interview with Norbert Lange
Andrew Duncan interview, conducted by Norbert Lange, April 2011
I want to say first that one of very few books I have here is one in Old Irish called ‘Acallamh na senorach’, a 12th century work whose title means ‘Dialogue of the Elders’. But in modern Gaelic the word for ‘interview’ is also ‘acallamh’.
INTERVIEW ANSWERS
Q1 [compare German and British scene] How would you compare british and german poetry? I guess the groups and differences are in each country manifold. But I believe there are links in between? Perhaps a Strömung./ undercurrent, in both mainstream and what used to be called “experimentell”?
A1. The basic factor is the large number of poets writing and the diversity of the scene. This limits the scope of any generalisations. We are on a sort of beach which has hundreds of niches. This landscape is very new and its rules are perhaps unclear. For example, do you start by saying “I will avoid all the occupied niches and find an unoccupied one”? I think the poets who are successful follow this rule and the poets who don’t get anywhere don’t accept it. This is the ‘Grenzsituation’ which Paul Tillich described.
There are many more prizes and stipends in Germany, I think. Poets have to give a lot of effort to the decisions and the laudationes. I think this is a binding factor, as the older generation have to commit themselves to help the younger generation. This makes the scene healthier. In England there is less coherence, it is more common for the established poets to say “everyone younger than me is unimportant” and for young poets to be in a state of revolt which damages the way they use language. Actually English cultural managers believe in the power of the market and think connoisseurship is out of date.
I think both English and German literary cultures went through a terrific wave of americanisation, and people thought “USA = modernity”. This led to quite a lot of bad poetry, I think. Perhaps the day when you start to be a poet is the one where you wake up and realise “I can’t be American, I am a European. Tomorrow I will still be a European.” Yes, and Elvis is dead.
I don’t want to talk about the opposition between ‘experimentell’ and ‘mainstream’ (or ‘conservative’). I realised recently that I didn’t want to read in front of an audience which wasn’t already committed to the experimental wing. I couldn’t face an unselected audience because I was afraid that they first wouldn’t know what I was talking about and next would attack the stage. I feel very bad about this. So I know there are deep splits in the poetry scene but I also want them to go away and my hope is that the new generation is living in a completely different cultural landscape. There was for a long time a tier of very authoritarian conservatives in the English poetry scene who were grimly against anything at all modern. I don’t know the German scene well but I think that anthologies like Jahrbuch der Lyrik or Das Verlorene Alphabet, which cover the whole range of poetry, would be impossible in Britain, where the different fractions deny each other any legitimacy.
Q2 [Thomas Kling] You did translations of Kling poems for instance. And in his and in your poems anthropology seems to be very important. You two started in the 80s, in the punk milieu, as well.
A2. Thomas Kling was an incredibly gifted poet and this is why his poetry is so important to me. There is also another factor, that I identified with his work, there was that fundamental “Ich bin du” experience. I found it very easy to read his poetry. Of course identification is irrational, but there were objective similarities, we were born within a few months of each other and had listened to punk rock very intensively in the middle 70s.
I also had a very bad experience beside Thomas. When he read in Cambridge in about 2000 Thomas read his poems with that very musical and beautiful delivery of his, with that very precise ear trained by years in Catholic church choirs. I felt very stupid reading the translations and producing no tunes at all. Later Marjorie Welish, a big-scale American poet, asked me about the musical aspect. It was a terrible moment. Finally I would like Marjorie Welish to ask me about my poetry and not about why I delivered Thomas’ poems without the melody and the tempo changes! It just goes to show you should always rehearse. But we were too busy talking in the pub.
To be honest, I hadn’t noticed that Thomas was interested in anthropology. For me it has always been a factor, although there are so many reasons why that I can’t explain it. The rock band CAN made some recordings called ‘ethnographical forgery series’, which were their attempts to imitate the music issued on record by the Smithsonian Institute, and I loved that phrase, but when I heard it I was already doing ‘ethnographical forgeries’. When I was living in Germany in 1975 I heard a lot of Turkish music, it came in through the window, the other people in the house were Turks. I was fascinated and I tried to write a poem about it. There are many versions and in the end I spent ten years writing that poem. Later a friend told me that this type of Turkish music is called ‘arabesk’. The Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire got hold of recordings of Arabian music made in Jerusalem market. The music is quite similar to Turkish ‘arabesk’. They made a record called ‘Three Mantras’ where they played back these arabesque tapes and laid their own music directly on top of it. I loved that record, there was no ‘line’, the centre was everywhere. This influenced the way I wrote a lot. Superimposition, the background becoming the foreground, multiple themes, interference.
Q3 You mentioned superimposition. And I guess that combines different aspects of your work. Perhaps the german word would be “Doppelbelichtung”, one of Kling’s terms for his handling of material. (double exposure) Why is superimposition important? Is it a means of converse between different fields? A way to make different discourses communicate/contradict (sort of autopoetic)?
A3. I agree that ‘Doppelbelichtungen’ is the right word.
The decision to mix different data sources together was so basic that I can’t remember taking it. It was more like, one day I had piles of poems in my room and a lot of them used ‘superimposition’. Quite likely one source was a sense of contradictions within society. Part of ‘youth culture’ in the 1970s was a deep detachment from the business-based society that was in charge, a feeling that it had a diminished reality. We were looking thirty years into the future and investment managers were looking one year into the future. I worked in a factory from 1978 to 1987 and the contrast between that corporate and technical discipline and hanging out in the London rock/radical scene at weekends was a double life. So the superimpositions reflect a daily reality and also a sense of being part of another story at the same time. But there were lots of reasons and the impact of records based on montage and ‘documentary sound’ like Cabaret Voltaire was probably one of them.
If you look at poems like ‘Three Graves’ and ‘ Precipice of Niches’ the division between the different parts is clearer, they follow an ABC structure. In ‘Three Graves’ you have three monuments, roughly in the same geographical space, all as symbols of tyranny; first a Scythian ‘royal grave’ with sacrificed horses and so on, then one of the Nazi monuments at Kutno in the Ukraine, then the concrete sarcophagus around the reactor at Chernobyl. In ‘Precipice of Niches’ you have four examples of a ‘honeycomb of niches’, starting with an ego as ‘data fish’, then a reef which is very irregular and rich in fish, then a sort of ‘ballistic niche’, a set of circumstances which allowed some dust to move away from the sun and coagulate into a planet, then a partially imaginary culture which has many niches. But the end of the poem starts to mix them all together. The superimpositions are more about two structures interfering with each other, without the separation which that ABC structure enforces.
In ‘Weapons Form with Music’ I started out from a translation of a Chinese outlaw novel, ‘The Water Margin’, into Scots, being the longest book ever written in Scots. I was paying a tribute to the translator, Brian Holton, and to Scotland, so I wrote a series of 19 poems in which the mediaeval Chinese outlaws were in Scotland and doing things that Scottish outlaws do. This seemed logical enough to me, but Kent Johnson reviewing it for Chicago Review didn’t get it at all. This is a ‘Doppelbelichtung’.
**
Q. The first five lines...remind me of kennings, correct?
Definitely, I had to read some Old Norse skaldic poetry as part of my degree course and I was very taken with the kennings.
**
Addendum
I have just realised where the ‘superimposition’ idea came from. It was David Jones, author of ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata’, who I was involved with very intensively in 1973 and 1974, right at the beginning. ‘The Anathemata’ (1952) uses a superimposition style all the way through. This is what set me on that path, but I had forgotten it.
Q4: The anthropology we talked about... I think it is reflected in the way you build the sentences in your poems. They suggest a kind of grand metaphor which is made up by a combination of attributes (assemblage perhaps?). In one of the epigraphs in Savage Survivals you quote from Notes and Queries on Anthropology: “Are there signs used as an accompaniment to spoken language? Are they used in hunting, war, bargaining?”
A4. The “Notes and Queries” quote is a list of questions which field anthropologists are recommended to ask as part of “describing” a tribal society. I loved the passage in itself, but the subtext is also that writers of today, including me, have to struggle to understand how people behave. The background is about anthropology and sociology, together, offering a way of knowledge, and about the (English) writers of mid-century having a fluent set of writing practices which sounded real but which now sound completely artificial, like so many cheap melodies. Sociology dissolved this comforting and proprietary knowledge. Reality drained out of those books, they lost substance. I have a personal memory of the 1960s relating to a college, in my home town, being “upgraded” into a university. The sociologists at the college helped with the planning, they laid out student halls of residence so that students would meet each other when going to the washing machines, and so on. Meet 3.6 people per week, or whatever. (My parents described this to me.) This was 1966, and people believed in a New Society and thought that sociologists understood the rules of society. This connected with sociology replacing the “knowledge that writers have”, and maybe giving writers a new “knowledge commodity”. But sociology hit a big crisis, probably in the mid 1970s. Sociologists couldn’t make theory and facts fit together, and withdrew into a phase of rebuilding theory, which is still continuing. The failure of a “planned society” also had a bearing on this. The “list of questions” is also saying that I don’t understand society in Britain, but maybe I do own a list of questions.
A key line in the book (Imaginary in Geometry) for me is “what is social structure?”. The answer is something like “society has no structure but writers need to believe it does so that they can recover this structure and present it as organised knowledge and as property.” States and corporations are machines that run on rigidity and foreknowledge, they create small islands of predictability so that their programs can run. But these islands dissolve very quickly back into the vapour of human freedom. Writers didn’t really win the romance with sociology and don’t know how society works. I think writers can’t answer the big questions that people have.
