Archive for November, 2009
ARCHIVE: The Mama Dada – An Interview with Gerry Potter
Andrew interviewed Gerry Potter back in 2005, he touched on the argument between performance poetry and poetry on the page and how critics and readers perceive this. Andrew says of the interview, ‘ I couldn’t resist interviewing Gerry, I got a phone call and I was asked if I wanted to interview him. I thought at first they wanted me to interview Chloe Poems (Gerry’s alter ego). I had interviewed Chloe many times for The Big Issue, Flux and Manchester Evening News and I felt there was nothing more I could bring to the table but then I was told, “No, you will be interviewing Gerry”. I jumped at the chance at interviewing him, to see the man behind the mask. Gerry is a warm, funny man and seeing him apart from Chloe was refreshing, Chloe always scared me in interviews but Gerry made me feel welcome. That I suspect is the crux of all art, never confuse the product with the person’.
The Mama Dada: An Interview with Gerry Potter aka Chloe Poems. An Interview by Andrew Oldham
Chloe Poems first appeared in “The Beige Experience” – a Liverpool-based cabaret double-act in the late eighties. Born again, a fully rounded, impassioned visionary in gingham in 1993, Chloe has since followed her emotional mission to make the world a better place. Chloe has toured
nationally over the last seven years with her full length theatre shows, Knockers, Chloe Poems Healing Roadshow, Universal Rentboy, Kinky and ME. A stalwart of the cabaret circuit, Chloe has performed and hosted a diverse
range of events, from hosting Gay Pride in front of 100,000 people, to being ushered out of a Bristol pub whilst being told “Bristol isn’t ready for you”. Her anthology Universal Rentboy, was published in 2000 and her
latest book, Adult Entertainment is now available. Gerry Potter, creator of Chloe Poems, is also a playwright, director, actor and workshop leader. He talks here about his work, his career and his creation.
You brought two strong traditions together with Chloe Poems, the creation of a Dada like character and stand up. Where did this ‘ideal’ first come about?
‘I think I’m rather more Mama than Dada, don’t you? But I see what you mean. For me the whole essence of Chloe is about a cross-pollination of creativity, fusing a myriad of theatrical and lyrical styles. A lot of entertainment formats, such as stand-up, drag and dare I say it, even
performance poetry, have become staid in their presentation. Chloe is an opportunity to invigorate and enliven, whilst at the same time obeying the traditions of performance. I believe Chloe is as Rabelaisian as she is simplistic – a guerrilla in the minimalist shall we say. And why? Because as writers and entertainers we owe it to whichever artform we work in, to challenge the perceptions it surrounds’.
Critics of your work never sit on the fence; neither do your audiences, what has been your most positive and negative experiences on the road?
‘Critics, 99% of the time, are fine, whether they like my work or not, but there is 1% who should never have become literary critics and instead, if they ever could have married, would have been as happy then to beat up
their wives instead. Get over your childhood trauma and stop using the page as a place to abuse artists. There have been a number of occasions where I have been threatened with violence. Once I was nearly arrested by the police on a public order charge at a Manchester people’s festival (what price free speech eh?). However,
even these seemingly negative experiences have their plus points. A drag queen being hassled by a policeman is an image I find intriguingly compelling. The most positive aspect is, of course, audience appreciation. I get the most fantastic response from people who come to see me. For most of my audience, I think Chloe is a life-affirming, joyous and entertaining spectacle. These aren’t my words, these are reactions I hear on a regular
basis. Also, the diversity of my audience is a constant joy, from professors of Literary Criticism at Harvard University to people who’ve never been to a poetry event before in their lives’.
What processes do you go through to create new work?
‘The process is continuous. There is never a day that doesn’t spawn another ten ideas. I will then take one of those ideas and let it percolate, coffee-like, at the back of my mind, until it is ready to be poured onto
the page. There are ideas I’ve had percolating for many years, which still haven’t found the right moment to appear, and then there are some which are newer, who find their space on the coffee-stained page quite quickly. If I
could write as fast as I think then there would be an international library full of work’.
How hard was it for you to initially get your work published?
‘Very. A lot of people’s perceptions at that time were of a silly drag cabaret artist, understandably so, because I did a lot of silly drag cabaret venues. So I knew I had to take the character away from those environments and instate her somewhere else – on the performance poetry
circuit. As you can imagine it was quite a shock to both them and me, but gradually, and with a lot of time and effort, I managed to cement Chloe firmly in that world, including the Literature Festival circuit. It was only then that publishing could become an option, so thank you Bad Press for being aware enough to take the chance where so many others didn’t. After the first publication “Universal Rentboy”, and an increasingly higher profile, Route came forward with the second book and accompanying CD “Adult Entertainment”. A limited edition box-set of poetry “I’m Kamp” (not to be confused with Meine Kampf) also by Bad Press, and inclusion in anthologies such as Apples & Snakes Anniversary Compendium “Velocity” are steadily building up my publication catalogue. I’m very happy with the freedom
smaller independent publishing houses can give you – it feels a bit punk in its energy’.
What advice would you give to other poets out there looking to get published?
‘I would advise any writer who wants to say something different to approach a small press and not be smothered by the dogged rules and insistences of the larger poetry-by-numbers companies’.
You’re also a playwright, how does this work differ from poetry for you on both a private and public level?
‘It’s much easier being a poet. Putting on a piece of theatre can take years from inception to production. Although very rewarding, the process can be
frustrating and tiring. With performance poetry it’s almost all set up for you. You just have to supply the material. It’s quicker and more immediate, and if you have the skills you can make a performance poetry space as
dynamic as a theatre, without the incumbence of props and bitchy actors’.
Poetry is often seen as personal, both being written and in many cases performed alone, but as an actor you effectively become public property, how have you dealt with both having to direct your own work and in turn be
directed by others?
‘I think it’s the performance and not the actor that is public property, which is where Chloe, as a costume, is very important to me. I, as Gerry Potter, have no wish or desire to be recognised in public. I would find that distressing and rude. Having the artifice of Chloe is a very useful tool for me, as both a writer and performer. I have a compulsion to perform, not to be a celebrity. I direct the Chloe concept myself, but have been directed by others, namely Gary Padden. Those early shows were a joy and helped cement Chloe as a national touring figure. I’m very seldom directed now, and if I am, it’s with other people’s work. For example recently I played J Edgar Hoover in Mayhew & Co’s Mania at the Contact
Theatre, Manchester. Being directed in that production was a delight and an inspiration, and of course, I bring elements of that into my own performances as Chloe’.
When Chloe Poems becomes too much how will you be rid of her, will we be looking at a Sunset Boulevard ending or Who Killed Baby Jane?
‘At this moment in time I can’t see Chloe becoming too much. Paradoxically it would be too much for me if she wasn’t there. If that day should come, it wouldn’t be anything as melodramatic as a camp movie cliche, but perhaps something rather more subtle, like blowing up the queen. I think Chloe could only go if she committed the ultimate sacrifice’.
Adult Entertainment (Route) was an independent success, how hard was it for you to write and then promote the collection?
‘There are moments in “Adult Entertainment” which were very difficult for me. I still wonder if I should ever have written Are we Myra Hindley, but I did write it and because I don’t believe in absolutes I felt it should be
included. I sometimes don’t live comfortably with my work because I know it has affected people on any different levels. Some of those levels aren’t pleasant. But most of the time it was a joy to write. It allowed my to play
with the structure of language and make malleable what most intellectual purveyors of the craft would scoff at. It cemented my belief that language belongs to everybody and not the chosen clichéd cliques. It follows no form
that any other poetry book has been written in. I think people’s recognition of the freedoms, as opposed to the
restrictions I write within, contribute to its success. Much poetry at the moment, no matter how technically brilliant, feels constrained to me and lacks a certain instinct that I find essential. To me, many different poems by different authors feel like they’ve been written by the same person, or students at the same school. Route’s support certainly helped boost its visibility. Promotion is easy – it means I put a frock on and perform.
What do you think defines funny? An absence of guilt. The freedom to command language without remorse’.
What do you think defines poetry?
‘The freedom to explore the intricacies of language, the ability to restructure language and an ear for the language you grew up with as well as the new languages that will always surround you. Language is ever changing, ever brutal, ever delicate. I think what defines poetry is the poets compulsion to possess this’.
There is snobbery in the poetry world about performance poets, if you had the chance to answer your critics what would you say?
‘Grow Up! The people who want to imprison language should themselves be locked up for crimes against humanity. Performance poetry is the human voice communicating to today’s human beings, not yesterday’s librarians. I agree with some critics that performance poetry can topple into its own cliché, but can’t that be said for every form of entertainment? I’ve seen it at its most powerful and overwhelming, gob smacking an audience into silence, laughter and applause. It is a valid art form, which is finding an increasingly wide audience – an art form that belongs to the people, an art form that will produce and is producing performers and writers of the highest calibre. Its critics are now sounding as hackneyed and as clichéd as they are. Jump on board; explore the art form before you condemn it. I stand proud in my gingham gown, as an out-and-out performance poet’.
