Dialogue with Ian Pindar

                                                             

 

At risk of sounding ungracious or curmudgeonly, I don't get excited about a lot of contemporary UK poetry. It may sound paradoxical to then go on to state that I feel the general quality and range of British poetry is in many ways stronger than it was 30 years ago, when I first became interested in literature. It seems that most poets of today are open to a far wider diversity of influences and formal approaches than the rather conservative, narrow gamut of styles employed by 70s/80s poets. If you look at the recent output of  Faber and Faber, for example, it sometimes seems as though the avant garde (or a version of the avant garde) has become the mainstream. It may be that many of these contemporaries have honed their skills in Creative Writing courses and workshops; yet for all the skill and sophistication on display, its as though this has been won at the cost of other elements, with too many poems sounding like showy exercises or assignments, well-turned or adroit or clever but often somehow hollow at the core.

   Ian Pindar's Constellations (Carcanet) was a book that stood out for me as distinct from this tendency, full of the ambitiousness, craft and scope of earlier 20th Century Modernists, a genuine poetry of ideas which also manages to be remarkably sensuous, lyrical and often moving. Equally, from reading Ian's blog, I had the sense of a writer I shared a broadly similar outlook and tastes with. Last autumn we began an email correspondence which slowly ("glacially", as Ian says) formed into a dialogue touching on his poetry and its contexts, writers we're both interested in and other relevant concerns. I print it here now with Ian's approval (and editorial contributions).

OD: I have been re-reading Constellations, which was as you know a book I was immediately drawn to when it was published in 2012 and one which I wrote about very enthusiastically on this blog. I have to say the pleasure of reading these poems for me has not diminished on revisiting the volume. They have several qualities which mark them out from pretty much all other contemporary British poetry: firstly, a tone of exuberance and delight, of "luxe, calme et volupte" which can only be called celebratory.

IP: Thanks, Oliver. I think ‘celebratory’ is quite right. While I was working on the book my young son was diagnosed with autism and this had a big impact on me. Rather than wanting to be some kind of poète maudit (as I once did) I now wanted to affirm life and love and all the good things we can find if we look hard enough. Looking back, I see it as the work of somebody who is burning bright before they go out, somebody heading for a fall or driving at great speed into a wall, because soon after Constellations was finished I cracked up a little, as Scott Fitzgerald would say. So that’s me burning brightly before it all turns to ashes. That sounds melodramatic, but on another level it’s exactly what happened.

Another quality which makes Constellations distinctive  is what seems a conscious design to recapture a mode of mellifluous lyric beauty that has all but disappeared from British poetry but which connects with both an earlier poetic lineage in English and with traditions in other languages less hampered by "the gentility principle" than ours.

Well, it wasn’t a conscious decision to go beyond the gentility principle. Nobody has ever accused me of gentility. Maybe it’s a class thing. Although I was at Oxford, my father was a builder. I worked on a roof with him during the Long Vac. So I just don’t fit in anywhere. The Movement never interested me much. Larkin a little. But my first love was T. S. Eliot. In the end I found American poetry more congenial. It woke me up to other possibilities. Not just the founding fathers of modern American poetry, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, but the New American Poetry, the New York School, especially Ashbery, and the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Duncan and Charles Olson.

Constellations is also intriguing in its format as a book-length sequence rather than just a collection of individual poems. Can you say something about the concept behind the book: did you conceive of it, for example, as a single long-form composition (perhaps in the tradition of those American Modernists you just cited, who all wrote extended texts of one kind or another) or as a poem-cycle?

 I was very taken by Robert Duncan’s idea of an endless poem. He rejected the obligation to write tidy lyrics with beginnings, middles and ends. His Structure of Rime and Passages are never-ending poems. Constellations isn’t quite like that, because there is a sort of ambient narrative and the collection ends with the end of everything, eternal night/winter and the heat death of the universe. Where Duncan saw poems as areas, I saw them as constellations, assemblages, word-clusters. There are 88 constellations in modern astronomy, so there are 88 poems in five sections. The first section is a sort of fanfare, introducing the seasons. The second touches upon a seaside love affair. The third is darker and suggests some kind of economic crash and a war. I was suffering personally from the recession and I felt I was writing in the face of these two forces working against me, autism and austerity. A losing battle, of course. The fourth section is broadly philosophical. It ends with a poem about the Plane of Matter, an attempt to explain an idea that came from my reading of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I dropped out of a PhD on Deleuze many years ago, but he stays with me. The fifth section is about poetry itself. I wanted to argue for a poetry distinct from prose. The last section is a general closing down as winter comes, then night, and all the stars going out, planets becoming uninhabitable and cold. The heat death of the universe. It’s only a hypothesis, of course, but it puts out all the constellations in my book.    

 Fascinating answer - returning to the book with a sense of how the parts form a kind of loose narrative-arc has lent it even greater depth and continuity for me. I also love the idea you took from Duncan about a kind of never-ending poem and I can see how this informs the loose syntax (or parataxis?) of the poems and the way you build up clauses without any need for a linear momentum or 'argument' to the poem, juxtaposing these clauses without verbs or connectives almost more like musical phrases. Were there other poets who particularly influenced the musicality of your style here?

   Wallace Stevens, a poet who continues to infuriate and fascinate me, is the biggest influence here, not so much a source or a model but a mood. I was also very taken by H.D.’s decision to just number the poems in Trilogy, rather than giving them titles. So I suppose in Constellations I was doing everything you’re not supposed to do: no titles and word-clusters rather than conventional lyric poems (although as you say, they are lyrical). Constellations doesn’t really fit in anywhere, but I’ve always liked that Robert Frost thing about being a lone wolf.

