Author Interview with Liam Guilar.

 I was sent a series of questions out of the blue, and against my better judgement answered them.

You can read the answers below or at  https://www.nfreads.com/interview-with-author-dr-liam-guilar/.

If you follow the link you'll also find a library of authors answering the same questions. I wish i were still formally studying creativity as this would be an invaluable resource.

# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)! 

 

In a desperate attempt to appear windswept and interesting I used to claim to be the only lute playing kayaking medievalist to have been ‘smuggled’ over the Kazak border in the back of an apple truck before being given twenty-four hours to leave Samarkand.

My name is Liam Guilar, I rarely use the Dr. I was born in England but I have lived and worked in Australia for nearly forty years. I’ve had six collections of poetry published. I am the poetry editor for The Brazen Head (https://brazen-head.org) and a reader for DragonSmoke Press (https://dragonsmokepress.com). I also run a blog, Lady Godiva and Me (https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com), and a website (www.liamguilar.com).

 

My earliest publications were articles written about travels to remote parts of the world in search of white-water rivers and technical material for kayaking and canoeing courses, as well as for my day job as an English teacher. 

 

My first collection of poems, The Poet’s Confession was an accident. I was sending out enquiry letters for a book I’d written about a journey through what was then Soviet Central Asia, I had two prepaid envelopes left over. I did everything it’s possible to do wrong as far as a submission goes but the publisher was unconcerned and offered to publish the manuscript. I was so shocked I think I wrote back and asked, ‘What do you mean, I would like to publish your poems’.

 

The second collection, I’ll Howl Before You Bury Me was entered into a competition which it won. The prize was publication. At this point I thought I’d better start taking writing much more seriously. Cringing when you read your own work in print is unpleasant. So I backtracked and went the usual submission route, submitting individual poems to increasingly prestigious journals while collecting enough rejection slips to paper the wall. The idea of writing short poems soon lost its appeal, so after Rough Spun to Close Weave was published I turned to using poems to tell stories.

 

I’m a medievalist by training and inclination. Lady Godiva and Me was an early attempt to combine poetry and research. It tells the story of the historical Lady Godiva, the legendary one, and what it was like growing up in Coventry in the 60s and 70s. 

 

My most recent book, A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019) is the first of three planned instalments in an attempt to rewrite parts of a long 12^th century poem. I’m trying to use the writing process to learn about the original 12^th century writer. 

# What inspires/inspired your creativity?

 

The pleasure of writing. The enjoyment that comes with moving words around until the box snaps shut and they can’t be moved anymore. It’s the best game in town. Even when the writing isn’t going well, I’d rather be doing it than anything else. I enjoy editing my own work as much as I do writing, even if a day’s work is less than ten lines.  

I first encountered Laȝamon’s Brut in the late 1970s. It’s a late 12^th century poem of some 16,000 lines. I did an Honours thesis, then a Masters (by research) on the poet and the poem, and realised that the traditional academic route simply can’t answer a lot of very interesting questions. I wanted to peer over his shoulder and understand him as a writer. To do this I started to rewrite three of his stories. 

 

The differences between a medieval writer and a modern one fascinate me. Modern advice for fiction writers, the kind you get in creative writing classes, workshops or ‘How to books’ would be meaningless. Consistency, back stories, character development, the idea that things can happen “off stage’ are all missing. The differences open up different ways of thinking about how a story works or could work.

 

And I enjoy research because it turns writing into a never ending learning process. I spend far too much time reading, looking at old maps, and comparing medieval versions of the stories I’m writing. I enjoy going down the rabbit hole offered by a question like ‘What would a rich woman wear to show off her wealth in sixth century England?’ or ‘Why does Locrin hide Aestrild in an earth house with ivory doors?’

 

# How do you deal with creative block?

 

I used to be terrorised by finished poems. I’d worry that I’d never start another one. Now I have a long-term project it’s not such a problem. I’m still daunted by finishing a book, so I make sure the next project has started before I finish the one I’m on. 