The “assemblage” is important for me. In “Wonders of Classification” you have a description of a collection of objects owned by a “medicine man” among the Inuit, and another found in a box in a Bronze Age female burial in Denmark. In the poem, this box is a forerunner of the “cabinet of curiosities”, and the theme is “the history of collections”. The box contained “some weasel bones, the claw joint of a cat, possibly a lynx, [...] a piece less than 1/2” long of a bird’s windpipe”, many other things. This is an “assemblage” as archaeologists use the term. We can also think of a book of poems as a collection of objects before acquiring words. We can think of the poet assembling objects and then manipulating them following a scenario and then using words to describe the result. This work on objects is vital. The box is a wordless poem. “From far and wide to close and tight/ objects glowing with virtue,/ fatally uttered/ in the classic and enclosing pattern,/ the populated stanza.”
These are “signed objects”, they are incomplete without the story signing them. I guess that the lynx claws are to climb the glass mountains on the way to the land of death, and the bird’s windpipe is to give the dead woman a voice to speak to spirits with. This assemblage seemed to me to lead on to some Germanic poetry, with heroes being frequently described as having the virtues of various beasts. It seemed inherently significant, the objects charged each other up, formed parallels and sets. That significance is not known to us.
I am not sure this poem belongs with many others of mine. Actually the lists of bones, claws, etc. sound like a poem by Maggie O’Sullivan and this may be a tribute to her.
Human beings deal with a storm of objects. The “classification system” of a society may be something essential to identifying it as a society. It would underpin language but could also apply to visual representations. Collections had to be organised, and by the time you have a museum with a million objects it is a way of showing what the classification system is, sets of analogies and contrasts that can be seen as a solid equivalent of the language. Society also classifies humans, and the way society classifies you could be an important part of what you are. The poem mentions “a hardened paradox”: the cabinets contained “wonders”, objects that broke the knowledge system, and individuals may feel themselves as evading official knowledge.
Q5: Deine Gedichte und Gedichsequenzen streifen zugleich verschiedene Zeitpunkte der Geschichte. Es wirkt, als würde das Zitat eines historischen Moments den Punkt in einer argumentativen Kette darstellen. “Three Graves” beispielsweise streift die Jahre 500BC, 1942 und 1986. Viele andere Deiner Gedichte beschäftigen sich mit der Russischen Revolution. (Your poems and poem sequencnes touch simultaneously on differnet moments in history. The effect is as the quottaion of a historic moment is being a point in a chain of argument. ‘Three Graves’ for instance touches on the years 500 BC, 1942 and 1986. Many others of your poems deal with the Russian Revolution.
A5. Lenin murdered three million people. A low estimate. The role of western Marxists up till now has been to take these three million people and explain that they were very very bad people, and it really doesn’t matter if you killed them, because they were such Bad People and Lenin was soooo intelligent. So you bury them and then carve lies on their grave-stones.
In 1954, my mother was in hospital, waiting to give birth to my brother, and she received a letter from the War Office. She thought it was her call-up papers to go and fight in Korea. It wasn’t that. This is just to say that I was born in the middle of the Cold War, it was everywhere. Every science fiction story of the 50s and 60s replays the Cold War in outer space. We were a programmed generation. There is some moment in Bourdieu where he says that sociology in the 1950s was stretched between the two poles of Soviet and American ideas, thus mirroring the strategic situation in the Cold War. Talcott Parsons or Marx. This moment already foreshadows a realisation that there could be a European sociology and that understanding Europe might depend on not being American or Soviet. So this is the 50s, we are being spoon-fed ideology. A key moment of late adolescence for people my age was dropping out of the Cold War. Becoming a lump of non-aligned curiosity. This often meant becoming either very pro-Russian or very pro-American, which wasn’t especially free.
Apart from “deprogramming” every day, the ‘underground’ British poetry had a lot to do with a sector of sentiment that had a lot to do with the exit of members from the British Communist Party after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. This section was called “the New Left”. A lot of people inside it knew each other. This was the poetry village I turned up in in 1976 or 1978. I was always convinced that the association with dictatorship in Moscow would mean defeat. I didn’t believe in Marxism. References to Lenin and Trotsky are mainly there to make this clear and to win an internal argument. It was a domestic argument. For example with Ben Watson, who is a Trotskyite, from 1978 until now. It is about being in a pub with Ben and trying to put over to him that Trotsky wasn’t such a wonderful person. It is no good winning arguments in poetry. Losing them might be more interesting. The payload of real knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian people, “concrete living people who can be loved”, is almost nil. I feel bad about this.
I learnt Russian in evening classes around 1979-84 and then began to read Russian prose, mainly about the Soviet era. After I learnt more about Russia I realised my earlier ideas were very superficial. But other poems followed, like part 3 of ‘Three Graves’, which is about Chernobyl, and ‘Sergei Korolev’, which is about the space programme in the 50s.
I think poetry needs to have political idealism as its driving force. The vision of an island floating next to Britain in the Atlantic, where everyone is free. A horizon you can look up to from what is happening right in front of you. But this horizon is not Russia or the USA.
I was thinking recently about European poetry and the Second World War. You couldn’t find out from the poetry the dates of the war, the course of almost any battle, or who won. Poetry fundamentally does not narrate history, it is like arias from an opera with prose, somewhere else, that tells the story and sets up the characters. This usually works very well but I can see that if the reader doesn’t know about the Cold War, for example, the poetry loses its meaning. It is no good having a personal theory of history. You end up being like some sect based on a wrong reading of the Book of Revelations.
I was worried at some point that I was writing very critical poems about the society I lived in but never writing about the goal, the kind of society I wanted to live in. I did go on to write some poems about spontaneity and exit from the structures of power.
Ben Watson writes poems in a way that directly expresses his ideals. He writes them as “one-take improvisations”. This is literally freedom, spontaneity, exit from the structures. It is in the ‘Grenzsituation’.
I am interested in the gap between beliefs about the large scale of politics, such as the politics of the Soviet Union, and concrete, domestic practices. And in what happens in the gap. Maybe not in simple mirroring. I don’t think I have written anything useful about this. Somehow poetic style reflects political ideals.
Q7 In einen Interview hast Du einmal gesagt, “History is the real theme of poetry”. In deinen Gedichten gibt es scheint sie in vielen Formen aufzutauchen: Da sind die Gedichte mit direktem historischen Bezug im Sujet, wie Three Graves oder das Gedicht über Koroljow. Aber auch in Gedichten, die auf den ersten Blick ein anderes Thema verfolgen, scheint Geschichte auf, etwa im Gebrauch bestimmter Worte, die einen weiten kontextuellen Rahmen aufmachen. By Pound gibt es den Satz (ich vermute, er sprach über die Cantos) Poesie sei der Versuch die Geschichte des Stammes (history of the tribe) zu schreiben. Könnte man das auch über Deinen Schreibimpuls sagen? Wie vers the st Du Deine Beschäftigung mit Geschichte? (You said in an interview once “History is the real theme of poetry”. In your poems it seems to surface in many forms: there are the poems with a direct historical theme, like ‘Three Graves’ or the poem about Koroljow. But also in poems which seem to follow a different theme at first sight, history is glimpsed, for example in the use of particular words which open a broad contextual framework. In Pound there is the saying (I presume he was talking about the Cantos), poetry is the attempt to write the history of the tribe. Could one say that about your impulse to write too? How do you understand your work with history?)
A7 Oh my God. This is an untrue statement so I am wondering if I ever made it. The probability is that I did and that I have to take responsibility for it. I can only support this as “a provocative statement made by a speaker in a poem who has a partial realisation of the truth”. Quite close to being simply untrue, but maybe there is a way out! The statement seems to disqualify all sorts of people who were undoubtedly real poets but did not write about History. As a challenge to a developing poet, this is interesting. Saying that “the real subject of poetry is politics” is probably more interesting. Does my poetry pass this test? well, most of it is purely personal, about relationships or states of mind, and definitely not “about history”.
The line is in a poem in “Threads of Iron”, not an interview.
My father was a historian. Of astronomy, most of the time - but also of alchemy. Naturally I identify with historians. In general I think I have been thinking about history all my adult life, I find that you can start to think about history from any local point, but the “poem explaining History” is something I never wrote. Lots of my poems are about individual moments in history. “Anglophilia, a romance of the docks” is about propaganda about England, but not “about English history”.
One thing I am against is private views of history. I wrote about Richard Aldington and his 1935 poem (‘Life Quest’) where he is standing by the Straits of Gibraltar and imagining the flow of ideas from Egypt to Britain in about 2000 BC, as narrated in a book about “diffusionism” by Grafton Elliot Smith. No one believes in diffusionism any more. So Aldington is seeing the pulse of history, except it’s imaginary. Elliot Smith wrote about any number of tangible objects which sustained his theory. So he holds an amulet in his hand, and sees a vast historical pattern shimmering across it. I really dislike this! I think this is like “The da Vinci Code”, a kind of illuministic knowledge flowing down history, for initiates. Quite similar is Kathleen Raine’s use of the Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, where she is effectively saying that “this mosque with its sacred geometry is beautiful and this is a proof that modern materialistic art is a failure”. It doesn’t prove anything! Similar again is the theory of history held by some of my contemporaries, whereby Pound held the Truth in his hands, and vouchsafed it to Olson, and Olson vouchsafed it to Mottram, and Mottram revealed it to his students, and only they know the Truth. To me this is illuministic and irrational. I can see the power of these ideas, I find Aldington’s poem very interesting, but history is a pattern with a meaning in every part, not just in one “golden thread”. The seeing of patterns can overthrow reason and turn into ideology.
