Richard Berengarten (Burns)

Richard Berengarten [Burns] interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 16th March 2015

0:05:07
[Starts with a reading of ‘These Hands’]
Born in 1943 in Hampstead, London, and brought up in Golders Green; on grandparents, I have only one scant memory of my maternal grandfather sitting in an aunt’s house; both sides of my family were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, so Ashkenazi Jews; I have researched them quite extensively, trying to find out more about my ancestry because a lot of this was hidden from me; my father died when I was three and my mother didn’t really keep up contact with my father’s family; what I discovered, partly through an aunt who was still living in Los Angeles aged eighty-eight, was that my father was the youngest of seven or eight; the older ones were half brothers and sisters because in Jewish families at that time if a wife died her husband would marry her younger sister; thus his half brothers and sisters were also his cousins; he was born in Warsaw; the family came over in stages to the East End of London in the first years of the twentieth century; they emigrated for all the reasons that Jews did so from Eastern Europe, one of which I discovered later was from the fear of Jewish boys going into the Russian army; if they had done and were identified as Jews then they had a very rough time; my father was a child prodigy as a musician and I have photos of him acting in films as a boy before the First World War; his father was a cantor in a synagogue; I have a photo of him surrounded by lots of boys, wearing a splendid top hat; the musical tradition continued in my father’s family through several aunts and uncles; according to my aunt in Los Angeles, in Warsaw my grandfather had possibly worked in a fruit and vegetable market but also in jewellery, both typical Jewish trades; from her description it was a well-heeled, middle-class upbringing; photos of my grandmother and her children at that time suggest they were beautifully dressed and she was wearing a gold watch; my mother’s family were from Latvia and Lithuania; she was the youngest of seven; they were grocers; they came to London probably in the 1870s or 80s so my mother was born a cockney; here they were in businesses of various kinds.
8:03:11 My father became a musician, a cellist; one of his fellow musicians was Sir John Barbirolli; unfortunately my father damaged his wrist so could not play professionally; he was multi-talented with musical instruments and eventually went into the business; in the early 1920s I have discovered that he was selling saxophones through newspaper adverts; apparently he was one of the first – if not the very first –to import the jazz saxophone into this country; he was also in contact with an aunt who had gone off to Hollywood to sing on movie sets, to dub the stars; an older brother, Seymour, had been a composer and had also gone off to L.A. and I have photos of him with Errol Flynn, Buster Keaton Jr. and Rudolf Valentino on set in Hollywood; my father’s saxophone business took off in the 1920s and he started a firm in the West End of London called Alex Burns Ltd; it was in Shaftesbury Avenue, and as a very small child I remember going into the shop and being surrounded by musical instruments and being hugged by various musicians; he was pretty well-known in the musical world, so when he died suddenly of a heart attack on his birthday in 1946 there were quite extensive obituaries in ‘The Melody Maker’ and other similar papers at the time; I remember aged six when all the gramophone records had been moved home, not only were they of classical music but also of jazz; I discovered among these 78s one by Dizzy Gillespie that I’ve never heard anywhere else; my mother was about thirty-six when he died, and at least ten years younger; it was an incredible blow as she was actually pregnant with my sister; on the day he died she answered the door to find the postman had brought a telegram with birthday wishes to my father; I have written a poem about this to do with heritage, talking about my father and mother, the ancestral heritage of Jews, and my English children in an English garden; the poem is called ‘May’; my mother was very brave; she did her best to keep the musical instrument business going but she failed because it had been built on my father’s reputation and expertise; she was not musical and couldn’t even sing in tune; she went to work for her brothers; one was in the catering business and owned hotels, and another was in the wine and sherry business in the City of London, a sister was married to a man who ran a ‘trading stamps’ company; my mother died aged fifty-six; she was very bubbly, extrovert, volatile in temper and rather a romantic; in some ways she was a difficult mother because she combined being very ambitious for me but also possessive and rejecting at the same time; fortunately I was sent away to boarding school in Sussex, a prep school, aged six; I didn’t like it much but I think it probably saved me from the usual complexes that Jewish boys may be prone to; I was then brought back to a little school in Swiss Cottage, again a prep school; then the money ran out so I was sent to the local grammar school, Hendon County; that was wonderful because there were girls, and I was on the threshold of puberty; then suddenly I got a Middlesex County Council scholarship to Mill Hill school; this was just after my Bar Mitzvah, an odd occasion because I didn’t really know much Hebrew and if anything knew more about Christianity than Judaism; our family belonged to the Reform Synagogue which was very liberal; however, I did take my Bar Mitzvah seriously, and the Rabbi was a man I admired enormously as a spiritual figure; the place at Mill Hill was conditional on my attending chapel, which I did once a day and twice on Sundays; Mill Hill had been founded by Welsh non-conformists about 1800 and has a similar neo-classical architecture to Downing College here, with lovely grounds; we had a very good rugby team; Christian tradition meant that I learnt the Bible through the lessons in chapel although I refused to sing or pray throughout my schooldays; I was the first boy in my year to become a prefect and eventually rose to Senior Monitor, Head Boy of the school; there was a certain point where the Head Master, Roy Moore, of whom I was very fond, suggested I might pretend to pray, but I replied that it was ‘against my principles’; I did feel that I wanted to maintain what I understood of my Jewish identity; more recently one would say that there is something ‘other’ about being Jewish in English society – one is the ‘other within’ – and there is plenty of documentation and theory on that