Usually ‘block’ is because I’m stuck on a technical problem. Then I read other writers to see how they solved it.    

 

The worst block is total dissatisfaction with what I’m writing. It can bring everything to a shattering halt. Then I have to accept that I am writing badly and give my-self permission to do so. One of the hardest things to teach students was that a draft is a messy approximation of the finished product. It took me years to accept my own advice.

# What are the biggest mistakes you can make in a book?

 

For me, letting another writer’s voice or method take over. I spent the last two years reading, and reading about, David Jones. It’s taken me six months to get him out of my current draft. Trying out other writer’s techniques is an important way of learning, but I don’t want the experiments to show up in the final product. 

 

The other major mistake is letting the research dominate the story telling. You shouldn’t know, from reading the text, how much time I spent looking at a map or how many books and articles I’ve read about post-Roman Britain.   

# Do you have tips on choosing titles and covers?

 

I’m very bad at titles. So no. As a reviewer, I’d say avoid titles that are confusing and cover art that isn’t directly related to the contents.

 

# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you and how do you deal with them?

 

There are different types of bad review aren’t there? The glowing one that seems to be talking about another book is embarrassing. The one that points out where you went wrong is painful but useful. The worst kind is written by someone who is using the review as an opportunity to massage their own ego at your expense. I’ve had two of these. 

 

My worst experience of being reviewed was by someone who made so many factual errors that it was obvious he either read with no attention or didn’t understand what he was reading. It felt like I was being gratuitously insulted by a total stranger. You want to respond. I wanted to bury the writer and the editor who published the review with a withering rebuttal. But responding is not a good idea.

 

Having said all that, I write reviews and because of my own bad experiences I’m aware that I’m dealing with a chunk of someone else’s life. While I think professional academics are fair game and should be held accountable for bad writing and sloppy thinking, with poetry books, if I can’t say anything positive, I’ll hand the book back. I prefer to be enthusiastic and celebrate books I’ve read which I admire or enjoy. I set up a blog on my website called Enthusiasms for that purpose. 

 

Dealing with feedback is a fascinating problem. See next question. 

# How has your creation process improved over time?

 

I think I was very lucky. Although I’ve been trying to write poems all my life, when I started writing for publication, I was writing articles about kayaking, or technical pieces about kayaking or teaching. You can’t afford to be precious. If you are obscure, incoherent or wrong the consequences can be serious. I learnt early on to show the draft around and ask for feedback. It took me some time to apply the same logic to writing poems, but once I did it made the end product so much better. It’s tempting but self-defeating to see writing, especially writing poetry, as a private activity. 

 

Dealing with feedback is a skill in itself. It’s very easy to fold up and accept everything someone else says; it’s also very easy to reject everything.

 

I taught the idea of circles, which I read somewhere a long time ago. The inner circle is your family and friends. They are supportive but unlikely to be useful. The outer circle is editors, publishers, reviewers who may be driven by their own agenda and may not be useful. The middle circle is made up of people who know something about writing but can be trusted to be honest without being destructive. Staffing the middle circle is another skill. There’s little point in showing your work to someone if you know what they will say in advance. 

 

It helps if you respect the person giving advice. I’m not a fan of writing workshops or creative writing classes for that reason. I’ve been in some that were comically bad. The best feedback is the one that tells me that I can’t get away with the things I already know are flawed or points out something I haven’t seen.

# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?

 

Writing stories I’m always surprised by the way the words lead off in unknown directions. Even though I’m following a storyline it’s fascinating to see how incidents and characters expand. The best moment is when I read the book a year or so later and it surprises me because it’s good. I wonder how I wrote that. The worst part of completing a book is rereading it a year later and finding that section I really should have cut out or revised. I wonder why I wrote that.

