I S S U E 7

The Poem’s Apprentice

Camille Ralphs speaks to poets about the development of their craft in this new interview series for PBLJ

Karen Solie

It has taken an inexcusably long time for the UK’s poetry scene to notice Karen Solie. A gap of more than three years separated her Griffin Poetry Prize win, with Pigeon (House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2009), from Bloodaxe’s wise publication of her Selected Poems here; the only collection released in the UK since then is The Caiplie Caves (Picador, 2019), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. In the LRB in 2014, Michael Hofmann wrote that ‘a poem of Solie’s . . . seems out of control, but isn’t; it exhibits grace while falling, which is perhaps what grace is’. Her determinedly ambivalent work, in which the ghost is the machine and any moment could well be the moment of truth, is bedevilled by brilliant detail and detects a metaphysics even in the super-superficial. Poets of such skill and intellect are hard to come by, and harder still to trace back to their literary origins. But as poetry director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, as well as a recent lecturer at the Manchester Writing School, Solie evidently has a huge amount to offer to the tyro poet.

How did the experience of growing up on a farm affect how you approach the writing process? 

In some respects, thinking about how my upbringing might affect the way I write is pure speculation, as it’s impossible to know how, or if, I would write otherwise if things had been different. I mean, I’m sure my background has affected my writing, it can’t not have, it’s just hard to know how without anything to put it into relief. I am pretty detail-oriented. Maybe it all goes back to learning the difference between Phillips and Robertson-head screwdrivers when I was five in order to hand them to my dad, who knows? There’s no real work-life balance on the farm, no real separation, and I’ve always been interested in writing about, or through, the physical details of work. Its names and procedures are interesting to me on metaphorical and contextual levels as well as associatively and sometimes etymologically. And the experience of detail can be a means to relate, as a writer and a reader. We all live our lives in detail. Even if we’re not familiar with a particular place name or tool or process, we are familiar with living where specific repeated actions are laden with history, where certain objects are talismanic, where place names become ridiculously figurative. And I suppose a farm upbringing makes one practical, comfortable with solitude, and able to entertain oneself. Because there’s no one around and because maybe the house is small and crowded with family and animals and one needs to carve out one’s own space inside it. 

To some extent, every assumed poetic ‘apprenticeship’ is formulated retrospectively—with a Frostian claim that whatever happened ‘has made all the difference’. Some poets, though, deliberately work towards being ‘career poets’ or practise with the so-called 10,000-hour rule in mind. Is that totally bats, or could it get us somewhere?

It could get some people somewhere, I suppose, and not others. For any poet the primary goal is to write good poems, and whatever facilitates that is the poet’s business. Some find it useful to think in career terms, some don’t. But I don’t think poetry is something a person can ‘master’, even after 100,000 hours, and the life that informs new poems never stops happening. Until it does. I don’t know that there’s any ‘there’ to get to. Or perhaps every ‘somewhere’ has a new set of conceptual and compositional problems in it. And, you know, thank God for that. 

From what I gather, you didn’t do an MFA and you came to writing poetry relatively late. What did you do instead that contributed to the development of your literary skills (whether you knew it at the time or not)? 

I read. I was lucky my parents always had books in the house, and that reading was part of life. I didn’t read poetry, though, until well into my undergraduate degree in my mid-twenties—it wasn’t really a thing where I grew up and we didn’t read it in school—but I read the short story collections and novels my parents had around. Some of it was great and some of it was crap but I read it all. As a kid I loved Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. My dad had a book called A World of Great Stories that includes work in translation by Russian, Chinese, African, South American, Scandinavian authors, and many others, as well as Brits and Americans. I adored that book and was shocked and seriously haunted by a number of its stories. It was an education in more ways than one. After high school I earned a journalism diploma at community college and worked as a reporter for a daily newspaper in a mid-sized Alberta city for three years before deciding to attend university, journalism being the only writing job I could think of. Covering court and government, protests and accidents, culture and the ‘dog-shows and bake-sales’ element was also an at-times harsh education and good training in editing, clarity. I studied English and philosophy as an undergrad, and really discovered poetry in my third year, though I hadn’t started writing yet. My MA is academic, in fiction and literary theory. All have contributed a great deal to what I write, though all knowledge is writing knowledge, isn’t it.

