Interview

Alison Brackenbury talks to Paul Stevens

Paul Stevens: Alison, you’ve written: “I hope to persuade you that the Internet, maddening and muddling as it may be, does offer valuable new spaces for poets and their works.” (“The Muse and the Mouse”, PN Review  — http://www.pnreview.co.uk/ ). Has your view of the Internet changed since you wrote this? How important for poetry is the net?

Alison Brackenbury: The Internet has certainly become a more difficult beast in recent years, and it takes up valuable time to fend off viruses and fraud. But I have had a series of heartening examples to confirm that it can link poems with new (or lost) readers. Publication in your magazines has brought my work back to readers who commented they had not come across my poems for over twenty years. The deliberate “networking” of MySpace and Facebook provides “new spaces” my article did not dream of. Nor did I think of online tuition, which I now do occasionally, for excellent new writers, via The Poetry School, http://www.poetryschool.com.

I think the internet marks something of a division in the world of poetry, its writers and its readers. Poems by major living poets are certainly there — many illegally reproduced. But the poets themselves are curiously inactive. I cannot think of an Internet magazine, for example, which regularly includes work by Britain’s most successful poets. They appear still to be publishing in the major printed magazines, which aspiring writers find slow to reply and very difficult to penetrate.

The internet, on the other hand, is awash with magazines with a very quick response and publication time. It has popular workshops and forums. It has an international readership which is demonstrably different from that for books and printed magazines. All this seems to me to be operating as a lively, but separate world from the traditional hierarchies of print.

PS: How important for the Internet is poetry?

AB: It’s a good example of a subject whose enthusiastic followers use the Web to create their own sites and services. We can, I report proudly, quantify this. Google finds a hundred and fourteen million references to poetry (as opposed to three hundred and twenty nine million for football, and a million and a quarter for silverfish). So the answer is that poetry is far less important to the internet than football, but far more important than silverfish.

PS: What sort of presence do you have on the Internet? How does it affect your poetry?

AB: I try to make limited but permanent use of any outlet for poems. I have had a website for seven years, with a very good web editor, Helen Whitehead, who understands poems and HTML. We add a new poem every two months, and Helen springcleans the site once a year, updating all the dull but detailed sections. The site now has a blog, where I can add short essays, the odd mummers’ play etc, again at the magic interval of two months. It’s at www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk.

I also have MySpace pages, which have not turned me into the Arctic Monkeys, but are, I think, a good additional way to keep poems in circulation. I have separate pages for my cat and horse poems. It’s amazing how quickly my cat and old pony have picked up HTML; besides, they are far more photogenic than me. The main page, (with links to cat and cob) can be found at www.myspace.com/alisonbrackenbury . I’m also on Facebook, where other faces are most welcome to find me. I have not, however, mastered online Scrabble!

Computers do crop up in my poems as a subject, (usually linked to sleep deprivation; beware). I enjoyed experiments by other writers with interactive poetry, and Flash poems which flew across the screen, but I am not an innovative writer. I’ve always seen the Web as a medium for my existing messages.

Although writing can be an obsessive and blinkered business, I do have a sense of readers at the edge of my horizon. The Internet has made me more certain than there are readers out there, and less likely to think of them as editors or critics. It may have confirmed my confidence in the more accessible strand of my writing (which does not always meet the approval of academic reviewers).

PS: You write of being a “writer busily working in non-literary jobs, and therefore rarely in touch with other writers”. How do you work around this situation? Does this isolation have some benefits?

AB: I am not sure that I am always successful in overcoming my lack of time. I never feel I read enough, for example. I would also like more opportunities to meet other poets. But it suits me very well to live anonymously. My neighbours do not complain when they pop up in the TLS, and no one flatters me when I have an occasional success, or embarrasses me when I fail in some project. Readers also tell me that the sense of daily life, and regular, inescapable work, is one of the features of my poetry which they warm to.

PS: What sorts of things do you do in your job? How do they inform your poetry?

AB: It is, mainly, a manual job. I pretend to be an electro-plater, but in fact I only know how to wire and unwire and pack the components we rust proof. I try not to drop Rolls Royce tooling worth hundreds of pounds, or to put Worcester’s job in Gloucester’s box while talking to Tewkesbury’s driver about his life on a canal boat. I also wrestle with the accounts.

I do write directly about work every few years or so, and I think this produces some of my better poems, such as “Bookkeeping”, from the 1980s, or “Plus Allowances” from my new book. It may add to a general sense in my work of the materials and practical skills on which our lives depend.