Pound wanted poetry to be the history of the tribe. But he was an American, and Americans are made up of Amerindians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. We can include a few Samoans in there! So you can’t write a history of the “American tribe”. This idea seems inherently flawed.
In 1973 and 1974, I was most occupied with David Jones. He did write a “poem about history”, The Anathemata. Jones was insistent on finding physical details for every scene he described, he was a painter and always wanted visual information to feed his imagination. So then, as a teenager, I was fantasizing about my future poems. As The Anathemata Part II, roughly! If I had written an epic poem, it would have been a poem about technical progress. These ideas were simply grandiose. I suppose the interest in concrete facts and technology helped me to reach something I could actually write. If we jump to about 2001, I write “A Materials Code for Jerusalem”, which is about C.R. Ashbee as town planner for Jerusalem, under British administration under a League of Nations mandate. The point of the poem is that he was redesigning Jerusalem to look more beautiful but couldn’t do anything about the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, so it was a picture with people left out. So this is your “poem about a moment in history”, and it is full of details, which I got from a book about Ashbee. And this is typical of my methods, I get books about some topic and use details from them to furnish the poem. This also raises the question of what the sources are- I am always capturing sources. Ashbee was an Arts and Crafts man, he believed that machine production was corrupting and that handicraft was virtuous. This belief in objects and craft skills is close to Jones, who was an Arts and Crafts man too. Now, there is some analogy between this belief in the “virtuous object” and a belief in style in poetry, that the way a poem is written expresses the real person and also embodies virtue. A poem would seem to be “low technology”. So maybe this Arts and Crafts thing, a lost phase of the British Left, is still influencing poetry.
Lots of my poems are about technology and I guess they are fragments of the large-scale poem about progress which I dreamed of at 17. “Les Paul’s Garage Studio” comes from a book I read about the history of the recording industry. Pfleumer invented a way of laying gold leaf on plastic to be the mouthpieces of “gold cigarettes”, a fashion of the time. They “never left a leaf of Pharaoh’s smile” because of the gold mask of Tutunkhamun, which made gold fashionable. Then he used the same laying technique to invent recording tape. Thirty years later, Les Paul took the “erase head” off a tape recorder and invented double tracking. So the poem probably comes from two particular pages of a book about technology. If we have one German and one American, that probably suggests that the history of technology excludes nationalism, from the outset.
Q8 Schreiben
Wie beeinflussen die Themen der Gedichte Deine Art des Schreibens? Wahrscheinlich lässt sich Thema und Stil nicht trennen. Ents the en Deine Gedichte aus einer bewussten Entscheidung heraus, ein bestimmtes Gedicht zu schreiben? Oder ergibt sich das Gedicht zwangsläufig aus einem Interesse an Themen und Motiven?
(Wie wichtig ist Recherche? Und wann ist ein Gedicht abgeschlossen?)
(How do the themes of the poems influence your way of writing? Probably theme and style cannot be separated. Do your poems arise out of a conscious decision to write a certain poem? Or is the poem the necessary result of an interest in themes and motives? how important is research? And when is a poem complete?)
A8. It is getting harder to find themes. My interests are getting more specialised. As for finding ideas, it is never the same twice. I play around with lots of ideas and throw them away if they don’t work. An example of an idea that hit me recently was the Cologne Mani Codex, a third century copy of Mani’s autobiography, from Egypt, the only known copy. It is tiny, 3.5 cm by 4.5 cm, 23 lines per page, the letters are about 10 mm high. This was presumably to disguise the book, because the owner could have been arrested for owning it. Most antique literature was destroyed in this way, we have only strange fragments of it. The suggestion is that you put the book behind a convex glass jug of water and this acts as a lens so that you can read the script! The imagery of light is fundamental to Manicheanism, you can talk about looking at the light of a star which is where the souls go, the tiny star is like the book. Looking through the eye of water or through the lens of dark air. Then you could talk about the mass of destroyed works, burnt during witch panics in the Roman Empire when anything vaguely “occult” was feverishly found and burnt. I like the idea of something that doesn’t even look like writing until you apply the right optic. It was the religion of light, I would love to think of Manichaeans making advances in optics and lenses because they were persecuted. This poem will never get written, there are too many problems, starting with the difficulty of explaining to people what this miniature codex is. If you start talking about suppressed traditions it sounds like “The da Vinci Code” right away. The poem sounds like “Spectrum Flight” already. If you imagine consciousness as a series of frames, a long series, some frames show an interesting pattern and I grab those. It is like picking pebbles up on a beach. The ones I keep eventually develop into poems, or fragments of poems. So much else just washes past me and away, all the time.
We had snow here [Edenkoben] in December, and a few days later there were lizards running around. I was told the lizards sleep in dry-stone walls, and I was wondering how that works. If they aren’t insulated they will die of cold, but if they are so deeply hidden they can’t tell that there is sunlight outside and it is time to wake up. Their awareness is regulated by light. So I like the lizards. You can see that via “light” there is a link to the glass, the water and the Mani codex. So you could put these two images together. I think the reader would find it very hard to follow this analogy, the angle is too steep! So this is the job, to make analogical jumps that are easy enough to follow. I am thinking of the lizard’s soul going out to the stars, rotating for six months, and then coming back to it. Or, the codex is about the right size for a lizard to read. I can imagine a lizard hidden in a dry stone wall with a codex, following it letter by letter, and at the end of the book there is a message saying: sleepers awake! Or maybe the stars rotate because the lizard is reading the book with its calendar of instructions. So far, this poem is not going well!
If you have about thirty ideas in an early stage of development, some of them will go to a second stage and become poems. I copied a lot of files onto the laptop I brought to Germany and I have been looking at files of abandoned poems which I had forgotten about. Interesting to me! Anyway, most ideas are never going to reach the end of the line. The ones where a completely different idea arrives that merges with the first one but radically extends it are the ones which are going to survive. This is the “double exposure”.
I saw a short documentary film by Vera Chytilova about a gymnast where the theme was a trainer telling the gymnast what the routine was going to be and she said “I can’t do that!” By the end of the film it works, but I identified with her because every day when I look at the plan of the next poem I think “I can’t do that!” She warms up to “Bony Maroney” by Larry Williams, I remember that. Like, it’s a freezing cold gym but if we play some rock and roll maybe we will stop feeling so cold and we can face the problems. With “Precipice” it seemed impossible but by 2 am I was going great guns and improvising variations that made it more complicated.
Research is such a constant factor of my life that i don’t think about it. Yes, the poems are made of information and a great part of that information comes from research. The reason I find a pattern interesting is very often that I don’t understand it. Then I have to find out about it so that I can set it down in words and preserve the original impression.
Q9 Savage Survivals und The Imaginary in Geometry
“Savage Survivals” und “The Imaginary in Geometry” scheinen Zwillinge zu sein. “Geometry” scheint den Prozess von Weltvergewisserung in den Blick zu nehmen, also wie unsere Wahrnehmung der Welt (über Augen, Sehprotesen: Kamera, Bildgebende Verfahren) unser Bild der Welt beeinflusst. Ich habe das Gefühl, dieses Sehen in “Geometry” findet zwischen den Bildern statt, ist quasi schon das Bearbeiten der Sinneneindrücke zu Weltanschauung (Ideology). Du schreibst ein Gedicht über die Ents the ung von Identität (Precipice of Niches) ohne ein lyrisches Ich als Zentrum. Mit Identität meine ich ein Subjekt, aber eben auch der Planet schliesslich. Das scheint eine Art Kosmologie darzustellen, die vom kleinsten Teil zum größten Teil blickt. Savage Survivals dagegen macht den Eindruck, als wäre das übergeordnete Thema die Manipulation über die Sinne, als Propaganda oder Verschwörungstheorie...
( Savage Survivals und The Imaginary in Geometry seem to be twins. Geometry seems to take the process of discovering the world in view, so how our perception of the world (through eyes, artificial means of sight: camera, image-building processes) influences our image of the world. I have the feeling that this seeing in “Geometry” takes place between the pictures, is as if already the processing of sensory impressions into ideology. You write a poem about the origin of identity (“Precipice of Niches”) without a lyrical I as centre. This seems to represent a kind of cosmology, which looks from the smallest part to the largest. “Savage Survivals” in contrast gives the impression that the superordinate theme was manipulation via the senses, as propaganda or conspiracy theory.)
A9. You are right, the two books are twins and were written during the same period. A lot of the poems deal with the difference between the visible and the visual.
This brings us to the “superordinate theme”. I don’t think there is one! I think there is something more like a design principle, and that principle is variation. So if there are 120 pages of ‘Geometry’ the first rule is that they are all different. If I could quote “Coastal defences of the self”,
Show me the gaps in the profile, the teasing surges
peaks in the infra-red
Double attractors holding a perverse pattern steady
Oblique chatoyant signatures
parodies metaphrases thefts and mimicry
Masks hiding deeper intent
a kind of hole in the web
This is a description of where “style” reveals “underlying pattern” and the underlying pattern is complex and intermittent. In 120 pages the pattern does not repeat 120 times but maybe 3 times - it is a long pattern. I don’t want to reproduce copies of my personality like an apple tree producing apples.