The Moving Writer
Moving house is stressful for anyone but writers tend to have another worry, their journals, drafts, final poems, fiction and publications. I have been writing for over fifteen years and I have boxes of this stuff. Scribbled ideas, drawings, drafted scripts, novels, poems etc that I have either written or will eventually write. I am the Womble of writing.
Then there are other boxes containing correspondence and archives (these are often archives that I have inherited or that I am the executor for). So, you can imagine how fearful I am of moving these things.
Now, I can’t lift, this is not down to a life of laziness (though I could be accused of this but many would laugh this off as many class me as prolific – I always feel a slight tinge of guilt when not writing) but down to spinal damage (from the act of prolific writing). So, I always worry when others have to move these boxes, books can be replaced (well, some of them).
So, why move? The answer is simple, look at my new view pictured above. I am no longer valley living, bottom living, I am no longer hemmed in. I can see the horizon but when the movers touched those boxes I still had a lump in my throat.
My advice? To invest in some heavy duty plastic boxes that can be sealed, that are waterproof. The great thing about these plastic boxes is I can see them now, even in a room full of cardboard boxes. They shine out. I can count them, know that they are all there, see the seals unbroken, know that they are safe. I will get to them soon enough, the cardboard walls between me and them will come down and then the writing will begin again - Andrew Oldham 25/11/2009
ARCHIVE: Expelling Paradise – An Interview With A.L. Kennedy
Andrew interview A.L. Kennedy in 2006, in the the interview they discuss the importance of the short story vs the novel. Andrew says of the interview,‘I enjoyed interviewing Alison, she was attending the first Short Story conference at Edge Hill, and she was the keynote speaker and I was there delivering a paper on Ray Bradbury. We managed to catch up, we had bumped into each other over the years but normally at festivals, and we never got the chance to sit down and talk. This was actually the first time I was able to pick Alison’s mind on a number of issues prevalent in her writing and career; from her obsessive characters to her public criticism of the judging of the Man Booker Prize’.
Expelling Paradise: An Interview With A.L. Kennedy by Andrew Oldham
Novelist and short-story writer A(lison) L(ouise) Kennedy was born in Dundee, Scotland on 22 October 1965. She studied English and Drama at Warwick University where she began writing dramatic monologues and short stories. She was Writer in Residence for Hamilton and East Kilbride Social Work Department and won the 1990 Social Work Today Award.
She has worked for the arts and special needs charity Project Ability since 1989, first as Writer in Residence (1989-95), then as editor of Outside Lines magazine, and has been a member of the Management Committee since 1998. She was editor of New Writing Scotland (1993-5) and was Writer in Residence at Copenhagen University in 1995. She reviews for The Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and the Daily Telegraph, is a contributor to the Guardian, and has been a judge for both the Booker Prize for Fiction (1996) and The Guardian First Book Award (2001). She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2000.
Her first book, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990), a bleak collection of short stories set in Scotland, won several awards including the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. In 1993 she was named as one of Granta magazine’s 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2′.
She has written two other collections of short stories, Now That You’re Back (1994) and Original Bliss (1997), and her novels include: Looking for the Possible Dance (1993), which centres on a young Scottish woman’s relationships with her father, her lover and her employer; So I Am Glad (1995), winner of the Encore Award, which focuses on the trauma of child sexual abuse and its consequences in adulthood; and Everything You Need (1999), the story of a middle-aged writer living on a remote island and his attempt to build a relationship with his estranged daughter.
She wrote the screenplay to the BFI/Channel 4 film Stella Does Tricks, released in 1998, and edited New Writing 9 (2000) with John Fowles, published in the UK by Vintage in association with the British Council. Her new book of short stories, Indelible Acts, was published in autumn 2002.
A. L. Kennedy lives and works in Glasgow and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. A critic of the Mann Booker Prize and with strong views on the media since 9/11, her latest novel Paradise (2004), published to critical acclaim (“a symbolic narrative that powers itself on despair and self-hurt” – The Guardian), didn’t even appear in the Mann Booker long list. The story of Hannah Luckraft’s search for a sustainable paradise, in a dark tour-de-force that examines failure and the dark extremes of the soul, has been cited as Kennedy’s break through novel.
You are a writer unafraid to stand up and speak about war crimes and crimes against humanity, 9/11 and Iraq. Why do you feel so few writers are willing to commit to a view on these areas? And how passionately do you believe that the media have censored the truth?
“I think writers are like everyone else – they have lives and distractions. I can’t say I’ve met one unaware of our current political surroundings, or pleased with them. But it does take a huge amount of effort and energy to find an outlet for information that the media find unacceptable, or that shows the media in a poor light – effort and energy are in short supply sometimes. People may also be afraid of rocking the boat – because it will always be turned into a stick to beat you. I can begin to tell you how little our media tell us – you might simply try getting direct feeds from Reuters and Knight Ritter – the sources the press themselves use – the contrast between what we’re shown and what there is to see, the contrast between spun and unspun news is massive. Last week I had to watch Newsnight which included a vox pop of two Iraqis – two, since when was this representative? – one was for the occupation, one against – when every survey in the last year, and before it, has put those who disapprove of the occupation at over seventy-five percent. Was the sample size phoney because that would make the implication less embarrassing for a journalist with a brain, or was this the imposition of phoney “balance”? In which case no brains were harmed in the making of the programme. And on we go”.
Do you feel that the world around us has gone mad or that individuals in our society are becoming sane? If so, why?
“The world is pretty much the same as usual – but we notice more, we have access to information faster, and we have spare time, because we’re comfy Western people – there’s a backlash with media management, paid “journalism” and so forth, but people do still know when they’re being lied to. The British Empire got away with murder for hundreds of years; the USA will have trouble driving its agenda through. But it’ll get a good way forward, because people are still motivated by greed and fear and altruism is a bit complicated and we’re not brought up to embrace it, or understand it.”
Novels are not an immediate response to a global or personal event but have the events of the last fifteen years, since the Kuwait War filtered into your work? And if so, how have they manifested themselves on the page?
“I’m sure they have, but it’s such a huge influence that I wouldn’t really necessarily know about it. You could surely read a train full of fundamentalist Christians plunging through an atrocity-filled landscape to who knows where as a metaphor for Bushite foreign policy. But I didn’t mean it at the time. I am writing a book about the Second World War now and that’s certainly a response to the size of footprint that war and inhumanity have had in my subconscious and conscious.”
Novels, film and plays are areas that have a slow process in getting published or viewed. Poetry and short stories are seen as immediate (and unfortunately, sometimes as throwaway), as a short story writer, how much of this do you agree with?
“I could wish that short stories had any outlet, throw-away or not. They’re just invisible. Films get much higher profile attention – plays, it’s fairly arbitrary – the money’s awful and the support is a mess, but if you get a winner, again it’s very high-profile, very quickly, for not too much work. Literary novels are well-regarded but getting less and less support. Short stories are looked upon as inferior as a prose form (which is absurd) and poetry has the kudos, but no cash and no space on Waterstone’s shelves. Really, you’re looking at a culture determined to deconstruct itself from the top down – people still like reading, still buy books, but booksellers and publishers are pretty much ensuring that they’ll be able to buy less and less, or poorer and poorer quality – from the cover designs approved by Waterstone’s buyers, to the spelling that it’s no one’s job to check anymore.”
Readers can keep a whole short story in their mind, compared to a novel, making the short story a more intense process for the writer and the reader but why do you feel British Audiences have such a problem with this form?
“It’s not the audiences that have a problem – it’s the booksellers and publishers. If you can’t see a book in a shop, if it isn’t reviewed, if you don’t know it’s there, how would you buy it – by using a divining rod? Don’t blame the audience, it’s there.”
What engages you about short story writing and reading?
“As you say – it’s intimate, it’s intense, it’s highly flexible, it’s the ultimate test of naked prose with nowhere to hide.”
You edited New Writing 9 with the late John Fowles, a writer known for shunning the Literature scene, but what was it like to work with Fowles and what did you learn from the process? And what was the process of collaboration?
“Sadly, John was very ill throughout, so we didn’t collaborate – his name is there as a courtesy to a fine writer – and the one piece he did like, I put in. I didn’t even talk to him. And now he’s dead. This is how we miss people.”
In your new book Paradise, the protagonist, Hannah Luckraft, is nearly forty and with nothing to show for it. The novel seems to be an exploration of failure, what drew you to this character and theme?
“Not sure if I thought of it as a book about failure, but I certainly don’t have a problem with failure – most people do it. We all fail to live forever.”