PS: Writing of the Poetry Daily site on the internet, you remark that you find it useful as a link with American poetry, and go on to talk about “…the qualities I most admire about poetry from the USA: formal assurance, vivid respect for the details of daily life, including manual work, and a complete absence of the English anxiety about writing which takes in animals or wild landscape”. What are some of the American poems which appeal to you, apart from the one by Robert Wrigley that you cited?

AB: Poetry Daily (www.poems.com) has caused me to buy, and admire, books by Maxine Kumin, Jane Hirshfield, William Logan, Robert Pinsky and Joshua Mehigan, amongst others. I was particularly attracted by the subject matter of the first two, and the technical deftness of the other three. I’ve also been moved by countless poems on Poetry Daily, and completely failed to remember the names of their authors. The poem very easily becomes detached from the poet!

PS: In “The Muse and the Mouse” you comment favourably about the internet forum Sonnet Central. Are there any other sites, especially forums and workshops, that you’ve found enlightening? Have you participated in online public poetry workshops? Do you have any other mechanism for workshopping your own verse?

AB: I’ve just found the Glasgow Herald’s daily poetry blog, which has an appealing mixture of classic work, some lesser-known, such as Charlotte Mew, and new poems, such as work from the marvellous Edwin Morgan. These can be read at http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/poetryblog.

I also recommend the recordings of contemporary poets, regularly updated, which are run by Alex Pryce, a marvellously dynamic student at Leicester University. Poetcasting can be heard at http://www.poetcasting.co.uk/.

I have never had time to get involved in online workshops, although I know other writers who find it invaluable. I’ve had some very useful comments via the online magazine Snakeskin at http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~simmers/, both from its excellent editor, George Simmers, and from other contributors. I think my work would benefit from detailed scrutiny before it leaps into MSS. Maybe when I retire…

PS: I’m intrigued by your reference to “the English anxiety about writing which takes in animals or wild landscape” — can you please expand on this?

AB: I have found that some English reviewers seem to have a very urban standpoint, and are baffled that anyone should want to write, for example, about a woodpigeon. But readers do want to read about animals, as I can tell from the comments strangers have sent to me about the poems they enjoyed in Singing in the Dark.

I also find that some reviewers seem to assume at first that anyone writing about the countryside — especially horses — must be conservative or rich. To their credit, after reading my books carefully, I think they realize that I am anti-hunting and the impoverished owner of an elderly pony! England is deeply scarred by class, and horses, for example, can soon be seen as a symbol of privilege, although, confusingly, they are also owned by teenage girls who live in modest suburban roads.

Because I grew up in the country, mud and mallards seem to me to have almost the power of a language, and jostle in my mind with words and ideas acquired during my formal education. This is, I suspect, far less usual in England than in the USA, where a writer such as Robert Wrigley appears (from his work) to have grown up on a farm, and then become an academic, but still continues to live, for at least part of the year, amongst horses, wild woods and rattlesnakes.

I think there are some signs that English critical attitudes are changing. Charles Bainbridge recently reviewed Singing in the Dark for The Guardian, and was very positive about the horse poems. I also think that global warming may have shown that the countryside is not some quaint preserve of Georgian poetry, and that observation of birds or insects may give vital signs for our survival (or otherwise).

PS: In “The Muse and the Mouse” you refer to “writing with a strong local inspiration”. Is that how you see your own work? How important to your poetry is a sense of place?

AB: Yes, I think my work is deeply linked to place; although, in common with my farmworker ancestors, who “flitted” round Lincolnshire, I have known a series of places to which I have become attached in turn.

PS: You live in a different part of England from where you were raised: one example where this is expressed is in “Apple Country” from Breaking Ground, 1984. Is one place more important to you than another in forming your poetic landscape?

AB: I always found Lincolnshire a somewhat intractable subject. It’s a landscape ravaged by large-scale farming, with flat fields and magnificent skies. Strangely, I grew up in a house owned by my father’s employer, surrounded by a small wood. Riding has taken me, week after week, into a succession of Gloucestershire’s privately owned wooded landscapes. They have provided the buzzards, moles, etc who populate my work.

PS: To what extent do you see yourself as an English rather than a British poet?

AB: I think I have some of the stereotypical “English” qualities, such as reticence. But there’s no ethnic purity in England. My grandfather was of Welsh descent, as I’ve described in “Bloodlines”. Edward Thomas, who has been very influential in my generation, defined himself as “mainly Welsh”. “English” poetry, even when it appears most traditional, plays a mixed music.