‘Precipice’ might be about the origin of the self but is certainly about the origin of Difference. It shows a weak idea of the self, passive in the face of information. This is
soft as an eye and fresh as air
the droppy deity of sweet water
that falls everywhere
[...]
naked in flash floods
a niche fish that knows in flashes
that adopts the colour of the air
and recites the tale as told it
This ego is “soft as an eye”, not something rigid and dense. It is a “niche fish” and completely dependent on the niche, it “falls everywhere” and cannot climb, so the poem is about the niches not the self. The fourth part of the poem describes a culture rich in niches, so it is seeing human experience as dependent on the geometry of the culture it wakes up inside. This is like saying that there are 40 languages in Europe because of mountains and seas, so that the incredible cultural diversity is due to geology and humans just flow into it passively, like rain. Some cultures just have more interesting roles for people than others. The ego “recites the tale as told it”, i.e. if you grow up in Frisia you become a Frisian. You don’t go to live in Frisia because you have a Frisian personality. So... the design principle of ‘Geometry’ is to create 120 niches.
In ‘Savage’ I think the only two poems about manipulating reality while pretending to reproduce it are “Photographing the Ideal” and “Andy the German”. Conversely in ‘Geometry’ the whole sequence about documentary film has that subject.
Q10 Bei “Andy” wird unter anderem gezeigt, wie ein Spitzel sich in eine Miliz einschleicht und sie unterwandert. Der Maulwurf (Spitzel) heisst Andy. Ich glaube nicht, dass der Name ein Zufall ist. Die Vermutung liegt nah, dass Andy ein Selbstporträt des Autors ist und wir in der Figur etwas von Deinem Selbstverständnis als Dichter entdecken könnten. Willst Du Deinen Leser unterwandern und ihn manipulieren? Die Frage ist kokett, ich weiss. Aber es gibt noch andere Gedichte, die könnte man sagen “Propagandamethoden” [das ist nicht präzise] verwenden, Fälschungen der Geschichte, wie die veränderte Lebensgeschichte von Koroljow in “Martyrdom”. Wie kommt es zu diesen Fiktionen?
[[In “Andy” we see among other things how a police informant secretly joins a militia and infiltrates their command. The mole is called Andy. I don’t think the name is a coincidence. The guess seems likely that Andy is a self-portrait of the author and that we can discover something of your self-understanding as a poet in this figure. Do you want to infiltrate the reader and manipulate him? The question is coquettish, I know. But there are other poems which one could say (this is not precise) use propaganda methods, falsifications of history, like the altered life story of Koroljow in ‘Martyrdom’. How do you come by these fictions?
A10. I find this disturbing! I suppose that disinformation is designed to look like accurate information, it would be strange to make it look any other way. I am not spreading disinformation! What I write is based on an “invitation”, it is an invitation to enjoy the poem and to participate in the socialist movement, among other things. Naturally this resembles the kind of propaganda which invites people to identify with the rich and to distrust anything rebellious. Any propaganda is stuffed with people who look authentic and trustworthy.
If I say “the poor are many and the rich own shares in each other”, is that conspiracy theory?
I am not trying to “infiltrate” the reader. My poetry relies a lot on facts. If I tell people that Pfleumer invented recording tape by adapting a process he used for laying gold solution onto plastic for “gold tipped cigarettes”, that is simply a fact, I don’t want people to say “I don’t believe you”. The only way to be credible is to tell the truth.
The fiction whereby Koroljow dies in the camp and never gets the chance to realise his rocket design was simply to support the main point, about wrecking the Soviet economy by burying the talented in concentration camps. The story of him dying is untrue but it’s more compelling, the death rate in Magadan in the 1940s was 20% a year. Without that it sounds like I’m making propaganda for the Soviet system, which is impossible.
In the discussion at Edenkoben someone in the audience said what I was writing wasn’t “kritisch” because it wasn’t about testing and dissecting words. I was taken aback at that, but I think it’s probably true. Even “Anglophilia” is not just about documentary as manipulation but also about loyalty and the act of committing yourself to a community and to its myths and its films. I don’t like feeling alienated and dissociated, all my writing is about trying to leave that condition. So many poets write from inside the discourse of hated authority, they break the links, bring about dissociation, and regard that as victory. So the senses empty and the heart empties. I don’t think that’s enough.
“Andy the German” is a real person and he has read my poem.
Correct, the manipulation of data by something like CNN news is a technology and just as precise as other modern technologies. I think “information distortion” is a technology like other technologies. The media which promote the dominant world-view have got slicker every year for the past 40 years. The citizens haven’t got more critical at the same rate. It used to be easy to show up propaganda and feel very intelligent. That was a whole era, it has gone now. The “skin of the system” has just become much more illusory, much more integrated. It is super-real, more than real. Poets really need to work to win their point.
Q11 ARBEIT oder Handwerk
Als wir uns unterhielten, sprachst Du an einer Stelle vom Gewissen des Autors. Ich hatte das Gefühl, Du vers the st das Schreiben von Gedichten als Handwerk, durchaus im traditionellen Sinn einer Tätigkeit mit ethischen Implikationen. Sennett hat den Handwerker (Craftsman) beschrieben als jemanden, der seine Tätigkeit mit einem Bewusstsein ausübt. Im Gegensatz zu Arbeitern in Industriebetrieben oder Büroangestellten. Die Idee dahinter scheint nicht nur die zu sein, etwas um seiner selbst Willen gut machen zu wollen, sondern auch mit der Arbeit eine gesellschaftliche Funktion zu erfüllen, die über das einfache Erledigen von Handgriffen hinausgeht. Wie verstehst Du das Handwerk des Dichtens?
(In Prynnes Vortrag zu den Maximus-Poems von Olson habe ich ein wundervolles Hölderlin-Zitat entdeckt, das nur am Rande: “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch lebet der Mensch auf dieser Erden”)
(Work or handicraft. When we were talking, you spoke at one point about your conscience as an author. I had the feeling that you understand the writing of poems as a craft thoroughly in the traditional sense of an activity with ethical implications. Sennett described the craftsman as someone who carries out his task conscientiously. In contrast to people working in industrial firms or office workers. The idea behind it seems to be not just wanting to do something for its own sake, but also to fulfil a social function with the work, which goes beyond simply going through the required motions. How do you understand the craft of writing? [[In Prynne’s lecture on Olson’s Maximus Poems I have discovered a wonderful Hölderlin quote, this by the way: “ “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch lebet der Mensch auf dieser Erden”)
A11. I am not convinced about this craftsman legend. It is saying that work in an office or a factory is automatically alienated. Also that poets have access to real consciousness and 30 million other people in the workforce don’t! I am not sure how housework and childcare fit into this model. We talked about “Arts and Crafts” earlier on.
There is something important about the way the poem is written, and it was expressed in an essay by Christopher Middleton called ‘The Viking Prow’, where he describes how a piece of Scandinavian wood carving has the physical properties of being a concrete object and simultaneously has all that artistic energy wreathed around it. The idea is “present” because the concrete object grasps it, traps it. It can’t drift away. A poem is also an object because it has so much work put into it. It is important that it be finely wrought, and this is a direct showing of the poet’s consciousness, not the same as description of personal experiences.
Another thing important to me is the tradition of gift poems in Irish and Welsh. Thus you have a very ornate object, and a very ornate poem describing how beautiful it is. The poem is also an object, and can be exchanged as a gift, and bestows status on giver and receiver. I do feel connected to this, but the objects I describe are rarely aristocratic status objects, are mostly products of high technology.
I just assume that people trust me, maybe some features of the poem are there to arouse trust. I am interested by how people regard proof in poems. A poem has to be a proof of itself, it is designed to pass tests. But people seem to have very different views of what constitutes convincing proof. For example if someone says “I write Wispy Pastoral Poetry and therefore what I say must be true” I don’t find that persuasive.
Conscience would apply to something like ‘Surveillance and Compliance’. It is based on an “autobiographical complex” around 1986, then I finished the book in 1991 or 92. There were big problems with it. I came back and rewrote it quite extensively in 2000, and printed that one. So the book took 14 years. I just wasn’t satisfied. Autobiography is resistant to brilliant design ideas. ‘Geometry’ and ‘Savage Survivals’ are non-autobiographical, that was probably a response to the problems I’d had.
My understanding of poetry is not very modern. It relies on emotion, personal experience, identification, personal symbolism, moments of insight. “Process” plays almost no role in it. The key decisions are intuitive. A lot of people see unwritten poems as being about 10 lines long, I see them as being about 80 lines long. It’s as if I had a hundred blank canvases made up, all super size. I know the poems are going to be that length. Don’t ask me why it’s like that. I set out to write short poems once at least, ‘Spectrum Flight’ came out of that. I think it was “10 poems 14 words long”, or maybe 14 poems ten words long.
[note. Norbert was asking me questions so that he could introduce my work at a reading in Edenkoben, in the Palatinate. So I don't think this was published anywhere. The information may also have been useful to him in editing one or more anthologies of British poetry in German magazines. I think he started with Olson and then got to Prynne.)