20:22:19 The difficulty with memory is that since the invention of the photograph one isn’t quite sure if one is remembering what one has been told; we used to take out photographs very often because my mother wanted me to know a lot about my father; for example, there are pictures of him playing his cello to me; but I can think of at least one memory that is nothing to do with my parents; we had a nanny and she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and I think that she was probably the first woman that I fell in love with; her name was Nurse Downing, she was blonde, tall and buxom; I remember walking with her up from our house in Wentworth Road, up Hoop Lane, then turning right down a little lane which took us to the Hampstead Heath extension, some 10-15 minutes walk away; she told me there were fairies on the tops of the flowers and if I looked carefully I would be able to see them; I think I believed I saw them; I now realise that it was an important stage in the development of fantasy, which has been very important to me; I was probably four or five at the time; of my first boarding school, I remember farewells at Victoria Station on the way to school, rather as J.K. Rowling describes it; I remember the train journeys and my tuck box; I remember a pond with tadpoles, growing carrots, and learning French; I remember being taught to swim by a plump woman who would lower us into an unheated pool on a pole supported by a towel around the waist; I learnt very quickly and was a good swimmer; she was also an absolutely abominable piano teacher who rapped my fingers, so I never learned to play an instrument; my father would have been devastated as he’d hoped that I would have gone to the Sorbonne followed by Vienna, and I would have become a musician, no doubt about it, or at least learnt to play well.

25:28:10 The little school in Swiss Cottage was great; it was a day school; I remember having the freedom aged eight or nine to wander all over London with a little ‘I-Spy’ book and went everywhere alone; I got a bus to Swiss Cottage and walked the rest of the way to school; it was a typical prep school of the time; there were beatings; the Head Master was an ex-Colonel with a limp, I think an artificial leg; we did have one master who used to read to us after lunch, and he read Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ right the way through; that was wonderful; another interesting thing to say about that period was the beginnings of reading; my mother had a lot of books and gave me free range; I used to take them down and tidy them even as a little boy and among them were poetry books; I was an early reader and read voraciously; I read the ‘Just William’ and ‘Biggles’ sorts of boy books, but also read books like ‘Little Women’, also Kenneth Graham’s ‘Dream Days’ and ‘Golden Age’, not just his ‘Wind in the Willows’; I remember that prepubescent age of very intense imagining and entering into the world of fiction; poetry came a little bit later; I remember a teacher called Mr Annetts, the one who read us Tolkien, and at Hendon County School there was a Mr Richards who got us writing poems – I wrote one that was a Hiawatha parody – and he was also a nice man; I had hobbies apart from reading at that time – carpentry, collecting stamps and matchboxes (I still have the latter); some coins, cigarette cards had been passed down to me from older cousins but I didn’t really collect them; I did marquetry a little later; I had a dog and we used to go for walks on the Heath with a friend who had a dog; games came later at public school where it was very much part of the whole ethos; I was quite sporty and was in the junior school boxing team; I was in the rugby team right the way through; there was a difference between the state grammar school and Mill Hill, but not in terms of the academic expectation or achievement; the shock was in the fagging system, the so-called ‘year system’ and the absence of girls; the year system meant that you couldn’t talk to boys in a higher year without them addressing you first, which I found absurd; there were ridiculous things called ‘privileges’; if you were a ‘fag’, a first-year boy, you had to wear your coat buttoned up with one button; in the second year you could undo your jacket, and in the third year you could pull the collar up; all this was done ostentatiously; it was a typical public school, based on militarism and fear of homosexuality, though it did exist; W.H. Auden described the system as ‘liberal fascism’, and there was that element of total irrationality and stupidity; I found myself completely able to survive that; I remember the first day there seeing a little boy of my age weeping in the first full house-meeting; I thought, “Poor kid, he’s had it for the rest of his career”; I went through all the things the other boys went through and adapted to survive; I think I was fairly tough and had been prepared for this by my previous boarding school; I wasn’t just ‘the little lost Jewish boy’ at the school but was very much able to survive in it; I had been totally anglicised; any bullying was systemic; I would not allow myself to be bullied as an individual, so the systemic bullying I just took, as we all had to; there were some aspects of the school that were wonderful; there was an extraordinary range of things to do – carpentry, marquetry, keeping tropical fish, there was a good art centre – so I availed myself of just about everything; there were clubs and drama, a school magazine of which I became editor; there were school prizes for literature which I won in my second year; by the sixth form I was both enjoying it and rebelling against it; there was a time when a group of us who were prefects decided we were going to break out of school at night, and hitch-hike to Soho, smoke and watch girls, then hitch-hike back; this was just before I left

