Tony Williams's Poetry Blog

The Palm Beach Effect

2013-01-07T10:53:00.001+00:00

You can now buy The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard) from the CB Editions website. The publisher Charles Boyle explains why he published the book, which is a collection of essays, memoirs, poems and other items by a list of contributors stellar enough to send me into a blind panic at finding myself among them.

As CB says, Hofmann is for many (me included), one of 'no more than two or three that at a personal level really count'. When the solar system arrives at the star Vega and is annihilated, Hofmann's work will be amongst those miraculously saved, for the edification of the ghosts. Read this book to find out why – and read his own books too, of course.

Antony Rowland, I am a Magenta Stick

2012-12-17T15:29:00.000+00:00

Antony Rowland, I am a Magenta Stick (Salt, 2012)

Antony Rowland's first book, The Land of Green Ginger, was an excitingly varied collection: there was a cartoonish humour, interest in family history and European history, travel and holidays, and a strange, dense style which did violence to syntax and vocabulary while seeming on the whole to be perfectly clear. I am a Magenta Stick continues all of that – and in that sense it's pretty much a continuation – but perhaps the elements are more integrated. The personal and public histories coincide; it still feels varied, but also coherent.

The 'Engrish' poems of the first book appear again here, compiled (really or purportedly) from miswritings by those for whom English is a second language; and there are several using a similar approach to a different sort of found text, online hotel reviews:

We found someone in our bathroom. That was weird.

The relaxation room was cold. The toaster

was trained by a parrot. No coasters

for the bell-captains. We found a beard

in our suitcase...

It goes almost without saying that many of the source texts are funny; what makes these into poems is, on the one hand, the play with lineation (most don't rhyme, unlike the one I've just quoted), and on the other, the way the sources are collated into a larger text with a poem-like trajectory of mood, tone and/or narrative.

There are poems about puddings, 'Sausages' and 'Gravy'; Rowland has pretty much cornered the market in historical-language-of-food poems. Neither of these rise to the heights of his masterpiece 'Pie', but they do show how almost any topic can be an occasion and opening for thinking about, say, the First World War, and how joyful a close and benevolent attention to the sound of words can be.

Rowland's interest, if that's the right word, in the Holocaust is represented with some fine poems. In particular, there's the tension between needing to know about history and the danger of enjoying them. 'Serchio Bathing Party' visits the scene of Primo Levi's death ('our cameras flash in awkward reverence'), while 'The Fuhrerhauser', reprinted I think from his Knives, Forks and Spoons pamphlet, visits various death camps. There's something of Paul Celan, not just in the subject matter, but in the scrupulous refusal to editorialise; we're just given words, and the discomfort of bafflement is one of their effects that we won't be excused:

Why are you in

a mystical corner, a roof

beached on its concrete?

Landscaped to perfection,

the reserve peters

to a wood koy platform.

In lines we tortoise

the Clumber: children hand

each other, clasp roses...

At the imaginative centre of the book are the family history poems, or rather the poems which use family and wider public history as conduits to reach and illuminate each other. 'Elizabeth Frost', a kind of potted life-history of a servant (doesn't that sounds worthy and dull?) is one of the most wonderful poems I've read , a masterclass in sound and richness and narrative pace:

We come out of a smile round an altar

in a Dissenting chapel, allowed with a cap

every other Sunday, Elizabeth haltered

to a black dress for the family baths,

dressing, scouring, cooking, running with coals,

pulling cinders from hearths, tending laths...

In a way the whole poem is a foudnation for the final image of the old woman 'dug/into Ganton Mount with a quota of stout,/a gill fetched every evening in a silver jug'. The image resonates in the lifetime the poem has conjured; it's miraculous.

The book also has one of my favourite ever lines, describing a sloping cobbled street as 'steeped in leg-work'. Lovely. And Rowland has just won the Manchester Poetry Prize; read this book to see why.

Tim Love, By All Means

2012-11-27T10:10:00.001+00:00

By All Means is one of the first of the Hotwire imprint from Nine Arches Press; it’s a hundred pages, something like a novella’s worth of short stories. There are nine stories in all, and I’, inclined to put them into three groups: the artfully constructed personal histories, the metafiction-y ones, and the rest. What’s most striking though is what they share: eight and bit of them are written in the first person. I wonder how I feel about that; usually the narrators are distinct characters, but often they seem to be middle-aged men, so that you wonder if that’s a theme or if the narrators are all versions of the author grappling with versions of his own concerns (actually that’s probably two ways of saying the same thing).

My least favourite stories were the metafiction-y ones, which on the whole I felt didn’t put their cleverness enough to use: ‘Fractals’ is about making up a short story, blurring the boundaries between the two; ‘Method of Loci’ similarly imagines a meeting on a train, then interrogates its own imagining. It’s the sort of thing Borges did vertiginously, but the margin for error is tiny, and I’m afraid I didn’t feel much vertigo.

Much better were the pieces which left cleverness behind, and just told stories. The most straightforwardly realist story here, ‘The Big Climb’, depicts a father and son after the mother’s disappearance. ‘Do you know where she is, Papa?’ ‘She’s having a holiday.’ It’s focused, retrained, and moving.

I liked best the personal history pieces, which usually throw us into a present moment and then unspool backwards to show the narrator’s past. The technique is complex but well controlled. ‘Olga, December ‘76’ starts off by seeming to be about the extrovert Olga, but gradually refocuses on the quieter narrator and his gradual drift and re-calibration from radical-dabbling youth to conservative middle age. It’s very good. I also liked ‘Doors and Windows’ and to a lesser extent ‘Late’, both of which have a broadly similar MO. ‘Dreams’ pushes the technique almost beyond narrative into personal-historical reflection, without quite achieving the satisfying resolution I wanted – it felt like a piece which needed and deserved a larger space in order to develop fully. But the ambition of showing how lives are knitted together, while eschewing the Big Meaning, is impressive and worth pursuing.

All the Bananas at large

2012-09-26T09:44:00.003+01:00

A quick up date on All the Bananas I've Never Eaten, which is now out and available from Salt, Amazon, etc. You can read sample stories from the collection at Carrie Etter's Sudden Prose and Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon. There will be a launch event at the Lit & Phil on Newcastle on Wednesday 17 October, 7.30 start – a short reading, glass of wine, etc. Free entry. Please come!

Signs of life and another blog

2012-08-30T10:17:00.001+01:00

It doesn't take a genius to work out that this blog has been pretty much dormant for a while now. That's not about to change, but I do have a spanking new Wordpress blog Writing and Walking to record the progress of my research project on the role of dog-walking in my creative writing practice. That should be a more active and interesting site.

Meanwhile I won't close this blog, but just use it for occasional on-walking-related items and me-me-me updates. Two of the latter:

An interview at Stride with Charles Whalley on my engagement with outsider art in the production of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head.

News that my collection of flash fiction, All the Bananas I've Never Eaten, has gone to press this week. My heart's throbbing like an octopus.