How did you get the idea/inspiration for the book?
“From religious art and the idea of someone who has a good childhood, but not a good life.”
You will probably spend the next few years fending off these kinds of questions but there are parallels between Hannah and yourself e.g. age and location. Did you do this to make the character more authentic, crisp or where you drawing parallels with yourself?
“When I started writing the book, Hannah was older than me – I wanted her to be slightly older. Not sure why. And I wanted to use the landscape of my childhood and some of the thousands of odd locations I’ve ended up in on the road. I’d forgotten what Fife and Dundee were like, but working in St Andrews had reminded me and it’s a nice, claustrophobic, pretty but poor setting that seemed to suit. And Dundee is a hellhole – it was good to make her annoyed. Beyond that, there are no parallels – that’s what made writing her fun.”
Alcoholism is often seen on the fringes of society, how hard was it to tackle this subject in the book and to engage readers?
“One in eight people have – that’s not really fringe. Everyone has met one, or is one, or knows one – it’s deep in our culture. I just had to try and make it real, not self-indulgent with the first person aspect, not rose-tinted, because ultimately it’s a killer. Above all, a book is about people and people will read it and they will be involved if it appears to be about people. No one asks these questions if the book is about a middle class couple – or any other ‘default protagonists’ – but how many people aren’t middle class, how fringe are they?”
The book is structured around the Stations of the Cross, why did you choose to structure it this way and what do you think it brings to the novel?
“It seemed appropriate because of the end with death, or a death that brings paradise, or a metaphorical death that brings life. And Christian imagery is very strong anyway, to borrow, and has a lot of booze in it. If you know the story, it lends inevitability and I wanted to get some of the weight and the oddly spiritual quality that you see in people who are destroying themselves.”
Your novels and short stories are often based in Glasgow, is this because you believe you should write what you know? Or does something keep drawing you back to exploring the characters and streets of this city?
“Most of them aren’t based anywhere, it’s assumed that they’re set in Glasgow – if I don’t specify, it’s because I have nowhere in mind. I’m often more interested in people. If I’ve been very clear about setting – mainly in Paradise and So I Am Glad – it’s because other elements are very unrooted, or fantastic, or mobile and there’s a balance needed.”
Your narrators are often obsessive, what draws you to these kind of characters?
“I’m probably obsessive. I think you can’t write a novel without it. But the passions that drive us are interesting. Love is a kind of obsession, we all suffer that. We tend to label positive obsessions differently and leave the negative ones as ‘obsession’”
Paradise was noticeably absent from the Booker 2005 and in the past you have made your view clear about the Booker, stating that it was: “a pile of crooked nonsense”. Why do you feel this? And why do you feel Paradise was ignored after so many great reviews?
“The year I judged the Booker the judges were openly agreed that a book other than the winner was the best book. I found that hard to stomach. I also found it hard to stomach the chair’s speech (published before the judging took place) praising the primacy of the English novel when there was only one English novel on the list and that turned out to be the winner – it doesn’t make anyone look good. It devalues the prize and devalues UK literature. There have been changes made and I don’t know how it’s run now – the fact that John Banville won this year seemed very encouraging to me. But I doubt I’ll ever get near the thing as a novelist, no matter what I write. That’s up to them.”
Finally, what draws you back time and time again to short story writing? And how does this differ from your novel work?
“Each idea has a form in which it would best be expressed – as long as I have ideas that would best be expressed as stories, I’ll write stories. It’s no more complicated than that.”
Love of SF Film
I am sat here watching Contact with Jodie Foster, it is an underrated film, maybe a little too ponderous but so is the Sagan novel. The idea though is of interest to me that an alien species communicates with us via science, specifically the use of the first 261 prime numbers (I didn’t say Sagan was a user friendly SF writer). This mathematical puzzle opens a wider world or Universe that seeks to share technology with us. I think maybe the math element of this film is what probably killed the film at the box office and John Hurt’s portrayal of the philanthropist Hadden is a little creepy. Then again, Foster is wooden and she reminds me of the awful closing scenes of The Silence of the Lambs, ‘Doctor Lecter, Doctor Lecter’ becomes ‘Aliens, Daddy, aliens’ in that same wooden drawl. I wonder how she would have tackled the role of Ripley in Alien? I dread to think.
That moan aside there are some great SF films from Forbidden Planet to Alien to Dark Star. I’ll give Contact a chance but are there any SF films that really rock your boat or just hack you off, please share here - Andrew Oldham 14/11/2009
ARCHIVE: Making Snow Angels With Michael – An Interview with Eva Salzman
Andrew interviewed Eva Salzman shortly after the death of the talented and much missed Michael Donaghy. Michael and Eva where good friends and this interview serves to celebrate not just Eva’s work but the memory of Michael. The interview was published in 2004. Andrew says of the interview, ‘It was a dark time in the world of poetry, Michael’s death had come as a shock to many of us. I only met him once, he was kind, open and warm. I remember this interview as having that same feeling. Eva didn’t just answer the questions, she came up with answers that made me want to question her more. She is a fascinating poet and a warm human being. It has always been a joy to interview her and I hope I will interview her again in the future.’
Making Snow Angels With Michael: An Interview with Eva Salzman
Interview by Andrew Oldham
Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island where she was a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant H.S., her teacher was Frank McCourt; she received degrees from Bennington College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA), where she studied with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Josef Skvorecky, Stephen Sandy, Patricia Goedicke, Ben Belitt, Thoms Lux, Stephen Dunn and Jorie Graham. Her books include Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe), One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press), illus. Van Howell, Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford), and The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe), all Poetry Book Society Recommendations/Special Commendations. Her grandmother was a child vaudeville actress, and her mother is an environmentalist. This background, and a diverse range of jobs – as Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies’ houses – all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with performers and visual artists. She has collaborated with the director Rufus Norris and with composers Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip Cashian and A.L. Nicolson. Shawna and Ron’s Half Moon: An Americana Satire and One Two, commissioned by the English National Opera Studio, were performed there, at Hoxton Hall and at Greenwich Theatre. Cassandra, a mini-opera written with her composer father, Eric Salzman, has been performed in Dusseldorf, Vienna and Oslo. She won 2nd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and major prizes in the Arvon and Cardiff Poetry Competitions. Grants and awards include those from the Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, London Arts Board and the Society of Authors. Her poetry and fiction has been frequently broadcast on the BBC; she’s read at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican, Poetry Society, Troubadour and at festivals all over the UK, as well as in Ireland, Spain and France. In the US, she has read at the Nuyorican Café, the Walt Whitman Association and at Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, where she taught as a Fellow two years running. Her varied teaching work has included Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island University, London), regular teaching for Arvon courses, for community projects in London’s East End and a residency at Springhill Prison, as well as continuing input to the Poetry Society’s educational programmes and co-devising the Open University’s first Start Writing Poetry course.
Her poetry, fiction and features have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon, Review, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, London Magazine, and in the anthologies: The Firebox ed. Sean O’Brien; Hand in Hand ed. Carol Ann Duffy; Sixty Women Poets ed. Linda France; Last Words eds. Don Paterson & Jo Shapcott; and two New Writing anthologies (British Council/Picador/Vintage) eds. John Fowles, A.L. Kennedy, Penelope Lively & George Szirtes.
How do you feel the two Literary Cultures of the USA and the UK differ?
