That is my subject and in a way it was a writer like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s subject too.

So we can replace our desire not to feel with heroin or ideology or train-spotting or the way we hold a knife and fork, or with the design of a building or with various mysterious symptoms that make us suffer when we walk to the bus stop. If all this sounds like I have mostly been reading Freud – which I have – I am dramatizing two of his most iconic case histories it’s a massive, subtle, very hard job in the end, I’m with Henry James most of the way: “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

It’s a bit pathetic probably, but I don’t know of any substitute either. There are nice things like sex and swimming and drinking wine with friends, but in the end my desire is to be alone writing again. It is the way I feel less alone actually, and that’s all messed up too, but it’s how it is.

GE: Finally, could you talk a little about your being part of And Other Stories,in terms of it being a reader-active, translation-central operation?

DL: And Other Stories historically represents exactly the right literary provocation at the right time. What they have achieved is extraordinary in such a cynical publishing atmosphere. We know that to make something innovative and substantial happen in art or science or education – or human rights for that matter – always comes down to a few remarkable and driven people.

Stefan Tobler is a passionate publisher with great tastes and instincts. He is serene, astute and he is using everything the 21st Century offers to introduce readers to the blazing international literature he and the highly skilled AOS core team champion.

It’s quite sad to see how decent people involved in mainstream literary publishing have become toadies to the perceived tastes of the ‘market’. This is all due for a change and everyone knows it. The international Occupy movement has so astutely chimed with popular disgust at an exhausted and failing corporate culture. If I let ‘the market’ write my books for me and tell me what I think and how you think and what we are like, what kind of conversation would I be having with my readers? What kind of conversation would they be having with me?

Furthermore, the reading groups that AOS are in conversation with have read lots of international literature and presumably speak quite a few languages- they represent a big exciting world. I will never forget the shock of reading an article in a respected broadsheet newspaper in which Ian Jack laid in to the distinguished academic Gabriel Josipovici, author of Whatever Happened to Modernism, and then he somehow felt entitled enough to take the piss out of what he saw as his foreign name. In this context the reading groups are essential.

***

Deborah Levy’s work can be very helpfully encountered at www.deborahlevy.co.uk

Swimming Home will be BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (10.45pm) from Monday 27^th February.

Thanks to all at And Other Stories.

Gareth Evans is a writer, curator and editor (www.gotogetherpress.com; www.artevents.info). He is Adjunct Film Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, current Writer-in-Residence for Jerwood Visual Arts and the Co-Producer of the essay film Patience (after Sebald), currently on UK release with Soda Pictures (www.nbcq.co.uk; www.sodapictures.com).

I

to the corporeal so then beginning

scenes: QC, defending,

possibilities of the trial

be everything clear

then splice security

from the depths to the known sign.

Trickled through to critical mass,

a staid life,

fortunes courted then daily.

Quit school for a bruise tip harrow

low, dead or going.

II

Climate wane, not worthy

repetition, don’t like

but then coupled to your hide.

Grown to use to feel to desperate

or alone by the spare and the charm

dust of a folk lyric. What a country

and what a country.

Stop ears with the wedges or

endeavour or wadges or scrap book.

You and impressed on with the walls

and ways in hard runnings, the heart

is idle contagious and near stable –

all the other towns are hung collective

not a penny in the pocket not a trembling

hand but out –

all is not well then exterior hurt

then there’s the guidance

systems Jehovah gave

shreds of devotion

buried deep beneath the

red still earth

fixed aspect of time

kow-towed to rest

bed and wake Jacob, they are knocking heads too.

To gather be sure in response

or repose. Time: that there’s

simply nothing for it

we’ll simply out endure.

III

Interesting size, slight foxing

we’ll channel the blood to what

then that’ll be a .

Far side

on elective then

it always looks grim.

sit tight and

so, here you are! Coming

country stomped and pleasure-trip refreshed

long johns trailing the streets

like hell you’ll stand for this.

Photo credit: Kathy Riley

How can poetry engage with economic and environmental issues? Does it need to? And ought that engagement to be on a formal level too? I am thinking especially here of your reaction to the light-wasting ‘funland’ of Vegas at the beginning of the travelogue ‘Western States (1)’….

