Poetry Landscapes

Christine Webb, 3 March, 2008

Anne Stevenson,  7 Dec 2006

André Mangeot, November 2006

Meg Peacocke, October, 2006

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Christine Webb on taking an MA in Creative Writing

Sally: The rewards and problems with creative writing classes, ever 'on the mat' have been aired once again in Acumen 60. Four months into an MA at Royal Holloway, with 6 weeks of teaching to go, I wanted to hear how you rate your progress.

Christine: When I started, I'd had a collection (After Babel, Peterloo) out for three years. It was high time I had another. There was a long year when my partner, Jackie, was ill. I had been writing but there was the practical problem of finding time to work on the poems.

I applied for the course Dec 06 and got taken on early in 2007 for the following October. I felt I should go with a generous complement of poems. In fact I needed 24 pages to apply for the course. About 12 of those I submitted were new (ie not from After Babel), and in the intervening 9 months I wrote a lot more.

I started October 07 and was surprised to find we were only four students. The course is run by Andrew Motion with six tutors of whom Jo Shapcott’s on the poetry option. I chose to do it half-time (in two years).

S: What has it done for your poems?

C: It's difficult to quantify. Some of the things I wanted, I've certainly found. A timetable with impetus (having to provide every two weeks 3 or 4 pieces of work, to leave with the tutors and 3 classmates for discussion the following week) concentrates the mind wonderfully as Dr Johnson said. I wanted to be part of a community engaged in the same activity and off whom I can bounce work I'm doing. I also wanted to work under professional poets and be given fresh tools to interrogate my work with.

Besides the Creative class of three hours there's a Critical/Theoretical class of one and a half hours - looking at different themes, at contemporary poets’ work, dipping into a historic range of styles from Beowulf (in translation, natch) to iambics and many kinds of stanza. Most of the versification and prosody I didn't actually need (because Christine taught English in schools throughout her working life). I did a couple of presentations, one on translation and one on Michael Symmons-Roberts’ ‘Corpus’, a poet whom I admire and learned from. This class also demands written work – some poetry, but most recently a 4,000 word essay on consciousness in the work of Ted Hughes (my choice).

S: In practice?

C: Both tutors are very good at putting a finger on a word or line or section you've been unsure of, and telling you how to think about it to put it right. The four students have become confident in analysing each other's work and there's a great cross fertilisation of ideas. We're all very different kinds of poet. It gives you a much broader perspective of things possible.

S: What will the course have given you long term?

C: It's made me less self-conscious because I’m forced to write. It can be inhibiting with just yourself and a pencil. And the past sits on my shoulder. It's easy to get paralysed by decades of studying and teaching. I'm more apt now to ask myself when I should economise or expand. And experiment in new directions.

S: Can you give me an example?

C: Writing very short poems; writing a twenty-line poem in a single sentence; making ‘found poems’ that challenge your characteristic voice; writing in very free forms as well as the odd sonnet or villanelle. The course has jogged me forward, made me write more.

Anne Stevenson

Have you formal educational background in philosophy?

   Philosophy was more or less father's milk to me. He taught courses in Ethics, Theory of Knowledge and Aesthetics, first at Yale and then at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I grew up and went to school. Charles L. Stevenson's ETHICS AND LANGUAGE  (1944) and FACTS AND VALUES (1960s) are still recognized philosophical texts. He is known for introducing what is known as the 'Emotive Theory of Ethics': ie. "When I say something is 'good' what I mean is I like it, and I want you to like it, too." Although he was personally a remarkably gentle and generous man, his conviction that moral  values could never be absolute but were always subject to emotive definition got him fired from Yale. I inherited his skepticism; it was part of me before I knew who I was. Yes, I did take philosophy courses at Michigan, but I was more interested in music and literature in those days. Much later, I began to read the philosophers with curiosity and amazement, but I never really lost that underlying feeling of doubt. Very early on I came to the conclusion that all religions are imaginative projections of the cultures that need them and therefore create them. I have a lot of time for myths and metaphors drawn from religious beliefs, but I have never subscribed to any idea of a religion being 'true'.

Was your father's interest in your progress influential?