   As a young man I loved HD as well - or at least her short Imagist works. I remember trawling through Hermetic Definition, Helen in Egypt and the Trilogy with feigned but actually waning enthusiasm - Eliot hit the mark when he said her work "lacks the element of surprise". The highly-wrought, highly-strung manner which works beautifully in a 6-line lyric fails to hold the interest over a book-length poem all in the same elevated style. However, I can see what Duncan was responding to in her in The HD Book - it is her mythopoeic intensity (delivered in a much less egocentric, masculine, heroic way than, say, The Cantos) that he brought forward.

 If we turn from Constellations to your debut Carcanet volume Emporium, there is a marked difference in both tone and form. The mood is darker, touched with surrealism and with a frequent satirical edge to the poems. The main influence seems to be the Eliot of Poems 1920 and particular the quatrain poems with their almost Augustan sharpness. Can you say something about this dramatic contrast between the two books?

It’s odd because as you say Emporium is darker, but when my life actually became very dark my poetry brightened up, hence Constellations. I can only put it down to having learned humility or something. Humility before life, but also before poetry. The first big poetic influence on me as a teenager was T. S. Eliot. He seemed everything a poet ought to be. Now I don’t read him so often, haven’t read him for a long time. It’s not that I don’t think he’s a great poet, because he undoubtedly is. I think perhaps discovering other American poets broke the spell a little. I can see why William Carlos Williams, for instance, thought that Eliot represented everything one ought to resist. Williams no doubt hated those Frenchified quatrain poems, but I just wanted to try writing one once!

Your first book was a biography of James Joyce. Could you say something about how this project came about and to what extent your interest in Joyce relates to your enthusiasm for Eliot and other Modernist poets? To me, many passages in Ulysses contain the most densely poetic language of the 20th century and have always been an important inspiration for my own writing and I'm wondering whether it's been the same for you.

The Joyce book came about because a friend asked if I’d write a short biography for her new imprint. I chose Joyce because he was always a favourite. I studied Joyce and T S Eliot under Terry Eagleton at Oxford and wrote a little thesis on Finnegans Wake. Anyway, the book is aimed at the ‘general reader’ not academics – and while writing it I kept thinking of that Auden line: ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts.’

I remember most of all the tortuous negotiations with the Joyce Estate over permissions and copyright. My wife was expecting our first baby, so it was a stressful time. I have a file full of correspondence with James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, the executor of the Estate. He was helpful, although we didn’t always see eye to eye. I’m grateful to him for one detail that he told me does not appear in any other Joyce biography: in his final months, while in Zurich, Joyce would walk through the snow with his grandson and every now and then he would stop and produce a little black notebook to record some thought; he would ask Stephen to turn round and he would place the notebook on the boy’s back and write. That notebook has never been found – a great pity as it would have given us some indication of where Joyce was heading after Finnegans Wake. 

One aim of my book was to make Finnegans Wake less intimidating. It has a reputation for being either gibberish or impossibly erudite. I wanted to demystify it and show that it is in fact terrific fun to read. I am satisfied with Joyce. I feel in a funny kind of way that I did right by him. One reviewer said I had made Joyce and his work “funagain” – that’s good enough for me.

I can’t say Joyce has influenced my poetry in any way. I once attempted to write in a kind of Finneganese and it was awful. I think ‘Loon’ in Emporium flirts with being Joycean, although its presiding spirit is Samuel Beckett. I may be wrong, but I thought your poem ‘Local History’ from Human Form had something Joycean about it (‘stomps sockfoot’). 

As for Modernism, it’s interesting how Modernism became almost a dirty word in Britain after the Second World War. In A Sinking Island Hugh Kenner quotes Donald Davie: ‘the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Pound and Eliot never happened.’ Immediately post-war, Pound was out of the picture: a fascist and a traitor (this, I think, helped greatly to discredit Modernism in some minds). T S Eliot survived in British affections – aided by his practical cats – but did he maybe help to bury Modernism when he executed his reactionary turn, abandoning the avant-garde and reinventing himself as ‘an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics’? Then along came Larkin, an insistent enemy of Modernism and of ‘difficult’ poetry generally. He famously attacked Modernism – the 3 P’s: Pound, Parker and Picasso (and he hated Finnegans Wake).

So in post-war Britain we were left with a lyric tradition based on the triad of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin. Things have changed a lot recently. British poetry is always playing catch-up and only now is it assimilating post-war American poetry, especially the New York School. Everyone sounds like Frank O’Hara.

Heap of Broken Images

      