‘Despite my years living in a Home Counties cliché (Tunbridge Wells) even now I cleave to an idealised view of the European intellectual, with England virtually part of Europe – not how the English see it. Who wouldn’t want to be part of Europe I thought?! Though transplanted to the UK ages ago, I’ve never felt anything but an outsider in England, where American literature is permitted its place in the hierarchy…eventually. The English aren’t keen on us actually living among them. Once poets are safely dead, they’re drafted into the canon. The anti-American bias was in evidence since before this Bush era – maybe a hangover from WWII’s “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”. This poet’s not overpaid. Pass on the other two. The English frequently mistake me for a representative of the US government. You’re supposed to be able to tell from the shoes. It’s a contrived division between the two literary cultures which, historically, a certain kind of writer feels determined to bridge or ignore. (I’m in a train trundling across a bridge at the very moment I write this, leaving New London, Connecticut.) I recall attending an event protesting the closing down of Oxford’s poetry list, at which a starry array of poets read, including on behalf of absent or dead American Oxford poets. Michael Donaghy and I, the only two Oxford published Americans in the audience, were the only two poets not asked to read at this event. This odd omission is not uncommon. Recently, the publication of Faber’s “Selected Poems” by Robert Lowell was celebrated at the London Review of Books bookshop by a panel of three English male poets. The fourth panel member – the co-editor – was a visiting US academic, whose first words to me were: Why weren’t any American voices taking part? Don’t ask me I said – I only live here. I often wonder whether most current English editors, faced with Mr. Lowell’s typescript themselves, might have simply returned it to the poet, with a cool note about his voice sounding “too American”! Hush my mouth. I’ve just finished a month of giving workshops and readings at universities such as Brandeis, Connecticut College and Columbia University, I’m reminded of the assembly line poetry culture of US academia, which turns ‘em out, like it turned me out too. My Columbia MFA fellow student’s parting shot to me, when she heard I was boarding a plane to England, was a warning to “Watch out for those formal elements”, as if the Formalist mafia were lying in wait on the other side, pens drawn like pistols. I watched the growth of the so-called New Formalism with some bemusement, since I thought all poets secretly beavered away at form, even if from the privacy of their own homes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the slightly illicit nature of the activity was precisely what appealed to me. This whole movement’s lines were more sharply drawn in the US where the prevailing aesthetic seemed almost dependent on an ideological stand against rhyme or metre. Even now, there exists in the US this “us” and “them” mentality, perhaps because poets, and people generally, seem to need to belong to some church. Frequently, I’ve exchanged rants about language poets with the poet Michael Donaghy. Such schools define themselves in exclusionary terms, with reference more to what they are not, than what they are. It’s a slightly less elevated kind of playground fight. The fun is to smash a few icons, while crafting some new ones of course. Actually, a lot of what Language Poetry did originally has been subverted along the way – as this kind of experimentation often is – by ideologues only glancingly interested in the poems themselves. God forbid. Why bother with such trifles, when there’s all that theory to get your teeth into? When I first heard about Language Poetry, I thought: “Language! In Poetry. Now there’s an idea!” The news of Michael Donaghy’s death came to me during my US tour and I’ve been utterly heart-broken by it. I was talked out of cancelling my tour by the Maddy, his wife, who insisted I stay in what was, after all, Michael’s hometown. My husband attended the funeral for both us, and I used my radio interviews and readings to talk about Michael and read some poems. We met within a year of both moving to the UK, where I live right round the corner from his house. We’ve frequently read and taught together, on Arvon courses for example. I recall both of us finishing our Poetry Society reading, which I’d gotten through with the help of some wine and he with the help of glass of water which turned out to be the proverbial vodka. Passing through the Poetry Society lobby, having accomplished our mission, Michael’s impromptu hop-scotch over a carpet of interlocking leaflets on the floor (somebody counting them, I thought, somewhat bemused by the activity ) went down well with me, but was not so happily viewed by what turned out to be the artist installing his art installation. Michael’s inadvertent critique seemed apt to me, but I mean what could a person say in apology? I thought. Sorry, I didn’t realise this was art?! This must have been not long after I’d introduced Michael and Don Paterson, my boyfriend who I lived with for a number of years. Frequently, I’d told Don how I couldn’t wait for them to meet; I’m sure Don must remember this well, and how we all went to France together with Maddy, before the birth of Ruairi, to stay in the house of my friend. Our car broke down en route, which prompted lots of tears and then mitigating alcohol. Actually, when we finally arrived, Maddy and I swam, rode horses and enjoyed ourselves lots, while the two male poets sat glumly in the shade, complaining about the heat, unable to swim and therefore proving my contention that most male poets can’t swim…nor drive very well. (I also remember Michael’s frantic call for us to evacuate the ever so slightly smoking car, and we all fled frantically from the mildly dysfunctional car, and stood there in a field for a while, observing it, until we realised it was not going to explode and we were the only ones who could do something about it. As with so many things in life, we waxed lyrical about the trip after it was over, just as the Irish love Ireland from a distance – and the way I love America from even further away – but I’d like to think that some of us waxed lyrical about Michael – about the guy and the poet – while he was still alive. He was also a wonderful Irish musician, as many know. Okay, so he rehearsed his jokes to perfection, but the showman really was a genuine poet. The first time I met him at Colin Falck’s poetry group (where I met Don too) the group weighed in about his poem “Pornography” as if it were no better than the usual, which was quite clearly not the case, as I insisted, amazed by the generally cool reaction. For god’s sake, I said, couldn’t we tell when something was really good? Colin, our fearless leader, must have. Michael and I departed that session together, and our friendship lasted from then, even though not all friendships forged in cups ever last more than plane-ride. This one was forged through poems too of course, and those by him will last. There weren’t enough, but it’s a good thing there were that many – more than the handful of good ones per book, which someone once said is the best one can hope for. Michael knew some London zoo orangutans personally, and did a very good chimp imitation. He was from the Bronx and I’m from Brooklyn, which may or not explain my also-close relationships with various beasts from the animal kingdom. (I don’t mean poets.) We both also held a series of unlikely jobs, knew a little of the underworld, even if he was Irish Catholic. (Like Sarah Bernhardt, I’m a lapsed Catholic Jew.) I was just in Santa Cruz, California, hanging out with some sea lions, blubbery lumbering beasts which spend their days squirming and squelching around gracelessly, shoving each other off their dry perches, constantly vying for room and bickering in distinctly inelegant honking tones. Not that Michael was the bickering type – he avoided all confrontation to a fault – but he would have appreciated the raucous spectacle. He had a hard time saying ‘no’ and that positive, friendly mask he presented to the world was often at odds with what he really felt inside, to the point where sometimes I’d want to shake that smile off his face. But then lots of people really liked him for this warmth, and women were incessantly falling in love with him. I’m taking up a lot of this interview talking about Michael Donaghy, but naturally this is the moment and opportunity to do so. Perhaps someone will want to hear more sometime; it’s an urgent need to talk people you love when they die. I was delighted that he chose to visit my dream the night before he died (when he had so little time and so much to do!). Side-by-side, we fell back into the soft snow, made snow angels and had a brief conversation about the cosmos and the starry sky overhead. He said he could stay there looking at the heavens forever. It was a lovely dream. To return to the question, I think the British literary scene is more maledominated and sexist – perhaps like the culture. British publishers often seem unwilling to take risks, but instead tend to congregate in aesthetic coffee clutches, all backing the same horses, rather than wanting the pleasure and excitement of putting their own stamp on things. Maybe this is the stock US individualist speaking, or how Americans like to think of themselves. My host just described to me a poet colleague who is a literary entrepreneur – in the best possible way – with her energetic Mickey Rooneyish approach to new projects. Maybe you’ve seen the films? “Hey, guys! I got an idea! Let’s put on a poetry show in the barn!” I should say that my host was describing this with admiration, even if this approach may seem culturally shallow, tasteless, tacky or exhibitionist to some – this kind of “hey, let’s make do and put together a show just for the heck of it” thing which, these days, I find refreshing for its energy, spontaneity and innocence (god forbid I use such a word about anything American!) which I really miss sometimes. Many English people find this impulse excruciatingly embarrassing, and I did too…once’.
As a New Yorker, now living in the UK, how did 9/11 affect your identity and the feeling of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’?
‘At the precise moment US friends were insisting I was damn lucky to be out of this damned country, these events have made me long for home more than ever – rather perverse I know. Of course I don’t think of myself as American, but as a New Yorker, Actually, I was back in the States for 9/11. Fortunately, we weren’t in the city at home, which is just across the water from the twin towers. We were terrified where we were though, just outside the city. I felt like my past really had tumbled down, virtually in front of my eyes. Before that, from a distance, I could almost pretend it was still all the same. Was that some loss of America’s innocence? That innocence was long gone from me – maybe part of the reason I left the place like I did, holding a cynical view of Americans, as does everyone these days. I see things differently now. Maybe it’s the so-called ignorance of many Americans which keep them innocent too, not always in a pleasant way. But many really do believe in the corny precepts America is based on. Meanwhile, the English seem to prefer the idea of the American as an ignorant dolt, but that is ignorant thinking too. Also, it is precisely the diabolically bad media which prevents anyone from getting a clear picture of the American opposition to the clichéd, imperialist, war-mongering, redneck mentality which I sometimes think some English would prefer to believe is an accurate picture of the American character, when of course the truth is infinitely more complicated…and interesting, if I may say so. By the way, on this trip, I’ve been hanging around with a lot of Republicans, all of whom said they’re planning to vote Democrat. Fingers crossed. Kerry recently said: “Bush has united our enemies, divided our friends.” It does seem to me this nation is deeply divided right now, which aptly represents an internal division I’ve felt culturally for many years living in the UK, but felt even when I was living in NYC, partly for political reasons and partly as a twin’.
You were a dancer up to the age of twenty-two, what drew you from this Artform into writing Poetry?
‘I can’t remember not writing – both fiction and poetry – so I never turned towards poetry from anywhere else. It may seem odd that I practised both verbal and non-verbal art-forms, but I’ve never felt any contradiction. However, reading and writing are and have always been utterly essential to me; they are part of my identity. I’ve written for as long as I can remember writing’.