   I was the oldest of three daughters, the one hovered over the most and probably the least able to cope with the outer world when I was a child. Everything was an immense puzzle to me. But yes, my father's interest in my playing the piano and cello, for instance, and in my early writing, was indeed influential. I wanted to please him and my mother, too. My father read poetry aloud to his family, which during the war incorporated two teenage English refugees, while my mother read fiction and history. I lapped everything up. Even mygrandmother, who lived with us, read Dickens and Louisa Alcott to us. I can't remember a time when I didn't write poems and stories, even plays, and show them to my parents and sisters. School meant nothing to me (though I made plenty of friends) and I paid little attention to my teachers until in high school, in Ann Arbor, I had a series of wonderful ones, especially in English, and began to crawl out of my shell.

A reviewer wrote recently 'Correspondences is surely Stevenson's masterpiece.' Do you agree?

   Yes, though the poem is flawed, I think I do. By the time I wrote Correspondences I was in my thirties and had been through one divorce and was about to embark on another. All my assumptions about what life was and what it should be had been more or less shredded during the 1960s. There I was, the mother of three children, the wife of a distinguished academic, and I still felt like a naughty child testing my will to see if it were free.  Correspondences was an alternative to breakdown. I needed to put my past in order to see where I and the kindly academic world I'd grown up in might be going in the future. Writing Correspondences was a necessary ordeal for me in the early 'seventies. Almost a punishment.

 I found Correspondences powerful and on the whole painful. Was each character taken from a real person?

   Many of the characters were composite figures from my past, some were taken, with variations, from the pages of 19th century letters written by members of the Beecher-Stowe family in New England. Some (like Marianne Chandler) were based on my own family's  legends. Kay Boyd is based on me, but she is not really me. I never broke down in a New York museum, for instance. Ruth Arbeiter is sort of based on my mother, but again, there are differences. Her love affair with the Englishman Paul Maxwell is purely imaginary. I remember saying to myself at the time that all the women in this epistolary poem were really versions of or variations on the same women, the same archetype. And at the core of this archetype was a profound feeling of guilt or sin. New Englanders were still feeling sinful a hundred years after Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter.

The dichotomy between head and heart so forcefully portrayed in Nick > Arbeiter's accusations to his father, infiltrates other poems of > yours. Is this to some extent autobiographical or observation?   

I was brought up to think clearly and rationally. My mother's family was a liberal, protestant, church-going medley of Germans, Scots, French Huguenots and a few Welsh. They valued education, had tender hearts and very little money. My father's was half German, half Italian, much wilder and more secular. The Christian Business man in Correspondence is an invention, but I did have a great-grandfather in mind who went went and made the family fortune. My parents met in high school in Cincinnati, Ohio, so they weren't really New Englanders. They were intelligent and naive in a New England way, though. "Do right and fear nobody" my Italian grandmother used to tell us girls. "Yes, but how do we know what is right?" we would tease her. One grandfather had lost all his money and gone mad, the other had died at 35. What kind of behaviour would insure you against an unhappy life?.It didn't seem to me that you could control your future. I came to that conclusion when I was about ten.

Have you thought of writing straight drama?

   Yes, when I was in high school and college I acted a lot and wrote some short  plays. But when I married an Englishman and came to Cambridge I moved in entirely different circles. I didn't know how to get back into the world of the theatre and the arts. I was sick of the arts, anyway. I longed to live in 'the real world' -- which I imagined was like the worlds of Dickens and Jane Austen

You write often about people who don't communicate properly.

 Most people communicate badly and don't know that they are thinking in cliches. Poetry has always been, for me, a process of clarification through letting particular lines and phrases tell me what to say. The tune in my head, as it were, shows me the way. "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"  Who said that? E.M. Forster, I think.

Your questioning makes me think of the Metaphysical poets? Is there one to whom you feel a special debt?

   I owe a lot to John Donne; also to George Herbert. It was T.S. Eliot, I think, whose writing introduced me to Metaphysicals when I was at Michigan. But the poet I learned most from - and am still learning from - is surely Shakespeare. I still constantly read Shakespeare. Currently my husband and I are watching DVD's of the BBC's Complete Shakespeare. Wonderful entertainment every evening.