35:47:10 I had been in the science fifth and had intended to become a doctor; before going to Mill Hill I had been a St John’s Ambulance Brigade cadet; I moved from science to arts when I won a literary prize; I had started keeping a diary when I went to Mill Hill; I had read the diary of Anne Frank and that had been the trigger for me to keep my own diary, and, out of that, poems began to emerge; I still regularly keep notebooks with scribblings in them and that habit began when I was thirteen; I still have those diaries and they reflect thoughts as well as day-to-day happenings; I moved into the arts sixth and what I really wanted to do was English, I quite enjoyed history, but unfortunately I had to do Latin as well; I would have preferred to have done French but we didn’t have much range in choice of subjects then as people do now; one of my deep regrets is not having studied mathematics further because these days when I read philosophical texts in which there are equations, I find them difficult; an example would be Mandelbrot’s book on ‘Fractals’ which I started, enjoyed, and understood the importance of fractals, but when I came to the mathematics I was baffled; I am sad that I haven’t had a chance to learn that language; I can remember three special teachers in the sixth form who I respected for different reasons; one was called Phimister, a historian, and I liked his approach; there were two English teachers, Mr Stringer from Oxford and Mr Winter from Cambridge, I learnt later that he was a Leavisite and had been at Downing; I found myself even then rebelling against some of his rather strict ‘values’ which were Leavisite in what, in retrospect, seems to me a naive way; if a work of literature was what he considered to be ‘pro-life’, that was fine, but Jonathan Swift’s rather cynical view of life was not to his taste