Artists/Poets are often perceived as making things happen, politically, socially and/or emotionally, how do you see your work in this?
‘I’ve written the odd polemic, but much of my work is implicitly political. I’ve been told I’m the sort of person who makes things happen – both good and bad. Watches don’t exactly stop dead when I put them on, but machines do malfunction when I go near them. I have a far better relationship with animals, and men. I don’t know if I’m going off-piste here to mention how the kind of people who put themselves forward in some way are also the ones who end up taking the flak. The stereotype of the American makes them the crass but also outspoken one which means I say what others often tell me they’d like to say, but don’t, and this foot-in-mouth tendency I try to put to good use if I possibly can. However, the “messages” are less in my writing, and more in the uses I put the writing to, or in the kinds of teaching I end up doing, often in the service of good causes – the kind of work most writers I know wouldn’t and don’t touch with a barge-pole. It sort of started with the English seeming to not know what to do this NYC Jew, so I’d get placed among ethnic communities, for fellowships and teaching. That worked for me fine, even if I roll my eyes at the pigeon-holing and incomprehension about my work. Even if I don’t write politically, I want to be able to do a little for some greater good. Part of this comes from Jewish (Catholic?) guilt. I’m obsessed by the injustices of the world, and often see in the smaller cowardices and lies of people the far larger crimes they seem to represent. I see the tyrant and large-scale hypocrite in the petty playground bully, for example, or even in my fellow poets. This may sometimes be a fault in me, or a curse’.
Your new collection, Double Crossing was Poetry Book Society Recommended, but what poems or Poets would you recommend and why?
“I’m assuming you mean poems by others, but I’d say to read both American and British voices. It’s important to read in different genres. I’m reading a book about Mormons at the moment. However, I don’t recommend Mormonism as a life-style choice, and neither does this book, about a largely forgotten massacred perpetuated by these breakaway Christians (another advertisement for atheism!). When I came to England, I was simply carrying on with a literary love affair I’d had with England as long as I could read my grandmother’s classic, old-fashioned collection of some books; she ran a book business from her home, but this was just an excuse for accumulating something like 20,000 books in her home. My first reading was intensely old-fashioned: Fielding, Dickens, Fielding, Richardson, George Eliot, Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Hardy…and then later Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edith Wharton. I worked my way up to modern times; I was trying to approach things chronologically but now I mix and match eclectically, which perfectly suits my temperament. Early poets I read included Keats, Dickinson and the Romantics, and then Frost, Auden, Bishop, MacNeice, Kavanagh, E.B. Browning. I go back to most of these poets, and also admire Molly Peacock, Derek Mahon, Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy, Colette Bryce, Simon Armitage, C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Hacker, Kathleen Jamie, Ciaran Carson, Sean O’Brien and Michael Donaghy. I like individual poems, rather than poets, if you know what I mean’.
Double Crossing deals with various issues of gender, love, sexuality, politics of sex, drawing from a myriad of the everyday and from the realms of mythology. What draws you to mythological figures and what do they have to say about modern situations and events?
‘Of course we’re all just re-writing the same stories, over and over. When I wander towards some mythological topic, I might do some research, but usually long after a first draft. Then, I’m often struck by the uncanny way I’ve made connections unconsciously, as if we’re all dipping into some collective unconsciousness when we tread this territory. I found this when writing “Poor Relations”, when I was reading about some early creation myths and their connection to certain elements such as gold and silver, and when I was writing “Helen’s Sister”, which gives a voice to Helen of Troy’s not-quite-so-beautiful twin sister, living in the next town, her life lived in the shadow of fame and beauty. Also, my muse poems, with their conceit of the muses as men (or women dressed as men, and other such subversive things) allowed a broader palette from which to draw, while writing about the things I was going to write about anyway. With these last, I ran out of muses, and so began to make up new ones, allowing myself to add to myth a little, in my own small, and irreverent way’.
What do you think makes a Poet?
“If we only knew, eh? I do know a little what doesn’t make a poet. Selfexpression is inadequate, as is dull competence with form. One can improve one’s work, but I often think poets are born, which is not to say that one can’t blossom late, or come to the genre through the back door. Poets must have an instinctive, musical understanding of how language works. Some well-known poets let me down in this respect, having a feel for anecdote or narrative line, but being painfully unmusical with no feel for the music in the words and lines. I recall one saying she couldn’t in a million years write a traditional sonnet! Eh?!’
How much does personal culture, background, religious upbringing affect your writing? And, how do you see your role as a Poet within the wider realms of this?
‘I’ve talked about guilt as a motivation in the political realm. I think sometimes of the wandering Jew; I loathe nationalism, even as I feel its pull. I’ve managed to belong nowhere, or everywhere. Nothing seems to fit perfectly, or it all does. The club I belong to is the large one consisting of writers who never settled, or moved around incessantly: Joyce, Lawrence. All New Yorkers are foreigners to begin with anyway. What is a New Yorker, but somebody from somewhere else? I never thought about being Jewish at all (why would I, living in a Jewish city?!) until I moved to England. Now, I think of identity as imposed on me by others. I realise that my cultural roots (and this is my primary attachment to religion, coming from a staunchly secular, liberal, intellectual family…who were all rabbis two generations back) are inescapable. I’m not painting NYC as some kind of racial utopia but I honestly never noticed people’s colour or religion particularly – unless they’re highlighting it in some way – in the same way I notice it in England. The English seem particularly deft at pigeon-holing and putting people in their place, as I’ve said. I never experienced antisemitism….until I came to England, and that makes me happier to be part of my minority – again, maybe out of sheer perversity. Where I live now I feel I’m part of a number of minorities: as an American, as a Jew and as a woman, that great majority minority. I’m most at home in exile, among exiles. I feel more affinity with a Palestinian (which isn’t really so odd, when you think about it) than I might with an Englishperson. I’ve managed my outsider situation by working in prisons or in a place like Ruskin College – the ‘working man’s college’, as it is known – or among the disenfranchised. Of course I’m now a foreigner in my own country now, America being strange to me in precisely the way England used to be. There’s a certain poignant sadness in this situation. Some of my poems (perhaps more so the earlier ones) have a kind of peculiar nationalism of – the learned nationalism of the outsider or displaced person, which its own language, subsequently employed more broadly, for all transactions, including romantic ones. My family came through Ellis Island in NYC, like a huge percentage of the US population. It was the usual emigrant story of Jews seeking a better life in the US, and running from Cossacks and Pogroms. One grandparent was Polish/Russian, another Latvian and the third from Hungary. I’ve never been to any of these places but hope to go sometime and see if I can track down a few Salzmans or Jacksons (a changed name of course). One side is Pasternak, and I grew very excited when I heard this. My Great-Aunt reassured me that yes, it was indeed the same family as the Hollywood Producer, when naturally I was thinking of Boris. We’re still not clear on this connection. I live in hope. I am related to Edward G. Robinson, an actor from the 30’s who played mainly gangsters – a criminal-ish connection I can’t help but relish. My grandfather was an extraordinary polymath but he and his six siblings all worked to put money into the pot to send the youngest to medical school – that’s how it was done – from where he emerged to become a pretty famous shrink, specialising in human sexuality. Two other brothers were union men; one Great-Uncle subscribed to Soviet Life his whole life. My grandfather tutored me through High School – where Frank McCourt was my English teacher – as he did my grandmother, which was how he met and courted her. This polymath grandfather was a Levi or Cohen, I forget which; the fact is passed down in families through word-of-mouth, but is relevant only to those with the appropriate genitals – as with so much in life. His wife, my favourite grandmother, was a child vaudeville actress. My father is a composer, and my mother is an environmentalist. Well, all this is raw material, and I don’t expect I’ve gotten through a quarter of it. Who knows what I’ll do with it all, but I doubt this mix of artistic and political will go to waste. Of course I lost relatives in the Holocaust so I have only a short ancestry behind me whereas my artist husband’s family came to the US as pilgrims. Before around 1900. there’s a big blank. I have some early c.1900 photos of various relatives, some of whom look intriguingly dark-skinned and Gypsy…). Although Americans are mocked for their search for roots, in another way the Jews especially re-invented themselves by obliterating whatever of their past was available to erase. One set of my grandparents seemed to air-brush out their Jewishness completely, and even my father’s generation are strangely uninterested in their own history. Maybe this is partly why Americans, more generally, are cavalier about their heritage – because their identity is conjured up, invented, newly-minted, even though they appreciate the notion of heritage in England, where everything is supposed to be old. In the US everything’s supposed to be new. I wonder if this accounts for the US poet’s willingness to take more risks (which may mean more bad poems too, but, hey, at least they try!). This is another affinity I feel with Michael Donaghy; I often thought that both of us had reinvented ourselves in another place from scratch, away from family and a familiar place. Right now, I’m interested in returning to an American vernacular overlaid on all this Britishness instilled in me. Of course, I’m not convinced that this American voice has ever been absent – as I’m sure various English editors who have seen my work would agree’.