# Do you tend towards personal satisfaction or aim to serve your readers? Do you balance the two and how?

 

Good question. Over the years I’ve encountered many writers who claim they write poetry purely for their own satisfaction and have no interest in what a reader thinks. Some of them claim, aggressively that they don’t read any other poets. I wonder why they expect their work to be published or read.

 

So ideally there’s a balance. I want to satisfy my own curiosity, and I want to enjoy myself. I want to learn how to improve what I’m doing. But I am convinced that if a writer seeks publication, then they should be offering a total stranger more than just the spectacle of a writer writing a poem. 

 

I hope anyone reading A Presentment of Englishry, or the narrative I’m working on now, will enjoy the stories. So as I’m revising, I’m very consciously considering what a reader needs to know. I try to avoid writing in way that would require an unlikely prior knowledge. How good is your knowledge of 5^th century heresy? 

 

There’s real satisfaction when a stranger says they like my work. I’d be delighted if a reader was lured into finding out a little more about the historical background to the stories. There’s another level of satisfaction when someone who knows this material better than I do tells me what I’ve written has given them new insight into it. 

 

# What role do emotions play in creativity?

With poetry this is a loaded question, since the assumption is often that poetry is an expression of emotion. Poets who spend their lives writing about themselves don’t often interest me so it would bore me to be one of them. Besides, how many poems have you read about happiness? Apart from the usual emotional Ferris wheel of excitement and disappointment, I think of writing as a craft or a trade. I’m not ‘expressing myself’, I’m building something. On the other hand no one’s paying me to meet a deadline. There are days I can’t do it, so on those days I have learnt to do something else. 

 

# Do you have any creativity tricks?

 

I ‘translate’, usually early medieval texts. I can stumble around in two medieval  languages and two modern ones. It’s a way of forcing me to think about modern English. It’s also a useful practice when I’m stuck or bored with what I’m doing. ‘Translate’ is in inverted commas because I would be mortified if anyone read the end result. ‘Stumble around’ is not false modesty.

I walk a lot. Some of the best lines come from the rhythm of walking. I compose as I walk and If I can remember it until I get home and write it down, it’s usually worth keeping.

 

# What are your plans for future books?

 

I set out to tell three stories from Laȝamon’s Brut. The first appeared in A Presentment of Englishry. I’m working on the second now, which is the story of the end of Roman Britain. Parts of it have started to appear in journals and on line. If I finish it, and If I find a publisher, I will have to do the last of the three stories. 

#What do you think about writers having to have an online presence.

 

There’s definite pressure on modern writers to maintain their ‘online presence’. I often wonder how some have time for writing, they are so active on twitter, Instagram, Facebook discussion boards, blogs etc. 

 

However, while answering your first question I was laughing at the number of links I included, so perhaps a limited involvement is useful. I am the poetry editor for the Brazen Head, and a reader for DragonSmoke press. I also write articles, reviews and blog. I used to worry these would detract from my writing. However, none of them is particularly time consuming and reading a superb submission to The Brazen Head or DragonSmoke press keeps me honest when I’m evaluating my own work. Having to verbalise why I am not  going to accept a poem, or writing a critical review, makes me want to ensure I’m not guilty of the same flaws.

Having a rough idea where you are on the scale from utterly incompetent to excellent is important in any activity. And matching ambition to that awareness is essential. 

 

#what’s the best writing advice you’ve ever been given.

 

Four things.

 

You can’t read too much. Good writers are always good readers first.

 

The idea of ‘critical circles’ I mentioned above.

 

‘You can’t play the instrument if you don’t take it out of the case’. One friend writes a poem a day. Everyday. He throws most of what he writes away but he’s the most technically proficient poet I’ve ever met. ‘Translation’ comes into this category. 

 

Finally, something I read in one of Alan Garner’s books:

 

If someone else can do the job better, let them. 

Always take as long as the job requires.  

