unused interview
Unprinted interview stuff
In about 2005 I did two really good interviews with Adam Fieled and with someone whose name I never gathered (for Signals magazine). Recently, I looked at the on-line versions and realised that there is material which got edited out. Space is free on a site like this, so I thought to use this material. For some reason I didn’t store the emails, so these replies are a bit fragmentary and I lost the questions.
Q2 (question was something like “why do you write such sad poems”)
I find this hard to explain. I once read an interview with a guy from Radiohead, the rock band, where he said that they'd been told they would never get anywhere playing sad songs on a concert stage, and he laughed because he knew they were wrong. I have a radio tape of Radiohead playing at the Reading Festival, some year, the singer announces "The Bends", this unbearably tense, howling, angst-drenched, song, and this huge cheer goes up. I knew that melancholic poems could make people happy, and I knew this when I was maybe 15 years old. It was one of my big realisations in life.
Another radio moment was someone talking about a melodic profile or phrase which goes through all mammal vocalisations, a curve which triggers off a shivering reaction, hair bushing, etc., and an impulse to rush together to keep warm. A sort of howl. The signal for cold is linked to social touching. To understand a sad poem, you have to look at the reactions of other people in the room, and at what happens next. If you trigger this reaction, it's very deep.
The decision to go with melancholic poetry, full of dread as you say, is divisive. It gets rid of most of the audience. I think this is much more the divider, with me, than being obscure or abstruse. But if you are drawn to it, the implicit knowledge which you share is wonderfully rich, and it creates a deep bond. I spent my childhood at a boarding school where most people disliked me, and I never thought I was going to achieve wide popularity; but I knew I had my audience waiting for me, and I didn't ever get distracted by wanting to write like JH Prynne, or like a pop poet, or something.
I made a slogan once, Strength Through Angst. I made a joke about this style, but I didn't want to give it up. My first poems which I kept were written when I was 20 - but the idea of writing in that way was there years before that. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to go on obeying the decisions of a 17-year old! Maybe it was a terrible mistake! Maybe I should have made beauty and happiness much more central. Maybe I should have focussed on writing about I love you, you love me. People like that too, I think.
I wrote four books which were consciously not about alienation, the cold, etc. For people who didn't like the other ones. Which were. I blame myself for using anxiety as a drug to jack people's intakes open and put them into acute states.
All the time you're supplying information, you're running down and being tracked down by monotony. A basic need is to preserve uncertainty in the text. If the poem is built around an I-figure, and that I-figure is affectively unstable, that builds in uncertainty. A lens fluctuating through a colour cycle. This high level of uncertainty is the engine that drives the poems - the pulse, the drum. The poet closest to me, in many ways, is Kelvin Corcoran, and his verse constantly has this high uncertainty. It's not melancholic, though. He reaches that dance of reversals in a completely different way. More critical and dialectic. I think other poets got into the observer as a variable through philosophy, for example phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty. I started writing poetry of high quality (my word) much earlier in life than a lot of people, and this is why the way I write is very subjective and not philosophical at all.
Alien Skies is about metabolism, again through reptiles. If you look at reptiles, which just close down when it's cold, you get a new view of depression as a setting of the metabolism, which governs perception. Mammals lose heat all the time, in a depleting way, but huddle together to keep warm, helped by sounds. This image may relate to The Drowned World, an early Ballard novel in which the earth goes back to Jurassic heat and people start acting like reptiles. This is your alien sky, with its coded light. I read this in 1969, so it's another example of living out very early object-choices.
** (Q3) (question was something like “why is British poetry torn by feuds and how do you deal with people not respecting each other”)
Where I come from, a feud means that you kill someone because they have the same surname as someone who once killed someone with the same surname as you. This not literally how poetry works. In order to find a new metaphor, we have first to ask what the reality is which 'feud' refers to. My impression is that the phenomena this refers to are very rare. They may be secret - people engaging in surges of hatred alone in their rooms. As for written accounts of them, I am not familiar with any. The closest I can get is some passing remarks made by Eric Mottram sprinkled in essays on something else.
Journalists find quarrels between poets make good copy. They also find it difficult to take an interest in the process of composition. This has led to biased coverage and possibly to the notion that poets spend their energy fighting with each other. Surely poets spend most of their time alone and most of the literary process is silent and internal.