If you could add one module or regular exercise to every contemporary MFA course, what would it be?

Self-directed field trips. 

If ‘an art school should be a mixture of a monastery, a pub and a sweatshop’ (Ilse Crawford), what should a school for poets be?

A mixture of music lessons, going to the carnival on mushrooms, spiritual contemplation, and trade school.

Did you, or do you, have music lessons yourself? 

I studied classical piano through high school, and participated in the annual terror of examinations and festival competitions. The metronome haunts my dreams. When I moved to Lethbridge I paid a friend in whisky and cheese to teach me guitar, and for years afterward played all kinds of shows with various bands. I lived briefly in Austin and the same friend was kind enough to include me in his band there. I wrote some songs I had the misguided audacity to perform. They were reprehensible. Though I wasn’t writing poetry then, the experience has taught me in retrospect that poems and songs are different animals. Writing good poems doesn’t mean one can write good songs, and vice versa. Learning and practicing music does teach how, as in writing, disciplined attention to mechanics and technique can make one more intuitive, can develop one’s instincts. Listening to a range of work improves the ear and makes creativity possible, just as we can’t write well without reading. And there’s a body memory that evolves through practice that’s analogous to what happens in writing. A kind of internal tuning fork. 

You’ve mentioned fiction and literary theory, as well as philosophy, as non-poetic influences on your work. Would your work be any good without them? How important is it that poets have major interests, or even areas in which they dabble, outside of poetry?

Again, it’s difficult to know if my work would be better off without those influences, as there’s no way to know what that would look like. I think it’s important that people have major interests and things they dabble in, from the ridiculous to the sublime. I can’t conceive of a life in which poetry was the sole interest, I get anxious just thinking about it. But neither can I conceive of writing it without it being a real interest, a compelling and ever-changing set of problems, an evolving conversation with traditions and one’s contemporaries, simultaneously a saving grace and an absolute nightmare, an interest more fulfilling than what it produces. It’s why other people’s writing is so much more interesting to us than our own.

A few poetic influences you’ve cited elsewhere: Fanny Howe, C. D. Wright, Frank O’Hara. They’re an interesting mix. Why were you drawn to them, and how have you deliberately drawn on them and other poets in your work? 

I suppose I’m drawn to the work of writers who approach what, to me, is unfamiliar. But I’m also interested in those who explore my continuing preoccupations, but whose minds work differently to mine, whose styles and structures shake something loose in my own. I’ve gone about some shameless imitations. Attempting to work with space and voice on the page like C. D. Wright, for example. Results are mixed. Still, it’s instructive and interesting to try. Frank O’Hara is one of those writers who demonstrates, among other things, the mark of idiosyncrasy, personality, in intelligence and insight. I’ve loved Fanny Howe’s work for a long time for its devotion to mystery and difficult thinking, for how her work mines the relationship between clarity and ambiguity. Some writers are influences in very particular and traceable ways—techniques of syntax, the line, perspective with regard to the image. Others use structural or technical elements in ways I couldn’t pull off in a thousand years, but there might be something about atmosphere, mood, or subject that I can approach in my own way. The question of specific influences always strikes cold terror into my heart, as when I think about it they proliferate and become qualified beyond all control. 

Is there anything in your previous books that you’re glad to have left behind? Anything you miss?

Yes, in the books as in life, plenty I’m glad to have left behind, and plenty I miss. I hope I’ve left behind an over-reliance on irony, coyness maybe, cuteness, a pose—a certain tone of voice and perhaps an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic. In all my books there are lines, poems, that make me cringe in horror and remorse. But people change and our writing changes and, to be honest, I don’t read my own past work unless I have to for specific purposes. And I think I take more risks now, am more inclined to represent how my mind actually works, than when I was younger. What I do miss is probably situational. That is, having the time for all of it. 

What do you wish you could do as a poet? Are you consciously doing anything to work towards that thing?

What I wish I could do as a poet is everything I am unable to do now or am incapable of doing, ever. I wish I were as intelligent as the writers I admire. I wish I could write as insightfully, as innovatively, as sensitively, as they have. What I do is continue to read, study, and experiment, try to challenge my habits while also respecting the more respectable of my instincts.