 

How to write a poem

The Irish Poet Austin Clarke:

Robert Frost had been given an honorary degree in Dublin, and after the conferring was introduced to Clarke.

'As we sat together on a comfortable sofa in Newman House, he asked me what kind of verse I wrote. Having been rarely asked such a question I was confused, and then suddenly, thinking of the 'strong man' whom I had often seen on his 'pitch' near St Martin's in the Fields, replied: 'I load myself with chains and try to get out of them'. 'Good Lord!" exclaimed the wise octogenarian poet, 'You can't have many readers'.

The truth about writing poetry: a parable

Two Dedicated Poets die on the same day. One goes to heaven; the other to hell,  nothing to do with their poems.

In Heaven the Angel takes the poet to a long sweeping beach. “Your reward”, says the Angel, “is to spend eternity counting the grains of sand on the beach”.

The poet smiles and asks; “And because this is heaven the number of the grains of sand is finite?”

‘Yes’, says the Angel, happy to see that the poet understands the blessing of it.

The poet kneels and worships the wisdom and kindliness of God.

Meanwhile:

In Hell, the Imp takes the other poet to a long sweeping beach. 'Your punishment', says the Imp, 'is to spend eternity counting all the grains of sand on the beach'.

The poet scowls and says, ‘And because this is hell….”

The Imp, laughing with demonic, impish glee interrupts Impishly: “The number of the grains of sand is infinite.”

The poet laughs. ‘This isn’t damnation’, he says, ‘this is just business as usual’.

Ruskin, Davie, Graves: a ramble inspired by the AAWP conference 'discussion of process'.

I read Ruskin’s “On Modern Painters”, especially the section “of Truth of water” ( Vol 1, section V) where he castigates landscape painters for  throwing a blob of color on a canvass and exploiting a tacit agreement with the viewer that that blob means: ”Water; with or without reflections”…Ruskin said it looked nothing like light on water, and went out with a notebook and pen and carefully described what he saw. [1] It’s a powerful antidote to modern theorized claims about the Prison House of  Language or the slippage of the signifier. Starting with the admission that no one will ever manage to paint the sea, he then praises those who get closest. Nice metaphor there. 

As Ruskin says about painting the sea (Vol I part two, section v, ch1 point 5), it’s impossible, it can only be suggested by means of ‘more or less spiritual and intelligent conventionalism’(Vol 1 page 355). 

 A poem is a conventional literary category, and so there is a general sense of what a poem is and should do, and while that obviously varies across different versions of ‘poetry’, there are dominant assumptions about what a poem should be: in terms of diction, subject matter, and treatment despite the various movements over the past two hundred years.  In fact, given the lyricization of poetry over the past two centuries, we have fallen such a long way since Chaucer could write about everything and anything. Put against the works of the great medieval poets, most modern poetry seems flat and anemic.  

These often unspoken definitions, internalized over the years, exert a significant pull on the writing of any piece, they are part of the way in which I recognize that I am writing a poem,  so the paradox arises that to write a poem one must adhere to the conventions, but I want to avoid the conventions, but if I avoid too many of them is it still a poem.  

And that had merged with a distinction Donald Davie makes between two types of poems[2], one of which he calls “literary” but which I think of as the ‘Poetic Poem’: it’s the one where the poet is being self consciously ‘poetic’ ticking the right boxes,  and having poetic thoughts which no one,  let alone the poet, has ever had during the experience it purports to describe. Done well it can be interesting.  Done badly , which it so often is, the poem is the verbal equivalent of Ruskin’s blob of color…we accept that  someone is having a poetic moment and don’t enquire too closely about the truth of it.  We respond as well trained seals, especially if the subject matter is about some kind of individual trauma. We parade our sensitivity by responding to poems which invite us to sympathize with the poet and which don’t challenge us ot consider our assumptions or values.  

Whatever happened to the "Affective Fallacy"? Or, as Sir Geoffrey Hill put it in a discussion of Owen, "The Poetry had better not be in the Pity'.