'freedom borne out of containment'

2012-03-14T12:22:00.000+00:00

Charles Whalley reviews All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at Sabotage Reviews.

Dickinson & Rilke at the OK Corral

2012-03-07T19:19:00.002+00:00

This post grew out of a Facebook discussion on Mark Burnhope's page about Emily Dickinson, and specifically what it is about her that people rave about. It's cobbled together from my comments there, with more stuff added in. I'm sorry that I start by talking about Dickinson and end by talking about Rilke, just because Dickinson deserves the space to herself.

I think that there are just a few writers – Dickinson's one, and Rilke's another - whose poems are (usually empty) landscapes in which the abstractions become a bit more concrete and the concretions a bit more abstract. So that the poem becomes a heroic, metaphysical version of thought – one has the impression (rhetorical of course) that the poet is grappling with Reality rather than Surfaces. (Umpteen bad poets _want_ to give that impression, though...)

These poets' poems seem to me to take place in dreamlike or closed landscapes (same reason why the Western is a great vehicle for moral/metaphysical narratives - the empty stage), so there's only a distant connection with a 'real' landscape to be depicted. Of course it isn't as simple as that - some concrete purchase is always handy, to help the reader as much as anything. (We can't imagine that space in advance, so even if the poem's action is taking place in a non-space, it's useful to have it gestured at via the odd image, like a shoe, or a can of chicken soup.)

There's a great passage in Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity where he accuses Rilke of being a secular theologian:

Rilke... was one of the founders of the jargon [of authenticity]. For years every ambitious Privatdozent viewed it as an obligatory exercise to analyse that first elegy: 'All that was commission.' The line expresses the vague feeling that an unsayable element of experience wants something from the subject. This is similarly the case with the archaic torso of Apollo: 'Many stars expected you to feel them.' To that the poem adds the uncommittedness and vainness of such a feeling of command, especially when it expresses the poetic subject: 'But did you manage it?' Rilke absolutizes the word 'commission' under the shelter of aesthetic appearance... The fact that the neoromantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form. It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose [miaow!]... The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theological overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament.

Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (trans Tarnowksi & Will), pp68-9)

Adorno is pretty much a materialist, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he is hostile to the idea of religious or metaphysical realities and formulations.

But this argument does suggest a quite surprising link between that position and the principle that poetry ought to deal in concrete images and details, where the level of concretion equals vividness equals success – as if this foundation of modern poetry is uncomfortably related to an unthinking realism. (I don't mean that Adorno is an unthinking realist, but that many people behave as if material reality as it appears is all there is, without having as he did a philosophical position underpinning that.)

Also, notice that a subject who did not feel either lonely or secular might accept this reading without rejecting Rilke's mode of writing - if one _is_ religious, these religiose tones might be acceptable. I'm not sure if one can choose to be that, though – even a sociable, religious person might be a lonely and secular subject, historically speaking.

But, more generally, Adorno's point about pseudo-religious content in literature (and life) is a good one – if you) _don't _ believe something specific, what does it mean to speak of being 'spiritual'?

There's a lot in this line of argument, most of which I have only begun to explore here. Even if you love Rilke, once you have understood how his technique is pulling on some dusty old strings, then, even when you read and enjoy his work thereafter, it's hard not to be conscious of being manipulated. Am I really being hypnotised if I decide to play along with it?

James Davies, Plants

2012-02-27T07:54:00.001+00:00

James Davies' Plants isn't about the green things – instead it's a book of plants as in substitutes for the poems that should have been here; a bit like a book of sicknotes. In the first half, 'Unmades', each page has a title, and then a brief description of the circumstances explaining why there's no poem. For example:

Cat Stand Off

Considered 15th March 2006
Not written same day

Maybe this sounds like a thin joke to sustain over half a book. All I can say is that everyone I've seen with the book sits there grinning and reading out examples to each other, and you can't say fairer than that.

In the second half we get some actual poems, written in a comic, disjunctive half-sense full of invented words and cartoonishly strange images. It might look knockabout at times, but this sort of writing is very hard to achieve, and I was pretty much bowled over by it. Some bits I liked:

Because we was pudding and cream to me
this doll of course
beavers vs clouds
: a wine at amazon.com

*

I went into the night pletch
My jelly was green ok?
Mike's was diamond blu
He had the steak and I had the chips

('My Name is Ray')

a pixie in the wood with a hood
near enoki:
gruft of hamwick
parley burl
chinese muppet shows
the extras from top gun

('Entonox')

a monkey with a band aid
a band aid on a monkey
a monkey with a trumpet
a trumpet on a monkey's head
a donkey with a banker's hat
a duck with a traveller's cheque

(the sestet of 'Dieter Roth Shopping Powder')

I also liked '16 Glass Bead Games', a series of diagrams whose labels ('Luck (positive)', 'Intention and outcome', 'Is it OK to forget love') may be titles, or what the arrangments of beads mean or represent, or something else again; and the vaguely Kennardish prose poem 'Kate Bush', a sequence of illogical but somehow coherent paragraphs intermittently populated by famous and non-famous people.

A charming and mainly hilarious book. (Other reviews by Tony Lopez and Colin Herd.)

Interview on Uncle's Head

2012-02-25T16:29:00.000+00:00

New interview with me on All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at the Nine Arches blog here.

Fuselit: Contraption

2012-02-24T19:36:00.000+00:00

After a delay of roughly fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy-two years, the latest issue of Fuselit is out. (Actually it was out a few days ago, but I think the people in glass houses thing will protect me.) This issue is called (and focused ingeniously on the theme of) Contraption.

More details here. You can access it online for free-or-pay-what-you-like, or buy the print edition (which comes in a gold box with a mini-CD and a bonus booklet and a set of instructions) for £7. I do feel that the artefact is worth having, but then I would, because I've got it...

Ira Lightman: roll with mustard

2012-02-23T11:43:00.000+00:00

Phone in the Roll (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2011).
Mustard Tart as Lemon (Red Squirrel, 2011).

Phone in the Roll is a pamphlet of 'experiments with voice to text apps on a smartphone'. In principle I very much like this sort of attention to process as a writing tool – of course (or maybe no 'off course', but certainly for me) the test of processes is the end result. Does the machine generate something which delights?

Well, I'll answer that by speculating further on Lightman's process: the smartphone thing can only be a stage in the process, with further stages either side and, significantly, some prior stage in which the voice which is to be processed is generated. Clearly that generation wasn't random: perhaps the most striking aspect of Phone in the Roll is its thematic coherence, the way it rehashes and garbles and pokes about in the phone conversations people might have, their distant, problematic interactions (yes, including sex), the brash, vulnerable, public–private act of whipping out a phone from your crotch pocket and whispering to a loved one in the street. The textual interference caused by the voice to text process (whether real or imagined) thus has some rationale and role. The pamphlet is a record of mishearing, misspeakings, gaffes and gobbledegooks:

Hi Jules, is it?
Was texting not bad but that was?
Nothing in there.
I thought that is fine.

