I S S U E 8

The Poem’s Apprentice

Camille Ralphs interviews two poets about the development of their craft

Christopher Reid deserves young poets’ admiration not only for the quality of his work—its vulnerable, humane humour, and its daring and protean growth in unpredicted new directions; the fact that, as Adam Newey wrote in The Guardian in 2009, it ‘has always delighted in confounding expectations’—but for the many areas in which he has influenced British poetry. His early books, Arcadia (OUP, 1979) and Pea Soup (OUP, 1982), were noted for their ‘Martian’ aspect: their making things new by viewing them through extra-terrestrial eyes. Later, A Scattering (Areté Books, 2009) won the Costa Book Award and The Song of Lunch (CB Editions, 2009) was adapted into a short film starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. During the 1990s, he held the role of Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber, where he acquired new writers such as Don Paterson and Lavinia Greenlaw and managed old hands such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. He later became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.

You and I have talked a bit about Ted Hughes before—about how he said that, at Cambridge, he would get up at six and read a Shakespeare play before nine (and some Chaucer if he had time left over). What did you get up to, in terms of self-directed development, as a student poet?

I’m afraid I had none of Ted’s colossal self-motivation. I felt defeated by my studies at Oxford. It would have taken me a week to read a Shakespeare play, and I would have been baffled all the way through—not so much by Shakespeare’s words as by what I was expected to think and say about them. I was immature and insecure. More than that, the air of lofty judgement that was cultivated in Oxford in those far-off days was alien to me. I didn’t know how to emulate it and didn’t, at heart, want to. At that time, you couldn’t really have called me a ‘student poet’, though I did write the occasional snippet of verse, just as I had done at school. Being a poet in the face of academic attitudes towards poetry— the superior tone practised in lectures and critical essays—would have taken more gumption than I possessed. I suspect that Ted’s recourse to Shakespeare was a form of daily self-immunisation against similar attitudes at Cambridge, a reminder to himself, in heavy doses, of what really mattered. I didn’t have the wit to do anything like that, so I shirked the problem and simply fell into lazy ways. My brightest moment, though, was the discovery of a new publishing initiative, the series of books put out by Penguin under the label of Modern European Poets. Here were a number of poets, mainly Eastern European— Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub and others—who, coming from such a distant world, far apart from the English tradition that I was supposed to be studying, seemed to evade the whole Oxford trap. They became my secret resource and, in that regard, they were the equivalent of Ted’s Shakespeare.

There are many books out there that aim to advise young poets, including Hughes’s own Poetry in the Making (Faber & Faber, 1967). Which do you think are indispensable?

I don’t think there are indispensable books of instruction. Not even Poetry in the Making, though it does convey gloriously the author’s own excitement at watching out for, and capturing, a poem. Of course, I’m only speaking for myself and there may well be poets who in their early days derived benefit from using the book as a primer; but now I see its main value as encouragement to poets young and old, even old lags like me, to keep things fresh and lively. As fresh and lively and super vigilant as Ted’s own prose. All of which is not to say I haven’t enjoyed reading other people’s manuals: Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012), for example. But again, the pleasure and profit have been from seeing Glyn’s lively mind in action, the unorthodox, skittish approach he takes to the subject. He's like a school teacher who doesn’t stick to the syllabus as closely as his employers might expect him to, but who nonetheless stimulates the brighter kids to excel. And it would be wrong to leave out of account books which, while not written with instruction specifically in mind, can serve much the same purpose, if read in a sympathetic spirit. Top of my list would be Keats’s letters. Very near the top, Ted’s—if you’ll excuse the obvious partisanship of that recommendation.

In an interview in The Guardian, you mention learning Latin grammar ‘at a ridiculously early age’ but admit that this did come in handy later on. How important is it for a poet to engage with work in more than one language?