That’s another issue. Robert Graves made a simple but useful distinction in poetic Unreason. If we ask if a poem is successful then there are two answers: successful for the poet, and successful for the reader.  Far too much poetry may well serve as therapy for the poet, but offers the reader nothing except the opportunity to wear his or her politics or ideology on their sleeve or to parade their own sensitivity.  Come to think of it,  I.A Richards called these  “stock responses” though I don't think he was talking about ideology. There is, somewhere, a fine poem by Thom Gunn about this all.

It may make sense one day. 

---

[1] I don’t claim to have read all six volumes of Modern Painters.

[2] In Under Briggflatts (1989) ‘One fertile in associations and analogies , that may be called ‘literary’; and another , that goes immediately into prosody, to be called poetic’. (128) 

Geoffrey Hill, W.B Yeats, Robert Graves and Margot Rudock.

That list of names is willfully bathetic.

In his most recent Oxford lecture (30/04/2013), Hill, falling into the orbit of Graves’ early writings on Poetry, describes their attraction as partially due to the exploration of two conjoined factors: craft and trauma. As he says (I’m paraphrasing ) all technique and no crisis: The Movement; John Wain, Davie, et al with Larkin and Empsom as presiding geniuses. Crisis without a sound grasp of, or a naïve indifference to, technique, and you get Margot Rudock, who can be found in what Hill describes, with great relish in the pronunciation and repetition of the adjective: Yeats’ “lunatic” anthology, ‘The Oxford Book of Modern verse (1892-1935)’

Why Yeats included Rudock is anyone’s guess. Her pictures suggests she was beautiful. Roy Forster believes she was infatuated by him and he with her. Hill in his collective writings on poetry calls her Yeats’ ‘mistress’.  In her letters to Yeats (published as “Ah Sweet Dancer”), she addresses him as Darling Yeats. They sound like the letters of an increasingly unstable adolescent:  she was twenty seven, twice married, and the mother of two children. Her little poems seem inconsequential in the anthology, even if compared to the equally baffling inclusions from Dorothy Wellesley. 

But Yeats was giving them both advice on how to write. (see previous posts)

Yeats to Margot Ruddock, in a letter undated, but early April 1930:

I do not like your recent poems. You do not work at your tecnic (I cannot spell the most familiar words because of my illness-this is my first real letter) you take the easiest course-leave out the rhymes or choose the most hackneyed rhymes, because-damn you- you are lazy. Leave off verse for a time. When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second-hand-there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface-difficulty is our plough. Yours affectionately…

To which she replied, in an unsigned letter dated 24/4/36 which begins, not “Darling Yeats” or “Darling W.B.Y”  but simply:

Yeats

Never say I do not work, for I am sitting from morn til night over a poem so bad so bad so Bad. Do you know that you have made poetry, my solace and my joy, a bloody grind I hate!

If we are in our natural state we write like the Swami (In his native). 52 poems of sheer ecstasy in a day.

I loathe poetry, I loathe working at it for given grammar and words (of which I have not enough), Poetry should not be worked at. Scrub floors and sweat in offices but do not sweat at poetry which is spiritual sweat.  And to make it physical sweat as well is to condemn it with all other earthly things.

It’s a strange thing to write to the man who wrote Adam’s Curse with its description of writing poetry:

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,  

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.  

Better go down upon your marrow-bones  

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones  

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;  

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet  

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen  

The martyrs call the world.’

The 2013 Bad Joyce Award

And the winner is

me.

http://www.johnbutleryeatsseminar.com/home/bad_joyce_essay


And in case the link dies here is the effusion with hitherto unpublished explanatory notes in purpule. What intrigued me is how easy it is to do this badly and how that underlines why doing it well is so insanely difficult.

Jay's son and the Fish Herman

By J.W.Winebar

Yes, G O’logical, harmed with prick and stammers, is evacuating my fallacious period, hoping to find dinner saucers.