Death is central theme in your writing. Would you agree with John Fuller that 'Life itself can only be obtained in the shadow of death.' (The Flawed Angel)

   John Fuller is surely right, though I would put it differently: no life without death. Short and simple. Aging is, in part, a matter of coming to terms with death. So many of my friends and loved ones have died that I wonder I am not morbid. But then I think how dreadful the world would be if we didn't die! Think of the traffic!  Think of the hospitals! Though I have had my romantic moments, and though I've never believed that human life can come to anything but a tragic conclusion, I suppose at heart I am a stoic. I prefer laughing to moaning as I prefer eating to hunger and drinking to thirst; and though I am pessimistic about the future -- not just about myself, but about this lovely planet we humans, in our greed and stupidity, seem daily to be consuming - I spring up each morning as if I had forever to live.

André Mangeot, November 2006

Can you put us in the picture about when & how you started writing.

I suppose it starts before we ever think of it as 'writing'. In junior school probably. The usual exercises, tasks we were set, the Sunday morning letter home. I vaguely remember sucking my pen and wondering what one was meant to say. I'm sure I made things up to fill the page. In a sense everything is new and possible at that age: the discovery we don't have to stick to the script, what we actually see or hear - and getting away with it, pulling it off, that's exciting and formative too. It's a time that possibly we never recapture, overlaid as it is by what we 'learn'. I wrote a play with parts for all the family, about a painting that 'went missing' from our living room. We all learnt lines and acted it out with my gran sitting there dutifully as 'the audience'! I loved Edward Lear's nonsense poems, and wrote bad imitations. Writing was already part of me, though I wasn't really conscious of it.

When the teenage years set in I lost a lot of the early naturalness and began to agonise over each word I said or wrote. Worried what others would think. My first job was with a small publishing business in Suffolk. The guy who ran it liked some of my early poems and brought them out in a pamphlet I was embarrassingly proud of.

But my first love was fiction. I wrote two novels in my twenties - heavily influenced by writers like Greene, Naipaul, Le Carré. A couple of agents and publishers were interested but nothing happened. Three years studying 'literature' was a privilege, they intimidated me. I remained trapped in the hesitant, over-literary straitjacket that tightened around me through university. I had to 'unlearn' - reading swathes of classic and contemporary crime fiction in the interim, Chandler, Bowles, Highsmith, James Lee Burke, these seemed real, alive and hugely exciting - before I wrote anything half-decent.

Alan Ross at London Magazine published a couple of short stories and was hugely encouraging. Shortly after that I stopped writing. Instinct told me I had to stop worrying about it and simply live. That out of whatever experiences lay ahead the writing would return once it was ready. It took nearly ten years. Memorable years if not always happy - travelling, strange and interesting jobs, love, marriage, divorce. Once out the other side I found myself writing again. A lot of distilled experience emerged. The surprise, to me, was that it did so in forms that suggested poems rather than prose. I didn't plan it that way. Which maybe vindicated the years of not worrying, or even reading much. That space washed away my earlier anxieties and influences. The most exciting thing about the new poems was realising their voice was finally my own. 

 Your poems are direct, pared and very physical, drawn from raw lives & the world of the working man. I guess this is why they adapt well to performance.

I try not to analyse what my poems are about or how they come to be written. I almost said 'how they write themselves' - because the strongest - and the strangest - seem to arrive that way. The only thing I'm aware of - and to some I know this is a drawback in my poetry - is that I still tend to tell stories. Mostly that means they are relatively straightforward in terms of beginnings, middles and ends. I accept this can be less satisfying, and bear less re-reading, than more allusive forms. I'd still like to feel there are layers if you look - something going on in terms of language, rhythm, image - but in performance, you're right - that accessibility and narrative drive means they're probably more easily grasped by the ear at one reading. This helps a live audience. And there's humour there too, with the serious stuff. I enjoy connecting directly, face-to-face, discovering immediately what works or doesn't. It's a different challenge each time, whether the audience are poetry lovers or people who've just wandered in by mistake. Who look terrified when poetry is mentioned and are dying to escape. It's probably more of a buzz to get them smiling, see them settle into their seats and stay to the end, than almost anything else. That's one of the moments when you know why you're writing, and why in spite of most of the planet ignoring it, poetry matters. The power is in the words themselves. Learning to read well can't be a bad thing and my happening to settle in Cambridge in the mid 1990's, was a stroke of good fortune.