The triggering of Article 50 last week was widely spoken of as an "historical event", an example of that common doxological trope that positions national events involving soi-disant important dignitaries as "history in the making" and the events and actions of ordinary people as mere un-newsworthy flux ( I'm reminded of the line from In the Cave of Suicession: "It was not a day that changed his life but it was a day in the change of his life".)
    One of the least egalitarian men in Britain, Jacob Rees-Mogg, compounded this fallacy by working himself into such a lather on March 29th that he actually believed that comparing Teresa May to Elizabeth 1 ("a modern-day Gloriana") represented a meaningful analogy and invoking Sir Francis Drake (and by metonymic extension the Spanish Armada, in the same week that other Tories had waxed gung-ho about fighting to keep Gibraltar from post-Brexit Spanish control) was something other than public school-boy wooden-sabre-rattling of a particularly embarrassing kind.
   Although at the current rate of ill-planning, lack of foresight and high-handed ineptitude in diplomacy (as though when against all logic you choose to divorce someone you get to dictate all the terms and settlements) Brexit may never actually come to pass, March 29th will be come to be remembered as momentous for all the wrong reasons. It's the lack of a sense of historical context among Euro-sceptics which is so damning, leaving them blind to the importance of us remaining part of that European (and world) culture whose influence has given us almost all that is valuable and enduring in what passes for own cultural heritage. The essence of our traditions - the legacy not only of being a small, mercantile island but also of being the most voracious colonial expansionists of all time - is that they are largely an engrained palimpsest of other borrowings and plunderings, rather like Barthes' image of the text as textile, inwoven from other intertexts. What would we have left - in literature, art, music, cuisine - if we were really to remove all the elements we haven't over many centuries imitated, absorbed or pillaged from other cultures? Surely it would amount to very little: The World According to Jeremy Clarkson, the Wurzels' Greatest Hits and the fry-up breakfast, perhaps?
    And yet it's one of the abiding strategies of not just the political Right but of liberal humanism in the arts to promote a vision of British history and tradition that manages to subsume influences from extraneous sources as though they were both nationalised and naturalised. In his fascinating study The Origins of Modernism (1994), Stan Smith explores how Eliot, Pound and Yeats all participated in this rhetorical process within their poetry, often at odds with the iconoclastic vigour of their engagements with language and form.
   Especially relevant here is Smith's identification of what Eliot saw as the crisis overtaking Europe after the First World War as seminal to the thematic currents of The Waste Land, showing how even at this early stage Eliot's ideological stance was rearguard and xenophobe:
   "What The Waste Land laments is the loss of that cultural-political homogeneity which Eliot was to advocate in his lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933, published as After Strange Gods. Eliot's desiderata here consciously spell out the implications of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and they identify precisely what is absent from the modern waste land: 'at least some recollection of a "tradition" such as the influx of foreign populations has almost effaced'; 'the re-establishment of a native culture only possible for a people less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races'.
   Like Eliot's notional period prior to "dissociation of sensibility", was there ever really a time of "cultural-political homogeneity" to harp back to, any more than the immigration-free, closed-bordered Albion many Brexiteers deludedly pine for? In its stark, anxious vision of the fracturing of European culture and history, fragments of which the macaronic text "shores up against its ruin" - another palimpsest of borrowings - perhaps The Waste Land will ironically come to seem one of the prescient poems of our times:
  "The poem speaks not of reconstruction and restoration but of disintegration and decay, emerging from that moment in which time and space, history and geography, were rewritten and redrawn at Versailles, and post-war frontiers fabricated new and factitious 'organic wholes' and instant national traditions out of Europe's heap of broken images".

  
  
  

Memories of John Heath-Stubbs

   An entry from my journal, dated 19^th March 2001: ‘First meeting with John Heath-Stubbs. I entered the tiny flat – dark, shabby, with singed wallpaper – feeling diffident and over-awed. Extraordinary head looming out of the shadows, silver hair on end, cavernous cheeks. He greets us, a little distantly. Then the bulky frame hunches over, head in enormous hands as Guthrie goes through appointments, times, dates with him like a solicitous mother with a teenage son. He answers in bewildered tones – has forgotten to do this, can’t remember what time he’s supposed to do that, has lost such and such an address.’

    ‘I thought he was in bad spirits and felt dreadfully de trop, but it was obviously just the practicalities dismaying him– as the others got up to go he said (obviously having heard I was interested in poetry) “Wait, I wanted to speak with Oliver” and asked me to sit quite close beside him as he is not only blind but deaf now in one ear.’

   ‘His manner changed instantly to a sort of quizzical charm, a scholarly meandering warmth, as soon as we touched on his reality: poetry, words, music. The subjects he ranged over seem like Keats’ description of Coleridge’s rambling conversation on Hampstead Heath: his own composition, done on tape recorder then transcribed and redrafted; emendations of manuscripts of English poets, best examples being Milton and Keats -  problem more complex in Shakespeare, what with quartos, folios and ambiguities of Elizabethan handwriting eg. “O that this too too solid flesh” could also be “sallied flesh” or “sullied flesh” ; then Peter Russell (prompted by my rather nervously-random question, seeing a book of PR’s on the shelf), John had known him a little after the war when he was editor of ‘Nine’, too close an adherent of Pound’s views, maybe his anti-semitism as well; Pound an important poet, despite his disgraceful later politics; foolish to disregard his earlier poetry because of them eg. ‘Sestina: At Altaforte’ does not extol violence but is a dramatic monologue about a violent man; had not met Pound but knew friends who had, John Wain had visited him at St Elizabeth’s and found him “not all there”, disjointed and inconsequent; a great translator, though, esp. his Chinese poems; comparing ‘Cathay’ with Arthur Waley, one says “Blue, blue is the grass” the other “green, green”, in fact blue is the more correct; analysis of colour-terms in different poetries, more ancient verse uses words more for the effects of light than the colour or pigment itself eg. Anglo-Saxon poetry has very few colour-words; one poet who was very disappointed in Pound was Montale, whom John met in Italy – why hadn’t Pound come over to the Hermeticists?

But Pound not really interested in contemporary Italian poetry, too besotted with romanticised view of the past etc. etc.’

    The entry trails off, no doubt unable to reconstruct any further involutions of John’s extraordinary conversational flow. Even these few inadequate jottings, however, may serve to give a flavour of what an audience with him could be like: the vast range of reference, drawing on a profound erudition not just within literature but also across a diversity of other disciplines; the breadth of notable contacts and collaborators stretching back to the Forties, always mentioned casually and never in a name-dropping way; the startling connective-leaps and yokings of heterogeneous elements John’s memory would habitually encompass. What’s missing from this account, however, is the affable humour that was also an integral component of John’s conversation – the anecdotes, asides and quiet laughter he would use to deflate his more earnest pronouncements.

    After being introduced to John by Guthrie McKie - John’s tirelessly loyal and helpful friend, long-term advisor and Watts-Dunton-like organiser - and living as I did only five minutes away from the flat in Artesian Road, I became a fairly regular visitor over the next five years, frequently reading to John in the evenings and later transcribing some of his taped poems, as well as typing drafts into fair-copies on my computer. If Guthrie was away, more practical assistance was sometimes required: opening and reading out mail; shopping for books or stationery; unearthing something John had mislaid in the cluttered flat.