40:54:06 It was automatic to think of Oxbridge after Mill Hill; there was a direct introduction to Pembroke College through a teacher who was related in some way to Basil Willey; I remember the interview with the Senior Tutor, David Joslin, who asked me if I smoked; I was utterly thrown, so said “Not in school, sir”; I was offered a cigarette, and later, a place and was asked to come for the scholarship exams, although I did not win one; this was 1961 and I went up to read English; there was still a dearth of girls in Cambridge at that time; it was still full of very silly rules and traditions and I didn’t like my supervisor; his name was Ian Jack, an expert on the eighteenth century, who had just come from Oxford; though we became friends much later and I grew more fond of him, and even read a poem in his memory in Pembroke Chapel after his death; at Oxford he had been used to teaching men who had gone through military service; he had no conception of the Zeitgeist of the early sixties, and teenagers irritated him; basically we were interested in girls and literature, but also all sorts of other things like jazz and the occult; he was also a nervous man; I decided after half a term to leave Cambridge; I had been reading Camus and Colin Wilson and thought of myself as a sort of ‘Outsider’ (‘Étranger’); together with another chap at Pembroke, Sebastian Santa Cruz, the second son of the then Chilean Ambassador; we decided to run a stall at Portobello Market, live real life and become real writers; I went home and told my mother and she was devastated; she sent me to see my old Head Master who told me I could not do this to her, and I realised he was right; so I came back and found that Sebastian had done the same; all this happened in just one weekend; I did Part 1 and got a 2:1; during that time I was publishing poetry in Granta and doing poetry readings; there was a little poetry magazine run from King’s at the time called Pawn and the editor was a choral scholar called John Blackwood, a friend of mine; he was a Buddhist and introduced me to the ‘I Ching’; with some others we started an Oxbridge magazine called Carcanet which evolved into one of the leading poetry presses in this country under the editorship of Michael Schmidt, who came up to Oxford a few years later; I was very much involved in the literary world and a little bit in the drama world at Cambridge; I did some acting at the ADC but realised there were talents far greater than mine; I was on stage once with Richard Eyre, John Shrapnel and Michael Pennington in a production of ‘Death of a Salesman’; I had girlfriends first from language schools, and then my girlfriend at Newnham, who eventually became my first wife; I did no sport or politics; Leavis was still around and his lectures were packed; he was rather past it by then, unfortunately, and would spend time complaining about Eliot and the Criterion, and how badly he had been treated; I can still remember some of the things that he said, like: “Shelley was always his own hero – even when it was a heroine”; Raymond Williams was an inspiration, a very gentle, quiet man whom I had enormous admiration for and got to know personally later; he was a socialist and was one of the influences that led me towards a fuller political awareness; I only went to his lectures but he was terrific; there was John Broadbent, who was a King’s man, who was absolutely inspirational; I met him much later – I think he became a painter in Norwich – and told him how much he’d influenced me in his lectures; the other major influence was George Steiner; his lectures were packed; without knowing there was a college protocol, at the end of my second year I wrote to him and asked him if he would supervise me for the Tragedy paper and he said yes; his supervisions were actually mini-seminars; they were also inspirational but they didn’t in the end do me much good; what happened was that I went into the Tragedy exam in a terribly naive manner and took in an offprint of a poem that I had had published in Granta; that was ‘cheating’ though it had absolutely nothing to do with the paper; I think I wrote on the Book of Job, which was not quite the right thing to do; I was called up before the Senior Tutor before graduation and told that I was ‘very lucky to get through’; instead of sending me down they gave me a moderately low degree – a 2:2; I had attached my poem to my paper, wanting to show that I was a poet and knew was tragedy was; it was a very stupid thing to do; oddly, these days I teach study skills including examination skills telling them not to do that sort of thing – play the game they ask you to play and not the one you want to; at that time I was a voracious reader but tended towards poetry more than fiction; I was not interested in the eighteenth century, probably as a reaction against Ian Jack, but I did do an early Medieval paper as I wanted to go as far back as possible; I was more interested in the romantics and moderns I had no particular hero among poets, but many;

Second Part

0:05:07 Spending so much time on the first part of a person’s life is one way of doing at interview but I don’t tend to think in linear influential terms; I think is can present a distorting, facile view; in this respect I am always reminded of a passage in Northrop Frye’s book on William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, who suggests that there is a fallacy in biographical criticism, in that by bringing back the work of an artist or thinker to mere biography, one risks reducing it; his point is that it is rather like taking a painting and stripping off the layers until you come to the bare canvas; what is of interest is not so much the biography, even if that can be revelatory in terms of the work itself; what is actually most important is the artist’s work; that work is the product of conscious intention; so I think that would be my approach