PS: Another reference from “The Muse and the Mouse”: “those of us with our own specialities (moles, squirrels, lame horses)”. What do you see as your own specialities as a poet?

AB: I run through these every time I do a reading: love poems, horses, war, cats, travel (less frequent now), and VAT. I may have something of a monopoly on VAT.

PS: Obviously horses are very important to your poetic (and actual) world. Why do you think that is?

AB: I think humans have always needed people (the herdsmen and stockkeepers) who spent their lives, mainly alone, with animals. I’m descended from at least four generations of shepherds. My grandfather and uncle loved horses, which they used to pull their shepherding carts. I was occasionally allowed to ride them; they were little cobs, not unlike the ones I’ve owned. My father started work as a ploughboy. Horses were still being widely used on farms until the end of the Second World War, eight years before I was born. My father’s employer also had fields full of racehorses, so I grew up with a galaxy of horses around me.

Frustratingly, I couldn’t ride as a child, as my parents couldn’t afford riding lessons or ponies. So I was in my twenties, and living in a town, when I learned to ride (very badly). I never outgrew the mania, and I have owned at least one unaffordable horse for the last twenty-five years. The horses are my gateway to the countryside; I’ve even written the odd poem on their backs, such as “High Notes”, the poem about buzzards in Singing in the Dark. But my present pony, aged twenty-three, is definitely my last, so I will have to return to the ground and put on walking boots to find my subjects soon. The horses have provided other themes for my life and poems: their enthusiastic appetites, and the physical danger of their size and speed. That shows up in my bones, unfortunately, as well as in my poems.

PS: In your interview with Vicki Bertram in PN Review (PRN 132) you said that “…childhood is vital in choosing at least some of their subjects for [poets]”, but went on in your answer to concentrate on place rather than on other aspects of childhood. Can I persuade you now to expand on the issue of the influence of your childhood on your poetry?

AB: I think I’m too young to talk about childhood. I’ll reserve that until I’m eighty.

PS: How important to your poetry are concerns such as the old and the new, country and town, the impact of technology and pollution?

AB: These are all important. I grew up believing that, unless we had a nuclear war, which I hoped we could avoid, a civilization would continue where, for example, certain books of poetry would always be read. I now feel that we have damaged the climate and used up resources so recklessly that this kind of civilization might not survive; that our descendants might be huddled round campfires with scraps of song in their heads. I hope that I am wrong.

PS: Is it fair to say that the past and the extent of its interface with the present, and what we might call “speaking with the dead”, are topics to which you often return? “The House”, “Robert Brackenbury”, “Live”, “Dreams of Power” spring to mind.

There is only
the old magic, forced out in new ways

— “The House”

AB: Yes, when I was young, I sought out my favourite dead amongst my (imagined) ancestors. When you are older, of course, you have more recent deaths to deal with. Both my parents died recently. I think my next book will have poems which try to speak of this.

PS: You talk in the interview with Vicki Bertram about your preoccupation with “the sound of poetry”, and certainly the music of your verse makes a strong impression on readers. And music features strongly in the themes and imagery of your verse: Brahms in “Night Out” for example, “Yesterday Vivaldi visited me”, “After Beethoven”, “Xerxes, an opera”, Bricks and Ballads, Singing in the Dark. How would you articulate your engagement with the music of language, and beyond that with music generally?

AB: I don’t find it at all easy to write musically. English soon becomes a rough and rocking language. Just as iron tends to rust, English tries to break back to Anglo-Saxon. Music itself is, I find, completely absorbing; but perhaps less easy to carry in the head than a poem. I have a particular passion for English folk music, and its tough, unsentimental lyrics sung to the most melting of tunes.

PS: Do you think that your involvement with radio broadcasting has developed your manipulation of sound in your poems?

AB: I think it has made me more aware of what sounds well, when read aloud. It also leads me to write poems for possible broadcast (such as a recent set about the floods) which have space between them for broadcast prose or sound effects. They may not be quite as effective alone.

PS: Robert Graves wrote:

Though the poet ought to write as if his work were intended to be read aloud, in practice the reading aloud of a poem distracts attention from its subtler properties by emphasizing the more obvious ones. The outward ear is easily deceived. A beautiful voice can make magic even with bad or fraudulent poetry which the eye, as the most sophisticated organ of sense, would reject at once; for the eye is in close communication with the undeceivable inward ear (Observations on Poetry 1922-1925).