Peter Riley: It would be wrong to think of it as a project, as if I’d decided to do something like ‘Tintern Abbey’, plotting the passing of time against natural permanence, but was diverted from this by an awareness of how the Andorran economy works. What began it all was simply that walk, which gave me a route and a shape, a plot for the poem to follow, in which the physical and the intellectual could share the same trajectory. Awareness of the socio-economic reality was thus integral to the first intent. I don’t mean I conceived of the poem as I walked – I never do that – I mean that in the writing I always knew where it was going because I’d already been there. It was going to have, eventually, to go down into that pit. Meanwhile the more diversions the better.

Like Alstonefield it mimics how the mind disports itself when you’re out walking and becomes inventive and acute in new ways because you have escaped from your everyday awareness and have nothing to direct you except the surface of the earth. It gets quite extravagant and talks of chucking poetry, and finds itself quoting parts of lyrics in remote and lost languages. This all belongs within the same area of concern, about what happens to cultures.

There’s a question here of the status of the textual voice, of exactly who makes those remarks in the poem. The separation of authorial and textual voices has now become a commonplace, as in the attempts to defend Larkin as if the poems were written by someone else – that clearly won’t do. The poet’s attitudes and beliefs always deeply inform the poetry, and I think it’s only in lyrical poetry that you can make that separation strongly. All the vagaries in that poem are mine (vagary is a kind of speciality of mine) and the gesture about chucking poetry in the skip is one of them, one of several points throughout which question the wilful venturing stance of the narrative. This renunciation is also contradicted elsewhere and the voice of the poem, whoever’s it is, also mocks itself at times.

The descent into Andorra, Part II of the poem, the reluctant descent into the commercial centre, and the escape from Andorra in the hope of sanity, these are, I think, a vindication of poetry’s power to make a theatre of our condition, which is not to solve it or critique it, but to display the hopes and fears whizzing round the place in a vibrant, engaging language and to make some sort of cohering work out of it all. That’s the hope of it anyway. I don’t know any reason why anyone couldn’t write a poem of personal development (or simply ageing) in relation to an apparent natural constant at any time; the condition is always there, and the constants are there however great the apparent circumstantial transformation, like a place the size of Wales changing from a peasant economy growing tobacco to a tax-evasion haven, and the constants are not just mountains and stars and rivers but also a living human faculty for which I might still be prepared to use the word “soul”.

But to get to your actual question, poetry engages with economic and environmental issues because we live them, personally and intellectually. They are so built into our perception that it hardly seems necessary, sometimes, to mention them, they’re in our breathing. The qualities of the writing, its virtues, are self-sufficient. They offer to be taken up into other areas outside the poem, even into politics, but are not bound to anything except the poem. A “political poem” without writerly qualities defeats its own message. A writerly virtue like “eloquence” is also political; to ask a poem to be eloquent is asking it to recognise certain forms of reality in the human condition, such as our ability to cope with harm and stand above it. It is actually a form of clarity, it means to speak out.

Generally I find it better to leave direct political engagement out of it, or just register the evidence, because I don’t want to step outside the personal earth-theatre in which the poem acts. That’s a theatre of living on earth rather than recommendations for improvement of the arrangements. If it works it’s a total theatre, hinged on the particular. Poetry must be the most inappropriate medium possible for preaching to the world, directly or through linguistic encryptment. It would defeat itself by its very nature because poetry isn’t only sharp and perceptive and incisive, it’s also obliged to be, well, entertaining in some way, or delightful, and always was however serious it got, before modernism. Even Pound recognised this necessity, at first. Or anyway, why should poetry take upon itself a task that prose does so much better?

My remarks about Las Vegas just rehearse what everybody knows really, while registering a stranger’s astonishment. The lack of main verbs, here and in other places, is a habit I seem to have got into which allows me to posit a moral position from a distant platform. I name it, as I think it is, propositionally, without letting the self take hold of it in an active idiom of event and declaration. I like to leave the reader some space around the percept. “Stranger” is exactly my position in a lot of these pieces, including the ones which are entirely at home.

TL: There are many concerns expressed in The Glacial Stairway about the depredations of the market and its effect on various more entrenched, slower-moving, traditional ways of life, with whom the poetic voice frequently aligns itself (‘we share a condition, of/having been betrayed)’. The ‘fiscal paradise’ of Andorra; villages cleared to build hotels – to what extent is The Glacial Stairway a statement of assessment on modernity and its interaction with what we might call ‘pre-modern’ ways of life?