I would get in this but there
was nothing in there. I thought you would.
You use entry gate
but there was nothing beyond it.

That quotation was taken almost at random, and doesn't quite do what a quotation ought – I think the pleasure of this collection is mainly cumulative, the relentless piling up of half-sensical chatter, which ends up deliciously dissatisfying, a bit like trying to love someone through a little block of plastic and wiring.

The conversational origin or at least mode of Phone in the Roll has an analogue in Mustard Tart as Lemon, a collection of Lightman's older poems from Red Squirrel Press. These poems are less 'difficult' in the sense that they are less concerned to disrupt syntax, and deliver a more overt narrative/argument. They aren't 'conversational' but they are discursive. It does seem to me that Lightman is very often a discursive poet, interested in pursuing ideas (and talking directly about them, and about emotions) via a series of sometimes oblique but nuanced and nice steps. (Those wonderful double-column poems of his may be an exception, something else entirely.) In this respect he is a relative of the Metaphysicals, and more distantly but for me more illuminatingly of the Horatian tradition. There's something meditative, benign, still, about the poems' discussions which is different from the violence of some of the Metaphysicals. More Marvell than Donne, it seems to me.

At an apparently superficial stylistic level, Lightman makes a lot of use of indents, specifically a pattern of alternating non-indented/indented lines which seems to me fundamentally Horatian, an orderly modulation, a continual unfolding of opening–completion or statement–qualification. The interaction of the lines is striking here:

high
tide
swells
rain
churns
the river

But the Horatian flavour is more evident here, where the lines string out a relatively prosaic, discursive sentence to quietly lyrical effect:

The arrow's headed back
to your
suburb of Norwich, not
mine we're crossing

town to reach by
your car. "It's
lovely." Next to
the road's name a

road you can
follow the
arrow to
is also named.

There are other modes in evidence too – not always meditative, sometimes more packed-in and rhythmically dense, as in this piece of metrical play:

my modernity's health's at the centre not drinking
of brand-name transcendence turned to the powerless
to vote disadvantage onto the bogeyman

In some ways this earlier work shows Lightman as a poet more accessible by a reader feeling their way. But I don't think it's right to think of this poet as less experimental than the later model - just working through a different region of the poetic terrain, always thoughtfully and always with an ear and appetite for the joyful.

Gloating round-up

2012-01-06T15:08:00.000+00:00

Some new reviews of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head came out over the Christmas period: three at Sphinx by Jon Stone, Rob Mackenzie and Nikolai Duffy; an extended and very interesting version of Duffy's at Stride; and one by WN Herbert in the latest edition of Poetry Review (online version available here). All very gratifying, and I'm indebted to all the reviewers for their ~~discernment~~ generosity. Rob also later blogged about the issue of fictionality and hoaxing as it relates to the pamphlet. And – in other but still me-related news – the same issue of PR contains my poem 'A Bouquet for Pauline Viardot', about the C19th singer; the first time I've got in, so I'm bloody chuffed.

Situating States of Mind Conference

2012-01-06T14:41:00.002+00:00

Situating and Interpreting States of Mind 1700-2000

An Interdisciplinary Conference

14-16 June 2012

Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers

Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)

Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)

Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place and historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression.

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness

- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners

- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition

- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind

- representations of liminal states of consciousness

- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking

- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy

- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place

- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past, decay and dilapidation

- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness

- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers: anita.oconnell@northumbria.ac.uk or leigh.wetherall-dickson@northumbria.ac.uk. Please see www.northumbria.ac.uk/statesofmindconference for details.

PBS Pamphlet Choice

2011-11-09T13:25:00.000+00:00

I'm deliriously happy to say that All the Rooms of Uncle's Head is the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice!

Interview with Harriet Tarlo

2011-11-08T10:50:00.000+00:00

Harriet Tarlo is the editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011), a fabulously stimulating introduction to the work of sixteen poets more or less closely concerned with place and landscape. Her own work includes Poems 1990-2003 and Nab. She now teaches English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Harriet gave the following very generous and interesting answers to my questions:

TW: Harriet, thanks first of all for this anthology, which I've been exploring slowly. Partly that slowness is just an accident of how my reading happens at the moment, but partly it relates to the nature, and range, of the work you've chosen. Some of it's the sort of work that might get called difficult - at any rate I've been grateful for your introduction which really helps the reader to navigate the different approaches and techniques and ideas which the poets use. I keep having to stop and go away and digest something, or have a go at something myself. It's as much a book of prompts for landscape poetry as a book of landscape poetry itself - prompting further reading and further writing.

HT: I am rather delighted at the idea of you going away and trying things out; it illustrates the way in which good poetry of an exploratory bent demands participation and effort from the reader ... but takes it a step further even. Perhaps some of that will be in your next collection?

I think it will, but probably not in ways that are immediately apparent. Much of the work in the anthology is some distance from my own approach(es), so when I try it out I don't move seamlessly into it but into a strange unknown terrain somewhere in between. I'm stretching the spatial metaphor a little, but I suppose I'm agreeing with you that the work demands participation. I wouldn't want to appropriate techniques anyway, but yes, putting in some effort as a reader (as long as you get something back) tends to stimulate me as a writer.

Actually, I’ve always felt somewhere in between myself – I think many poets do when it comes down to it.

So the introduction really does introduce the work, as well as functioning as a mini-critical essay on the work and a justification for the anthology. It feels carefully judged in terms of tone, positioning, and so on. How much blood was sweated in the writing of it?

Rather a lot of blood actually -- I found it far harder than writing a "straight" academic essay. I wanted it to be subtle enough to do justice to the work, but I didn't want it to be off-puttingly academic. I wanted it to introduce the work, but not over-explain it. I wanted it to be long enough to say something, but not tediously lengthy. I also felt like a position statement for my own ideas and poetry as they have developed over the years, a justification of ideas I have been bandying around. I wanted to mention every poet at least once. Furthermore, it had to do the usual anthologising job of explaining how the book works and why the poets therein were chosen. Choosing was hard too of course. There's some great work out there, but neither Tony (Frazer, the publisher) nor I wanted to have very brief selections from many poets. We wanted decent selections from people we felt had really contributed to this area over the years.

I'm interested in the distinction you make between this work ('radical landscape poetry') and pastoral, which you argue contains at its heart 'the morally and socially-inflected contrast between the cultural/urban and the natural which has... become increasingly outdated.' There's a sleeping dog which I don't want to wake here; I mention it because I agree that pastoral is socially inflected, and while the work in the anthology often is as well, it seems to me to be more consistently interested in the relation between an individual and a landscape, in the lived experience of being somewhere. To put it another way, I think that Marvell could have written 'Upon Appleton House' (a poem I very much admire) without going there - the landscape is mainly used as a language for speaking about society. Whereas it would be absurd to say the same of Mark Goodwin's 'Borrowdale Details', for example - it's a poem about being there as much as it is about the place itself. Is this something which characterises radical landscape poetry, the idea that it's about place-as-experience rather than place-as-object?