Do you ever find yourself wishing that ‘this unpopular art which cannot be turned into / background noise for study / or hung as a status trophy by rising executives’ (Auden) was more impactful and more widely thought about, or is a smaller audience a blessing in disguise?

What? Poetry isn’t popular?! Just kidding. I’ve participated in a number of panels asking whether poetry is dead yet, to the point it almost seems like wishful thinking. I guess it would be nice to sell more books. But honestly, I don’t think about it much. If anything, I’m surprised it’s as popular as it is. But reading it, and writing it, does continue to make the odd person’s life better, so there’s that. 

Daljit Nagra

When Look We Have Coming to Dover! was published by Faber and Faber in 2007, it brought to the core of British poetry a desperately needed bold new voice (and went some way towards rehabilitating the reputation of the exclamation mark). Since then, Daljit Nagra has published three more books with Faber: Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011), a version of the Ramayana (2013), and British Museum (2017). The most recent of these, as Edward Doegar noted in an interview with Nagra for Prac Crit, emphasises the question over the exclamation; but while Nagra is evidently keen to diversify his oeuvre, and is not a poet who will ever get stuck in his own rut, he is consistent in his willingness to thumb his nose at expectation and authority. His writing is invariably animated, alive with knowingness—even at its most reflective, it is thronged by many-eyed music and many-mouthed images. He has taught English in schools, has been a generous mentor to many emerging or formerly emerging poets (his influence can be felt in, for instance, Richard Scott’s Soho) and today works at Brunel University. 

You were about thirty when you first started writing poems. How long was it before you started taking your own work seriously? 

A decade from writing seriously to debut collection. I never really took my work seriously, even in that time, because I assumed book publication was for others; having a working-class background and little exposure to poets, I’d assumed for some time that I’d be knocked back when I tried a publisher. I think this helped because I treated poetry as a hobby and wrote freely. 

Perhaps taking yourself too seriously too soon is a shortcut to silencing yourself; perhaps we should all think of ourselves as apprentices indefinitely. But do you ever find yourself silenced by your inner critic when faced with a blank page? What’s the remedy?

I’m always finding myself silenced by the blank page, and always for good reasons. I think of the Greek term pneuma, its medical application denoting the whole breath of the body, or the body’s full capacity. When I approach a page and am about to write, I often feel I don’t have enough of the poem in me to write—I lack the pneuma, or I don’t have enough of the body and breath of the poem for a first draft. If I don’t have enough of this breath, I usually find I lose interest in the poem. My approach of late has been to read a lot of poetry that sounds as little like me as possible, to see if that will liberate new work. This has been useful because my new work feels very different to my previous collections.

Are there any ways in which starting so ‘late’ turned out to be an advantage?

Many advantages. I’d already been married, had a child, divorced, and been ostracized from family by the time I turned thirty. This enriching experience gave me greater detachment from ambition and glory; I was writing to keep my imagination stimulated and free from my domestic difficulties. My life experiences helped me shape my work accordingly. I am a very slow reader, so after finishing at university at twenty-five, I continued reading poetry and enriching my knowledge, which again helped enormously when I came to make aesthetic choices later on.

Charles Bukowski: ‘Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.’ How do you feel about that?

I often come across distressed poets who feel they have not been successful enough after their successful debut, so yes, struggle to succeed is always important for some writers. Equally, poetry is a small artform and every poet is always facing extinction at every stage of their career, if we can call it a ‘career’—success for poets is not the same as the outrageous praise that can await a novelist (bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, et al). So I would wish every poet any success possible! That said, too much early success must surely be as limiting for a young poet as too little recognition is for an experienced writer who’s sent into the wilderness of praise. I would love recognition to be spread more evenly and given not only to work that instrumentalises but also to work that is innovative. Too much praise at present seems to be for the interesting personal story and not enough for the interesting technical innovations.

Do you feel that a clear line separates your juvenilia from your mature work? If so, do you know where that line falls, and what changed around that time?