I’m no linguist, let me make that clear. What I meant when I said that about Latin grammar was that it gave me a sense of the way words and sentences worked. The underlying structures. Early on, too, we were put to writing in Latin, like little medieval monks, both original compositions and translations. We even translated pieces of verse: a stanza from Tennyson, as it might be, into heroic couplets. Needless to say, we didn’t actually speak the language, but that didn’t invalidate the exercise. There’s a poem in Spanish in my most recent collection, with the title ‘Pueblo Natal’, and it’s about Lorca’s birthplace. I went at it in much the same spirit as I once tried to write like Virgil or Tacitus. Because my spoken Spanish is poor, you might regard the result as at best a clever fake, and I don’t think I could disagree, but I’m still pleased that I attempted it. I’ve done a few more in Spanish since. Luckily, I have a Spanish- speaking wife, as well as my friend Alfonso, in Granada, to correct the grammar and straighten out the idioms. Don’t worry, I have no intention of writing a complete book in what my wife calls Spanglish, but the exercise is refreshing. So, to go back to your question, yes, it is important—to me, at any rate—to engage with foreign languages. ‘What do they know of English, who only English know?’, as Kipling didn’t exactly say.

How much do you think about etymology when you’re writing?

Well, I suppose my education gave me a sense of where Latin—and Greek— rooted words get their force, but I’m not like Milton, constantly working the vein. His attempt to classicise the language has, for me, rather too much of the dictatorial about it. As I say that, though, I can’t help remembering that in his blindness he dictated Paradise Lost, so the pedant in me is plainly still active.

What do you see as your first ‘perfect poem’ (in Helen Vendler’s term for work that has achieved both linguistic and emotional maturity), and why?

I’m not sure. There’s a poem called ‘A Valve against Fornication’ that I was tremendously pleased with at the time. It was taken up by Ian Hamilton and printed in his New Review, which enhanced the pleasure and did a lot for my self-belief. But I don’t know that I could call it a ‘perfect poem’ either in Helen Vendler’s sense or in the less technical one. What I was trying to do with it was to write a poem that developed an argument in purely visual terms. It’s about a wedding in a country church and I wanted it to proceed as if I were holding a home-movie camera and following the action stanza by stanza. I placed a lot of emphasis on the visual in my poems of those days, more than I tend to now, and this was one in which I felt I had carried the attempt off—even to the extent of going over to a second page! Put it next to ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, though, and it will look a very meagre effort.

Are there any poems of yours that you regret publishing, or that you wish you could edit? What changes would you make?

I don’t regret publishing it, but I do wish I had made a better job of ‘Survival: A Patchwork’, in In the Echoey Tunnel (Faber & Faber, 1991). I wanted to write a poem celebrating the survival of my first wife from her first clash with cancer. As well as being an actor, she made the most beautiful patchwork quilts, so I planned the poem as being like a patchwork fashioned from old scraps of fabric. But I don’t think I made the component parts scrappy enough. The textures are wrong. It’s the only poem of mine that I’ve ever wanted to rewrite thoroughly after it was printed, but the fact that thirty-something years later I still haven’t got around to doing so suggests, not exactly an aversion to the task, but rather that I don’t know how to address it. Still, if I could figure out how to dismantle the poem, as a patchwork maker might take an unsatisfactory piece of work apart, and put it together again differently, then I would.

Poets often come together in gangs or movements—in your case, the ‘Martian’ school was something of a breakthrough moment. How important have different groups been to your development at different times?

My friendship with Craig Raine—what eventually got called ‘Martianism’—is the only alliance that has been significant. Even that I’m disinclined to regard as a ‘school’ or ‘movement’, though it is true that I learned a lot from Craig’s example and critical stringency, so you might fairly say I was ‘schooled’ by him.

When Eliot was Poetry Editor at Faber, he responded thus to a young Norman Nicholson: ‘My own belief is that you would do best to put this book into cold storage for a time and start fresh on something else’. Can you remember any advice you gave regularly, or to multiple poets, when you held that role?