Strangely, I have just been re-introduced to 'Upon Appleton House' by a wonderful talk about Marvell given by Elizabeth Cook, a poet and novelist who was a fellow-speaker at the Holt Festival of Nature Writing in Norfolk in February.

I agree, certainly not place-as-object and, yes, often, perhaps always, place-as-experience is part of it, but perhaps the most radical thing is to push beyond that even to try to reach place-as-place, the non-human elements as having existence in their own right and our responsibility even to try to get past just our own experience of that. We are straying into ecopoetic or even eco-critical theory here. Of course it's impossible to actually do this and that is one of the things that has always attracted me to radical work in poetry, its striving beyond itself, ourselves.

Speaking of actually being there, a number of poems in the anthology appeal to me particularly because I know the places involved - Peter Riley's 'Shining Cliff', for example, which evokes a place which happens to play a minor but significant role in the private mythology of my childhood, and the extract from Tony Baker's Scrins which takes place in Birchover. On the one hand I feel that I have special access to those poems. On the other, the scene I imagine the Birchover piece taking place in is really Winster, the next village along from Birchover, so right landscape, wrong place. My local knowledge both helps and hinders me. Does it matter that many of these poems are about very localised places and experiences of places which aren't accessible to most readers? Is landscape poetry about giving place to people in a sufficiently vivid way that it's the next best thing to being there?

At its best, I think we see the macro through the micro as one does in ecological thinking actually. The localisation gives an integrity to thinking and to poetry. Perhaps also people can seek the places and are reminded of the places. After the Sheffield Ground Aslant launch, Peter Riley came to talk to students at Sheffield Hallam about Alstonefield, his poem based on walking around that Derbyshire village. I think we all felt slightly ashamed when he asked whether we had been there. We had been reading and thinking about the poem -- I do have it in mind to go there but hadn't got round to it -- how absurd in a way. It's not a big country. But of course we are reminded of our own places by other people’s; we draw parallels all the time in reading. And then again, we might have known the place once, as you did some of the places in the book. I had a rather moving email in a way from someone who had worked in the steel industry at Workington about my Workington poems -- he remembered the tipping of the slag over onto the beach. I of course had never seen it; had used found text from the conversation I had with slag collectors on the beach. But, yes, beyond all that, I do think that landscape poetry can take you to places -- at its best all writing gets you beyond yourself, your experience.

Does it go back to the opposition with pastoral, which seems to be all about using shared, stable ways of talking about shared landscapes, whereas these poetries are about making unstable experiences of landscape available for the first time, without that reliance on convention?

Yes, basically!

Your chosen term 'radical landscape poetry' clearly gestures primarily at formal and stylistic features. But for me there's also an echo of the tradition of political radicalism that was deeply concerned with issues of land ownership and occupation. Political rights in England were always tied to the land through the ideas of the parish and constituency, and the Levellers, Luddites and Chartists seem to me to have been fighting over the way land is occupied. Perhaps all this is tenuous. But is there, do you think, a political radicalism in these poems? Is there a political (perhaps with a small 'p') radicalism in the idea that poems challenge the way we interact with landscape and the world?

Yes, I think there is, very much so, and you are not off the mark at all with your historical references. "Radical" was always meant to imply both form/language and politics/ideology. Later on than the groups you mention of course came John Clare who is an important figure for a fair number of these poets. In fact recently, on the strength of The Ground Aslant, I was invited to join a great new venture of Simon Kovesi's tentatively called the Green Man Arts & Culture Collective. Gathering thoughts for our first symposium, I was surprised myself by how much I found Clare had influenced me, strange as that sounds -- the wonderfully anarchic and metonymic prose writings as much as the poetry (as is often the case with C19 poets). It is not just his uncompromising attitude to form and the way that his observation of nature, especially birds and nests, is so close and so respectful, but also his passionate defence of commonland and resistance to enclosure. There's such a wealth of writing on the English field in Clare and the field is my current obsession. For me it is the place where people and land meet most dynamically --- changing field patterns contain that history of desire, need, exploitation, economics --- and the extraordinarily wide range of aesthetic/emotional appeal (or not) that fields have for us closely corresponds to this human relation to land. Then of course there's the environmental movement and the newly termed "ecopoetics", a much debated term, is a consciously politicised poetry in response to ecological crisis. It's a place where some of these poets are happy to be housed, though not all. I would actually be quite interested (though I can hardly believe I am writing this after all the work of the last one) in compiling an anthology of English ecopoetics. However, Ground Aslant wasn't it -- something wider and narrower in a way. But politics is always there -- it's inevitable in poets who engage seriously with language and, for me, it can't be separated from their use of language and formal experimentation either. That question of whether it is more feasible for defamiliarised language to challenge the status quo, the "mind-forged manacles", has been hotly debated since the early days of modernism. What can I say? I still buy it!

The most obvious way in which the anthology is 'radical' is with regard to form. You refer to 'a degree of formal experimentation', and it seems to me that most of the poems are what we would call 'experimental' or 'innovative'. (And let's ignore the fruitless debates to be had about the applicability of all these categorising terms.) Can you say something about the forms in use? I'm particularly interested in the idea of 'open field' writing, not least because it seems to have a pleasingly literal application. And also perhaps something about linear vs non-linear? I do see clearly that 'linear' could be used to describe a formally traditional poem, and that this might not be the best or only way to write about landscape. But some of the poems do seem to me to be basically linear in form (such as Carol Watts' fabulous 'Zeta Landsacpes'). And, taking things literally again, I can't help thinking of walking in a landscape being fundamentally linear (plotting the route on a map) - for me the experience of being in and moving through a landscape may be archetypally linear.

Interesting and I couldn't agree and disagree more with different bits of what you say here! Yes, I am seduced by the idea of Open Field writing being organically appropriate to this work and it's the "tradition of the new" that I grew up in via the Americans (Duncan, Olson, Fraser, DuPlessis) and later British exponents (Caddel, O'Sullivan, Presley). It's there in the poetry and poetics from Olson’s

“Projective Verse” (1950): “We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other” and, later when he argues that “all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch, when you work it, come spring”. It’s more than a metaphor, though it’s that too. I have written about this “field poetics” in a recent essay for Placing Poetry, a book edited by your colleague at Northumbria, Ian Davidson, and Zoe Skoulding – it is out with Rodopi soon I think. In terms of poetry, for me the more dynamic, open form style of writing, which makes use of the whole page-space to create, is particularly suited to reflecting on and engaging with the spatial, be it the openness of a field, moorland, cliff or hillside, those spaces in which we see human and non-human elements at work as on a canvas in the open air. Here, poets might even attempt to embody the vast, complex, inter-related network of vegetation, insect and animal life that such a space contains, and to reflect intelligently upon it.