I wrote a few poems in my early twenties and then stopped for many years, assuming no one would be interested in what I had to say. One thing that never changed was my love for an exuberant English, a mixing of linguistic registers. The first few poems that I wrote and no longer have, luckily, were a heightened mix of literary and slangy English incorporating words from Punjabi. So in a way, I never developed! I think I just got better at taking the reader with me by not overdoing the mixed registers.

You’ve spoken a bit before about how important workshops and workshopping groups were in your early development. What makes a good one? 

A good one allows the participants to breathe, to express their views, to engage with each other so a micro-community of support is established. I attended a few ten-week courses, then attended monthly sessions led by Pascale Petit for a year. In each of these groups, I constantly learned how much cultural information from my own background could be engaging; I learned to negotiate how much of my own experimentation I could get away with before the poems became a turn-off!

Some influences you’ve mentioned in other interviews: Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, the German Romantics, Auden, Walcott, Heaney. Do you actively seek out new influences when you identify a ‘blind spot’ in your work?

Every story, every theme I develop has natural echoes that arrive from other authors who may have explored similar ideas, probably better than myself. It feels natural to go through other authors to help complicate the observations, to enrich the text and thus to offer greater pleasure. In many cases, discovery of new work or a new tradition will itself inspire new poetry. Recently, I was thinking about the Indian poet (who wrote in English) Nissim Ezekiel, and his poem ‘Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.’. I’d first read it at least two decades ago, and suddenly it occurred to me, in a reverie, that I should write a poem based on that poem; that poem was written in a Babu English, the colonial English of the Indian administrators. Within a fortnight, I’d written a book’s worth of material. Sometimes there’s a blind spot where research will unlock the poem, and other times there’s a blind spot in that the poem has been within us for years, waiting to be written, but we haven’t seen it sitting there waving to us from the rear.

What roles have imitation and translation played in your growth? Are there any exercises you’ve found particularly effective when trying to improve your writing?

Version writing has developed my skills. When I wrote my version of the Ramayana, I had no idea I would be learning quite so much about poetry from the inside out. I wouldn’t have the technical competence for the verve my latest book, due out in 2022, has exacted from me. The Ramayana involved extensive research and trying out of the many different features of characterisation, tone, plot and form that an epic demands. I’d recommend everyone should play around with a grand text so they’re pulled away from themselves.

The first manuscript you submitted to Faber and Faber was turned away; you edited it and submitted it again later, and it was accepted. What was wrong with the first version?

No one has ever asked me this, so thank you! There were about half a dozen poems in the first manuscript that didn’t work, even though they’d been published in good literary magazines. I’d mistakenly assumed they must be good enough, even after editing them post-publication. In the year I waited for a reply about that manuscript, I continued to rework many of the poems, including my Forward Prize-winning poem, ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’, so when I resubmitted I felt more confident about the work. I’d been working as a teacher of English in a large comprehensive school, so time for writing and editing was scarce, or that’s my excuse for why the rejected manuscript wasn’t good enough.

What do you dislike about the most recent work you’ve produced?

I don’t, I love it! It wrote itself in a few weeks as a long poem at the start of lockdown, and I’ve spent the past year editing it. However, in the spirit of the question, I haven’t been happy with my individual poems for the past three years because they have sounded too much like my own voice—as though I’d run out of new ways, for myself, of saying things. I’ve written three individual collections, so I’d want to keep things fresh, in terms of form and language. I’m happy exploring similar themes to those taken on in my previous work, though, because I want to deepen my aesthetic appreciation of injustice for the rest of my life, unless those injustices are consigned to history.

How has teaching, in schools and in universities, impacted on your own work? Is there one thing you find yourself saying to students and mentees more than anything else?

Teaching at a university for the past five years has been massively positive for my poetry. I am now reading more contemporary poets each year and reading more criticism than ever, mainly to inspire my students with the freshest poetry and, in turn, to inspire myself. Academia encourages poets to be successful; previously, I worked in schools, where a teacher’s success was not valued. My advice, I always say to my students, as to myself: keep it alive. Don’t shut down the poem too early, but have the confidence to regurgitate it, even a year later. Even after it’s been published in a magazine, keep editing. Of course, there’s an art to editing which is a subject of study in itself.

Camille Ralphs is Poetry Editor at the TLS.