This began as a totally meaningless play on Geological because I liked the idea of my “fallacious period”…I had no idea what it meant. The geologist is armed with prick, not pick, and this then sets up, again unintentionally, all the sexual references to follow. Dinner saucers a meaningless play on dinosaurs.

Back then I was on the royal road to the sub-constable, running from the veryneesy,  anal trickcyclist , Siggy, who was arrested for a fraudulent slit.

The royal road to the subconscious is Freud’s description of dreams, hence Siggy the Vienese psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst. I've  always liked the idea that anal is in psychoanalysis.  Though for me references to constables=the third policeman so the Royal Road=The rocky Road to Dublin…Freudian slip=fraudulent slit (linked to prick above, as well as “leers” in the “pubelick louse”)

  

G.O, I says, says I, while nostalgicating alcofrolickally over a few leers in the pubelick louse:

q) Cans’t shell  me eggs acterly what eventumanated?

a) Whilst imprisonyated by the sub-constuble, under sub section fifty spew, parachute 3, sub selection hive of the indecency fact,  inside the sub-vestibule  he did endite a tome, hight, in the vernacular, “The interpolation of creams”   The interpretation of dreams…exonerating his fraudamunt slit. And fleeced us all for gold.the first of several Jason and the Argonaut references and at the same time the idea that the book “fleeced us”…is in itself a kind of fraud….

q) Ah G.O  me dear, have some cold cheese, (Argo (Jayson’s ship), Medea, (his wife) Colchis, where he went to) which picks up Fleece above and then runs into the idea of the quest which follows)   slurp your grin bionic and tell to me in words spain and dimple of the subconstabo hoo buouillion.  Where id ego? 

a) the royal road to the subconscious has become the rocky road to Dublin…here introduced by the usual nonsense rhyme of an irish chorus…Whack his folderol he diddled his dildo on the rocky road to bubbling, from galway’s bay to the swine dark tea(irish=tea drinking…swine dark is obvious though it links to a run on pig jokes)

q) You can’t pig snore ham, canoe? (You can’t ignore him, can you?)  But doing what, tell me tell me. Give me the goss.

A) well, as I’ve heard it said, he was burning hairs all the way. (The chorus to rocky road is “hunt the hair and turn her/ all the way to Dublin/Whack fol ol de ra (and god alone knows what “hunt the hare and turn her” is supposed to mean )

q) That and that alone?

a) this now riffs off on Yeats’ “The Wanderings of Aengus” which is another quest narrative…what follows is obvious word play if you know the poem… Nah, he wanted to arrestimacate a deviant old fish  Herman, Aengus his mythical moniker.  Clammed to have cast his line and caught a dish, a silvery stout! .  When he laid his crutch upon the tyre, it burned into a simmering churl, with apple blossom round her fair, who flashed her bits at him and ran, into the dark king’s lair. Singing “maids, when you’re young, never bed a cold ham” (The last bit is “maids when you’re young/never wed an old man” a song giving reasons why young girls shouldn’t do this…and which gives the silent girl in Yeats' poem a bit of a voice. The pig reference is obvious and leads back to Pig snore, but also to tea (cut ham for “tea”…) )

q) Anne Heeded? (And he did?)

a) No no, that was not her nam. Some think she was a fig meant  for his imagined nation. (Obvious) He Followed up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen, (there’s a famous poem with this line in it…a dig at the essential sillyness of Aengus) with his blackthorn stick on the gravel walk, along the mountain road  (OK, After the rocky road there’s now comes a run on tune titles ) 