Philip Larkin said something similar in The Paris Review interview:

I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much — the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing there and their and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until It’s “performed”. It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that’s needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page. (Interview, http://www.parisreview.com/media/3153_LARKIN.pdf )

How do you respond to these notions?

AB: I do not find Graves’ views agree with my own experience. This includes, by the way, hearing Graves himself read, when he was very old and strange. He was in fact very theatrical in presentation. He arrived in a vast hat, and, I think, a black cloak. He read some of his poems compellingly, but simply gave up on others, saying he could not remember how the rhythms worked. He tossed these aside, fluttering. I have never seen a clearer illustration of the gap between the writer and his work.

I think in fact the eye can deceive. It’s possible to skim down a poem, thinking it works, especially at the end, then to read it aloud and find that it does not. The “beautiful voice” to which Graves refers can drown poems, especially when read by actors. Gielgud, though a moving actor, makes all Shakespeare’s sonnets sound the same by drenching them monotonously in his most silvery tones. The best professional readers of poetry, such as Simon Russell Beale, understand the spaces and silences within a line and keep them, which an amateur rarely has the confidence to do.

I am particularly interested in Larkin’s comments, as tapes of Larkin reading have recently been broadcast on radio. His own readings do illuminate his work. He reads surprisingly slowly, which emphasises the poise and space he can achieve in iambic pentameters. Although many of his stanzas are elaborately rhymed, he does not stress individual rhymes, so the reader keeps a sense of the poem as a musical whole, a small but absorbing world.

Andrew Motion has commented that Larkin could not give public readings for much of his life because of a disabling stammer. Motion believes that Larkin was very well aware that he could have given excellent public readings, and that he regretted this had not been possible. I think there is a sense, as you read Larkin’s remarks, that he is protesting too much.

I would agree with Larkin that there are poems which work, at least once, when read aloud to audiences and which do not keep their impact when read later on the page. There are poets who seem to me too wedded to this kind of effect, possibly through reading their work aloud too often and too early in their careers.

Slams and performance poetry do not, I think, deserve this kind of criticism. I’ve heard the odd slam, but do not manage to get to many readings, so I am writing in comparative ignorance. But it is clear that the performance of poetry now involves far more people than in my youth, with a far wider age and social range, and with very confident performances by women. I wholly welcome this. If work which is powerful in performance does not “stand up” on the page, this does not matter, if the writer has written the piece to live in performance. It does make the recording of performances necessary, if the impact of the piece is to survive its author.

PS: Tell me more about your experience of the Robert Graves reading. I saw Graves read in Sydney in 1967, and he read well then, though I know his health started to decline from about that time.

AB: I seem to have very limited memory of the Graves reading (although I can still see him clearly, with his shaggy white head — hat removed — standing in the dark hall of the Oxford Union, flinging the white pages of the discarded poems to his left.) Because of course dates, I know it was no later than 1974; it might have been 1973. I don’t remember much of what Graves read, except one poem about unhappy neighbours on Majorca. He seemed to have forgotten the rhythms of the poems he flung aside.

I think it was on that visit that, according to Professor John Carey, who was entertaining him, Graves strode through Oxford giving Carey lurid accounts of the bad atmosphere of the place. I think it was Carfax, the big crossroads, that he disliked. I can’t remember exactly what Carey says, but I think Graves claimed to pick up a sense of black magic or death. In fact, I rather agree with him (and there were a lot of executions and so on in Oxford).

Graves left a rather similar written comment on Valldemosa, an extraordinary town: one of those places on a kind of spiritual fault line, I think. Graves claims that when he first encountered it, it was full of witches.

He is very undervalued now. His metrics are very imposing. That was part of the authority of his reading.

PS: What about the visual arts (”Derby Day: an exhibition”, for example), in relation to your poetry?

AB: I love paintings, but I don’t see enough of them, living in the provinces. I have just had another try at Stubbs, via “Hambletonian”, the painting of the beaten horse which the patron rejected.

PS: Do you think readers might find your poetry sometimes difficult, or at least demanding of a very attentive reading? If so, does that need defending?

AB: I think sometimes my writing is too compressed or careless, which simply needs apology. There is room for a whole spectrum of difficulty in poetry. Each strand must be good of its kind.