“Linear” – well, it depends how you take it and your comments have certainly made me think about it again, especially regarding maps. Indeed, the work of Carol Watts and others in the anthology is not written in open form, but I don’t see it as linear either in the sense that, broadly speaking, the trajectory of the poem does not follow a cause and effect, or other logical/conventional/narrative, structure (beginning, middle, end) but is a much more circular, exploratory affair. In fact, in Carol’s case, she has invented her own prime numbers structure which is something that seems to me have been at the heart of experimental writing practice for decades – see Surrealist games, Oulipo etc, but also individual experiments such as Richard Caddel’s Ground, one of my favourite poems and one which uses a re-playing/spatialising of a found piece of text as its structure. Ultimately the writers in Ground Aslant all work in the free verse tradition that allows for the invention of independent new structures in poetry. All contemporary poets, wherever they may cast themselves or be cast on the traditional-experimental spectrum (and I agree that those debates can become tedious) are influenced by that vers libre revolution it seems to me. But, I am thinking here more about linear as used in the narratological sense where it is almost always “non-linear” in fact!

But then again, linear, as in it involves lines, is of course relevant to both poems in The Ground Aslant and maps – fields too of course in their enclosed nature (fields, walls) and in their plough-lines/planting lines. In poetry and the field, even the most open form/field poetry, the line is always there, even if only by its (relative) absence (the word “poetry” immediately demands it and won’t let it go): And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE?, says Olson in “Projective Verse”. There is so much one can do with the line, just like any discipline. My own writing deals in line fragments. I have relatively recently discovered Leslie Scalapino’s work and in a poem I admire she uses a long line right-justified which slips over the edge in a suggestive drift. So, I don’t see a clear divide between “open form” and “linear” poetry, and not only because I have these two ways of reading the word “linear” in my head at once. Walking though to me is really not linear – I can’t see it that way. The map is a flattened landscape, made to fit a page. Walking (even if worked out on a map, which I seldom do) is not flat (especially in Yorkshire!) – it is full of drift and wandering, diversion and going around and about, rather than directly, crossing fields, moors, gates, walls, not just walking along the line of them.

Hearing various voices*

2011-11-01T16:37:00.002+00:00

I'm very glad to be in the latest issue of Hearing Voices magazine, edited Jonathan and Maria Taylor, ISBN 0-9551800-7-4, 978-0-9551800-7-1, £3. Other poets in this issue include David Caddy, Alison Brackenbury, Alan Baker, Jacqui Rowe and Todd Swift, from whose blog post I nicked most of this text (thanks, Todd!).

To order , please send a cheque made payable to Crystal Clear Creators to Jonathan Taylor, Crystal Clear Creators, c/o Department of English and Creative Writing, Faculty of Humanities, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, U.K. Postage and packing is free.

A subscription to all three issues of Hearing Voices costs £8 or £7 to members of Crystal Clear Creators. You can also subscribe to the third and fourth issue, which costs £5.50 for non-members, £5 to members.

Meanwhile, or rather, about a month later, I'm looking forward to the Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, given this year by Sean O'Brien on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the week commencing the 5th of December. The lectures are free - it's a turn-up-on-the-day kind of event - and they will 'explore the depiction of England in the work of contemporary poets... and discuss the importance of myth-making in present-day poetry in England'. Sounds ace. And on the next night, Thursday the 8th December, I'm reading with Peter Bennet at the same venue (not quite so free - £6/4), and hopefully being 'distinctively English' in some shape or form. Come and see some or all of the above if you can.

*You love punning titles, don't you? Don't you?

'one of the best things I've read all year'

2011-10-24T13:29:00.000+01:00

A first review of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head, from Steven Waling at Brando's Hat. I'm thrilled to see such a generous and appreciative reading; and interested that Steven raises the issue of fragmentariness - I agonised over how much of the text should be 'lost', and in the end went for a fairly conservative approach. I certainly understand the argument that I should have gone further. Anyway, hurrah!

States of Independence (West)

2011-09-30T09:31:00.000+01:00

Get yourself along to the Brum Book Festival a week a Satdee tio visit the States of Independence (West) small press book fair, jam-packed with good things.

Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

2011-09-14T16:12:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to hear that The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, as was Antony Rowland's fabulous The Land of Green Ginger. The winner was Ciaran Berry's The Sphere of Birds. More details here.

Horizon Review

2011-09-07T12:01:00.000+01:00

The new issue of Horizon Review is out - as usual a massive crop of work to look at. So far I've only read Tim Turnbull's wonderful story 'The Haunted Horse', which I clicked on first mainly because Tim's work is ace but also because it was right next to my 'Training a Champion'.

Interview with Mark Burnhope

2011-09-05T14:16:00.003+01:00

Mark Burnhope's The Snowboy is published by Salt. Mark was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound.

In my endorsement for the book I wrote that “Mark Burnhope’s work is concerned with the physical – how a town is a physical place, how we live in a world of machines, our bodies among them. Many of the poems address disability, not only in the narrow sense our culture understands it but also in the wider sense that our physicality acts as a pathetic curb on the life of the spirit.” They are strange, challenging poems.

I asked Mark about poetry and writing via email.

Tell me about a poem you love from the twentieth century.

I’m cheating. This one was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, and it’s pretty Modernist in lots of ways. It’s hardly a hidden gem, but it’s one of my favourite poems ever, and the first one that springs to mind: ‘Pied Beauty’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love it because it has a whiff of ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’ decades before Wallace Stevens wrote that and Pound and the Imagists trademarked the idea. I can’t remember when I first read it, but it was years ago, and I’ve kept rediscovering ever since. It’s a praise psalm which doesn’t preach: ‘God’ is in the details. There’s an entire creative philosophy, theology and social commentary in it. The idea of God uncovered via the natural world has been around since the Psalms, and permeated Celtic Christianity as it emerged from within Paganism. In this poem, that nature stuff clashes against technology, industry, ‘tackle and trade’, those things which humans progress in and work hard at. It’s all woven together so that there’s no obvious above / below dualism. The poem simply praises design, with all its flaws. The ‘brinded cow’ and the ‘rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim’ speak of the beauty of imperfection. That seems to have moral shades as well, where Hopkins seems to say that good and bad, dark and light, right and wrong, are all blended together in this complex, beautiful world. Everything is ‘good’, even though the imagery acknowledges the darker side of industrial progress. And the poem just sings. It’s incredible to read aloud. The sprung rhythm, compound words, the liberal use of assonance, alliteration and sound recurrence. It’s a ‘squashed sonnet’, has the usual volta / turn, but the octet and sestet are shortened to a sestet and a quintet. Hopkins often reinvented forms like that. All those things contribute to the whole; the medium is really the message.

Tell me about a poem you love from any century before the twentieth.

