An interview with Henry Shukman

What are your duties as Writer in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust? Do you help organize the readings?

The Trust seems to offer one of the last true residencies, one whose primary purpose is to support an artist in the work they do. There seem to be many "residencies" around these days, but as far as I can tell they tend to offer support with one hand, and take it away with the other, by piling on duties that leave the artist no time to do what they're supposed to be there to do — namely their own work — or else by dictating what kind of work they should be producing during the residency.

So though there are duties at the Trust, they don't really cut into writing time. The main one would be producing a poem for each of the three art exhibitions that go up in the gallery each year, created by the artist in residence, in my case Simon Morley, a witty and inventive conceptual artist who normally lives in the East End, and, later in the year, Conrad Atkinson.

Another is to do the odd writing workshop, but so far I've had few of them. Also, I do help out with the reading series, booking some people for readings, (though most of the nitty gritty admin. is taken care of by the Arts Offcier, Will Carr). I'm also encouraged to be around for the readings each week — but don't need much encouragement, the series is spectacular — and tend to get seated at dinner afterwards next to whoever has been reading. So perhaps that could count as a conversational duty.

How has the Wordsworth Trust experience affected you as a writer?

Time is the great gift. There's nothing like empty days, or at least a good few empty hours. I've written a lot of poems in the past eight or nine months. I'm not sure about the quality right now, in fact I'm pretty unsure, but I decided I'd use the time to generate a lot of new material. This seemed particularly helpful just after publishing my first collection, when I began to feel a bit paralyzed.

So basically I've been letting out anything that wants to come onto the page, amassing a new folder of scraps that one day I will sift through in hopes of finding some beginnings worth pursuing. I've erred on the side of productivity so far, but obviously a time will come when I'll have to roll up my sleeves and get down to the real work.

Eavan Boland accuses modernism of turning poetry highbrow (and obscure), detaching it from its natural readership and popularity (see Strong Words). You don't seem to have much time for obscurity — is that a function of respect for audience or what?

Well, I do believe it's arguable that some twentieth-century poets tried to get away with murder — by ignoring the general educated reader in favour of some notional poetry specialist, who incidentally might well have been less well-read and less well-educated than a general reader.

I deplore the idea of poetry being steered down some tiny tributary where no one goes, and left there for dead. But highbrow and obscure are not the same charge. You don't need to be well-read to be obscure. Who knows, maybe the better-read, more intelligent poets, with better taste too perhaps, tend to write more readably. Easy reading is hard writing: it's true of poetry as well as prose. And in a way, poetry is really the most mainstream literary form we have today.

The novel, for example, is a compromised form — not just its length, but its shape, the typical plots, and so on, all have been to some extent dictated by commerce. Arguably only the short story and the novella are prose forms that could be labelled "Uncompromised Art." Not that commerce is necessarily a bad thing for art. Even Pindar had to produce to a given market demand — Homer too, of course.

I discovered poetry as a young teen, and that came about through reading poetry that offered things I couldn't help but love — wit, wisdom, nostalgia and so on. What I like best is something I understand at a first reading, yet am simultaneously troubled by a sense of something not apprehended. The master of this has to be Frost. He would be my greatest of the 20th century — I'd take him any day over Eliot. I think the basic tenets of my taste haven't changed that much, though I hope it has broadened and matured.

It seems to me madness to write things for a general public that only a few literary buddies who know you personally will understand. Why publish? Robert Lowell wrote about this, as people know, of some of his own earlier work, conceding that he had lines which only close family-members had a chance of understanding, and subsequently — years later — revising them to allow the general reader in. But on the other hand, when you look at the really big poets of the twentieth century from Auden onwards — Bishop, Frost, Larkin, Heaney and so on — it's remarkable how intelligible they are. A reader who knew only their work could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss over obscurity was about.