Could I suggest a different metaphor. This is radiation into vast space. Poetry began to differentiate relentlessly in the 1960s. As the radiation went on and on, individuals moved out of sight of most other individuals. As a secondary phenomenon, they also formed small clusters - which did not blow apart. If, 30 years later, an individual reads a book from some other quadrant in this vast territory, they find it incomprehensible. This is not hostility, or vengeance. The arrival of the Internet has certainly increased the scatter by making it easier for people to streak out into the empty zone and to find specialised texts that extend their original strangeness.
Many editors have turned my poems down. Many readers have turned my published work down. Does this amount to a feud? can we not account for the same events in terms of pure aesthetics? furthermore: if I reject anything offered - not just a poem but a record by U2 or Perry Como, or a dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken - is this some act of teeth-baring aggression or simply the exercise of my freedom as a modern guy? if the first person story is not 'feuding', then perhaps the third person account should not be either. Luis Cernuda said that what people dislike most about you is the most significant thing about you. This whole area is too big, too central, to be excluded from thought by an effacing word like feud.
I have a dream of a stereo text where we are made aware of what Sean O'Brien thinks of Rob Holloway's poetry and opinions and then become aware of what Rob Holloway thinks of S O'Brien's poetry and opinions. And if we watch closely we can get a sense of what the diameter of the cultural field is. Now that's what I would call geography. We exist not only as subjects but also as objects of knowledge, and legitimately so. I own a certain something but there is a cultural reality, independent of my will, which exists outside me as if in the form of a space, within which my path evolves.
The word 'still' implies surprise that the balkanised situation is still there. I think this is a misreading of the visible history. I think radiation is growing day by day. There is a hangover of cultural managers who think: the poetry market is very small, it's hard to manage, consumer choice should be eliminated and the market unified so that it's cheap to administer. Managers speak as if a poet did not want to be remembered by the reader, and did not want to write distinctive poems; as if 14 poets did not intend to write in 14 distinctive ways. As if there were a central norm of style and feeling and poets write distinctively because they have broken it in a fit of rage.
There are biological (or generational) reasons why the inherited knowledge of the cultural field should be interrogated and dissipated. A new generation needs new and clear information, because the attitudes they will develop are quite different from the ones which obtained in 1975. A map of the cultural field is too precious to inherit – you have to develop your own.
I think there are cases of bad behaviour. I see books about poetry neatly writing off most of the spectrum. We need a code of ethics. Stupid generalisations can go beyond opinion to become an abuse.
In about 2005 I did two really good interviews with Adam Fieled and with someone whose name I never gathered (for Signals magazine). Recently, I looked at the on-line versions and realised that there is material which got edited out. Space is free on a site like this, so I thought to use this material. For some reason I didn’t store the emails, so these replies are a bit fragmentary and I lost the questions.
Q2 (question was something like “why do you write such sad poems”)
I find this hard to explain. I once read an interview with a guy from Radiohead, the rock band, where he said that they'd been told they would never get anywhere playing sad songs on a concert stage, and he laughed because he knew they were wrong. I have a radio tape of Radiohead playing at the Reading Festival, some year, the singer announces "The Bends", this unbearably tense, howling, angst-drenched, song, and this huge cheer goes up. I knew that melancholic poems could make people happy, and I knew this when I was maybe 15 years old. It was one of my big realisations in life.
Another radio moment was someone talking about a melodic profile or phrase which goes through all mammal vocalisations, a curve which triggers off a shivering reaction, hair bushing, etc., and an impulse to rush together to keep warm. A sort of howl. The signal for cold is linked to social touching. To understand a sad poem, you have to look at the reactions of other people in the room, and at what happens next. If you trigger this reaction, it's very deep.
The decision to go with melancholic poetry, full of dread as you say, is divisive. It gets rid of most of the audience. I think this is much more the divider, with me, than being obscure or abstruse. But if you are drawn to it, the implicit knowledge which you share is wonderfully rich, and it creates a deep bond. I spent my childhood at a boarding school where most people disliked me, and I never thought I was going to achieve wide popularity; but I knew I had my audience waiting for me, and I didn't ever get distracted by wanting to write like JH Prynne, or like a pop poet, or something.
I made a slogan once, Strength Through Angst. I made a joke about this style, but I didn't want to give it up. My first poems which I kept were written when I was 20 - but the idea of writing in that way was there years before that. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to go on obeying the decisions of a 17-year old! Maybe it was a terrible mistake! Maybe I should have made beauty and happiness much more central. Maybe I should have focussed on writing about I love you, you love me. People like that too, I think.
I wrote four books which were consciously not about alienation, the cold, etc. For people who didn't like the other ones. Which were. I blame myself for using anxiety as a drug to jack people's intakes open and put them into acute states.