   John was well-known as a supporter and encourager of younger writers (recent poets who have benefitted from his guidance include Jeremy Reed, Matthew Sweeney and Christopher Hope), and it was not long after our initial meeting that he asked to hear some of my own poems. I remember sitting outside the pub almost opposite his door, The Cock and Bottle, apprehensively downing a few pints and scanning my paltry stanzas, wondering how I had the temerity to be reading my work to a genuinely famous poet, someone who had known TS Eliot and been friends with Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. Beer-emboldened, I eventually went through with the reading, rendered somewhat bathetic by John’s inability to hear my nerve-wracked voice properly – he kept saying “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, you’ll have to come closer”, until it seemed I was practically shouting my lines only feet away from his good ear, hammering out any subtlety or melopeia I fancied they might have possessed. Although John nodded his assent and made a few helpful suggestions about language and form, I went away feeling my poems had been damned with faint praise. The next time I saw Guthrie, however, he said that John had in fact liked them, thereby (it felt to me) conferring a sort of implicit acceptance.   

   My subsequent visits invariably followed a set pattern of events. I always phoned in advance, to avoid clashing with the numerous other friends and carers who would call on him – evidently he had another acquaintance with the same name, as he would always ask “Which Oliver is this?” John never mastered his building’s intercom system – if you buzzed his flat, he would usually have to navigate his way out into the landing to open the front-door for you, which could take some considerable time and no small effort on his part (attested to by the repeated sighs of “Oh God! Oh dear!” you could hear through the door). When, towards the end of his life, John was obliged to use a frame to move around with, this became even more impractical, and it was much easier to borrow Guthrie’s key and let oneself in.

     You would often enter the flat to find John in darkness, hunched forward listening to the radio turned up loud; either classical music or a documentary programme. You would have to switch the lights on for your own benefit and call out clearly “Hello John!” before he would look up and emerge from his reverie. Moments like this forced one to reflect on the condition of blindness – the shadowy isolation it imposes, the abstraction from physical reality, but in turn the compensatory sensitisation to auditory and verbal signals it seems to allow, obviously a decided advantage for the writer or musician. Despite the hardships entailed in such an impairment, traditions of blind musicians, bards and soothsayers seem to demonstrate a status of cultural respect that is all too often withheld in society from those with other disabilities. (It should be added, however, that John – like Borges - only became completely blind later in life; prior to this he would have been classed as partially-sighted or visually-impaired.)

    After greetings, there was usually the question “Would you like a drink?” Even after many visits, John would always describe the particular cupboard (“down the hallway, on your left”) where his booze was stored, seemingly implying there might be a fair amount to choose from. In my experience, there was invariably very little left – perhaps a half-bottle of red or a little sherry – small wonder, no doubt, in a flat often frequented by poets and with a host largely unable to keep tabs on how much was being consumed! Unfortunately, by this stage, John’s health prevented him from drinking much alcohol (unlike his bohemian Fitzrovia days), but he would always ask for a small tipple as I poured my drink – largely symbolic, I think, as it usually went untouched.

    John’s choice of reading-matter was remarkably eclectic, and reflected the diversity of his intellectual interests and the compendiousness of his knowledge. Although he was obviously concerned to keep up to date with the poetry scene, and would like to hear readings from magazines he subscribed to such as PN Review, Agenda and Poetry Review, he was just as likely to select one of the other periodicals he received, concerning subjects such as folklore, Christianity, history or ornithology. One book I recall reading through to John was an abstruse study of Japanese shamanism written by a friend of his; another was an analysis of symbolism in Sufi poetry. (There were, however, occasional gaps in John’s reading – apart from Joyce, whom we shared an enthusiasm for, he seemed to know little about the modern novel, and avowed that his favourite work in this field had always been Clarissa.)  

   John continued to compose poetry right up until his final illness, producing two full-length volumes (The Return of the Cranes and Pigs Might Fly) in his eighties. While even his most enthusiastic admirer would concede that these contain little that matches up to his best work, the characteristic amalgam of learned wit and reflective stoicism is still apparent, leavened by a fair quantity of occasional and light-ish verse. Yet John’s ear for poetic form remained punctilious and he would often ask for a piece to be read through a good many times – with often very subtle alterations of diction or cadence being insisted upon – before he was satisfied with it. One recalls what an accomplished and sought-after reader of his own work John had been at poetry events in the past, partly due no doubt to this sensitivity to the acoustic properties of English speech-rhythms, and his ability to match these to the measured tones of his sonorous delivery.

    During his last years John became noticeably frailer and, largely immobile, was confined to his flat. Although his memory for Latin and obscure lines of poetry remained undimmed, he seemed increasingly confused and forgetful about everyday matters. I saw less of him at this time. On my last visit, when he had been moved into a hospice near Harrow Road, John no longer recognised my voice. He passed away shortly afterwards, on Boxing Day 2006.

     Lengthy obituaries spoke of a rich and energetic career as a well-known author, translator, critic, editor and teacher always wedded to what he called (to the Queen, when collecting her Gold Medal for Poetry) “the ingrained habit” of writing poems. Since his death, however, there seems to have been no attempt to assess John’s significant contribution to our cultural life, and the gap his absence leaves. His poetic roots were in that generation – numbering Dylan Thomas, George Barker, WS Graham, David Gascoigne and Thomas Blackburn among his closest associates– who were in many ways “the last Romantics”, the last to hold on (precariously enough, given their historical milieu) to the notion of poet as vatic seer – a full-time, perhaps life-threatening commitment to the Muse, not just an academic’s hobby. John’s later development saw him look beyond the late Romantics he had written of so originally  in The Darkling Plain to Augustan models like Pope, consolidating a style of wryly elegant neo-classicism which – like that of Robert Graves – strives to counter the debased currency of modernity with a hard-won, highly-wrought personal mythology. This finds its fullest expression in Artorius (1972), perhaps the only fully-formed epic any contemporary poet has essayed, and a memorable testament to his ambitiousness, linguistic range and imaginative scope. In a contemporary scene notably lacking in these qualities – and indeed in deeply-read, generous-minded, Coleridgean figures like John, devoted to his craft and its lore but always prepared to share knowledge, pass on traditions and foster less experienced poets - a careful revaluation of his reputation and achievements is due.                         
                                                                                First published in PN Review, 2009