You also write essays, in particular I’m thinking of Babel (printed in Mslexia and reprinted in Incorporating Writing Issue 1 Vol 3), this medium is often seen as a direct opposite to poetry. What drew you, to what is traditionally perceived as academic, to writing essays?
“I’ve never thought of myself as a writer of any particular genre, but simply a writer. Reticent is not a word people who know me would apply to me, but that’s exactly what I’ve been up-to-date as regards my fiction, which I’ve always written, along with various kinds of non-fiction: essays, journalism and criticism (about which I’ve not been reticent enough!) The poetry world is a small one, and the criticism culture in Britain emphasises a biting wit, often at expense of the writer. This is not to say I think criticism shouldn’t include opinions, but it’s easier to be witty while being cruel. I’m very interested in writing which I term cultural journalism, which includes under its heading a multitude of literary sins (memoir, travel writing, anecdotal essays which verge on the academic), and I’m fond of sin. I’ve even written a screenplay with Anne Rouse, another American poet who has been transplanted in Britain long enough to also have a shared identity. I’m working on fiction and have been writing libretti and lyrics, a natural progression from my musical training. I don’t feel the desire to write much criticism anymore, but would love to have a year off teaching to do what I know I can do with a longer work of fiction. May I be granted that blessing. I’ve learned how few writers – and poets in particular – are genuinely self-supporting freelance writers, with no second income, trust fund or the luck (or pedigree) to have a succession of grants, minus the hard teaching slog which many of us depend on. I’ve never been anything but completely self-supporting, and it’s tough. Very few poets I know are, of if they are they have a domestic and/or secretarial support system’.
Do you feel there is a ‘glass ceiling’ for female poets in UK Literature?
‘This is my hobby-horse (god forgive – many others don’t) but I love the way the (mainly guy) poets, in their charmed circles, dismiss as nonsense whatever one says about the realities of being a woman poet/writer. Let them try to live my life for a week, or the lives of many others struggling year in and year out. Oh well, mustn’t complain. To hell with that; I’ll complain. A well-known female poet friend once said to me that it takes two or three books for women poets to achieve what male poets achieve in a single book. Repeatedly, I see nice bright young lads showing up and sweeping away the awards, and scratching each other’s backs for the next ten years, in pubs. It’s impossible not to be just a little cynical. Of course, some women achieve quick success too, but often more through facility with career game-playing than with words – forging the right alliances, and having amazingly helpful love affairs. I knew who my real friends were after I broke up with Don, which event affected my ‘career’ (if you can call it that) profoundly. I have to remind people that I ‘discovered’ and pushed Don, and supported him financially, domestically and as secretary for years, although of course we were mutually beneficial as each other’s editors. It’s never a good thing to have to tug on people’s coat sleeves and remind them of such things. Naturally, I never had this kind of support myself. I’ve have to do my own taxes and my own laundry – that great enemy of the writer, as I believe Martin Amis once put it. The joke is that women poets need wives too. Early on, I had a fairy grandmother who helped support my career – if it could be called that. I spent the rest of my life irritated to discover I had to eventually figure it all myself, and do it all myself. Having figured it all out, I realise too late one important secret: be incompetent and very bad at things so that someone else steps in to do it for you. Many women poet colleague describe in private their own similar experiences, which they know better than admit to many men, since such statements endanger one’s position. I’m acutely aware of the kind of backlash I invite by saying these same old tired things here again, but then the same old, tired things rule our lives. When I broke up with Don Paterson, some friends (only a few) suddenly dropped from my orbit, and I was once reduced to complaining that I got more attention for my alliance with a male poet, than for the work itself – thus reiterating exactly this fact, by pointing it out. Don himself, who’d certainly championed my work previously, suddenly failed to mention me when it counted. When Oxford dropped its list, I was out in the cold for a while. This is personal experience but it there are analogies in others’ stories, often told in private. (Here’s the impolite Yank speaking out again on a few unpleasant home-truths, which certainly are not just relevant to me…). I do think women are much more at the mercy of things nothing to do with the work itself. Some poets have been known to sleep their way to the top. My joke is that I’m the sort of person to sleep my way to the bottom – sheer perversity again’.
The editing process is often where Poets are made or destroyed, how does your personal editing compare to working with an editor?
‘I’ve done virtually all my own editing, except for isolated experiences with newspaper editors – usually good ones, although occasionally editors have abused this position to introduce their own agendas via some new, young writer, who puts herself forward for the job, without suspecting the Machiavellian strategies at play in the small, back-stabbing poetry world. I do believe that editing is a large part of the writing process, but I equally treasure the other more instinctive and mysterious part of the process. I’ve had to become a good editor, never having had the luxury one at my disposal as often as I’d like. I enjoy all the editing work I’ve done – for Bloomsbury, The Printer’s Devil magazine and for other book projects – perhaps more than I enjoy teaching in fact. When they start hiring American editors in the English poetry scene, somebody let me know’.
What are you working on at present?
‘I’m working on a novel, and short stories. Or rather I’m not working on the novel I should be writing, since I to pay the bills. Teaching is hard work, if you do it well, which I try to, and I teach all ages and levels, and in all situations, as I’ve taught myself to do – out of necessity. I need to find some impossible sum of money for medical things. I think patronage is a terrific idea. Should there be any rich people who are also keen on this system, I’m available for work’.
Finally, if you could invite anyone to supper (living or dead) who would they be and why?
‘There are too many choices. I’ve been reading a biography on Benjamin Franklin a fascinatingly eclectic, true Renaissance man who was also downto-earth. Surely good dinner party company. I’d be old enough to be safe from his roving, groping hands, although I understand he was pretty indiscriminate in his amorous inclinations and he liked older women too – though I don’t yet think of myself as older yet, I must say! I was recently reminded about D.H. Lawrence’s hatchet job on Franklin, in his Studies of American Literature. (I loathed Women in Love but The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers had an enormous influence on me; I don’t care so much for the poems, but I can appreciate their intent…sort of.) So, maybe I could be a notquite-silent third party at an event which involved sparring between these two men, punctuated by my occasional pithy and perhaps surprising contribution or rejoinder. Afterwards, these two gentlemen would no doubt withdraw during the Ball, since I can’t imagine that they’d be real keen on dancing, unlike Queen Elizabeth 1st, whom I could join, dancing a jig or hornpipe. She wrote poetry too and I wonder what she’d make of mine. In advance, she’d have to know that I had no designs whatsoever on the monarchy; some contemporary English literati might need to be reminded of the same. What I want mostly is the time to write what I need to write. Wouldn’t that be nice”.
Milner Place on PoetCasting
In a previous post, I spoke of how I, Milner Place, Ian Parks and Gaia Holmes recorded some poems for PoetCasting. Gaia was first up on the site, followed by me and now Milner is up there with some great poems. If you’re a fan of listening to poetry, then don’t miss out on one the truly great voices of English poetry. You can listen to Milner’s poems here. These are great recordings and show the diverse nature of Milner’s voice and writing. The whole experience of recording with these three poets was one of the high points of 2009 for me - Andrew Oldham 09/11/2009
Steampunk that PC
I am a big fan of the Steampunk genre, I think this is a left over from the film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Kirk Douglas. I was always fascinated by the Nautilus and Nemo’s styling of it, a modern vehicle but designed in Victoriana. The same could be said of H.G. Wells adaptation of The Time Machine featuring Rod Taylor. The machine in that is way beyond our own technology but the design is Victorian (yes, I know the book was written in that period but the Time Machine doesn’t have to be Victorian, as it is technologically advanced. See Christopher Priest’s version of The Space Machine, a modern novel but an old style machine). This blending of styles, the alteration of technology that is digital based into something that looks industrial appeals to me. So, I am delighted to share this link with you, you can Steampunk your own PC. Any takers? - Andrew Oldham 05/11/2009
ARCHIVE: The Monster Inside 1941-2004
Andrew wrote about the death of Spalding Gray throughout 2004 citing him as, ‘A major influence in my desire first to get into experimental theatre and then to start writing monologues. This was a man who wrote monologues on procrastination, the act of aging and the death of his mother. They were often humourous, painful and above all honest, making a direct contact with reader and audience. I was sad, but not suprised, to read of Spalding’s suicide. The greatest shame was that he was never as well known in the UK as he should have been. You can see his influence in UK comedy and theatre’.
Spalding Gray: The Monster Inside 1941-2004. Article by Andrew Oldham & Interview by Jeanne Carstensen (kindly reproduced here with permision of the authors)
The monologue, Monster In A Box begins with the line, “You see in 1967, while I was trying to take my first vacation, my mother killed herself.”