I want to say first that one of very few books I have here is one in Old Irish called ‘Acallamh na senorach’, a 12th century work whose title means ‘Dialogue of the Elders’. But in modern Gaelic the word for ‘interview’ is also ‘acallamh’.
INTERVIEW ANSWERS
Q1 [compare German and British scene] How would you compare british and german poetry? I guess the groups and differences are in each country manifold. But I believe there are links in between? Perhaps a Strömung./ undercurrent, in both mainstream and what used to be called “experimentell”?
A1. The basic factor is the large number of poets writing and the diversity of the scene. This limits the scope of any generalisations. We are on a sort of beach which has hundreds of niches. This landscape is very new and its rules are perhaps unclear. For example, do you start by saying “I will avoid all the occupied niches and find an unoccupied one”? I think the poets who are successful follow this rule and the poets who don’t get anywhere don’t accept it. This is the ‘Grenzsituation’ which Paul Tillich described.
There are many more prizes and stipends in Germany, I think. Poets have to give a lot of effort to the decisions and the laudationes. I think this is a binding factor, as the older generation have to commit themselves to help the younger generation. This makes the scene healthier. In England there is less coherence, it is more common for the established poets to say “everyone younger than me is unimportant” and for young poets to be in a state of revolt which damages the way they use language. Actually English cultural managers believe in the power of the market and think connoisseurship is out of date.
I think both English and German literary cultures went through a terrific wave of americanisation, and people thought “USA = modernity”. This led to quite a lot of bad poetry, I think. Perhaps the day when you start to be a poet is the one where you wake up and realise “I can’t be American, I am a European. Tomorrow I will still be a European.” Yes, and Elvis is dead.
I don’t want to talk about the opposition between ‘experimentell’ and ‘mainstream’ (or ‘conservative’). I realised recently that I didn’t want to read in front of an audience which wasn’t already committed to the experimental wing. I couldn’t face an unselected audience because I was afraid that they first wouldn’t know what I was talking about and next would attack the stage. I feel very bad about this. So I know there are deep splits in the poetry scene but I also want them to go away and my hope is that the new generation is living in a completely different cultural landscape. There was for a long time a tier of very authoritarian conservatives in the English poetry scene who were grimly against anything at all modern. I don’t know the German scene well but I think that anthologies like Jahrbuch der Lyrik or Das Verlorene Alphabet, which cover the whole range of poetry, would be impossible in Britain, where the different fractions deny each other any legitimacy.
Q2 [Thomas Kling] You did translations of Kling poems for instance. And in his and in your poems anthropology seems to be very important. You two started in the 80s, in the punk milieu, as well.
A2. Thomas Kling was an incredibly gifted poet and this is why his poetry is so important to me. There is also another factor, that I identified with his work, there was that fundamental “Ich bin du” experience. I found it very easy to read his poetry. Of course identification is irrational, but there were objective similarities, we were born within a few months of each other and had listened to punk rock very intensively in the middle 70s.
I also had a very bad experience beside Thomas. When he read in Cambridge in about 2000 Thomas read his poems with that very musical and beautiful delivery of his, with that very precise ear trained by years in Catholic church choirs. I felt very stupid reading the translations and producing no tunes at all. Later Marjorie Welish, a big-scale American poet, asked me about the musical aspect. It was a terrible moment. Finally I would like Marjorie Welish to ask me about my poetry and not about why I delivered Thomas’ poems without the melody and the tempo changes! It just goes to show you should always rehearse. But we were too busy talking in the pub.
To be honest, I hadn’t noticed that Thomas was interested in anthropology. For me it has always been a factor, although there are so many reasons why that I can’t explain it. The rock band CAN made some recordings called ‘ethnographical forgery series’, which were their attempts to imitate the music issued on record by the Smithsonian Institute, and I loved that phrase, but when I heard it I was already doing ‘ethnographical forgeries’. When I was living in Germany in 1975 I heard a lot of Turkish music, it came in through the window, the other people in the house were Turks. I was fascinated and I tried to write a poem about it. There are many versions and in the end I spent ten years writing that poem. Later a friend told me that this type of Turkish music is called ‘arabesk’. The Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire got hold of recordings of Arabian music made in Jerusalem market. The music is quite similar to Turkish ‘arabesk’. They made a record called ‘Three Mantras’ where they played back these arabesque tapes and laid their own music directly on top of it. I loved that record, there was no ‘line’, the centre was everywhere. This influenced the way I wrote a lot. Superimposition, the background becoming the foreground, multiple themes, interference.
Q3 You mentioned superimposition. And I guess that combines different aspects of your work. Perhaps the german word would be “Doppelbelichtung”, one of Kling’s terms for his handling of material. (double exposure) Why is superimposition important? Is it a means of converse between different fields? A way to make different discourses communicate/contradict (sort of autopoetic)?
A3. I agree that ‘Doppelbelichtungen’ is the right word.
The decision to mix different data sources together was so basic that I can’t remember taking it. It was more like, one day I had piles of poems in my room and a lot of them used ‘superimposition’. Quite likely one source was a sense of contradictions within society. Part of ‘youth culture’ in the 1970s was a deep detachment from the business-based society that was in charge, a feeling that it had a diminished reality. We were looking thirty years into the future and investment managers were looking one year into the future. I worked in a factory from 1978 to 1987 and the contrast between that corporate and technical discipline and hanging out in the London rock/radical scene at weekends was a double life. So the superimpositions reflect a daily reality and also a sense of being part of another story at the same time. But there were lots of reasons and the impact of records based on montage and ‘documentary sound’ like Cabaret Voltaire was probably one of them.
If you look at poems like ‘Three Graves’ and ‘ Precipice of Niches’ the division between the different parts is clearer, they follow an ABC structure. In ‘Three Graves’ you have three monuments, roughly in the same geographical space, all as symbols of tyranny; first a Scythian ‘royal grave’ with sacrificed horses and so on, then one of the Nazi monuments at Kutno in the Ukraine, then the concrete sarcophagus around the reactor at Chernobyl. In ‘Precipice of Niches’ you have four examples of a ‘honeycomb of niches’, starting with an ego as ‘data fish’, then a reef which is very irregular and rich in fish, then a sort of ‘ballistic niche’, a set of circumstances which allowed some dust to move away from the sun and coagulate into a planet, then a partially imaginary culture which has many niches. But the end of the poem starts to mix them all together. The superimpositions are more about two structures interfering with each other, without the separation which that ABC structure enforces.
In ‘Weapons Form with Music’ I started out from a translation of a Chinese outlaw novel, ‘The Water Margin’, into Scots, being the longest book ever written in Scots. I was paying a tribute to the translator, Brian Holton, and to Scotland, so I wrote a series of 19 poems in which the mediaeval Chinese outlaws were in Scotland and doing things that Scottish outlaws do. This seemed logical enough to me, but Kent Johnson reviewing it for Chicago Review didn’t get it at all. This is a ‘Doppelbelichtung’.
**
Q. The first five lines...remind me of kennings, correct?
Definitely, I had to read some Old Norse skaldic poetry as part of my degree course and I was very taken with the kennings.
**
Addendum
I have just realised where the ‘superimposition’ idea came from. It was David Jones, author of ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata’, who I was involved with very intensively in 1973 and 1974, right at the beginning. ‘The Anathemata’ (1952) uses a superimposition style all the way through. This is what set me on that path, but I had forgotten it.
Q4: The anthropology we talked about... I think it is reflected in the way you build the sentences in your poems. They suggest a kind of grand metaphor which is made up by a combination of attributes (assemblage perhaps?). In one of the epigraphs in Savage Survivals you quote from Notes and Queries on Anthropology: “Are there signs used as an accompaniment to spoken language? Are they used in hunting, war, bargaining?”
A4. The “Notes and Queries” quote is a list of questions which field anthropologists are recommended to ask as part of “describing” a tribal society. I loved the passage in itself, but the subtext is also that writers of today, including me, have to struggle to understand how people behave. The background is about anthropology and sociology, together, offering a way of knowledge, and about the (English) writers of mid-century having a fluent set of writing practices which sounded real but which now sound completely artificial, like so many cheap melodies. Sociology dissolved this comforting and proprietary knowledge. Reality drained out of those books, they lost substance. I have a personal memory of the 1960s relating to a college, in my home town, being “upgraded” into a university. The sociologists at the college helped with the planning, they laid out student halls of residence so that students would meet each other when going to the washing machines, and so on. Meet 3.6 people per week, or whatever. (My parents described this to me.) This was 1966, and people believed in a New Society and thought that sociologists understood the rules of society. This connected with sociology replacing the “knowledge that writers have”, and maybe giving writers a new “knowledge commodity”. But sociology hit a big crisis, probably in the mid 1970s. Sociologists couldn’t make theory and facts fit together, and withdrew into a phase of rebuilding theory, which is still continuing. The failure of a “planned society” also had a bearing on this. The “list of questions” is also saying that I don’t understand society in Britain, but maybe I do own a list of questions.
A key line in the book (Imaginary in Geometry) for me is “what is social structure?”. The answer is something like “society has no structure but writers need to believe it does so that they can recover this structure and present it as organised knowledge and as property.” States and corporations are machines that run on rigidity and foreknowledge, they create small islands of predictability so that their programs can run. But these islands dissolve very quickly back into the vapour of human freedom. Writers didn’t really win the romance with sociology and don’t know how society works. I think writers can’t answer the big questions that people have.