You mean, when I was Poetry Editor at Faber . . . Well, I did make a point of writing letters explaining my rejections to poets I thought were talented, just not in a way that wholly convinced me. There was no regular form of advice, though; each case needed its specific attention. One or two poets have thanked me in later years for taking the trouble, while I’m sure others would have muttered, ‘I didn’t ask you for your opinion, chum’, and torn the letter up. I do recall saying to one particular individual that I thought his poems suffered from falling too much ‘under the influency of poetry’, and I have no idea how that went down. What a job, though! When I was first appointed, Ted Hughes—we keep coming back to him—said, ‘You’ll make a hundred enemies every week’. And so I may have done. Thanks for telling me of what Eliot said to Nicholson: it shows he wanted to be not just categorical or ex cathedra but kind and helpful as well.

What did you mean by that—‘falling too much ‘under the influency of poetry’? How can new poets avoid that kind of thing?

What I probably meant was a tendency to old-fashioned diction and rhetoric. Plus a self-consciously rarefied or elevated stance. General preciousness. This may be less of a problem now, when a puritanical hostility to all that was once considered ‘poetic’ is what marks so much new writing, but I’m not a puritan either and I strongly dislike what seems to me to fall ‘too much under the influence of critical theory’.

You’ve previously described the caricatures in your Six Bad Poets (Faber & Faber, 2013) as ‘facets’ of yourself. Which do you think is the worst kind of bad poet, or the worst side of yourself as a poet?

I’m rather fond of my Bad Poets, all six of them. Even the most reprehensible are more to be pitied for frailty than condemned for wickedness. When you speak of ‘the worst kind of bad poet’, you summon to my mind degrees of atrociousness that lie well beyond the compass of my little book, which is more a farce than a satire. I don’t have the fury that would give birth to a Dunciad, though I can see that if anybody aspired to be the Alexander Pope of our time they would find no shortage of material. Dullness hasn’t gone away. It thrives. Sometimes it is awarded prizes.

Fred D’Aguiar is a British-Guyanese author, currently based in LA, whose work thrives on multiple heritages and miscellaneous literary influences, ever intrepidly varying weathers and timbres. ‘His early diction’, as André Naffis-Sahely noted in Wasafiri in 2010, ‘wavered between Brathwaite’s and Agard’s colloquialisms and Walcott’s wry grandiloquence’. His debut collection of poems, Mama Dot (Chatto & Windus, 1985), was immediately celebrated for its harmonious fusion of English and Nation language; his long, bold narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, Bill of Rights (Chatto & Windus, 1998), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. D’Aguiar is also known for novels (including The Longest Memory (Chatto & Windus, 1994), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award), memoirs (including Year of Plagues (Carcanet, 2021) and plays (including A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, anthologised in 1995). He has been Judith E. Wilson Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

You’ve said in an interview with Anthurium that you wanted to be a poet as early as high school, and that you were encouraged by an English teacher. What form did that encouragement take, and is there anything you’d like to have done differently back then?

My secondary school English teacher at Charlton Boys’ School in South London, Geoff Hardy, tended to read the Romantics aloud to the class. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Keats’s odes, and some outliers, Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’, Clare’s animal poems and, later in the nineteenth century, the Brownings. I took from his performance that poetry was first and foremost a sound, then a feel and a sense of these pieces of life. The English of those poems was so unlike the English of 1970s South London that hearing, say, Swift’s ‘A Description of the Morning’ legitimised the creole English that still percolated in me on my return to London, after ten years in Guyana, at the age of twelve. I immediately conceived of English as a plural notion. One thing I might change is my resistance to pop music: I preferred reggae, dub, funk, jazz and some classical, and baulked at anything in the charts that laid on feeling at the expense of argument or freshness of phrasing.

Lowell acknowledged the influence of Richard Eberhart as his first mentor; and, of course, he famously spent two weeks living in a tent on Allen Tate’s lawn later on. How have mentors influenced your work? Do you think the ideal apprenticeship leans on at least one mentorship, or is it more self-directed?