Was that when The Joy of Six got together?

Not immediately. I soon joined an excellent monthly workshop group, First Tuesday, where three or four of the 'Sixers-to-be' were already members. And I started going to a cafe called CB1 where they hold open mike evenings. That's where I read my first poem in public. The usual nerves. But it was a start. And I met Martin Figura and heard him read. He'd been in the army for over twenty years, was just back in civvie street writing his first poems, but he seemed outrageously confident as both writer and performer. A year or two later Poetry Ipswich invited six poets from Cambridge to read: it just happened to be us who were able to go. A afterwards, i n the pub we shared the feeling there were more interesting ways we could have blended our different styles and voices. That's where it started. We met up a few times to look at overlaps, contrasts in our work, potential multi-voice poems etc. It was great fun from the start and still is. One of our founding tenets was to enjoy ourselves and to entertain others with something very different from a traditional poetry reading. In six years it's progressed from a small village pub in deepest Bedfordshire to a week of different venues in New York - and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival last week. The pleasing thing is that audiences seem to enjoy what we do whether or not they're confirmed poetry lovers. We're still having fun. Once we aren't, or people stop coming, we'll stop.  

 How did your first full collection come to life?

 Two or three years ago I was having dinner with some friends at Anne Berkeley's house. (Anne's a member of Joy of Six). There was a general discussion about the ingredients of a certain cocktail. Anne found a book that settled the question and at some point after the meal I started leafing through it. Those extraordinary names (Damn The Weather, Twelve Miles Out, Ward Eight …) I was off in a world of my own. Almost instantly I knew I’d stumbled on a gift. The essence of several poems came to me; I was scribbling more ideas than one napkin could hold!

 Some were memories, stories, incidents I’d forgotten, triggered by a drink's name. Others were more directly related to alcohol, a bar or barman, famously alcoholic poets etc. To give the sequence more shape, I started grouping poems into different sections. And I wanted the book to begin with a barman opening up his bar, and finish with another, across town, closing down, locking up at the end of the night. I had a lot of fun doing the 'field research'! The poems 'Firebird' and 'Blood & Sand' in particular. The tone of my first book, Natural Causes, was pretty 'dark' in general. I wanted to lighten up a bit, write an entertaining book.  That's why I decided to keep in the cocktail recipes as well as their names. And the humorous epigrams about alcohol between each section.

I suspect one of the trade-offs may be that certain readers/critics haven't taken the poetry as seriously as I'd have liked... but what the hell. There are serious poems in there. I'm still thankful that cocktail book fell into my hands when it did.

Most of the editors/publishers to whom I sent the typescript responded positively. Most loved the concept, a few were less sure about all the poems. Finding a publisher took about 9 months and in that time about half-a-dozen poems dropped out and others went in. Redbeck and Egg Box both said yes about the same time. I had a difficult decision. Redbeck would've done a good job with it, their press was more established, but the editor at Egg Box was young, ambitious, grasped immediately how I wanted the book to look... so I just went with instinct. It turned out fine. I love the ghostlike barman photo on the cover, and the designs inside. It sells for a fiver, nearly half-the-price of most poetry collections, which means we've sold many more.

There's a lot of personal life in your poems. Sex, seduction, camaraderie. Does this just happen?

These are things most of us go through, so in one way or another they find themselves into nearly everyone's poetry. The challenge is to find a fresh take on them. And to know when a poem's not transcended the purely personal - in which case it should probably remain unseen. My first book is more personal than the second. Again, I think that's a fairly common progression. And the bulk of it's relatively sombre. But even when poems turn out dark (a lot of mine touch on mortality) if I have any conscious and consistent intention when writing it's positive: to celebrate life, in all its shades and aspects. The mire and the glory. If, finally, there is more shadow than light in the picture, I guess it's because, ultimately, that’s where we're heading, that's our true state. Water and air.