And equally, I'm not sure about "turning poetry highbrow, detaching it from its natural readership" The first edition of Lyrical Ballads had a print run of 500. Two years later there was the second edition, also 500. That's not a lot of copies. Fourteen years later, Byron was selling in tens of thousands. Yet Lyrical Ballads doesn't seem to me clearly higher-brow than Byron, and certainly not more obscure.

So what was the "natural" readership? Byron's? But nor could one understate Lyrical Ballads' later influence, of course. I believe Wendy Cope has sold each of her volumes in six figures. There are readers out there who like poetry, it would seem. They just don't (always) seem to like what the poetry establishment regards as its best, except for a few figures, of course, such as Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, and Douglas Dunn, who is well on his way to six figures with the Elegies.

In summary, I do believe that if you build it right, the people will come. And one of the wonderful things about being a poet today is that you're so unlikely to sell many copies that you may as well not worry about it for another moment.

Has this last year of residency and publication changed your ideas about what a poem should be?

The reception my book has had has changed things. It sold out its print run (forget everything I was saying above!) quite quickly, and they reprinted it, to my delight and gratitude, and as far as I can tell, touch wood, it's going OK. I think that has given me some confidence about taking my time — well, I've always taken my time with poetry (three years per poem, roughly) but now I don't worry whether I'm taking too much of it.

Also, it seems to me that there are approximately two kinds of poem in the book — the more serious and personal lyrical pieces, and the more whimsical, quirky and sometimes humorous ones. Before the book came out, I was uncomfortable about this. I regarded the lyrical ones as the "real" ones, and the others as ones that were perhaps just there to make sure the book felt contemporary or something.

In general, I think readers do tend to prefer one or the other, but whichever it is, they seem to appreciate that there are both kinds, and the oscillation between the two. So I've found it easier to accept that maybe I do have two different kinds of approach, and that perhaps it's not such a bad thing. Casting the net wide, and taking my time. I trust that the focus will tighten over the months and years between now and my next collection (assuming there is one) but I'm happy not to rush the process.

Isn't this oscillation, between the 'personal' and the 'whimsical', somehow indicative of contemporary poetry's unease with itself? On the one hand, striving for a kind of hermetic self-sufficiency in the shadow of Stevens and Eliot, and, on the other, needing to justify itself by dressing up in Larkin's bicycle clips in order to forge links with an imagined or wished-for community?

Does "hermetic" here mean impenetrable to the reader? Or abandoned by the reader?... But I take the point: in the presence of such a tiny readership, why not forget about readers altogether; or should you get on your bike and go get them?

My answer would be, again, that to publish is to indicate a hope for readers, and it's maybe an arrogance not to be aware of that hope, however bitterly it is likely to be disappointed.

About that "oscillation": a good example would be Hardy, who has two or three modes at least. Take the collection Satires of Circumstance: it contains the intense and wonderful lyrics in the sequence, "Poems of 1912-13," which are some of the most moving, and personal, poetry we have. At the same time the volume has the title series, the "Satires of Circumstance", which take a sardonic, black-humorous look at human foibles and fallibilities.

He originally put the Satires at the front of the book, then moved them to the back, then later was unhappy about having them in at all. Yet the title of the collection remained. Another thing to consider: we have to make our own readers. As somebody said, a good poem teaches the reader how to read it.

Can you imagine contemporary poetry taking as many risks with itself and its audience as, for example, MacMillan, Turnage, Ades and Birtwhistle would take in contemporary classical music? Are there natural limits to language, or simply limits to a poet's nerve?

There are limits to taste. One thing we love in good poets is their taste. Arguing by analogy from other arts is dodgy, I think. Both music and the visual arts offer, more or less unavoidably, a sensory experience. Imaginative writing, on the other hand, whether in prose or poetry, offers a sensory experience only once it has been understood and the imagination triggered. That there may be further meanings not grasped right away only reinforces the fascination of the experience, but it doesn't remove the necessity of intelligibility, if the imagination is to function. The talented people are perhaps the ones who seem naturally to know how to get this process to work.

26.7.03

Available from Amazon.co.uk: In Dr No's Garden (Cape, 2001)