This is the perfect moment and explosive force in Spalding Gray’s life, from this he ran and in the arms of it he created and bore most of his work, and in the end he returned to it. Gray repeated his personal history on a cold New York Winter’s night and walked into fiction and speculation.
Gray would have revelled in the mystery of his own disappearance, would have loved the run he had in the New York press and those who crept out of his past to tell tales that were an equal mixture of truth and faith. For three months, countless articles dug up his past, his upbringing and the inevitable end. His remaining family, his wife and children became subjects for the press and police. The facts and fears of that cold night manifested themselves in the discovery of a body in the East River three months later. The monster in Gray had finally surfaced; it was the inevitable end for it, suicide.
Spalding Gray was a unique writer, whose brand of neurotic witty monologues revealed an ever-increasing fear of the modern world and his role within it. Gray transformed the drama world and the delivery of the monologue into a modern, open-ended means of self-expression. Even Gray’s attempts at suicide, there had been a few dry runs before 2004, had resulted in series of development workshops in late 2002. This touching, hilarious look at his own attempt at suicide, was impinged on more and more by his Mother’s suicide, now frequently surfacing in his own life. In Gray’s words, about the night he jumped from the Staten Island ferry, he was searching for “the perfect moment”. Gray seemed forever to be looking for his Mother and share in the moment he had lost her. His fascination with suicide stemmed from this. In his 1992 book, Impossible Vacation, Gray lists a suicidal moment during his teens, when he considered jumping out of a window. “I figured I’d just break a leg or something, and end up in a cast for the rest of the summer … Then I also realised that mom wouldn’t be able to give me any attention, because she was cracking up and needed all of it for herself.”
Spalding Gray was raised in Providence, Rhode Island, as a Christian scientist, he was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age (he was held back for two years at a boarding school and was further segregated to the edges of his own life). In the sixties he attended the Alley theatre, in Houston; there he learnt and crafted his skills as actor, here he gravitated towards avant-garde theatre of the New York scene. Spalding Gray was a founding member of the Wooster Group. A keen observer of life, he wove monologues out of improvisation, starting with Sex And Death To The Age Of 14 (1979), but his breakthrough as an actor came after a minor role, as the US consul in The Killing Fields (1984), which yielded the monologue Swimming To Cambodia, later filmed by Jonathan Demme. The play focused on the behind the scenes events on the set of The Killing Fields, but ruthlessly explored USA’s responsibility for the ravages in Cambodia. It also showed how Gray saw his life, his failures and his darkest personal secrets, bore out the fact that he was comfortable on the edges of his own life. Other monologues followed, Terrors Of Pleasure (1988), Monster In A Box (1992) and Gray’s Anatomy (1996). All of them were made in to films.
Spalding Gray was haunted by his past, hemmed in by his Mother’s suicide and his own neurotic fears. Gray he played his life’s foibles, pit falls and highs out before audiences, blending fact with fiction, he actively sought out the bizarre underbelly of society, the peripheral groups, the minority fears, the UFO chasers, the Native American rituals, the Thailand Doctors, the quacks and shrinks, the scientists and Christians. Gray created a cut and paste life in his performances, art was life and life was art. He likened his unpleasant experience smoking marijuana in Thailand, to being trapped in “a demented Wallace Stevens poem, with food poisoning”.
It’s a testimony to Gray that he survived his childhood and later life. His personality was constantly raw, childlike and on the edge. His stage style ranged from throwaway to hysteria. And in the end his pasted together existence, his ability to hold back depression and the memory of his mother, just gave way.
The following interview with Spalding Gray was originally published in January 1998 on SFGate.com; the interview was with Jeanne Carstensen. It is kindly reproduced here with the permission of Jeanne Carstensen and SFGAte.com
Is it true that you’re claustrophobic? I’ve heard that. So I thought, my god, I’m going to put him in this little room…
“I’ve had attacks of claustrophobia, but this room wouldn’t bring one on. This is still a big room to me. I’ve probably had two or three of them in my life”.
Are you planning on going skiing while you’re here?
“I’m leaving from here for Aspen, Colorado, to do a workshop called “The Magic of Skiing.” I’m being sent there by Snow Country Magazine to write an article about it. I’m very pleased because I’m being hired as a writer to write about skiing as a result of this monologue, ‘It’s a Slippery Slope.’ We get up at 7 a.m. and do our centring exercises. It’s a six-day workshop. Then we do whatever. I’ll find out and write about it. I’ll probably try to ski 40 days this year”.
So you’ve really become a big skier.
“I have my moments. If I ski 14 days in a row, on the 7th day I’m skiing well”.
Is skiing where you’re finding your “perfect moment” now?
“I think looking for the perfect moment is deadly, or craving them, because they’re always surprises. But I’ve had some really great moments on the slopes that keep bringing me back. Moments I’d call getting into the flow that I’ve never had before in my life. One in particular in Vail, being way out on outer Mongolia and having to get down to ski school to pick up my son or they’d treat him like a delinquent truant. And just getting into one of these flow situations where I was at the top of the mountain at the bottom and I really couldn’t tell you how it all happened. Very mystical for me. Skiing is better than sex actually, because for me a good round of sex might be seven minutes. Skiing you can do for seven hours”.
I was at the show last night and I loved the line near the end, “I see landscape. No mirror. No story.”
“You know, that’s one of my favourite lines. It’s about the breakdown of the narrative and just taking in the awesomeness of nature. I rarely use the word ‘awesome’ but I just did. I’m very selective with it because it’s overused. But of all the audiences I’ve played it to, this audience last night responded to that line. I could feel it go through the house. That line is a powerful and threatening line because it’s saying I have nothing more to say. I have run out of words because I’m so taken with this moment of being in the landscape. It’s a nice moment, both there and in the monologue. You know, I say that I can’t make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I’m cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you’re always in control, you’re like God. But that’s a tangent”
What are the parts of your life that you won’t tell. Obviously you’re not telling everything, but you’re telling some very intimate things.
“I’m 56 years old, and the monologues are an hour and a half, so look what’s been left out. Here’s what happened in the case of ‘It’s a Slippery Slope.’ It was almost five years ago, I guess, since my son is 5 now … I didn’t think I was going to make it through, whatever that means. I was down to 152 pounds. The therapist that I was seeing was forcing me to see her. I was bouncing between the East Coast and West Coast flying back and forth and involved in all sorts of shenanigans down in Santa Cruz. Going back and trying to see my son and his mom back there and also breaking up with Renee. Also shattering inside and eating a lot of drugs and drinking a lot. I was in therapy in a very touch-and-go way and she really didn’t think I’d make it through this summer, which was the summer my mother killed herself at 52 — and I had just turned 52. I finally settled on the East Coast with my son and his mother to have regular therapy sessions once a week with Martha. Martha was very good to work with because she was a woman my age who I was attracted to but wasn’t sleeping with, so we could move that sexual energy in a different way. We always worked together in the office; we never did phoners. We had this rapport and she became my friend and everything was available and we could, or I could, select what might be appropriate as a narrative. So a lot of stuff was left on the cutting room floor of the therapist’s office. I’m very grateful for that process. What happened before with Renee, who I was with for 13 years and broke up with, is that everything would be dumped in her lap, which was inappropriate. She’d say, ‘Save that for your therapist’ or ‘That’s guy talk,’ but at the same time she was saying that she was hearing it. So it was important to break up that relationship and have Kathie be the woman I was with and to have Martha the one I was dumping on. I’ve gotten better at not dumping. That was a very good process for me, but I have a lot to unload”.
What’s it like still telling this story five years later? There’s some painful stuff here…
“It’s very hard. I was so nervous yesterday. I was a mess. I couldn’t be around the children. I’m with all three children here: my stepdaughter who is 11, Forrest who is 5, and Theo is almost 1 year. I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep; I was so agitated. I was trying to listen to an old tape of the monologue: I couldn’t stand myself; get out of my body, out of my head. We’re staying at a nice suite at the Pan Pacific; I guess they upgraded us: we can go from room to room; it’s a joy. I went and hung out with the children. Forrest was watching ‘Men in Black’ on TV and I watched that and then played with Theo, and that really helped me get out of myself because it’s a beast to perform. I’m so glad it’s almost over. It’ll be 4 years old in August and I’m ready to lay it to rest”.
Were you a natural-born storyteller?