Interview With John Hartley Williams

   Having admired his poetry for many years for its wayward panache and linguistic vibrancy, I met John at Ronnie Scott's in the spring, where he was listening to his talented daughter Natalie perform an early evening gig as vocalist in the house band. The double-bass used in the performance was a handsome instrument designed and made by my brother Laurence (link here). This (at least in my mind) seemed to seal a bond of serendipity between John and I and, continuing our conversation in a curry-house around the corner with BowWow-editor and fellow-poet Michael Glover, we found we had much in common. This intermittent online dialogue took place over a number of weeks during September and October.
        
    You' re an eclectic poet and a cosmopolitan one. The distinctive quality of your work often derives from the fact that it's difficult to pin down your influences and reference-points. Which poets (or other writers) have been most important to you over the years and in particular who would you say kickstarted your interest in poetry when young?

   At school we read Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Gerald Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot for A-level. I think there were some novels on the syllabus but I wasn't interested in them so much. The poets had a great impact on me, even Matthew Arnold. (I saw a piece recently by that wonderful maverick American poet Ed Dorn in which he suggested that 'Dover Beach' was the single greatest lyric poem in the English language. Surprising, no? Or perhaps not.)
   We argued endlessly over the Eliot versus Pound question. I was fascinated by Prufrock and The Waste Land but Pound's slangy directness (which came, I think, from Browning as much as it reflected Pound's origins) appealed to me greatly. A friend of mine used to say: 'If you're still writing poetry after the age of 30, you must be a poet.'
   I suppose I made that discovery very slowly. I went to France after graduating and discovered André Breton and Benjamin Péret and the surrealists of the inter-war years. I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud...I think of myself as a surrealist, in the essential meaning of the term, not the usage that is generally employed in Britain where it means something like 'a bit weird'.

    That's an interesting alignment and one that again puts you 'out of key with your time'. Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Pound were certainly all formative influences for me too. I'm wondering what it was about surrealism that particularly fired your imagination. As you imply, while the word has entered our everyday vocabulary in a corrupted sense, the essence of the movement in the context of literary Modernism has been almost completely lost sight of. Was it only the original Bretonesque automatic-writing style that inspired you or did you also warm to the less pure anglified version of poets like David Gascoyne and later Americans such as Lamantia, Tate and Ashbery?

    I spent one summer absorbed in automatic writing. It released great energies (or so I thought). The problem with automatic poems is what do you do with them afterwards? Touch 'em and the bloom is gone. I wanted to publish a whole book full; in the end a few ended up in Canada. I did edit some of them. Funnily enough I found the notebook the other day and started reading the originals.
    Ashbery's early books certainly impressed me, but I suppose I've always preferred writing that tells you something about the beating heart of the writer. Ashbery was sophisticated in a way that I admired, but you don't get to know the poet, do you? Or perhaps you do, except there's not a lot of emotion. 
    DH Lawrence could deal with feeling. (God help me, I picked Nottingham University because Lawrence had been there. What a joke.) I'm still a great admirer of his poetry, though he doesn't get mentioned much in the snooty canonicals. I was a Dylan Thomas fan, and I loved WS Graham (still love 'em both). It was the fierceness of the writing that excited me; so much of what was going on in the magazines seemed tame and insipid. I forgot to mention that at school I read 'Howl' along with a friend and that inspired me to write my own howl - in the character, as I recall, of a tramp. It was an epic and filled two exercise books with expletive deleted writing.
     I think American poetry of the fifties and early sixties was a terrific influence. I felt very drawn to Paul Blackburn, for example. That might surprise you but I felt a kind of kinship because he had been teaching at the University in Toulouse a few years before I got there and I responded to his interest in old Provençale - Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born (whom I translated), Gaucelm Faidit etc etc.
    In contrast to then, American poetry seems nowadays very tame, indeed precious. There's an awful lot of preciosity about. That famous Donald Allen anthology (I still have my battered copy) introduced me to Ed Dorn, Kenneth Koch, Lamantia, O'Hara, Jack Spicer (I loved his work), Lew Welch. And then I found James Wright and Richard Hugo. All of that writing seems grown from life, not from the workshop, and it still seems that way to me.    
    I don't think there's anything 'pure' about surrealism, by the way. It's always reinventing itself. It isn't a method for writing poetry (or indeed anything), it's an alignment to the universe, so when you say you think I'm 'out of key' with my time, I think, well, poets usually are somewhat out of kilter. I didn't, by the way, come across Gascoyne's work till much later.

   That's an interesting cross-pollination of influences. I'd love to read your howling tramp! I was looking back at Christopher Middleton the other day for the BowWowShop festschrift and one of the main things that has made his work stand out so notably over the years has been his immersion in foreign poetries and translation. Nowadays that's more common but in the 60s and even 70s, when a very tame post-Movement parochialism held centre-stage, it was less prevalent, I'm sure. Of course Middleton's also lived abroad for much of his life so has kept out of the fads and bickerings of the UK scene. You mention studying in Toulouse and now you live in Berlin, while many of your poems are set in other countries: perhaps you could give a potted history of your movements as a writer and how you feel these different locales (and languages) have impacted on your work?