Much of The Glacial Stairway involves non-urban places – in Greece, Italy, Provence – is there a poetics of retreat at work here? If so, how is it different to the way retreat from modernity is traditionally conceived of in nature poetry?

PR: I’ve brought these together because I think they’re the same question. Basically I can’t accept the dichotomy, which assumes the cultural condition of western Europe as central and optimal and to look away from it a “retreat”. Our experiential scope is greater than that. The places I visit are no more “entrenched” than central Manchester, and probably a good deal faster-moving, and they participate in more than the local market. This turns out to be why I went there and what I found. Actually the USA is about the most “primitive” place I’ve been to, in various respects. You don’t evade modernity by going to rural Transylvania, which I do from time to time, it follows you there and it meets you there, it meets you in your separation from what you witness and in your harmonisation with it.

I do think it’s salutary to get to know elsewheres, or at any rate it is for my temperament a necessary venture, perhaps because elsewhere is where I come from, though I recognise that other writers may have no use for it at all. And certainly I’ve been concerned to delineate value in terms which are foreign to us, especially of course in the book of travel sketches, The Dance at Mociu. But my idea is that it’s not a nostalgic exercise, rather a broadening one, that the faculties are exercised to their fullness in a remote Carpathian village as much as anywhere else, the visitor’s as well as the local’s. The sense of time-lapse is inevitable, faced for instance with strip-farming, but you have to understand how the place works within that apparent time-warp, and that nothing there is enviable as such or for its charm, but only as it has been achieved, in for instance the operations of a cohesive local society, all the interlocking functions, and how care is built into the inherited structure and maintained there. And indeed sometimes it’s clear that such achievement is not possible here in those terms, but that then implies the question about what is possible here, by what strategies, or is like a cultural reminder, weighing up gain and loss against what obtains in different conditions. Of course we have lost a great deal, socially, compared with these places, but there are reasons for that, and concomitant gains.

As for “nature” I take it as obvious that exposure to the raw details of the bionosphere is good for you and it would be silly to think otherwise. Air water and distance, plants, stones, birds, weather and all the rest of it. Tremendous ranges of imagery, the imagination liberated as the feet and lungs are, and entirely modern. I’m actually not interested in it until the human spirit is manifest, and sometimes you can see the place as an interactive and shaping force for the self as for the society that lives in it. And I’m happy to indicate the distinctions, the foreign beauties of the place, Mediterranean heat and light etc…I don’t think it’s appropriatory, because the self is seriously caught up in it, and the confrontation stands in a historical process.

Cover art: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham

TL: There also seems to be quite a lot of anger in the voice, would you say that’s accurate? If so, why, against what?

PR: Do you think so? Compared with the embittered fury which motivates a lot of the young poets I come across in this neck of the woods, I’m Beatrix Potter. Of course there is always a lot to complain about. Especially it has become starkly evident lately that management of the big economy is faulty, and has been for a long time. In fact the quality of life of half the population of the earth is currently being reduced because of the acts of a bunch of gangsters who gambled recklessly with the global economy and helped themselves to untold billions of public money, only to be patted on the back and told not to worry by the various politicians whose job is to arrange for their populations to foot the bill. You realise this when you travel around on the other side of Europe and find that there too almost everybody has been affected, everything is cut back, everybody’s ambitions have been curtailed, quite apart from all those who suffer actual hardship as a direct result.

Yes there is some anger, which is, or should be, directed towards injustices and despoliations which could have been prevented. I get particularly angry about the refusal of the British radical left to engage in practical politics, thus leaving the door open for the far right to walk into power, and look where that’s got us. There is also a lot of regret, which I look on as a larger condition, less specific, something that everyone knows and if they say not I don’t believe them. Anger doesn’t easily produce hope, but on the other hand regret goes hand-in-hand with nostalgia, so you have to be careful.