2:39:14 George Steiner had pulled me aside after a lecture and offered to get me a job on the TLS if I got a 2:1; I was honoured that he should say that but it was the last thing that I wanted to do; having been brought up in London and having been involved in the Transatlantic Review from the age of about seventeen, since they had published my first short story, I knew quite a lot about London literary life, and was not impressed by it; I was already a fairly ‘sophisticated’ Londoner; I did not like the TLS even then and that dislike has continued; what I wanted to do was to live in Italy, and that is what I did; I had fallen in love with Michelangelo’s sculptures and Botticelli on various visits to Italy, I wanted to learn Italian and read Dante, having read Eliot’s essay on him, and also wanted to find out more about Petrarch, having been thoroughly imbued with the Petrarchan tradition from Wyatt to Shakespeare; I got a job at a little language school in Padua called The Oxford School of English, then I moved to Venice; I had met an English poet called Peter Russell who had a strong influence on me; he was a Poundian and had gone to live in Venice to be close to Pound; he had published An Examination of Ezra Pound which had been instrumental in getting Pound out of the mental institution where he had been incarcerated after his conviction as a traitor; the book contained essays by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, George Seferis, John Heath-Stubbs, George Fraser, all sorts of very interesting people; I first met Peter when I twenty-one and he was in his forties; we stayed up all night talking; I was astonished at his breadth of knowledge; he was the first living poet that I had really met; he had translated Mandelstam and published Borges, and suddenly this whole world of living poetry and literature opened up for me; the deal was that I would get a job in the Venice branch of the Oxford School, and my girlfriend, Kim, who later became my first wife, and I would live in Peter’s flat; that is what happened next and was a wonderful period; unfortunately it didn’t last long enough; a relative became ill and I had to go back home and help; so I couldn’t do what I wanted which would have been to stay in Italy; I had been given a grant from the Italian Institute to translate Cesare Pavese, so was already translating poetry, but wasn’t able to take that up; to recap a little, from the age of thirteen I knew I was going to write but didn’t know whether fiction or poetry; by the time I met Peter Russell I had decided it would be poetry; I had been writing poetry all through my undergraduate years and my fiction wasn’t really very good; Kim came back to England with me and we decided to marry; in November 1966 we went to live in Greece; we both had jobs in a little language school in Thebes; we lived in a house on one of the hills, under which I was convinced there was the cave where Antigone had been buried; it the distance you could see Mount Cithaeron ; that was also a wonderful time; in April 1967 the coup d’état happened and the Colonels came in; suddenly there was martial law and we found ourselves in a Kafkaesque situation where we didn’t quite know what was going on; there was a marked discrepancy between what was said and what was actually happening; out of that experience I wrote my first mature poem ‘The Easter Rising 1967’, a parody-title from Yeats; I used the pen-name Agnostos Nomolos – ‘Nomolos’ being ‘Solomon’ spelt backwards, and ‘A. Nomolos’ being an anomalous person; I sent this back to the London Magazine and they immediately wanted to publish it; I still think that is a good poem; I got a job at the British Council in Athens after spending a few months on an island with Kim; she was by then pregnant with our first child; the autumn in Athens is the time that people let properties; I found a historic house where the Greek national poet Kostis Palamas had died; we found an apartment in that house, under the Acropolis; again it was idyllic, near Monastiraki market, and we would go out and listen to rebetika music and learned some of the dances; I have documented this in several previous interviews; then we suddenly heard that my mother was dying and we had to come back to England to look after her; that was an incredibly painful and difficult time; for the second time our life in the Mediterranean had been blasted apart by family responsibilities in England

13:19:06 When my mother died we moved to Cambridge; I got a job at the Cambridge Tech, thinking that it would be good to get out of London and to come back to a place where we had been together before; we bought a little house in Great Shelford and eventually moved into Cambridge; during that time I founded the Cambridge Poetry Festival; Kim and I divorced in the late seventies; after that I had a two-year Arts Council writer’s fellowship in Gravesend in Kent; at the same time I started doing a lot of work with children in schools on poetry writing, something I’ve done fairly frequently since then; I then had a stint as a visiting professor in America at Notre Dame; after that the British Council started using me to do teacher training workshops in English language and literature, mainly in former Yugoslavia; by 1987 I had got sufficiently interested in Yugoslavia to go and live there for three years, so that was the next stage; I kept the house in Cambridge and came back after my stint in Yugoslavia