Q)  Your mystical musical jigging code leaves me reeling…a gentle nudge in case the point is missedbut tell me, tell me…by the lord Harry Doodlums…the porpoise  he proposed, to himself if to no other, not his father or his mother or his sister or his brother, the desired, to him, termination of his endless vagabondation, of his up goings and down comings, on his hay down treaders across ridges and cwms, his wadings through streams, his weddings through corn, his windings through sheds and beds and streets and sheets, his lookings and his lostings, his hopings and gropings , his endless leavings and arrivings? this is fairly obvious….though Hay down treaders is a passing reference to Seamus Ennis’ awesome “Don Niperi Septo” (Which Carson prints as “The Dairy Maid” in 'Last Night’s Fun')…...Ennis is one of the great Pipers, and he introduces “the smokey house reel" with an brilliant bit of storytelling about a little girl who gets hired by a strange man who teaches her to rename everything in the house. The punchline goes: “ Rise up from your Barnacle, Dom Niperi Septoe and put on your Fortune’s crackers and your Hay–down treaders and come down the Wooden Hill because white faced Simony has a spot of Hot Cockelorum on his tail and if we don’t pour Pondelorum on it quick the great castle of staw Bungle will be in hot cockalorum”….

a) Merely to osculate. (I avoided the obvious play on “pluck til time and times are done')  Repeatedly, when he finally came to hour down. ( another song lurks here, Aitken drum(there came a man to our town etc…and his hat was made of the good roast beef”)  after a dinner of the good roast beef, against her ruby slips (which links back to all the slit references earlier but also suggests his attentions may be unwanted ), and to fondle her digitals with his phone.

Jay son I’d not walk all the way to fork for that, I’d be interpolating creams to be sure eye wood,I’d want to see her very dinner saucers at the very least and fondle her blooms day after day. 

Time, said the barmanminder, time to go Yes to G.O  says I, Yes. (Ok, the absence of  absent punctuation in the last section is obvious and so is the last word.) 

Basil Bunting on Poetry..and writing it part 2

This is the first 3.52 minutes of Bunting's introductory remarks at a reading given at Keats' house in 1979. See previous post for the rest of it. I'm not sure of the first French word so if anyone knows what Pound did say I'd be grateful for the correct/ion reference...

Bunting:

I thought I might perhaps indulge myself in a few irrelevant words before going on with the reading,  then I’ll read you some poems as a reward for listening to it. It’s because I think this is the last time that I’m likely to address a London audience,  by this time next year I’ll be over eighty and even more reluctant than I am now to travel away from Northumberland.

So I’d like to take the liberty of telling you a few things before I go on to read these other short poems. 

You know that my friends are dead for the most part: Yeats, and Pound, Zukofsky, Carlos-Williams, and the other day Hugh MacDiarmid and perhaps you think I belong to a dead generation that knew nothing that this generation need listen to.  However, my friends are not as dead as all that. It’s not wise to ignore what they had to say and quite daft to try to go behind them to the moribund poetry that they superseded.

I’ve noticed in the past few years a darker reaction than any I remember except at the beginning of the 1930s, In all things, In politics, social morals, in literature. To be sure, there are always of course wild men to be laughed at, not pelted, by people who refrain from making rash experiments in order to follow recipes that have been tried before and didn’t work. Which is the wilder road I’ll leave you to say; no names, no pack drill.  But I do find a ridiculous number of young men who are, as Pound said of Dante, (?diablement?)  dans les idée’s recu, ideas of long ago, unburied though rotten.

Of course, I’m thinking chiefly of poetic techniques, but there’s also a great rush to throw reason overboard and trust in one magic or another; to achieve wisdom without toil by practising the rites of some church or other or stilling the argumentative parts of your brain with drugs. Those who have neither gone Buddhist nor Psychedelic are apt still to desert God for the church, which exists by concealing God and which is partly responsible for the revival of censorship by irresponsible police or customs men, for blasphemy prosecutions and laws against undefined obscenity, for all that Mrs. Whitehouse symbolizes.  

Basil Bunting on poetry...and writing it

This is a transcription from a part of a talk Bunting gave in London, in Keats house,  in 1979.  I have taken it from "The Recordings of Basil Bunting" and as always my thanks to Richard Swigg who looks after "The Bunting tapes".