Beyond what’s in the news, there is a kind of modern melancholy which I think is essential to our condition; without it we’d just be in torpor. And I think there are complicated reasons for that which are to do with industrialisation and population levels and logistics but extend further. Senses of belonging and continuity became problematic, since at least the 18th Century, and the social structure has suffered distortions which seem to be getting worse. A lot of poetical militancy might just be an attempt to evade a resigned sadness which is our reality. But of course I grew up through the crazy and idealistic 1960s, and when you remember the serious dreams that lurked among all that nonsense, and the hopes given rise to, you get a sense of reversal, that societal time is going backwards: re-entrenchment of class system, return of all the authoritarian and militaristic structures, immense divisiveness, government completely out of touch with the realities of living here, really not a clue, just waving big sticks at us, and the police out of control again, and so on. You can’t dismiss regret with all this going on, and my generation did come out of their twenties thinking things were improving in a steady and irrevocable way and could only go on like that. That is, moving into a more and more egalitarian society. Then someone comes along and sets the whole machine into reverse. But to me it is a large issue, and specific temporal conditions have to be weighed against personal and nostalgic forms of regret. There may be forms of regret or melancholy which are existential. The Elizabethans thought so.

TL: A word that recurs with different senses and in different contexts throughout The Glacial Stairway is ‘structure’. It seems the poet is constantly trying to read things encountered structurally – the ‘unreal structure’ of credit finance, the indecisive and lonely world ‘An elite or egalitarian structure’ – what is the significance of connecting these sorts of political and social structures with structure as an organisational principle in your poetry?

PR: I don’t really do organisational principles. The poem grows from a starting-point, which may be a first line, or a title, or a quotation, or a vague picture or image field or the memory of a place, or a sense of a possible tone, a possible weighting, with a feeling that any of these might lead on to somewhere, might reveal something. And from there it grows and finds its form, which is sometimes determined by the intuitive construction of what becomes the first stanza, say it’s a six-line one I might go on writing six-line stanzas for the rest of the poem, though there are no rules in this. I never start from a message that I want to deliver; the message is discovered in the working through of the poem’s materials. And it ends when it’s reached somewhere which consummates the issue or which releases the inhering message preferably in a quite dramatic or rhythmically decisive gesture, though there are also codas sometimes. I used to be involved in improvised music as a listener, reviewer and occasional impresario. There structure is, of course, a non-existent entity until it’s all over. But there are structures all round us, from garden sheds to governmental systems and they’re not all constructed the same way. I look upon my intuitive structuring as a suitable process for a certain kind of fairly modest poetical production, quite disconnected from other structurings, justified as it leads to or is faithful to trustworthy perceptions of the world. That would include a sense of our failure, sometimes nothing else. And indeed I don’t think political, economic or social structures are necessarily wrong in themselves, but only as they fail us, which they often do.

Or to put it differently, in fact to contradict myself, what I’m interested in is how we evade structures. That is, we get by, in the most daunting conditions short of actual warfare. The structures are like mountains and in their shadows we build bars and gardens, both full of lights and music.

TL: It is common in what some people call ‘experimental’ poetics to focus on process, and in The Glacial Stairway there are several pieces whose formal structure are concerned with expressing time and/or distance in a graphical or systematic way (especially the walk-poem ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’). How did you arrive at such methods, and what do you think they can do that more traditional verse can’t?

PR: As above, the notion of a possible trajectory carries with it the sense of an appropriate disposition of the writing on the page and the previsioning of that is part of the initial impulse. The type of emotion, even the type of thought involved in, say, ‘Shining Cliff’ is so different from that of ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’ (though they may share the same kind of message in the end) that they demand different formats. I guess I work between two extremes – the natural obscurity of song, and the open telling of narrative. The two versions of ‘Western States’ at the end of the book stretch this contrast as far out as possible, expanding the distance between them to a maximum, while covering the same ground. I wouldn’t call it a system I don’t think. If it works the form and the content guide each other through the text.

These procedures are all quite closely related to traditional genres I think. The short poems or sets of them embrace the meaning of that abused word “lyric”, the more expansive pieces recall traditional narrative writing in prose or verse, and of course ‘Aria with Small Lights’, like a lot of other pieces in the past, apes traditional procedure closely and irreverently in its not-quite-strict end-rhyming. Like agreeing to a discipline and then occasionally playing truant. I’m very fond of traditional verse and sometimes like to have the poem look like it, in regular sections on the page, even when there are no traditional metrics at work. The forms and appearance of poems have a lot to say in themselves. A sense of stability is just as important to me as disruption. In fact neither makes sense without the other.