   I'd quite like to read my howling tramp poem myself, alas it is lost. One of the things that happens when you move around a lot is losing things. The art of losing isn't hard to master etc. Let's see: Potted biography: After University I went to Lille in France and taught in the Facultés Catholiques de Lille. (No, I'm not a Catholic.) I had a monk's room in the seminary and once smuggled a girl up there, but the priests were all academics and noticed nothing. I learnt to eat there. Catholics believe in eating well, and believe me these French fellows did eat well. A year later I was in Toulouse, drawn by thoughts of old Provençale etc, but the reality wasn't up to much. I recall Toulouse as being essentially damp and cold, which may surprise you. What was good about the place, if you were happy to get out of it, as I was, were all the Cathar sites you could visit - hilltop fortresses to which Simon de Montfort had brought blood and vengeance. Stirring and unsettling sites.                   
    Two years in France meant I had a pretty good command of French by the end of it, and I read French poets too. In French. (Though that wasn't so easy.) I was in France in 1968, year of les évènements. Having experienced the passion of the French students (I was tumbled from my Velosolex and given a few good luck swipes of the baton from a CRS man), I found England very milk and water, but I stayed for a year in Bristol.  I wasn't really writing much poetry at this time. I had decided I would become a novelist. Unfortunately I also had to earn a living and teaching in a Bristol school was inimical to novelistic enterprise.
    Then I went to Tito's Jugoslavija (a town called Novi Sad in Serbia, some 250 Kms north of Belgrade). I had a very light teaching load (for once!) and decided to make the most of it and finish my novel. (I didn't) After that came marriage and a British Council job at the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon. I'm not naturally an early riser but in the sub-tropical heat I found myself getting up at six in the morning to write a long autobiographical poem. It was never published as such, but I pillaged it for images and incidents in later poems.
    We came back to Britain in 1972 and I did a postgraduate degree at London and actually finished a novel (which no one wanted to publish). After that I discovered I had, as they say, over-qualified myself and after a series of job interviews that led to nothing (with not very humorously-minded people) I noticed a job going at the Free University of Berlin. I knew no German, apart from danke schön and Heil Hitler, but they didn't seem to mind. The spirit of '68 was still alive in in 1974. And this was West Berlin, of course, not the dreaded GDR. Instead of being interviewed by two men in ash-flecked suits (as happened in the UK), I was interviewed by everyone in the department, including the cleaning ladies, one of whom asked me if she would have to learn English to find out how I wanted my office organising.
     I kept abreast of UK writing by subscribing to periodicals. I was lucky to be working in university environments, and the libraries were usually good. I guess I was learning by doing, improvising as I went along. Of course the foreign languages that surrounded me kept me tuned to ways of saying things that were intriguingly different. I wasn't so much drawn to translation as to recasting things I heard said, say, in French or German, into English.
     My education as a poet was a series of accidents, some happy, some not so. The curriculum for Auden's daydream College for Bards was a) at least one ancient language and 2 modern ones; b) lines in these languages learned by heart, c) exercises in the writing of parodies, NO lit. crit; d) courses in prosody and rhetoric; e) students would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot. That's a provocation of course, but I've always felt my education certainly didn't prepare me for being a poet, and I'd have loved to be enrolled in Auden's college.

  You've certainly been peripatetic. In my College for Bards, travel would play a big part in the curriculum. I remember that Auden essay - it's a pleasant vision although you can't quite imagine Auden looking after a pet or tending a garden. I also recall you (and Matthew Sweeney) at the beginning of Writing Poetry quoting approvingly Louis MacNiece's "I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of laughter and pity, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions". I approve of this too: to me it means poetry drawing from the full gamut of what grown-up averagely-adjusted men and women partake of and experience, the opposite of the academic prigs, neurotic primadonnas and semi-autistic delusionaries most poets turn out to be. This links to what I found in re-reading poems from your marvellous book Canada the other day: they work around speech-rhythms that are not dissimilar to how you actually speak, even when the subject-matter is not benched in your own experience. Could you say something about this interrelationship -eg. does this reflect how you compose? How do you bring together acoustic and page-lead aspects of the poem?

   No matter what the received dialect of the age might be, you grow up speaking like the people around you. I grew up in London and the melody and intonation of London speech is still in my ears. I used to worry about being disconnected from everyday language. The sheer pleasure of sitting on a London bus and listening to the conversation behind me. I worked in a University, however, and I had native English speakers for colleagues (quite a few in fact), and of course Berlin is not far from London, certainly not these days. I had family in London as well, and so I was not disconnected in the way James Joyce would have been in Zurich. Would he have ever written Finnegans Wake in Ireland? There would have been no need to invent a new language for the tribe. Poetry always has to re-discover 'the real language of men' (and women) and I've always felt that any kind of writing that gets priggish about the force of the vernacular is lost. A great and abiding model for me remains Byron's Don Juan. How many poets these days could come within spitting distance of that kind of damn-my-breeches, devil-take-the-hindmost swagger?
     As far as composition goes, I'll usually start with a phrase, something someone has said, or an often heard remark, scribble an improvisation that begins with the phrase and then rework it into something that (I hope) still has the force of something that might have been a real utterance, by a real person. I'm glad you liked Canada. It actually became three books in one because Neil Astley said he could only publish me every five years. But don't get me on to publishers.

 That's interesting about Canada being 3 books in one as it does have a terrific range in there, both locations and experiences but also of forms and tones. There are the repeated stanzas of the first section and then the set fourteen-liners with a lot of variations in them of the 'Pistol Sonnets', in some of which you actually play with the formal constraint by making it part of the subject of the poem eg "How long to go on, then stop/A fine corrective, madam, to blather". Do you see form then as a necessary brake on the blather of confessionalist excess, or as (as Olson wrote in Projective Verse)"only ever an extension of content" (in your case, that "real utterance" of speech-rhythms you mention)?