All the time you're supplying information, you're running down and being tracked down by monotony. A basic need is to preserve uncertainty in the text. If the poem is built around an I-figure, and that I-figure is affectively unstable, that builds in uncertainty. A lens fluctuating through a colour cycle. This high level of uncertainty is the engine that drives the poems - the pulse, the drum. The poet closest to me, in many ways, is Kelvin Corcoran, and his verse constantly has this high uncertainty. It's not melancholic, though. He reaches that dance of reversals in a completely different way. More critical and dialectic. I think other poets got into the observer as a variable through philosophy, for example phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty. I started writing poetry of high quality (my word) much earlier in life than a lot of people, and this is why the way I write is very subjective and not philosophical at all.
Alien Skies is about metabolism, again through reptiles. If you look at reptiles, which just close down when it's cold, you get a new view of depression as a setting of the metabolism, which governs perception. Mammals lose heat all the time, in a depleting way, but huddle together to keep warm, helped by sounds. This image may relate to The Drowned World, an early Ballard novel in which the earth goes back to Jurassic heat and people start acting like reptiles. This is your alien sky, with its coded light. I read this in 1969, so it's another example of living out very early object-choices.
** (Q3) (question was something like “why is British poetry torn by feuds and how do you deal with people not respecting each other”)
Where I come from, a feud means that you kill someone because they have the same surname as someone who once killed someone with the same surname as you. This not literally how poetry works. In order to find a new metaphor, we have first to ask what the reality is which 'feud' refers to. My impression is that the phenomena this refers to are very rare. They may be secret - people engaging in surges of hatred alone in their rooms. As for written accounts of them, I am not familiar with any. The closest I can get is some passing remarks made by Eric Mottram sprinkled in essays on something else.
Journalists find quarrels between poets make good copy. They also find it difficult to take an interest in the process of composition. This has led to biased coverage and possibly to the notion that poets spend their energy fighting with each other. Surely poets spend most of their time alone and most of the literary process is silent and internal.
Could I suggest a different metaphor. This is radiation into vast space. Poetry began to differentiate relentlessly in the 1960s. As the radiation went on and on, individuals moved out of sight of most other individuals. As a secondary phenomenon, they also formed small clusters - which did not blow apart. If, 30 years later, an individual reads a book from some other quadrant in this vast territory, they find it incomprehensible. This is not hostility, or vengeance. The arrival of the Internet has certainly increased the scatter by making it easier for people to streak out into the empty zone and to find specialised texts that extend their original strangeness.
Many editors have turned my poems down. Many readers have turned my published work down. Does this amount to a feud? can we not account for the same events in terms of pure aesthetics? furthermore: if I reject anything offered - not just a poem but a record by U2 or Perry Como, or a dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken - is this some act of teeth-baring aggression or simply the exercise of my freedom as a modern guy? if the first person story is not 'feuding', then perhaps the third person account should not be either. Luis Cernuda said that what people dislike most about you is the most significant thing about you. This whole area is too big, too central, to be excluded from thought by an effacing word like feud.
I have a dream of a stereo text where we are made aware of what Sean O'Brien thinks of Rob Holloway's poetry and opinions and then become aware of what Rob Holloway thinks of S O'Brien's poetry and opinions. And if we watch closely we can get a sense of what the diameter of the cultural field is. Now that's what I would call geography. We exist not only as subjects but also as objects of knowledge, and legitimately so. I own a certain something but there is a cultural reality, independent of my will, which exists outside me as if in the form of a space, within which my path evolves.
The word 'still' implies surprise that the balkanised situation is still there. I think this is a misreading of the visible history. I think radiation is growing day by day. There is a hangover of cultural managers who think: the poetry market is very small, it's hard to manage, consumer choice should be eliminated and the market unified so that it's cheap to administer. Managers speak as if a poet did not want to be remembered by the reader, and did not want to write distinctive poems; as if 14 poets did not intend to write in 14 distinctive ways. As if there were a central norm of style and feeling and poets write distinctively because they have broken it in a fit of rage.
There are biological (or generational) reasons why the inherited knowledge of the cultural field should be interrogated and dissipated. A new generation needs new and clear information, because the attitudes they will develop are quite different from the ones which obtained in 1975. A map of the cultural field is too precious to inherit – you have to develop your own.
I think there are cases of bad behaviour. I see books about poetry neatly writing off most of the spectrum. We need a code of ethics. Stupid generalisations can go beyond opinion to become an abuse.
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