16:13:21 Being Jewish means that feeling of ‘otherness’ is there in the background all the time; it takes many forms and shapes; there is a constant awareness of having another dimension, other than the majority, that is, other than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, which I was the norm when I was being brought up, although that is not the case any more because we live in a multi-cultural society; if I am talking about formativeness this sense of having something ‘other’ meant possessing something powerful, important and perhaps secret; it wasn’t that I was in any sense a Marrano, a hidden Jew suffering from overt persecution, but I had been expected to fit in at public school within a Christian tradition, even though that wasn’t entirely my tradition; my mother had wanted this; she had been ambitious for me and had wanted me to assimilate completely – but not to the point of intermarriage, she rather objected to that; the problem from her point of view was that once this process had been embarked upon, it couldn’t stop; so I felt myself both English and Jewish with some sense of écart, scarto, gap,between the two and some sense of contradiction, but also pleasure; in my case being Jewish was something I was never ashamed of but quite proud of; there are other dimensions to be fitted in of course, one being the whole history of anti-Semitism; it is worth looking at Anthony Julius’s book on the history of it in Britain which has a brilliant first part but is not so good on modern anti-Semitism, which is so complicated; another theorist is Zygmunt Bauman, who suggests that the Jew is the ‘outsider who is inside’; one of the problems is that traditionally Jews have not been able to be pinned down within a society in a stable role; Jews have always been mobile; they may have been internationalist, mercantile, money-lenders – but could you really ‘trust a Jew’ if you were, say, a peasant or an aristocrat; the Jews never quite fitted into hierarchies; that analysis is very helpful; there are other writers – Sartre’s portrait of the anti-Semite in interesting, but there is another French writer whom I think important, Albert Memmi; he has a concept which he calls ‘Judeity’, and suggests that the term ‘Jewishness’ is perhaps too vague, ‘Judaism’ is inadequate because it is a religion; but his term‘Judeity’ implies the way in which a Jew feels Jewish, and all the concomitant beliefs and behaviours, subjective and objective, that go with that; so there is absolutely no doubt that these extend further than nationality and they cross over religion; in my own case there are certain features that would fit me into that kind of role which are fairly easy to mark out; one is that I am interested in foreign languages and another is that my sense of European identity is pretty strong; that is not to say that somebody who is not Jewish doesn’t have that, but there is a specific way of doing and feeling it; I’ve lived in Greece, Italy, the USA, Yugoslavia, and feel pretty comfortable in all of these places; internationalism is a contributing element to my writing; literary translation, irritation with ‘Englishness’ in the narrow sense as represented by, say, Philip Larkin, which I dislike very much; also as far as my own work is concerned I don’t belong to any particular group in this country; I am not part of the London Establishment, nor am I part of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’; I find myself very comfortable getting on with my own work but not being part of a group

25:48:16 I accept the idea of planes or layers of identity; if you ask me about my own identity, I think that identities overlap; they are like language registers and we bring out different identities according to whoever we are with; my own sense of identity as a poet and as a human being consists of sets of overlapping identities but with a kind of hierarchical structure within; first of all I would say that I am human; in that sense, where my poetry comes in, I would like to say I am a ‘universalist’ in the way that Octavio Paz was – he was a strong influence on me when he was in Cambridge; in a book published in the late 1950s he said “For the first time in our history we are contemporaries of all humanity”; he was speaking of Mexicans, but if I generalise out from that, that is what I think being a poet is about, we are “contemporaries of all humanity”; I see that as a moral urge and a humanistic statement about the future of humanity; poetry is dependent also on futurity; it evokes and is dependent on the expectation or the hope of futurity, as is any artistic creation, but particularly with language; to take this back to identity and identities, in my own case I would say that my next layer of identity underneath ‘being human’, is that I am a poet; I have the sense that I would have been a poet whatever culture I had been born into and whether I had been male or female; that may be part of my own personal myth but that is how I relate it to myself; below that, comes being male or female; I happen to have been born male, and my poetry and world view have been conditioned by that; below that comes the English language, which is terribly important; I write in English so am an English poet fully in that sense; below that come all sorts of other aspects of identity – like being white, born in England at this particular time, having a certain kind of education, being Jewish, all the way down to collecting stamps or whatever; these are all little groups to which one belongs; so there are overlapping identities, but the most important to me is the centrality of the human; I would put that above being English or Jewish or any of those things