PS: As Vicki Bertram noticed, the punctuation in your poetry sometimes forces the reader to engage much more closely with possible meanings and alternative syntactic structures. How deliberate is this? For example at the conclusion of “Derby Day: an Exhibition” there is an absent full stop:

And yet a brilliant day. Do not mistake:
That which we do best kills us. Horse and man
Amber in the mist of downs, sea-shore,
The spring of waves, glow greatly. They survive

Is that intentional? I can see how it might affect meaning here, rather as in the last lines of Robert Graves’ “Leaving the Rest Unsaid”

So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,

Or in “Yesterday Vivaldi visited me”: again the punctuation seems at times unusual, though certainly facilitating a broadening of potential meaning.

AB: These traits were all deliberate, based on enthusiastic reading of American poetry, especially the work of Paul Blackburn. I have slowly moved back to embrace conventional punctuation. But I do have endless trouble with commas.

PS: You’ve acknowledged the influence of Phillip Larkin’s work on your poetry, saying “he is bleak, but he stumbles into visions”. Is it fair to describe some of your work as bleak, or at least as pessimistic? On balance, do you think your poetry is more optimistic than pessimistic?

AB: I think the effect of my work is probably bleaker than I realize. I think It’s an act of optimism simply to get up each morning.

PS: Do you think Larkin has had an influence on the way you versify?

AB: Not enough, unfortunately. He can create unhurried space in lines, which I cannot. I have never been quite at home with the pentameter. I recently heard newly discovered recordings of Larkin reading. The rhymes in The Whitsun Weddings are so subtle that the ear can scarcely isolate them. I must have another look at rhyme and its variants.

PS: You’ve also acknowledged Wordsworth as a major influence, and certainly I can see that in your use of blank verse (or in your case, often, quasi-blank verse that contains some degree of slant rhyme) and the ballad form. How else has Wordsworth influenced you in terms of technique, theme and voice?

AB: I try at times to emulate Wordsworth’s perfect focus on his subject, such as his poem about the old man, walking quietly to Falmouth, to see, as the poem reveals at last, his dying son.

PS: What other influences would you acknowledge, especially in terms of verse technique?

AB: I think there are too many. I am a happy thief of stanza forms.

PS: Do you see yourself belonging to a school of poetry, or a group of poets with similar concerns, techniques and voices? Or if not, then with which contemporary poets (if any) do you feel the most affinity?

AB: I do not think of contemporary poets in terms of schools. You cannot really see the sea when you are swimming in it, can you? Only the water under your chin!

My allegiance is to poems rather than to poets, and would include Carol Ann Duffy’s “Mean Time”, Anne Stevenson’s “Vertigo”, and Jenny Joseph’s “The Ballad of Rodborough Common”.

PS: You occasionally use free rather than metrical verse in your poetry. Is it fair to say that you use free verse less than you used to? If true, why might that be?

AB: I think it was part of a long drive — after having my daughter — to write better. I did become almost addicted to ballads for a time. But every now and then I just let a poem run, to see where it will go.

PS: In another interview You’ve discussed the role of poetry in society, saying that poetry “contributes slowly, subtly but significantly to the way we feel and live”. Many people would disagree that poetry can have any sort of a political role. How do you feel about that, given that such poems as “Last Week”, “Gulf” and “Entrenched”, for example, seem to be written from a definite political perspective, at least in relation to current wars?

AB: I think one frustration is that it is hard to get topical poems published quickly. The Internet is, at present, one way out of that silence.

PS: Do you feel like expanding on your political views here, especially in relation to the “War on Terror” and its ramifications?

AB: I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, and a republican.

I am old enough to have seen other terrorist movements run their course. I hope this one will. But time and patience were not tried. Afghanistan has not had its promised aid, and the British soldiers there are at terrible risk. Wasn’t it Afghanistan that Kipling wrote of, when he described a soldier, “shot like a rabbit in a ride”?

I opposed the Iraq war. I wish I had been wrong. I cannot see at present that it has helped the Iraqi people. It has also become clear that the war is costing billions a year, while, for example, the provision of care for the old in Britain remains a cruel lottery.

PS: Is poetry a dying art?

AB: No. Many people write it. Many people seek out poems for the great occasions of their lives, such as weddings and funerals. I think poets could do with some of the black arts of marketing to scatter their poems more widely into people’s lives.

PS: What other questions should I have asked you?

AB: As it is very late and very dark, I think none! But thank you for the space to speak.

PS: Thank you, Alison Brackenbury.