I read a lot, attended poetry readings, and saw a lot of plays (still do!) and so became accustomed to the idea of an apprenticeship of immersion in the world of language as aural and spatial enactments. It struck me, too, how on the B-side of reggae 45s (the dub version) a DJ would toast or talk through some social and political issue or spiritual imperative. Take I-Roy, for example. He talked his way through an encyclopaedia of topics related to Black and working-class life globally. And he did it in rhyme, sometimes! Bob Marley made it clear to us that a knowledge of history was crucial to an understanding of our lives. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dread, Beat an’ Blood (Front Line, 1978) triggered a lot of copycats. For a young Londoner in the Seventies, that approach to poetry as a record and a book confirmed the oral and scribal as coterminous cultures. My mixed model—solo and group—also included a time when I attended a Black Writers Workshop in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, and a poetry workshop at Goldsmiths. Mentoring inculcates the habit of revision, of a sense of the temporal about the art. As MacLeish says (roughly recalled), ‘a poem is never finished, it’s merely abandoned’. The best mentoring might well be the least interfering kind, whereby the writer is gently nudged and nodded towards self- discovery. Good habits only ever graft onto creative practice if novice writers pick up those moves for themselves.

You mention the habit of revision. What about the habit of composition? Should young poets have a writing ‘habit’, or should poetry ‘come as easily as the leaves to a tree’ or not at all, as Keats has it?

I keep a journal for writing poetry and I add a little to it every day without any value attached to what I jot down, mostly first thing in the morning when my brain cells are fresh from rest and laced with the dreams of the night before. So write, yes, and regularly. I know Keats’s letters asked so many questions that his poetry appeared to be a ceaseless, happening thing even as he theorised about his art and protested against the idea of his art as a calling or obligation. I see the Keats of ‘negative capability’ fame as an exemplar of the persona engaged with poetry as lived and so inseparable from the mind and body, and by extension, outside of any need for devotion or any special status assigned to it.

I was very struck by an email you sent me a while ago, in which you said you had edited one of your poems after reading a review I’d written. How often do reviews inform your editing or future development?

I rely on the reader to remake the poem so that I become a stranger to it, that is, just another reader of it. The reader is therefore in a position, as the poem’s custodian, to do something with an incisive remark about the poem. I admire good readers as well as good writers. They’re the same creature, as far as I can tell, in that I write as a reader and read as a writer.

I’ve recently been talking to a mentee of mine about Greg Orr’s essay ‘Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry’ and how a poet might go about developing those temperaments. Is this a useful framework for thinking about poetic development?

I send students to Toni Morrison’s essay ‘The Site of Memory’. I see Orr’s essay as one of many incarnations for understanding the how, what, where, when, and why of poetry. His use of four temperaments reminds me of the vapours of being that the Greeks ascribed to existence; it is useful as an aid to understanding and it helps to frame the art in as many ways as we can in order to gel with the craft and alchemy of this marvellous beast of a lifeform. I admire Orr’s theory about poetry, though these days the poem enacts itself as simultaneously poetry and the theory about it. So, I also get students to read Brathwaite’s enduring trilogy, The Arrivants (1967–9), as poetics, as saying things about how poetry works or refuses the invitation to labour for something, as well as about its reclamation of lost histories, landscapes, biographies—never mind its propensity for song.

What about Toni Morrison’s essay makes it worth reading for a young poet?

I see that Morrison piece as a demand that history form and inform the poetic sensibility. She aimed her essay at fiction about slavery and autobiographies written by the enslaved. We’re all indebted (whether we know it or not) to the profiteering from the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans, which means our imaginary (conscious and unconscious) is tied to the legacy of that history as well (a legacy in need of repair and reparations). A young poet who opens, say, Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography (1789) picks up on him sanitising his experience to make it palatable to an English audience who needed to be persuaded to sign up for the abolitionist cause. The same can be said for Phyllis Wheatley’s poem ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’. She tacks a course between pleasing her benefactors and secreting the radical abolitionist vein.

Welsh bards described themselves as ‘carpenters of song’; calypso is among your acknowledged influences. To what extent does the music of language guide your composition process?