   'Form is never more than an extension of content' has upturned a bucket of blather on our heads.
   The experience of automatic writing taught me a lot about the relationship between inspiration, improvisation and composition (in the musical sense). Sometime in the mid-eighties I sat in my wife's parents' garden in Jugoslavija (as it then happily was) and for about five weeks committed one auto-poem after another to a notebook and then typed them up without changing a word. (The not changing a word took self-discipline, I can tell you.)

   I followed Benjamin Peret's instructions to the letter: 'It will suffice, then, to chase away this bitch reason, to write without stopping, without minding the crush of ideas. No more need to know what an alexandrine is or a litotes…Forget all your preoccupations, forget that you are married, that your child has whooping cough, forget that you are a Catholic, that you are a shopkeeper, that bankruptcy looms…you do not know anything except what you are about to be told. Write as fast as possible so that you lose none of the secrets about yourself being confided in you. Above all do not re-read anything….' If you get stuck, he suggests, pick a letter of the alphabet – A for example – and choose a word beginning with that letter to force open the gate of the unconscious. Ariadne's thread, he says, will come back by itself.

   When I read the poems through, I saw that repetitions of syntactic structures and key words, strangely enough, often provided a kind of liturgical form to what I'd written. Some of them were funny, some hallucinatory. There was a kind of joviality about them I liked. However I didn't think anyone in well-mannered Grossbritannien would publish them.

    In the end, I tinkered with a few of them and they became the last section of  Canada. Breton and Péret keep quiet about the authenticity (or not) of this tinkering. (Touch it and maybe the bloom is gone.) I could see that my unconscious mind was still marshalling syntax and whipping errant vocabulary into line and I took my cue from that. I think because of those experiments, when I'm writing these days, I find it easier to access improvisational swoops and flights, but I'm still enough of a traditionalist to want the final piece to hold its shape (not be baggy), be succinct, use language with care, use rhyme if I feel like it, use more or less complex stanza shapes, above all, though, create surprise (which is what automatic writing produces). 



I love the Peret quote. Your approach makes a bracing alternative to the tepid stylistic exercises of Creative Writing courses, which seem to have overspilled into the tepid generic poems, often highly competent but lacking in lived experience and substance, which are churned out these days. We seem to be in an oddly paradoxical position in the UK now: the scene is so glutted with would-be poetlings that they have flooded the market, while at the same time few can afford to go out and buy overpriced poetry books at a time when - thanks to the pernicious 'austerity-measures' of the Coalition - many of us can barely afford to pay our mortgages and bills. There are more poems being written than ever before but less people are reading them. Facebook and Twitter seem to have taken over from intelligent reviews as a way of forwarding new work. You implied in a previous answer that you'd had some bad experiences with publishers: what's your view of the current scene and where do you locate yourself within it (if at all)?

 

  You are damned right about the competent unlived-in poems people churn out. I knew we were all doomed when I saw you could get a doctorate for a volume of verses - to be judged by whom? By your lecturers? The only test of poems is whether or not you can find a real publisher willing to chance his arm on your work. This academic rubbish spills over into reviewing. Most poetry book reviews seem to be written by postgraduate students, in thesis language to boot. Hence no honest opinions, just a lot of linguistic flannel. (When did you last see a carefully honed hatchet job on some insipid volume or other? Everybody is watching their back.) Facebook and Twitter are grim organs of language destruction. Poetry evolves over time, in silence, with care.
   I don't really care for the current scene at all. The atmosphere reminds me of the theatrical world, where everyone is a 'luvvie'. I was at an Eliot prize giving not very long ago where the winner read from the winning book to a hushed audience a very bad poem. (I looked it up later in Foyles to make sure it was as bad as I thought it was, and I was right.) The poem was warmly applauded and I went round asking people what they'd thought of it. Most said they hadn't been listening.
   This ain't a scene I want to belong to.
   When Matthew Sweeney and I wrote our book 'Teach Yourself Writing Poetry' we were struck by a table concocted by Mick Imlah when he edited Poetry Review. It was a ranking list, putting poets in descending order of fame and glory (and achievement?), starting with Heaney, or was it Hughes, at no.1 and working down. This 'top ten' idea runs counter to our notion of how poetry might be part of any national culture. I don't know whether Imlah intended it as a joke or not. At any rate we amused ourselves with the idea that if we bumped off all the poets ahead off us in the league table, we'd end up Number One Poets. That gave us the idea for Death Comes For The Poets and started us on writing a novel. It began as a joke - but then we started to take it seriously, develop the characters etc.
    You mention the famous Coalition. Why is there no poetry (that I can see) conducting any kind of ferocious rearguard action against the imbecile politics of the Tories?

 

Can I ask you to say a little more about Death Comes to the Poets, an intriguing spoof-whodunit which I'm surprised hasn't reached a wider audience. Firstly, how did you and Matthew Sweeney come to collaborate together in the first place, since your partnership also produced the excellent guide-book 'Writing Poetry' we spoke of before, certainly the best of its kind? Secondly, how did the two of you go about composing a whole novel eg. did you each write sections/passages and then assimilate them, or was it a sentence-by-sentence negotiation all the way? I love the way the novel parodies both certain species of UK poets and certain familiar styles: did you and Matthew have particular figures in mind as you wrote ie, is there a sense in which it's a roman a clef? Not to give the plot away, but surely the ending leaves the dot-dot-dot of a possible follow-up ...any plans in that direction?