The “assemblage” is important for me. In “Wonders of Classification” you have a description of a collection of objects owned by a “medicine man” among the Inuit, and another found in a box in a Bronze Age female burial in Denmark. In the poem, this box is a forerunner of the “cabinet of curiosities”, and the theme is “the history of collections”. The box contained “some weasel bones, the claw joint of a cat, possibly a lynx, [...] a piece less than 1/2” long of a bird’s windpipe”, many other things. This is an “assemblage” as archaeologists use the term. We can also think of a book of poems as a collection of objects before acquiring words. We can think of the poet assembling objects and then manipulating them following a scenario and then using words to describe the result. This work on objects is vital. The box is a wordless poem. “From far and wide to close and tight/ objects glowing with virtue,/ fatally uttered/ in the classic and enclosing pattern,/ the populated stanza.”
These are “signed objects”, they are incomplete without the story signing them. I guess that the lynx claws are to climb the glass mountains on the way to the land of death, and the bird’s windpipe is to give the dead woman a voice to speak to spirits with. This assemblage seemed to me to lead on to some Germanic poetry, with heroes being frequently described as having the virtues of various beasts. It seemed inherently significant, the objects charged each other up, formed parallels and sets. That significance is not known to us.
I am not sure this poem belongs with many others of mine. Actually the lists of bones, claws, etc. sound like a poem by Maggie O’Sullivan and this may be a tribute to her.
Human beings deal with a storm of objects. The “classification system” of a society may be something essential to identifying it as a society. It would underpin language but could also apply to visual representations. Collections had to be organised, and by the time you have a museum with a million objects it is a way of showing what the classification system is, sets of analogies and contrasts that can be seen as a solid equivalent of the language. Society also classifies humans, and the way society classifies you could be an important part of what you are. The poem mentions “a hardened paradox”: the cabinets contained “wonders”, objects that broke the knowledge system, and individuals may feel themselves as evading official knowledge.
Q5: Deine Gedichte und Gedichsequenzen streifen zugleich verschiedene Zeitpunkte der Geschichte. Es wirkt, als würde das Zitat eines historischen Moments den Punkt in einer argumentativen Kette darstellen. “Three Graves” beispielsweise streift die Jahre 500BC, 1942 und 1986. Viele andere Deiner Gedichte beschäftigen sich mit der Russischen Revolution. (Your poems and poem sequencnes touch simultaneously on differnet moments in history. The effect is as the quottaion of a historic moment is being a point in a chain of argument. ‘Three Graves’ for instance touches on the years 500 BC, 1942 and 1986. Many others of your poems deal with the Russian Revolution.
A5. Lenin murdered three million people. A low estimate. The role of western Marxists up till now has been to take these three million people and explain that they were very very bad people, and it really doesn’t matter if you killed them, because they were such Bad People and Lenin was soooo intelligent. So you bury them and then carve lies on their grave-stones.
In 1954, my mother was in hospital, waiting to give birth to my brother, and she received a letter from the War Office. She thought it was her call-up papers to go and fight in Korea. It wasn’t that. This is just to say that I was born in the middle of the Cold War, it was everywhere. Every science fiction story of the 50s and 60s replays the Cold War in outer space. We were a programmed generation. There is some moment in Bourdieu where he says that sociology in the 1950s was stretched between the two poles of Soviet and American ideas, thus mirroring the strategic situation in the Cold War. Talcott Parsons or Marx. This moment already foreshadows a realisation that there could be a European sociology and that understanding Europe might depend on not being American or Soviet. So this is the 50s, we are being spoon-fed ideology. A key moment of late adolescence for people my age was dropping out of the Cold War. Becoming a lump of non-aligned curiosity. This often meant becoming either very pro-Russian or very pro-American, which wasn’t especially free.
Apart from “deprogramming” every day, the ‘underground’ British poetry had a lot to do with a sector of sentiment that had a lot to do with the exit of members from the British Communist Party after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. This section was called “the New Left”. A lot of people inside it knew each other. This was the poetry village I turned up in in 1976 or 1978. I was always convinced that the association with dictatorship in Moscow would mean defeat. I didn’t believe in Marxism. References to Lenin and Trotsky are mainly there to make this clear and to win an internal argument. It was a domestic argument. For example with Ben Watson, who is a Trotskyite, from 1978 until now. It is about being in a pub with Ben and trying to put over to him that Trotsky wasn’t such a wonderful person. It is no good winning arguments in poetry. Losing them might be more interesting. The payload of real knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian people, “concrete living people who can be loved”, is almost nil. I feel bad about this.
I learnt Russian in evening classes around 1979-84 and then began to read Russian prose, mainly about the Soviet era. After I learnt more about Russia I realised my earlier ideas were very superficial. But other poems followed, like part 3 of ‘Three Graves’, which is about Chernobyl, and ‘Sergei Korolev’, which is about the space programme in the 50s.
I think poetry needs to have political idealism as its driving force. The vision of an island floating next to Britain in the Atlantic, where everyone is free. A horizon you can look up to from what is happening right in front of you. But this horizon is not Russia or the USA.
I was thinking recently about European poetry and the Second World War. You couldn’t find out from the poetry the dates of the war, the course of almost any battle, or who won. Poetry fundamentally does not narrate history, it is like arias from an opera with prose, somewhere else, that tells the story and sets up the characters. This usually works very well but I can see that if the reader doesn’t know about the Cold War, for example, the poetry loses its meaning. It is no good having a personal theory of history. You end up being like some sect based on a wrong reading of the Book of Revelations.
I was worried at some point that I was writing very critical poems about the society I lived in but never writing about the goal, the kind of society I wanted to live in. I did go on to write some poems about spontaneity and exit from the structures of power.
Ben Watson writes poems in a way that directly expresses his ideals. He writes them as “one-take improvisations”. This is literally freedom, spontaneity, exit from the structures. It is in the ‘Grenzsituation’.
I am interested in the gap between beliefs about the large scale of politics, such as the politics of the Soviet Union, and concrete, domestic practices. And in what happens in the gap. Maybe not in simple mirroring. I don’t think I have written anything useful about this. Somehow poetic style reflects political ideals.
Q7 In einen Interview hast Du einmal gesagt, “History is the real theme of poetry”. In deinen Gedichten gibt es scheint sie in vielen Formen aufzutauchen: Da sind die Gedichte mit direktem historischen Bezug im Sujet, wie Three Graves oder das Gedicht über Koroljow. Aber auch in Gedichten, die auf den ersten Blick ein anderes Thema verfolgen, scheint Geschichte auf, etwa im Gebrauch bestimmter Worte, die einen weiten kontextuellen Rahmen aufmachen. By Pound gibt es den Satz (ich vermute, er sprach über die Cantos) Poesie sei der Versuch die Geschichte des Stammes (history of the tribe) zu schreiben. Könnte man das auch über Deinen Schreibimpuls sagen? Wie vers the st Du Deine Beschäftigung mit Geschichte? (You said in an interview once “History is the real theme of poetry”. In your poems it seems to surface in many forms: there are the poems with a direct historical theme, like ‘Three Graves’ or the poem about Koroljow. But also in poems which seem to follow a different theme at first sight, history is glimpsed, for example in the use of particular words which open a broad contextual framework. In Pound there is the saying (I presume he was talking about the Cantos), poetry is the attempt to write the history of the tribe. Could one say that about your impulse to write too? How do you understand your work with history?)
A7 Oh my God. This is an untrue statement so I am wondering if I ever made it. The probability is that I did and that I have to take responsibility for it. I can only support this as “a provocative statement made by a speaker in a poem who has a partial realisation of the truth”. Quite close to being simply untrue, but maybe there is a way out! The statement seems to disqualify all sorts of people who were undoubtedly real poets but did not write about History. As a challenge to a developing poet, this is interesting. Saying that “the real subject of poetry is politics” is probably more interesting. Does my poetry pass this test? well, most of it is purely personal, about relationships or states of mind, and definitely not “about history”.
The line is in a poem in “Threads of Iron”, not an interview.
My father was a historian. Of astronomy, most of the time - but also of alchemy. Naturally I identify with historians. In general I think I have been thinking about history all my adult life, I find that you can start to think about history from any local point, but the “poem explaining History” is something I never wrote. Lots of my poems are about individual moments in history. “Anglophilia, a romance of the docks” is about propaganda about England, but not “about English history”.
One thing I am against is private views of history. I wrote about Richard Aldington and his 1935 poem (‘Life Quest’) where he is standing by the Straits of Gibraltar and imagining the flow of ideas from Egypt to Britain in about 2000 BC, as narrated in a book about “diffusionism” by Grafton Elliot Smith. No one believes in diffusionism any more. So Aldington is seeing the pulse of history, except it’s imaginary. Elliot Smith wrote about any number of tangible objects which sustained his theory. So he holds an amulet in his hand, and sees a vast historical pattern shimmering across it. I really dislike this! I think this is like “The da Vinci Code”, a kind of illuministic knowledge flowing down history, for initiates. Quite similar is Kathleen Raine’s use of the Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, where she is effectively saying that “this mosque with its sacred geometry is beautiful and this is a proof that modern materialistic art is a failure”. It doesn’t prove anything! Similar again is the theory of history held by some of my contemporaries, whereby Pound held the Truth in his hands, and vouchsafed it to Olson, and Olson vouchsafed it to Mottram, and Mottram revealed it to his students, and only they know the Truth. To me this is illuministic and irrational. I can see the power of these ideas, I find Aldington’s poem very interesting, but history is a pattern with a meaning in every part, not just in one “golden thread”. The seeing of patterns can overthrow reason and turn into ideology.