31:48:01 What is a poet? The novel is very clearly bound to time, whatever you do, it involves narrative; if you play around with it like Joyce or Proust, or if you try to play around with temporal order like B.S. Johnson with his novel in a box, you can’t get away from narrative; poetry does not have to involve narrative; if you are asking me what is particular about poetry, and poetry’s particular genius, I would say that Shelley comes pretty close to the mark and so does Wordsworth; Shelley in ‘The Defence of Poetry’ and Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, those are very fine statements; the way I see it is that the poet takes disparate worlds or phenomena and brings them together; a great poet will do this in ways that haven’t been thought of before; it may be the creation of an entire system; Blake said, “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create”; in Book Two of The Prelude Wordsworth he talks about “that interminable building / reared by observation of affinities / in objects where no brotherhood exists / to passive minds”; you have something that you notice or perceive here and something else there, you bring them together, and that is poetry; that creates a kind of spark, that creates energy, that is energy, that is a heuristic experience, within the experience of the poet, but once it is registered in language it becomes poetry – this is, qi, as the Chinese would say – and it carries over to the reader; the reader re-experiences it, but for the reader the experience is for the first time; Dylan Thomas has the phrase “a grief ago”; that is linguistically brilliant because it brings in the structure of the word ‘ago’ and the assumption that it will be prefaced by a word or phrase relating to time; but instead here we have one that belongs semantically to another field, and there is an immense energy generated; that is poetry at its smallest; once you have that ability and way of perceiving things, then everything else follows, and you have what modern scholars have seen in Chinese culture, they call it “comparative cosmos building”; I find that very interesting; it could be the foundation of a religious or ethical system, or an entire social system, but the core of it is to see correlations, and not only to see them as pre-existent but also to invent them; that to me is what poetry is all about; that I see is a universal human gift or attribute and when it happens in language, that’s poetry; we use the term ‘poetic’ in various ways and we can ascribe it to areas of discourse and life that have nothing to do with poetry, but it is that frisson, spark, that is the core of it; polysemy is part of the key, in other words poetry is not a denial of meaning but open to a multiplicity of meanings simultaneously; as for form, it is not true that I don’t use open forms; I wouldn’t want to be thought of as a traditionalist in the negative sense; I have written sonnets and villanelles, I know how to do that sort of thing; sometimes I’ve invented my own forms, but I have also experimented with open forms, as in my book Avebury, and I have used the verset, or what I call the ‘verse-paragraph’ in The Manager; what one is always trying to do as a poet is to find the form that fits the impetus of the poem; the form will sometimes dictate it or arise out of it; in my case I am constantly looking for ways in which to mirror and articulate language and speech patterns; if I use an iambic pentameter, that assumes a whole body of tradition which goes back to Chaucer, and possibly implies certain modes of thinking and feeling; in a book like Manual, when that started arriving in my head, it didn’t quite have a form; the lines came out with a powerful rhythm; it started the first night I had arrived in New York in 1979; I was jet-lagged, which I had not experienced before, and I woke up in the middle of the night and went straight to my notebook, probably with lines appearing out of a dream, and a whole series of chorus-like lines came out; I puzzled over how to shape these for years, and it took me a long time to realise that the poem ‘wanted to come out’ as ten-line units, five and five, so that each little poem would represent two hands; I am interested in iconicity within the poem and also architectonic possibilities; to take another book like The Manager, I conceived of it as a kind of response to Eliot from the end of the twentieth century; on the cover of the first edition you see the image of a crowd flowing over London Bridge, reflecting Eliot’s line, “I had not thought death had undone so many”, which he quotes from Dante; what I was interested in doing here was finding a line-unit, or you like, a breath-unit, that would represent modern English speech; and that can’t quite be done in the iambic pentameter; modern English has far more unstressed syllables; so I was interested in the long line; I had played around with using a fourteen-syllable line, going back to the Elizabethans, and also looking at structures used in the King James Bible and many other models

45:43:03 All I have said shows how you must constantly work at writing poetry; it is a craft like any other and can only be built up by constant practice; it’s a skill; the old advice that you have from both Sir Philip Sidney and George Herbert is along the lines of “To thine own heart be true” – speak from your heart, and where your heart takes you; be sincere, suspicious of fads and fashions, prepared for knocks, don’t necessarily expect fame, and if it doesn’t come don’t be disappointed; poetry is something that you do every day and being successful is actually irrelevant; I write a little bit every day; I have various ways of writing; usually it starts off in a notebook and then I will type it, and it will go through various drafts; I prefer writing late at night, as Dylan Thomas said: “When … the lovers lie abed,/ With all their griefs in their arms, / I labour by singing light…” ; the American poet Theodore Roethke in a villanelle called ‘The Waking’ has a line, “I learn by going where I have to go” [Reads a poem from his collection ‘Manual’]