I got swept up in disco in the Seventies, so dancing to music is central to my poetics, with the poem as performance with rhythm, chimes, tone and so on. Calypso in the Caribbean (for me in Guyana, which is very close to Trinidad) tested the speaker who could say something relevant in a tight arena presented by the couplet and quatrain, the limerick and ode. There’s a great calypso by Sparrow where he sings about his death (it’s called ‘Sparrow Dead’) as a way of saying to the competition that he ain’t going anywhere anytime soon so they better bring their A-game to the arena. The craft side of the art may be inseparable from the artistry of poetry. Walcott’s poem ‘Cul de Sac Valley’ (from The Arkansas Testament, 1987) develops that carpenter image in this memorable and instructive way: ‘as consonants scroll / off my shaving plane / in the fragrant Creole / of their native grain’. While we’re on carpentry, I should say that I write to music from time to time. Two recent albums for doing that are ‘Promises’ by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders, and ‘Space 1.8’ by Nala Sinephro.

When you write to music, what impact does that have on what you’re writing? Is it similar to the effects of rhyme and metre?

I write sometimes with music without words, so, jazz, dub (reggae instrumental) classical, and traditional guttural chants and drumming. The impact is both to confirm the music achieved in a pattern of words that is the poem and to contradict it—the poem may want to say that it is tone-deaf and nonsensical. I sometimes listen to music as I write to escape intention and any outwardly driven identity imperative. For love to break out, and joy, there has to be this insistence on an interior life unresponsive to the sociology, politics, and economics of the body. I owe much to my early attention to music to the poetry of Okut p’Bitek (1931–1982) whose book-length poem Song of Lawino (EAPH, 1966) is steeped in the oral traditions of Uganda, and also harks back to the global troubadour tradition of poetry.

In another interview, with Poetry London, you quoted Charles Olson: ‘form is an extension of content’. How important is an understanding of form in poetry? Is there anything that ought to be added to the ‘traditional’ understanding of poetic craft to make it more critically inclusive?

My only addition to the usual entreaties about the need to read everything and mimicry (imitations in the Lowellian sense—a fruitful yield for the poet who emerges out of the shadow of the imitation) and apprenticeship (study as in putting in the time and devolving to expertise accrued around someone, somewhere) is this: form is one aspect of the poem’s declaration; that is, the poem may emerge in a shape that revision brings to the surface. I suppose I want what I do as a poet to be intentional (however limited it may look in light of the realpolitik of say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) rather than pointless and meaningless. I do not think the Dada poem performed by the victim during a mugging really ever stops the crime, though it makes the memory of the encounter something other than that of victimhood. There is some lesson about the need for quantum thinking in art, and in life as well, as a critique of the commodification of everything, if we take Duchamp’s urinal as an art exhibit.

How do you feel about conceptual poetry? Has it, or its forerunner movement in visual art (Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, for instance), influenced your thinking or practice at all?

Yes; maybe. It reminds me that laughter is an aspect of some poetry, and that the enactment of language owes nothing to anyone, least of all the poet. Conceptual poetry teaches the reader how to read the poem without any sensory underwriting or any condition of immersion and, magically, without history, as well. Though whether any act of imagination can be said to occur outside of history and place is debatable. Take the poetry of Bob Kaufman (1925–1986). A lot of it presents as conceptual (beginning with his tutelage in the Beat generation) and yet there are found elements of the lyric, an engagement with history and a praising of place, not to mention the unending partial perspective of the body. I do not see a quarrel among the many types and schools of poetry (I’m not too cool for school) so much as a sliding scale with traditional and experimental at opposite ends and with a lot of others in between. I need all the tools for my carpentry, for making sense of my movement between Guyana, the UK and the US, and of their intertwined histories.

Ray Bradbury once said he engaged with poetry with the goal of elevating his prose. As someone who’s written a lot of fiction, and successfully, would you say a poet should write prose to elevate their poetry?

I see the line and the sentence as partners in articulated bodies, and not as separate beings in a soup of expression. I would add plays to the equation in that many soliloquies in Shakespeare work as poetry. The run of a poem starts to resemble the run of a body and the workings of a mind, and is therefore character-based or imbued with personality (and im-personality), if we accept tone and intonation as twin captivators of something that looks a lot like a person (that could be animal or mineral or flora). Didn’t Blake sing that ‘Everything is Holy’?

Camille Ralphs is poetry editor at the TLS.