Pound wanted poetry to be the history of the tribe. But he was an American, and Americans are made up of Amerindians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. We can include a few Samoans in there! So you can’t write a history of the “American tribe”. This idea seems inherently flawed.
In 1973 and 1974, I was most occupied with David Jones. He did write a “poem about history”, The Anathemata. Jones was insistent on finding physical details for every scene he described, he was a painter and always wanted visual information to feed his imagination. So then, as a teenager, I was fantasizing about my future poems. As The Anathemata Part II, roughly! If I had written an epic poem, it would have been a poem about technical progress. These ideas were simply grandiose. I suppose the interest in concrete facts and technology helped me to reach something I could actually write. If we jump to about 2001, I write “A Materials Code for Jerusalem”, which is about C.R. Ashbee as town planner for Jerusalem, under British administration under a League of Nations mandate. The point of the poem is that he was redesigning Jerusalem to look more beautiful but couldn’t do anything about the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, so it was a picture with people left out. So this is your “poem about a moment in history”, and it is full of details, which I got from a book about Ashbee. And this is typical of my methods, I get books about some topic and use details from them to furnish the poem. This also raises the question of what the sources are- I am always capturing sources. Ashbee was an Arts and Crafts man, he believed that machine production was corrupting and that handicraft was virtuous. This belief in objects and craft skills is close to Jones, who was an Arts and Crafts man too. Now, there is some analogy between this belief in the “virtuous object” and a belief in style in poetry, that the way a poem is written expresses the real person and also embodies virtue. A poem would seem to be “low technology”. So maybe this Arts and Crafts thing, a lost phase of the British Left, is still influencing poetry.
Lots of my poems are about technology and I guess they are fragments of the large-scale poem about progress which I dreamed of at 17. “Les Paul’s Garage Studio” comes from a book I read about the history of the recording industry. Pfleumer invented a way of laying gold leaf on plastic to be the mouthpieces of “gold cigarettes”, a fashion of the time. They “never left a leaf of Pharaoh’s smile” because of the gold mask of Tutunkhamun, which made gold fashionable. Then he used the same laying technique to invent recording tape. Thirty years later, Les Paul took the “erase head” off a tape recorder and invented double tracking. So the poem probably comes from two particular pages of a book about technology. If we have one German and one American, that probably suggests that the history of technology excludes nationalism, from the outset.
Q8 Schreiben
Wie beeinflussen die Themen der Gedichte Deine Art des Schreibens? Wahrscheinlich lässt sich Thema und Stil nicht trennen. Ents the en Deine Gedichte aus einer bewussten Entscheidung heraus, ein bestimmtes Gedicht zu schreiben? Oder ergibt sich das Gedicht zwangsläufig aus einem Interesse an Themen und Motiven?
(Wie wichtig ist Recherche? Und wann ist ein Gedicht abgeschlossen?)
(How do the themes of the poems influence your way of writing? Probably theme and style cannot be separated. Do your poems arise out of a conscious decision to write a certain poem? Or is the poem the necessary result of an interest in themes and motives? how important is research? And when is a poem complete?)
A8. It is getting harder to find themes. My interests are getting more specialised. As for finding ideas, it is never the same twice. I play around with lots of ideas and throw them away if they don’t work. An example of an idea that hit me recently was the Cologne Mani Codex, a third century copy of Mani’s autobiography, from Egypt, the only known copy. It is tiny, 3.5 cm by 4.5 cm, 23 lines per page, the letters are about 10 mm high. This was presumably to disguise the book, because the owner could have been arrested for owning it. Most antique literature was destroyed in this way, we have only strange fragments of it. The suggestion is that you put the book behind a convex glass jug of water and this acts as a lens so that you can read the script! The imagery of light is fundamental to Manicheanism, you can talk about looking at the light of a star which is where the souls go, the tiny star is like the book. Looking through the eye of water or through the lens of dark air. Then you could talk about the mass of destroyed works, burnt during witch panics in the Roman Empire when anything vaguely “occult” was feverishly found and burnt. I like the idea of something that doesn’t even look like writing until you apply the right optic. It was the religion of light, I would love to think of Manichaeans making advances in optics and lenses because they were persecuted. This poem will never get written, there are too many problems, starting with the difficulty of explaining to people what this miniature codex is. If you start talking about suppressed traditions it sounds like “The da Vinci Code” right away. The poem sounds like “Spectrum Flight” already. If you imagine consciousness as a series of frames, a long series, some frames show an interesting pattern and I grab those. It is like picking pebbles up on a beach. The ones I keep eventually develop into poems, or fragments of poems. So much else just washes past me and away, all the time.
We had snow here [Edenkoben] in December, and a few days later there were lizards running around. I was told the lizards sleep in dry-stone walls, and I was wondering how that works. If they aren’t insulated they will die of cold, but if they are so deeply hidden they can’t tell that there is sunlight outside and it is time to wake up. Their awareness is regulated by light. So I like the lizards. You can see that via “light” there is a link to the glass, the water and the Mani codex. So you could put these two images together. I think the reader would find it very hard to follow this analogy, the angle is too steep! So this is the job, to make analogical jumps that are easy enough to follow. I am thinking of the lizard’s soul going out to the stars, rotating for six months, and then coming back to it. Or, the codex is about the right size for a lizard to read. I can imagine a lizard hidden in a dry stone wall with a codex, following it letter by letter, and at the end of the book there is a message saying: sleepers awake! Or maybe the stars rotate because the lizard is reading the book with its calendar of instructions. So far, this poem is not going well!
If you have about thirty ideas in an early stage of development, some of them will go to a second stage and become poems. I copied a lot of files onto the laptop I brought to Germany and I have been looking at files of abandoned poems which I had forgotten about. Interesting to me! Anyway, most ideas are never going to reach the end of the line. The ones where a completely different idea arrives that merges with the first one but radically extends it are the ones which are going to survive. This is the “double exposure”.
I saw a short documentary film by Vera Chytilova about a gymnast where the theme was a trainer telling the gymnast what the routine was going to be and she said “I can’t do that!” By the end of the film it works, but I identified with her because every day when I look at the plan of the next poem I think “I can’t do that!” She warms up to “Bony Maroney” by Larry Williams, I remember that. Like, it’s a freezing cold gym but if we play some rock and roll maybe we will stop feeling so cold and we can face the problems. With “Precipice” it seemed impossible but by 2 am I was going great guns and improvising variations that made it more complicated.
Research is such a constant factor of my life that i don’t think about it. Yes, the poems are made of information and a great part of that information comes from research. The reason I find a pattern interesting is very often that I don’t understand it. Then I have to find out about it so that I can set it down in words and preserve the original impression.
Q9 Savage Survivals und The Imaginary in Geometry
“Savage Survivals” und “The Imaginary in Geometry” scheinen Zwillinge zu sein. “Geometry” scheint den Prozess von Weltvergewisserung in den Blick zu nehmen, also wie unsere Wahrnehmung der Welt (über Augen, Sehprotesen: Kamera, Bildgebende Verfahren) unser Bild der Welt beeinflusst. Ich habe das Gefühl, dieses Sehen in “Geometry” findet zwischen den Bildern statt, ist quasi schon das Bearbeiten der Sinneneindrücke zu Weltanschauung (Ideology). Du schreibst ein Gedicht über die Ents the ung von Identität (Precipice of Niches) ohne ein lyrisches Ich als Zentrum. Mit Identität meine ich ein Subjekt, aber eben auch der Planet schliesslich. Das scheint eine Art Kosmologie darzustellen, die vom kleinsten Teil zum größten Teil blickt. Savage Survivals dagegen macht den Eindruck, als wäre das übergeordnete Thema die Manipulation über die Sinne, als Propaganda oder Verschwörungstheorie...
( Savage Survivals und The Imaginary in Geometry seem to be twins. Geometry seems to take the process of discovering the world in view, so how our perception of the world (through eyes, artificial means of sight: camera, image-building processes) influences our image of the world. I have the feeling that this seeing in “Geometry” takes place between the pictures, is as if already the processing of sensory impressions into ideology. You write a poem about the origin of identity (“Precipice of Niches”) without a lyrical I as centre. This seems to represent a kind of cosmology, which looks from the smallest part to the largest. “Savage Survivals” in contrast gives the impression that the superordinate theme was manipulation via the senses, as propaganda or conspiracy theory.)
A9. You are right, the two books are twins and were written during the same period. A lot of the poems deal with the difference between the visible and the visual.
This brings us to the “superordinate theme”. I don’t think there is one! I think there is something more like a design principle, and that principle is variation. So if there are 120 pages of ‘Geometry’ the first rule is that they are all different. If I could quote “Coastal defences of the self”,
Show me the gaps in the profile, the teasing surges
peaks in the infra-red
Double attractors holding a perverse pattern steady
Oblique chatoyant signatures
parodies metaphrases thefts and mimicry
Masks hiding deeper intent
a kind of hole in the web
This is a description of where “style” reveals “underlying pattern” and the underlying pattern is complex and intermittent. In 120 pages the pattern does not repeat 120 times but maybe 3 times - it is a long pattern. I don’t want to reproduce copies of my personality like an apple tree producing apples.