I’ve been asked about influences before, and I’ve never mentioned Matthew Arnold. Now I’m kicking myself, because ‘Dover Beach’ is another favourite. It’s Victorian, but don’t let that put you off. It’s hardly a perfect poem, it’s quite flawed; don’t let that put you off either. Its melancholic sadness is crippling, and really helped by the sounds. ‘Bring / the eternal note of sadness in’ is one of my favourite poetic lines, which is strange considering that it consists entirely of abstractions. People bang on about onomatopoeic poetry, how these consonants or those vowels really aid this and that conceit. Sometimes it all sounds like esoteric knowledge, I don’t get it. But these sounds really do support this poem’s feeling of sadness which literally comes in inevitable waves. The lines’ rhythms, stretched vowels, all those ‘S’ sounds, do mimic the slow ebb and flow of the night seashore. But right from that moment where the speaker (possibly Arnold himself; the poem was written during his honeymoon) invites his wife to the window to ‘hear the grating roar’, there’s an implied context – a wedding night, a story of embarking on a new life – which adds all this humanity, uncertainty, threat, to the poem. That desperate bid for hope, when all faith has been lost, is so life-affirming. I’m always tempted to skip the clever-clever second stanza, where Arnold tries to shoehorn in all this mythological, historical jargon which clashes with the multi-sensory effects of the first and last strophes. That context is important; it elegises his present Victorian age, and yearns for an earlier time. But I wish it was woven into the fabric of the rest instead of being on its own, sticking out like a jellyfish-stung toe. Anyway, it’s a classic, regardless.

I’d like to know about your writing process:
What do you start with – idea, sound, form, a single phrase?
What’s the process of getting that to a finished poem? How long does it take? At what point does it make the transition from mind to page? Pen and paper or computer?
What are your writing routines, if any? When and where do you write?

It varies. I’ve learned the hard way that starting with an idea is a bad… um, idea. Whenever I’ve said ‘I’m going to write about X’, the result was awful. Now I have to have a phrase, or better, a line. If I get two lines, sometimes that’s good, other times it’s really not. If two lines fit too neatly together in my head, it’s probably because they’re a trite little couplet not worth using. So, I’ll occasionally write the line down and play with it. But more often, that doesn’t get me very far; the poem is still nowhere to be seen. So I won’t draft the poem until another line, phrase, image suggests a way to go forward. Hopefully a set of images will emerge, with similarities and differences (having things clash and disagree is important) which might hint at a theme, or several themes. All this time I’ll be mucking around with linebreaks, because it’s fun, and also because they’re essential to finding out what a poem’s about, for me. They have to communicate themselves, especially if the poem’s language is more elusive.

How long do they take? The poems in The Snowboy took anything from an hour (which rarely happens) to two or three years. I don’t keep track of drafts, but some of them have gone through so many different shapes and sizes it’s not even funny. ‘The Centre’ used to be fairly long; now it’s one of my shorter poems. I write every day. If for some reason I can’t, I don’t beat myself up over it, because I’m fairly obsessive the rest of the time. Writing is a compulsion that I find difficult to stop. Of course, the more you write the more junk you accumulate, and have to throw away because it’s unusable tosh. But that’s all part of the fun. It’s a gamble, and there’s nothing like writing a lot to teach you muscle memory; things start to become natural and more subconscious eventually, and that reward makes everything worth it.

I know you also write (or wrote?) prose fiction. Why did you move into poetry? What’s different about poetry – why does it suit you?

To say I also write fiction sounds more impressive than it is, I think. In the middle of last decade, I decided to do an MA, having no idea what kind of creative writing it would focus on but not really caring. The MA sparked a big ‘off’ period for my poetry though, because it focussed a lot on fiction, and I suddenly got it into my head that I would write a novel. That consumed me for the next couple of years. It consumed me enough to make the first three chapters into my dissertation, and then to almost finish it in the years following. But I was too indecisive, chopped and changed its plot, structure, points of view. I switched it from first to third-person a million times. Now I’m at the point where it’s still in a drawer, unfinished. I’m still convinced the story is worth telling, but how? That’s all up in the air. Part of the problem is that I’m not very good at reading novels. I often dip into them, love their use of language and ideas, but can’t finish them. There are a number of novels I’ve finished, but it’s definitely not a habit. So fiction reading, following and keeping to a plot structure and all its threads, it’s a blind-spot. I’m not confident that I can do it on that large a scale. I’ve recently got into short fiction (I’m really loving Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy at the moment), and I’m flirting with the idea of trying to write some. I’ll go back to the novel, one day. But for now I’m a poet, I think, for a million reasons. If I exercise my prose muscles now, it’s usually for poetry reviews.

Tell me about your approach to lines and linebreaks.

I think of lines as like the strings on a guitar. They’re hardly the only thing which makes the guitar’s sound. You have the body, that chamber for the air to circulate round; the neck, fret-board; the shape of the whole guitar itself, which helps to define its sound. But the strings, the lines, are what will first hit the listener’s ear. I have no single approach to them, though. Each poem’s form tends to guide me on how the lines will work, what they do and how they do it. In The Snowboy, I have a kind of ‘try everything once’ approach to form. Each poem has its own needs in terms of imagery, sound, shape, linebreaks. In collating the poems, I was more concerned that images and motifs talked to each other than that shape and line were uniform. Having a variety of shapes which were able to shift and change almost at will, depending on what I wanted them to do, was important. It suited the theme of diversity and inclusion, that idea that ‘disability’ in a social sense can’t be boiled down to a set of physical problems, and even when it is, there’s a vast array of them. Disability is only one of the pamphlet’s themes, but as it emerged, it was glue for the whole thing.

I do have a few linebreak habits. An obvious use is to change sense, where a line which seems to mean one thing is suddenly enjambed, and the next line either adds something significant to the previous one in terms of sense, or disagrees with it, or rebuts it with a joke. It’s fun to deliberately break up the sense several times, across several lines. Prynne does that a lot. Another use is to break an established rhythm. In some poems that’s really important because the subject is the broken body, the breakdown of marriage, furniture, puppetry, the bits of a landscape. I remember your suggestion to give a section of ‘The Ideal Bed’ fuller lines with smoother linebreaks. The linebreaks were all deliberately jagged. Sometimes a word was moved down to punch the start of the next line, instead of the end of the previous line, as you might expect. But I took your suggestion because that section retold a pleasant memory, remembered exactly. When the memories become more difficult to tell, the voice becomes nervous and the details more elaborate and strange, the lines begin to fall apart and the breaks become more jagged and unpredictable. The same thing happens in ‘The House, the Church and Fisherman’s Walk’, where if I’m describing broken elements in the landscape, the words scatter themselves around a bit. Larry Eigner’s use of white space to show pause and laboured breath was another inspiration. I’ve learned from those nervous, fragmented utterances separated by white space, those lines scattered all over the page. And I’ve tried to adapt it for various poems, including ‘The Snowboy’ itself.

Lastly, Peter Didsbury sometimes switches from a looser metric into more deliberate blank verse for certain lines he wants to make more prominent for various reasons. I occasionally do that. And I sometimes finish a poem like that, where if I’ve found what I think is a perfect line, I might make it a blank verse one.

Your writing isn’t scared to be discursive – though you proceed via images, there’s usually a definite sense that you aren’t simply presenting a scene, it has some point or context that’s worth looking for and thinking about. How do you negotiate that difficult terrain?