TL: The Glacial Stairway includes some versions of poems by the 8th Century Chinese poet Li Ho, having reached this form through several translations and re-workings by 20th Century scholars. In what ways can translation be a poetic act?

PR: I guess that in poetry translation is a kind of collaboration but one which can embrace contrariety, especially when the original author has been dead for half a millennium. I take something not only not by me but also, in this case, quite alien in many ways to what my poetry normally does, with all that languorous aristocratic beauty, and make it at least partly mine, by working on small details. To realise points in it which I can recognise as my sense harmonising with something very far away, and so to come to terms with it. Thus emphasising, for instance, Li Ho’s lamenting of the servile and deprived condition of the palace women. A claim is made that those aristocratic forms of beauty are now open to the commoner as a right. It takes a lot of work and concentration over a long period of time. Some of the most unreadable poetry books I’ve ever seen are the “collected poems” of major foreign poets ruthlessly translated into English as if the translator is a kind of postal worker. Sometimes made worse by a grim determination to represent the metrics of the original.

TL: When The Literateur interviewed Sean Bonney, we began one question with a quotation from your Alstonefield – ‘I could go South, / to the heart of smooth success [. . . ] And come back up here three times a year /for humanity’ – and really, I’d like to ask you a similar question about the existence (or not) of a north/south divide in British poetry, but differently accented. How do you think your writing might have been different had you stayed in the north?

PR: I love the north of England. Apart from the hills, there’s a sense of personal openness and directness, no-nonsense, no frills, and determined and cheerful resourcefulness in comparative poverty. I suppose when it comes to the reality that’s all folklore – what you actually get is the same conditions as anywhere else. But northern hard-headed straightforwardness is a healthy fiction to cultivate as an antidote to the cryptic mannerisms of the southern poetry gangs.

Actually I don’t know any reason why my poetry would necessarily be any different if I’d stayed in the north (and it wasn’t very far north, really, just up beyond the Midlands). I trust I’d still know what was going on in poetry from Cornwall to Orkney if not further, and after all there are no barriers to this information for those who are interested. Where you live makes a difference, perhaps, at that formative stage when poets band together in exclusive groups, but all you can do after that is break it up, you have to; the only people who want the categories you create to become part of history are the academics. In the late 1960s I was in touch with people from the north who wrote a plain-speaking socialistic poetry virtually without figuration of any kind, which they probably thought was “northern” and to some degree they might have been right. But they erected a wall round this poetry, fed it to each other exclusively, turned their backs on alternatives, and we never heard from them again. I think this was a pity. There were possibilities of interaction which were closed. Groupings I knew in the south-east did exactly the same thing.

TL: One of the poems in The Glacial Stairway features the line ‘forgive me if I write badly’. A slightly facetious question, but since the text suggests it – what, do you think, does it mean to write badly, if anything?

PR: All over the poetry world people are throwing around the words “good” and “bad” and nobody hardly ever has a shadow of an aesthetic belief to support those judgements. Normally it’s gut reaction, opportunism, or surrender to endorsed attitudes, conformity to established procedures – and this happens at the “innovative” end of the spectrum as much as anywhere else. Occasionally it’s political, but the attempts I’ve seen to state an aesthetic basis for evaluating poetry have mostly been pathetic. “Poetry is a kind of magic” and so forth. Or the most abstruse philosophical critiques can be seen to be founded on pre-determined aesthetic choices. Most poets, let’s face it, make judgements which support their own poetry. In the commercialist zones, but not only there, were are told not merely what is “good” but also what is “best”, and we are told it again and again. And the prizes and the appointments repeat it. The cast of this theatre of the superlative constantly changes, but the sales-talk doesn’t and hasn’t for at least 40 years. Poets are elevated ridiculously in a quest for heroic achievement which I think is neurotic. Poets are not in fact all that much better than one another. But it’s not only in the big publicity routines, it’s also in the avant-garde claques. The poet Douglas Oliver once suggested that superlatives should be avoided completely in talking about poetry.

Personally I look for a “poetic” quality in the writing. Poetry is after all what I am mainly interested in; so for me it is its own objective. But whatever that quality is, which may well involve certain echoic, historical tones, I’d want to see it as an active force, I’d want to recognise the world in it. And a balance of forces. But the important thing is perhaps that there’s no knowing where you’re going to find this, or how it may be disguised.