‘Precipice’ might be about the origin of the self but is certainly about the origin of Difference. It shows a weak idea of the self, passive in the face of information. This is
soft as an eye and fresh as air
the droppy deity of sweet water
that falls everywhere
[...]
naked in flash floods
a niche fish that knows in flashes
that adopts the colour of the air
and recites the tale as told it
This ego is “soft as an eye”, not something rigid and dense. It is a “niche fish” and completely dependent on the niche, it “falls everywhere” and cannot climb, so the poem is about the niches not the self. The fourth part of the poem describes a culture rich in niches, so it is seeing human experience as dependent on the geometry of the culture it wakes up inside. This is like saying that there are 40 languages in Europe because of mountains and seas, so that the incredible cultural diversity is due to geology and humans just flow into it passively, like rain. Some cultures just have more interesting roles for people than others. The ego “recites the tale as told it”, i.e. if you grow up in Frisia you become a Frisian. You don’t go to live in Frisia because you have a Frisian personality. So... the design principle of ‘Geometry’ is to create 120 niches.
In ‘Savage’ I think the only two poems about manipulating reality while pretending to reproduce it are “Photographing the Ideal” and “Andy the German”. Conversely in ‘Geometry’ the whole sequence about documentary film has that subject.
Q10 Bei “Andy” wird unter anderem gezeigt, wie ein Spitzel sich in eine Miliz einschleicht und sie unterwandert. Der Maulwurf (Spitzel) heisst Andy. Ich glaube nicht, dass der Name ein Zufall ist. Die Vermutung liegt nah, dass Andy ein Selbstporträt des Autors ist und wir in der Figur etwas von Deinem Selbstverständnis als Dichter entdecken könnten. Willst Du Deinen Leser unterwandern und ihn manipulieren? Die Frage ist kokett, ich weiss. Aber es gibt noch andere Gedichte, die könnte man sagen “Propagandamethoden” [das ist nicht präzise] verwenden, Fälschungen der Geschichte, wie die veränderte Lebensgeschichte von Koroljow in “Martyrdom”. Wie kommt es zu diesen Fiktionen?
[[In “Andy” we see among other things how a police informant secretly joins a militia and infiltrates their command. The mole is called Andy. I don’t think the name is a coincidence. The guess seems likely that Andy is a self-portrait of the author and that we can discover something of your self-understanding as a poet in this figure. Do you want to infiltrate the reader and manipulate him? The question is coquettish, I know. But there are other poems which one could say (this is not precise) use propaganda methods, falsifications of history, like the altered life story of Koroljow in ‘Martyrdom’. How do you come by these fictions?
A10. I find this disturbing! I suppose that disinformation is designed to look like accurate information, it would be strange to make it look any other way. I am not spreading disinformation! What I write is based on an “invitation”, it is an invitation to enjoy the poem and to participate in the socialist movement, among other things. Naturally this resembles the kind of propaganda which invites people to identify with the rich and to distrust anything rebellious. Any propaganda is stuffed with people who look authentic and trustworthy.
If I say “the poor are many and the rich own shares in each other”, is that conspiracy theory?
I am not trying to “infiltrate” the reader. My poetry relies a lot on facts. If I tell people that Pfleumer invented recording tape by adapting a process he used for laying gold solution onto plastic for “gold tipped cigarettes”, that is simply a fact, I don’t want people to say “I don’t believe you”. The only way to be credible is to tell the truth.
The fiction whereby Koroljow dies in the camp and never gets the chance to realise his rocket design was simply to support the main point, about wrecking the Soviet economy by burying the talented in concentration camps. The story of him dying is untrue but it’s more compelling, the death rate in Magadan in the 1940s was 20% a year. Without that it sounds like I’m making propaganda for the Soviet system, which is impossible.
In the discussion at Edenkoben someone in the audience said what I was writing wasn’t “kritisch” because it wasn’t about testing and dissecting words. I was taken aback at that, but I think it’s probably true. Even “Anglophilia” is not just about documentary as manipulation but also about loyalty and the act of committing yourself to a community and to its myths and its films. I don’t like feeling alienated and dissociated, all my writing is about trying to leave that condition. So many poets write from inside the discourse of hated authority, they break the links, bring about dissociation, and regard that as victory. So the senses empty and the heart empties. I don’t think that’s enough.
“Andy the German” is a real person and he has read my poem.
Correct, the manipulation of data by something like CNN news is a technology and just as precise as other modern technologies. I think “information distortion” is a technology like other technologies. The media which promote the dominant world-view have got slicker every year for the past 40 years. The citizens haven’t got more critical at the same rate. It used to be easy to show up propaganda and feel very intelligent. That was a whole era, it has gone now. The “skin of the system” has just become much more illusory, much more integrated. It is super-real, more than real. Poets really need to work to win their point.
Q11 ARBEIT oder Handwerk
Als wir uns unterhielten, sprachst Du an einer Stelle vom Gewissen des Autors. Ich hatte das Gefühl, Du vers the st das Schreiben von Gedichten als Handwerk, durchaus im traditionellen Sinn einer Tätigkeit mit ethischen Implikationen. Sennett hat den Handwerker (Craftsman) beschrieben als jemanden, der seine Tätigkeit mit einem Bewusstsein ausübt. Im Gegensatz zu Arbeitern in Industriebetrieben oder Büroangestellten. Die Idee dahinter scheint nicht nur die zu sein, etwas um seiner selbst Willen gut machen zu wollen, sondern auch mit der Arbeit eine gesellschaftliche Funktion zu erfüllen, die über das einfache Erledigen von Handgriffen hinausgeht. Wie verstehst Du das Handwerk des Dichtens?
(In Prynnes Vortrag zu den Maximus-Poems von Olson habe ich ein wundervolles Hölderlin-Zitat entdeckt, das nur am Rande: “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch lebet der Mensch auf dieser Erden”)
(Work or handicraft. When we were talking, you spoke at one point about your conscience as an author. I had the feeling that you understand the writing of poems as a craft thoroughly in the traditional sense of an activity with ethical implications. Sennett described the craftsman as someone who carries out his task conscientiously. In contrast to people working in industrial firms or office workers. The idea behind it seems to be not just wanting to do something for its own sake, but also to fulfil a social function with the work, which goes beyond simply going through the required motions. How do you understand the craft of writing? [[In Prynne’s lecture on Olson’s Maximus Poems I have discovered a wonderful Hölderlin quote, this by the way: “ “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch lebet der Mensch auf dieser Erden”)
A11. I am not convinced about this craftsman legend. It is saying that work in an office or a factory is automatically alienated. Also that poets have access to real consciousness and 30 million other people in the workforce don’t! I am not sure how housework and childcare fit into this model. We talked about “Arts and Crafts” earlier on.
There is something important about the way the poem is written, and it was expressed in an essay by Christopher Middleton called ‘The Viking Prow’, where he describes how a piece of Scandinavian wood carving has the physical properties of being a concrete object and simultaneously has all that artistic energy wreathed around it. The idea is “present” because the concrete object grasps it, traps it. It can’t drift away. A poem is also an object because it has so much work put into it. It is important that it be finely wrought, and this is a direct showing of the poet’s consciousness, not the same as description of personal experiences.
Another thing important to me is the tradition of gift poems in Irish and Welsh. Thus you have a very ornate object, and a very ornate poem describing how beautiful it is. The poem is also an object, and can be exchanged as a gift, and bestows status on giver and receiver. I do feel connected to this, but the objects I describe are rarely aristocratic status objects, are mostly products of high technology.
I just assume that people trust me, maybe some features of the poem are there to arouse trust. I am interested by how people regard proof in poems. A poem has to be a proof of itself, it is designed to pass tests. But people seem to have very different views of what constitutes convincing proof. For example if someone says “I write Wispy Pastoral Poetry and therefore what I say must be true” I don’t find that persuasive.
Conscience would apply to something like ‘Surveillance and Compliance’. It is based on an “autobiographical complex” around 1986, then I finished the book in 1991 or 92. There were big problems with it. I came back and rewrote it quite extensively in 2000, and printed that one. So the book took 14 years. I just wasn’t satisfied. Autobiography is resistant to brilliant design ideas. ‘Geometry’ and ‘Savage Survivals’ are non-autobiographical, that was probably a response to the problems I’d had.
My understanding of poetry is not very modern. It relies on emotion, personal experience, identification, personal symbolism, moments of insight. “Process” plays almost no role in it. The key decisions are intuitive. A lot of people see unwritten poems as being about 10 lines long, I see them as being about 80 lines long. It’s as if I had a hundred blank canvases made up, all super size. I know the poems are going to be that length. Don’t ask me why it’s like that. I set out to write short poems once at least, ‘Spectrum Flight’ came out of that. I think it was “10 poems 14 words long”, or maybe 14 poems ten words long.
[note. Norbert was asking me questions so that he could introduce my work at a reading in Edenkoben, in the Palatinate. So I don't think this was published anywhere. The information may also have been useful to him in editing one or more anthologies of British poetry in German magazines. I think he started with Olson and then got to Prynne.)
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