As a reader, I love the feeling that there’s a context, a world in the periphery of a poem. I like to think that a poet had a reason to write it other than to fill a page; they were spurred on by something. That’s where Confessional poetry comes in, I suppose. Confession is buried under the surface in my stuff, not overt. I hope readers will supply their own contexts; I just invite them to. Everything they need to know is in the poem. ‘The Ideal Bed’ has a background of marital breakdown. I’m working with painful memories, some too painful to remember. So I use broken bits of narrative; imagery which is literal as well as strange, symbolic, metaphorical. I try to dunk you into experience rather than retell it and say ‘Now go and think about it.’ I couldn’t do that. My memory plays tricks on me. I hope the poem itself plays some of those tricks.

When I started seriously workshopping poems, a good rule of thumb to remember was that poetry isn’t the place for preaching or ‘making a point’, and the harshest subjects needed to have the lightest touch. That took a while to go in. I’d written poems with the deliberate intention of ‘telling’ the reader something, and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I gradually came to see that ‘points’ are earned when everything else works. The ‘point’ had to be one of a range of things my poems did. But yes, you could say that there’s a didactic, discursive element to my work, sometimes. It might be because that old ‘Show, don’t tell’ rule is a bit inadequate to me. As a reader, I want you to tell me something. If it’s worth thinking about, I’ll enjoy thinking about it. I do stand by ‘no ideas but in things’, but ‘things’ aren’t the same as ideas. The idea of ‘pure poetry’ is a widespread cliché, I think, because it’s so unattainable. Everything communicates: imagery, rhetoric, and statement, but also vocabulary, form, sound, line, and rhythm as well. It all ‘tells’ you things.

I’m interested in that word ‘discursive’ because it implies a level of confidence in ‘the message’. I hardly have that confidence. Religion and disability are dangerous territory because their traditions are so full of forceful soap-boxing, therapy, and saccharine languages. I know that some readers will find messages that aren’t there simply because of the nature of the material. As soon as I say ‘I am disabled’, some people will think I’m making a ‘point’, a political statement. But if I said ‘My eyes are blue’, would they still think that? Both statements are the same kind of pure and simple fact, but the latter is more likely to make the reader think about suffering, pain, frustration. Why is that? I do think that readers can have an intention to go into some kinds of work, and read it in a certain way, and I like to play with that intention. If you think I’m farcically labouring a point, I probably am. Maybe the ‘point’ is that there is none. I might use OTT rhetorical devices, like puns, to undermine a message I’ve half-delivered. I hope the ironic slip from a serious tone might make readers laugh, wonder if I’m really soap-boxing at all. I am being serious some of the time. I’m very serious in places, but I’ll let you decide where and when you think I am.

Last thing: you mention ‘simply presenting a scene’. I wanted to pick up on that, because in ‘Milo Won’t Go in the Water’, that’s what I’m doing, really. I paint the Leisure Centre swimming pool as a water-filled brain. It could be an inner landscape more than a literal scene. Maybe Milo is refusing to embrace or address the real issues of his Hydrocephalus. Maybe Milo is me. I don’t know. In the end I tell you how he feels about the situation, but I don’t tell you how to feel, and you’re still asking ‘Who is Milo, anyway?’ I don’t ask you to sympathise with him. I’m not interested in sympathy; empathy is more realistic, and there’s nothing like laughing with someone to make us feel empathy towards them. I often play with the idea and validity of delivering a message, rather than delivering a finished one. That’s why ‘The Man Upstairs’ (God / Schopenhauer) delivers a message to the councils instead of me: because they have the required gravitas / arrogance, and I don’t. It’s also why it’s a ‘draft’, not a finished letter. Other poems are like that, where you can see a point if you want, or you can just enjoy whatever else the poem is doing. It’s up to you.

OK, the Apocalypse is upon us: natural disasters, alien invasions, milk shortages. The British Library is on fire. Which one page do you rip out of The Snowboy to keep in your pocket as you roam the lawless wastes, and why?

Well, I’m getting married next year. By the time the Apocalypse is at its worst, my fiancée, Sarah, will be my wife. You didn’t mention zombies, but assuming she hasn’t been eaten yet (and even if she has) I’d take ‘The Snowboy’. It’s the title poem, completely central to the collection, and everything else kind of revolves around it. It commemorates the miscarriage we grieved together, and still do. It’s strange, being a father to a child who never ‘lived’, but always goes with us as a concrete fact. So it’s important. Plus, that poem is all on one page, so I wouldn’t lose any by ripping it out. In the throes of a post-apocalyptic panic, that just makes sense.

Interview with David Gaffney

2011-08-08T16:24:00.000+01:00

David Gaffney is simply the best writer of flash fiction I have ever read – it was reading his work that turned me on to the possibilities of this amazing form. As well as three collections of short fiction he has published a novel, and works in a variety of innovative ways beyond the page. His website is here.

TW: You’re best known for writing very, very short stories. I first came across your work when a student of mine at Salford recommended Sawn-off Tales (Salt) to me. I read them and was (excuse the pun) blown away. More recently you’ve been publishing longer things – looking at The Half-life of Songs, your latest collection of short fiction, the length of your pieces seems to be creeping up. Is that deliberate? Is the very short form ultimately limiting?

David Gaffney: I’m not sure. I know that lately I have found it more difficult to get things down to a 150 word format - the length I used in Sawn-off Tales - and my pieces tend to be now 500-1000 words, which I find a bit frustrating, especially when it comes to reading live because I enjoy reading the really short ones in a live setting. In a live setting I think it’s hard to concentrate on longer pieces of fiction – poetry works better as performance for the same reasons. You can grab hold of it and really explore it.

Sometimes when writing short fiction you are aiming to discover what the story really is, where it lives. Where is its beating heart? If you can excise a live, writhing sliver of 150 words from a bulky chunk of text then it’s a delight, but you don’t always find those nuggets. Very small stories are like tiny scampering animals with a constant need to eat and they are very tiring to look after. So yes, the short form does have its limitations. It reduces the time the reader gets to spend in the world of the story. You could probably reduce a lot of stories down to a few hundred words and keep the essence and the message. Here’s a 145 word version of Chekov’s the lady with the dog I just made now.

THE LADY WITH THE DOG

A new person appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri met her in the public gardens.

"May I give him a bone?" he asked; and when she nodded he asked courteously, "Have you been long in Yalta?"

"Five days."

"Let us go to your hotel," he said softly. And both walked quickly.

Afterwards they talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other. It was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They both knew that in a little while the solution would be found, but it was clear that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

The End

What you lose with flash fiction is the cumulative effect, the richly textured world which a reader can think about while they are reading, adding their own thoughts and interpretation as they go, and comparing their life to the lives of the characters. With flash fiction the reader is in and out so fast the story doesn’t touch the sides, so a re-reading is often needed, but it doesn’t always happen. People tend to gulp flash fiction down quickly like oysters, one after another, and it has been said to me that my stories ‘do your head in’ if you consume them like this. In Sawn Off Tales there are 58 stories. That’s 58 settings, 58 sets of characters, 58 scenarios and 58 plots. It’s a lot to take in. But in a sense, as my style is similar, and some of the outsider-type themes to my stories are related, there is continuity. Although the characters might have different names and jobs, possibly they are in fact the same; there is a little sawn off world where all these people live, a kind of twin peaks crossed with the archers.