“No, I wasn’t. I was very withdrawn as a child. I can remember when, my mom told me this: My Cocker Spaniel died of distemper when I was maybe 6 years old; my mother said I didn’t speak for almost a year. And they were thinking of taking me to a therapist, which would have been very unusual in Rhode Island at that time. It wasn’t until I got to Emerson College that I began using storytelling to shape my day. I was working on a garbage truck and scraping dishes and I would tell stories of my day to the chefs there and other workers, and that continued and got most intense when I moved to NYC in 1967 and was living with Elizabeth LeConte. We had no television and I would come back from walking the streets of New York. I was collecting unemployment from Texas, and I would shape my day at the end of every day and the ritual of that was extremely satisfying. I took a free workshop with the Open Theatre in 1969. Joyce Aaron was running it, and everybody was encouraged to bring in short autobiographic tales and to tell them in a theatrical way; and if you had a moment of blocking, the Open Theatre had a technique called ‘jamming’ in which you’d repeat the word over and over like a musician, like ‘I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell.’ I stood up and did one day in my life with no jamming. I just flowed. And afterwards Joyce said, ‘Who wrote that monologue for you?’ And then I knew I had something. But that was ’69 and that was the big era of Grotowski and theatre of the body and deconstruction of text, so it never occurred to me that would be appropriate to use as an art form until years later. You know, I’m really influenced by the American autobiographic movement. I am more influenced by writers than I am by theatre. I was reading Thomas Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell and even Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. And Baba Ram Dass, for that matter, when he came back from India and did those first tapes, which were oral reports of his experiences in India, which he later published as a book. I didn’t graduate from boarding school until I was 20. I failed 7th grade and 9th grade, and my senior year I was in the senior play and was also writing very well, and I couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to write or act, and all my life I think I was trying to figure out how to get the two together and finally I did”.
And since you started doing that, of course, this has become a new theatrical genre. Why do you think this kind of autobiographical performance has become so popular in the last two decades?
“I think it’s a reaction to the virtual. I think it’s the simpleness of it, the presence of it, the minimalness of it in the face of not just the virtual but the extravaganza – Titanic, Speed II, Cats – the huge megaproduction of life. And it’s going back to a very simple form. I grew up with radio. I didn’t see a television in our home until I was 11. And radio allowed me to have my own imagination. So Ozzie and Harriet’s house was internalised, personalised. Television stripped that and literalised that and put it outside of me and stole it from me. Now we don’t have a television. We have a monitor and the children rent videos. But they’re also forced to be within themselves in relationship to reality”.
Speaking of virtual, what do you think about the Web?
“First of all, I have an allergy to computer screens. They remind me of electronic jello. The substance of the computer screen doesn’t hold my attention or my eye”.
You mean the low resolution, the way it flickers?
“The whole composition of the screen. The quality. I just finished working with the singer James Taylor, editing a version of ‘It’s a Slippery Slope’ for Mercury Records. And we were doing 12 and 14 hour days in which we were looking at ProTools. And they were literally carving the image on the screen. So you have the sound, a representation of my voice physicalised on the screen, and you’re taking the mouse and you’re shaving and shaping the sound. Fascinating, but not of any interest to me at all. James really got into it. I didn’t. I sat in the back and basically daydreamed and had sex fantasies and waited to be asked to listen to something. I don’t type. I’m extremely dyslexic. I write longhand when I write, and I rarely do write. I compose all of my monologues orally. I refer to myself as an unconscious Luddite, but I’m not against it. I have friends’ access information for me. What you get is a lot of opinions. You have to spend a lot of time sorting through it. What I’m worried about is the ecology of information versus feeling. How much information can you feel anything about? I live a very minimal life in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Population in the winter: 2009. I have all I can deal with just in terms of the library. I love to go into the Sag Harbor library and not look at the computer. I can’t call up anything on the computer. I like to wander in the shelves and look at the books and actually pull one out and look at it”.
The tactile experience.
“Yes, because I’m very disconnected. It takes me a lot to ground. I’m a very airy Gemini. Part of why I live in NYC is that it’s a real city. The children help ground me. I have to have that physicalisation for me”.
Was there anything special about the audience or the performance last night?
“I tried to tell myself: ‘Don’t worry, don’t have great expectations,’ because I played this show in Berkeley as a work in progress. I had always said that the Bay Area was one of my favourite audiences, but after the experience in Berkeley I began to think again about it because I thought I detected a lag in there. They were checking on SC: spiritually correct; and PC, politically correct. Like when they put a lag in a radio broadcast to make sure there’s no bad language going out over the air. The audience was thinking if it was proper to laugh at or not, a bit self-conscious. So I tried to prepare myself for that last night, and we started out and there were a few pockets of laughter here and there and I thought, OK, I’m just going to play it for myself and we’ll see where it goes. So I got into a real nice neutral place, and right at the beginning when I said, ‘I did my first monologue in 1979 called ‘Sex and Death to the Age 14′; nothing too traumatic, basically masturbation and the death of goldfish.’ Boom, they were in. Not to say that laughter is the only thing it’s about. It’s a humorous piece. But it’s one of the ways that the audience signals to me about their involvement. It’s very erotic. I don’t laugh a lot. But if I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover. From then on out it was a great house. And a big house, and hard to play. And it was so good that I gave all my material, so it turned out to be 1 hour and 49 minutes last night. It was supposed to only be an hour and a half”.
So it’s not totally memorized?
“It’s not memorised at all because I don’t memorise. It’s visualised. So I’m speaking memory. But it’s organically memorised because there’s no text to memorise. It’s what I call ‘bushwhacking.’ An actor or an actress memorises lines and then they have to pretend they don’t remember them so they’re fresh. But there’s a track there. I’m running up a different trail every time and eventually one gets set through tramping in the same space so many times”.
I understand you’re working on a new monologue called “Morning, Noon and Night.” How’s the development process going?
“It’s a very healing, positive piece, not that ‘It’s a Slippery Slope’ wasn’t, but it’s a monologue that reflects the comfort zone and it’s still funny and it’s still working. It’s one day in my life in Sag Harbor in Eastern Long Island from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep. So it’s my ‘Ulysses,’ my ‘Under Milkwood,’ my ‘Our Town.’ In fact, I’m listening to Donald Donaldson read all of ‘Ulysses’ when I have insomnia: it’s 42 hours unabridged and that’s my meditation for the one day. I’m workshopping it now at PS 122 in New York. I just finished doing Mondays. This works well because the audiences are very used to that process there and come in open. Morning, Noon and Night is one day and I’m up to 3 in the afternoon and it’s already an hour and a half. I will bring it back in the fall and try and develop the whole piece there before I take it out on the road. I’m not in a rush to get it out. I’m not in a rush to turn my children into characters before they’re people”.
But they will be characters if it’s a day in your current life.
“Forrest is a very central character. The dialogues with him are incredibly funny”.
Has fatherhood changed your work at all? You seem to be turning toward the positive, letting go.
“It’s not sentimental, but it’s extremely human and grounded and less ironic and less cynical and trusting those other emotions to surface in a sincere way that are also fun, and play well. Most of all it changes me as a person and it’s going to change me as a performer. It’s extremely humbling and a very strong event for me to be in a situation where the other’s need is larger than mine and I can accept it. With a woman it would be very hard to do that because of what I went through with my mom. Her need devoured her – it was so big, and I’m sure it smothered me as a child. So suddenly, that I’m able to deal with it with a child is a big surprise. Also, in the relationship with Kathie, who I’m not married to but live with: we’re not in that claustrophobic one-on-one thing because the children are an enormous filter system or other point of reference. Maybe we’ll have to keep having them. I say in the new monologue: I understood once I held a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them. Whoa, what an anchor”.
The View From Here: How Competition Kills Craft
Andrew is this month’s Guest Writer at The View From Here. In his article, How Competition Kills Craft, he looks at the trend of publishers who seek to be in competition with each other. Publishers who copy ideas, author styles, and produce carbon copies of more famous books. You can view the article here and buy the December issue of The View From Here to see the article in print.
About this website
Register for Updates/Log in
Twitter News
- The poem that will feature on BBC R4 POETRY PLEASE in Oct is from Best of Manchester Poets http://t.co/ek0m1nh 2 weeks ago
- Great news, one of my poems will be broadcast on BBC R4's POETRY PLEASE in October, will let you know the. Tune in. Thanks to BoMP. 2 weeks ago
- has just received the proofs for his first collection GHOSTS OF A LOW MOON from Lapwing, Belfast. Due for release in 2010. Whooooooo! 3 weeks ago
- More updates...
Posting tweet...
Powered by Twitter Tools
Blogroll
- Alhama Creative Holidays
- Brando’s Hat
- Cadaverine
- Comma Press
- Eyewear
- Flux Gallery Press
- Incorporating Writing
- Incwriters
- London Magazine
- Manchester Lit List
- Max Dunbar
- North American Review
- Peony Moon
- Poet Casting
- Poetry Magazines
- Puppywolf
- Richard Winston
- Route
- Stones From Other Mountains
- The Hesistant Scribe
- Todd Swift
- Transmission Magazine