What do you like an audience to take away from your readings? Is this different with your group?

There's no real difference. In each case it's surprise. Excitement. Energy. A desire to read, to write, to attend another reading. To realise poetry might be more thought-provoking, enjoyable, accessible than they thought.

Meg Peacocke, October, 2006

I wasn't sure whether to advertise a reading by MR Peacocke or Meg Peacocke.

This is a problem I wished on myself when I started publishing. I didn't want to use what I'm always called, which is Meg, because I'm not keen on nicknames used publicly, and incidentally half the sheepdogs in Cumbria are called Meg, but I use Margaret only for cheques and stuff. Hence the decision to use initials, which turns out to be a nuisance... I don't mind a bit, so please write what feels least cumbersome to you.

In a way your Cumbrian cottage with its unexpected animals that came and went,  was a new starting point.

I've lived on  a small farm in east Cumbria, on my own, for more than twenty years. I grew up in the country, but then moved about a great deal, for work and during my married life; so to be here is to connect the early and late parts of my life. Making poems is part of the same pattern - I started very early, was mostly blocked from late schooldays onwards, and began again when I came here.

When I was 20 I biked and walked all over the Drôme, and further east, with a half-French friend whose family farmed near Dieulefit. We slept in barns and lived on bread and cheese and apricots and I still remember it like yesterday. The basic connection with animal life, and the transhumance etc., was just part of ordinary local life then.

Three collections are published by Peterloo Poets, and now I'm working on a 'new and selected'. I write a lot about the natural world, though nowadays the poems relate more and more to people; but I never know where a poem is going to come from, and I don't know what I have to say until I've said it. I find out as I go along: words act like the white stones in the dark wood.

I'd like to know more about your process of writing.

Some things take months or years - I often have a phrase or a sentence but have no idea where it belongs, discover the context ages later, and that's because I hardly ever know what a poem wants to be about, I have to find out; and perhaps that's what gives the impression of exactness, I've had to work and work to discover what wants to be said. That sounds a bit daft I think; but it seems as though it's the poem that's wanting to say something, not me. What comes out is quite often a surprise. Though there are poems, occasionally, that just turn up complete and I only need to adjust a bit.

There's something in there about form - when once I know what the form of a poem is, I can usually write it quickly. But I don't know how I know what the form is, it's a kind of recognition; and I have wads of stuff that I've had to abandon because I could not find the form, or else I've forced it and it's stiffened up all wrong. I'm wary of thinking until a late stage (almost the editing). I find it necessary (and difficult) not to make judgements, think that the false starts come with deciding too soon what a poem is about/where it begins or ends. Mostly I put down all the scraps that arrive, all over a page, never beginning at the top because my indoctrinated mind will believe that what's at the top is the beginning. It's like collecting scraps of material to make a quilt, you just make a heap. No, I've never made a quilt, and brood on the colours and eventually - sometimes - you see, not decide, that this goes with that and what if... etc. There are decisions to be made, of course, but very late.

Do you go to workshops?

Hardly ever, partly because there aren't any good ones within reach and partly because I can't take a poem till it's almost completely cooked - that is, I know what it's saying or wanting to say - and then it's too late; and it seems invidious to take completed poems to a workshop, it looks like showing off. I do try poems out , usually on one or two people who aren't poets, to find out whether what I've said is clear: that's what I chiefly want...clarity. Usually they pick out the bits that I suspected were not clear but I didn't want to admit to myself.

You seem to do a lot of listening to the landscape, it's people, and to yourself.

I suppose I'm an observer - a watcher and listener. When I was fifty I trained as a counsellor: that training makes one a bit more conscious of what one is doing in the listening. I worked in a children's cancer unit for three years, which was good even though painful, because the observing combined with play. Children use words to draw with, not to explain, and I understand that. The good parts of life, I find, are a kind of serious play, and I feel very lucky, getting old but having good health, to be able to live increasingly in that way, a second childhood of the most fortunate kind: not to be relied on but to be enjoyed. You lose a lot - especially friends - but that brings into sharper relief the delight and mystery of what you have and what you have had... I get suck down the drain at times, there it is, and come out again in due course.