TW: And you’ve published a novel, Never Never (Tindal Street Press). Was the process of writing a sustained longer piece very different from the process of writing flash fiction?

DG: The writing of novels is incredibly different to producing short fiction. The main difference for me is you can’t sit and read the whole thing quickly, or experience it the way a reader will. A reader will read your novel in small chunks and you don’t know which chunks these are going to be. Engineering a novel feels like taking your whole house apart and laying all the bits flat on the floor to have a look at them and then putting it all back together again and doing this everyday while you are still trying to live in it, or like putting together a flatpack piece of furniture when you don’t know what the piece of furniture is for, or what it does, and you have no instructions and there always some bit left over and you don’t know where it goes. I’m writing a novel at the moment and I’m trying to make each chapter like a short story because it’s easier for me to focus on completing each part if I do that.

TW: Your work is resolutely contemporary – it takes place in the world we know, of Hula Hoops and benefit fraud, Aldi and Guardian Soulmates – but it’s also often very strange. Sometimes it seems to me to veer towards speculative fiction (like in ‘Special Pudding’, where the narrator tastes everything her lover eats – and puts on weight accordingly), but more often it’s about the oddity of real people, of characters who could really exist. Do you see yourself as a realist writer? Can you comment on your choice of material, setting, tone?

DG: You are right there are a few sci-fi type weird ones, but they are all rooted in reality. 'Special Pudding' was inspired by a large woman who sat opposite a tiny thin man in a restaurant in Budapest and ate everything on the menu while she nibbled at olives. I tried all kinds of ways to get it into a story, and I’m not so sure it works that well. After I’d written it Irvine Welsh wrote a novel with the same theme. I prefer the realist stuff, but sometimes your writing takes you in that direction. There really isn’t much control. I think that fiction - or any art - should not be fully knowable or understandable on a literal level, I think it works best and has more resonance, when it’s mysterious, when you don’t know what it means or why it’s there and you can’t put your finger on why your mind keeps coming back to it and bothering it, turning the ideas of the story over and ovcr and wondering why it disturbs, why it’s funny, what it is about. So with that in mind I always tends towards the obscure I think, be it fantastical or just plain humdrum weird. You can tell people what to think or you can make them think it. An example of a work of art that is annoyingly literal is I think the lyric to John Lennon’s song 'Imagine'. Here’s how I imagine its inception.

YOKO: Mmm I like the tune John, but what’s the words gonna be about?
JOHN: Well I want the song to make people imagine that there no heaven, no god and no countries. But I’m struggling with how make people imagine those things.
YOKO: Well what about you just say imagine there’s no heaven, imagine there’s no god above us and imagine there no countries?
JOHN: That sounds too easy. What if they can’t imagine it?
YOKO: Just say it’s easy if you try
JOHN: Ok that should work –job’s a good un. What should I call it?
YOKO: Call it the distillation of truth in an annihilating world
JOHN: Catchy - thanks

TW: Who are your own favourite writers of short fiction? What books should fans of your work be reading?

DG: I love the stories of Tania Hershman, but increasingly I’m influenced by the work of visual artists like David Shrigley and text-art type poets like Patrick Coyle and James Davies.

TW: You’ve worked ‘beyond the page’ with several projects – turning your stories into mini-operas, working in the medium of PowerPoint, turning real people’s confessions into short stories, telling stories via lost cat posters, and so on. Your latest project is a sound installation for Birmingham Book Festival. Will you tell me about that, and perhaps talk more generally about your interest in this sort of project? Is it important to you to work outside the traditional writing structure of desk–coffee–paper–brain? To work with other people?

DG: Yes, I really love the collaborative aspect to ‘off the page’ projects and also I like the fact that these projects are a great way to stimulate new ideas. There can be much more to writing than producing text for printed books and in some cases it’s a better way to reach people. More people might see a piece of text in an art gallery for example than on the pages of a slim volume in the little visited short story section of Waterstones. Literature can be really enhanced by linking it up with other platforms and formats. I am always trying to develop writing projects that flex with the culture and push at boundaries. My current projects include a sound installation for Birmingham book festival called Boy You Turn Me, a project with Cornerhouse Manchester called Errata Slips which will involve me inserting fictionalised errata slips into publications in Cornerhouse bookshop, a project for Preston Guild which consists of three interlinked stories which will continue for twenty years, and I’ve just finished a project at Manchester Piccadilly station called Station Stories a unique literature event using technology and live improvised electronic sound where six writers linked to the audience by wireless headphones technology take you on a tour of Piccadilly station and read specially commissioned stories inspired by the station and the people who use it and work there. Different artistic formats can converge into exciting new products no-one has ever seen before; an example might be the recent project ( not one of mine) linking car satellite navigation systems with stories about certain places, and the emerging iphone apps that use augmented reality to relate fictions about cities as we wander about and point the device at buildings. This way of working can mean coming up with really meaningful art form collaborations. I performed my PowerPoint stories project with a live free improvised music group. Having said all of this, I value a good quality printed product – something to hold and enjoy – which is why I enjoy the innovative design and graphic work of work of McSweeney’s printed books, for example, and also the work of graphic novelists like Daniel Clowes. In this world of transient digital ephemera people still want things they can touch and own and hold on to. And it’s not all about digital, which is the mistake some people make when trying to force freshness onto a writing project. Too many new developments are just printed stories on websites.

Interview

2011-07-12T19:17:00.002+01:00

Angelina Ayers of Matter magazine asks 10 questions and I try to answer them.

Peony Moon

2011-07-11T17:40:00.000+01:00

Michelle McGrane very kindly features four poems from All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at her blog Peony Moon.

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at Ledbury

2011-07-07T10:50:00.000+01:00

Just back from a mammoth trip mixing family and friends, work and pleasure over a distance of six or seven hundred miles of motorway. The work bits were hardly onerous – on Saturday I filled in an author questionnaire (mainly draft blurb/promo material) for my book of flash fiction coming out with Salt next summer; and on Monday I read at Ledbury Poetry Festival in a de facto launch of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head, my new pamphlet with Nine Arches Press.

I read with Alasdair Paterson, who read mainly from his striking Flarestack pamphlet Brumaire and Later but also from his Shearsman book On the Governing of Empires. We did a pamphlet swap and later that evening I sat outside the bunkhouse we were staying at and read Alasdair's through, drinking Stella and watching a pair of peregrines above the woods opposite. It's a coherent, lovely pamphlet, and I'm looking forward to buying and reading the Shearsman book.

You can buy copies of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head at the link, or direct from me at a reading – next one is Trashed Organ at the Bridge Hotel in Newcastle on Wednesday 13 July, 7.30 start.