My extract starts at 3.54...after it ends there is applause, a pause and then he reads: "Now we have no hope..." Punctuation is obviously mine, and doesn't do justice to the measured rhythm of his speech.

Poetry hampers itself when it undertakes advocacy, however indirectly. I would have maintained that, even against my much loved Hugh MacDiarmid,  whose advocacy was mostly against unreason, for thought and tolerance and renewal.  But poetry that advocates obscurantism, or, on the other hand, advocates naïve slogans of liberalism, is a nuisance to everybody who can read.

What I have tried to do is to make something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be propped by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself, something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their dues to the party or say their prayers, without implying the stifling deference so many people in this country still show to a Cambridge degree or a Kensington accent.

It’s brought...it's brought me just what I expected from the first; Nothing. If I set aside the handful of people who over praise  my verses and the few who take the trouble to run them down,  I think nobody takes any notice of them. Even my publisher hasn’t bothered to let me know, for all but a year, whether any copies of my collected poems have been sold or not, and I’ve never seen the book on sale in a book shop. I live on two small pensions, which together amount to somewhat less than the usual old age pension, in a house which is not mine  where Northern Arts allows me to stay in part of  new town planned for the greatest  possible density of population, in short an intentional slum.

I’m not complaining but describing conditions an honest poet must expect.  And they will get worse not better. Yet I think something is wrong where Arts Administrators draw salaries immeasurably more generous than any income that they find appropriate for an originating artist. Though they can be quite generous to performers.

And I think it’s unfortunate, for England, as well as for myself, that after sixty years of fairly good work without pay, I haven’t even a house of my own to die in.

Well, I’ll put that away, you’ve put up with it  and, well...….[Applause]

A Strange Thing Happened at the Book Launch.

No, people didn’t rush to buy books. 

I’d read a poem called ‘Not just a broken token song”. I hadn’t had time to explain why I don’t like such songs but the poem is a light hearted criticism of them.

So reading over, standing at the table with the books for sale, doing the usual  smile and greet. A man approaches the table, stands directly in front of me, picks up a copy of the book, starts thumbing through it.

“The word whore trips off your tongue?” he said or asked. It was hard to tell.

I was too baffled by this opening to do anything except gold fish impersonations.

“Yes, he says, still thumbing through the book, I see you’ve used it again .”

I think I muttered something about contexts. 

“Well”, he says, “you’re the poet”, and dropping (tossing?) the book back on the table, exits.

Leaving  aside how rude such behaviour is, and all the clever things I thought of saying  a week later,  I’ve been trying to imagine what he thought he was doing. 

So let us assume he was an educated, rational human being.  This was, after all, an event in an academic writing conference.  He obviously objected to a word (ok, that’s not entirely rational in my book but let’s run with it) and he felt strongly enough to want to police his little patch and make his unhappiness known.  But there was no attempt to enter into any kind of dialogue, no attempt on his part to explain what/why/;  no effort at all to even make his point clearly.

I was obviously not worth the effort of an explanation.  So exactly what I was supposed to do with his outrage remains a mystery.

Leaving aside the specific Incident, and all the clever things I thought of much later, it also seems emblematic of a growing failure to read poem as poem.   It’s an extreme version of the “ideological reading”. 

As a writer I choose words in context, to produce an effect in context:  I believe it is possible to give words to a character to signal that this character is speaking and behaving in a way I am criticising.  (This is exactly what’s happening in the poem in question).  I’m interested by  attitudes and opinions  that aren’t mine and poems seems a good place to explore them.

But if poem isn’t read as poem, as something made, and the writer not given credit for the time and thought that goes into its making,  if the default reaction is to pick whatever seems unacceptable without stopping to consider how the words are working, then what’s the point of writing a poem and putting time into its construction?

There are people who wonder at my lack of enthusiasm for publication…..