 

    In the eighties I invited many British poets to Berlin to give readings. When Matthew Sweeney came we struck up a conversation about the craft of poetry which has been going on ever since. I suggested we should write a book together and at the same time the Hodder Teach Yourself people got in touch with Matthew  and asked if he'd be interested in writing a primer for poets, so everything came together rather well. We saw the book as a continuation of our conversation, and that was the tone we aimed for. We used a cassette tape to monitor our own discussions because we'd get so interested in what we were saying we'd forget to write things down. We wrote almost everything together, line by line. We had to do it that way if we were going to sustain the talky nature of the thing.
    It wasn't so easy to apply this technique to the writing of the novel. It was still a sentence by sentence negotiation, but a lot more fraught. I can still hear Matthew sighing and saying: 'It's just not plausible, John.' Some of my suggestions were probably a little wild. We did and didn't have certain characters in mind when we wrote. Death Comes For The Poets isn't a roman à clef, but some characters are types or composites. I leave it to the reader to decide who the characters might be in real life. We were disappointed that so many publishers turned the book down. A typical response was: 'Great story, pity about the poetry.' And yes, there might be room for a follow up - but first of all the book has to reach that wider audience you mention. By the way, we will be reading together from the book at the London Review of Books Bookshop on 12th November, 19.00



              

The Kaleidoscope of Sounds

    When I mentioned Hope Mirrlees in the previous post it reminded me that I'd planned to re-up the review of her Collected Poems which appeared on Eyewear earlier this year but which got only the briefest of showings before another post superseded it. Here it is (apologies for repeating myself if you've already read it):

    TS Eliot’s assertion, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, that genuinely new works of art force us to readjust our sense of the whole tradition that lies behind them, so that “the past (is) altered by the present as much as the present is altered by the past”, is equally true of genuinely innovative editions of non-contemporary poets, jostling our preconceptions about a period or movement and obliging us both to reassess what we assumed we knew of literary history and to question the criteria by which that history has been formulated.  Peter Robinson’s illuminating Complete Poetry and Translations of Bernard Spencer (Bloodaxe) from early last year was one such edition, reshuffling our awareness of mid-century English poetry ( all too often dominated by what might be termed the Auden supremacy) by elevating a figure whom Edward Lucie-Smith once described as “the type of the excellent minor poet” to definite major status.

    Sandeep Parmar’s enthralling Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems(Carcanet) forces a similar re-evaluation of in fact several different areas of critical interest. Mirrlees’ long experimental poem Paris (1920) is perhaps the nearest any English poet has come to negotiating the vortex of continental High Modernism, yet prior to this edition the text has been all but unknown despite its startling, kaleidoscopic brilliance and its presaging of both The Waste Land and Mrs Dalloway. It also jolts us into a reappraisal of the role of female authors in the inception of Modernist advances, contra the well-established tradition of lauding Joyce, Eliot and Pound as heroic, exiled pioneers. Paris may be located within a context of other ‘vers libre’ poets like HD and Mina Loy (on whom Parmar has also written), the non-linear, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose of Dorothy Richardson,  Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein and the intellectual endorsement of Mirrlees’ friends Jane Harrison and Virginia Woolf, who with her husband Leonard first published the poem under their Hogarth Press imprint.

    The fact that, after Paris, Mirrlees didn’t publish another full-length book of poetry until 1976 - just two years before her death and  written in a far more traditional, formal style - might be seen to point towards the seemingly anomalous nature of her Modernist experiment but equally begs questions about the hostile reception its publication was met with and the poem’s subsequent burial from any sort of readerly access – ironic, when only two years later The Waste Land (also published by Hogarth) found acclaim from within the literary establishment Eliot was already a part of.

   Such questions, among others, are amply addressed in Parmar’s lengthy and insightful Introduction. Careful to locate Paris “within the context of (Mirrlees’) wider oeuvre, her life, and her networks of influence”, Parmar examines the biographical backdrop to the poem, detailing her progression from Classics undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, to sometime member of the Bloomsbury set. Indeed, prior to this edition, more readers will be familiar with Mirrlees’ name from footnotes to the Diaries or Letters of Virginia Woolf than as a writer and one wonders if the association with Bloomsbury (often slighted for what has been seen as its dilettantism and snobbery) might be another factor in Mirrlees’ later critical neglect.

      It was at Newnham that Mirrlees first met the anthropologist and “first woman intellectual” Jane Harrison, who was originally one of her tutors but who rapidly became the key influence in her development.  Parmar is tactfully circumspect about addressing the nature of their relationship, although by revealing the private codes the couple used when talking about each other (eg. Elder and Younger Wife, both betrothed to a totemistic Bear-figure) she leaves us in little doubt that there was what Virginia Woolf called a “Sapphic” element to their long-standing co-habitation. But equally it was an intensely intellectual partnership, with the two women learning Russian, attending academic conferences and travelling throughout Europe together.

   Harrison’s ideas about the primacy of ritual as a bridge between Art and Religion, derived from her study of Ancient Greek culture, powerfully inform the structure and movement of Mirrlees’ long poem from the use of Harrison’s anthropological term “holophrase” in the opening line onwards.  Paris can be read as an improvisatory striving to discover an underlying ritual within the flux of quotidian urban life: “I want a holophrase” (defined by Parmar as “a primitive linguistic structure that expresses a complex concept in a single word or short phrase”, a description which tellingly resonates with Pound’s characterising of “ the image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”) signals an attempt to encapsulate the teeming diversity of a single Paris day into a patterning of imagistic and linguistic flotsam inclusive enough to dismantle poetic hierarchies and find as much value in adverts, street-talk and signs as in the official high culture of the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe.

   As such, Paris is both marvellously attuned to the cross-currents of pre-1920s Modernist movements – its collage of disparate perspectives and registers seeming to point towards the Cubist principles of Braque and Picasso, its enthusiastic embrace of urban multiplicity holding parallels with Futurism and Vorticism – and also astonishingly prescient of later open-form poetries, particularly the kinds of “process-poems” which attempt to plot unstable ontologies across both a timed duration and the typographic space of the page, from the psychogeographic London-forays of Iain Sinclair right up to the disjunctive Language poetry of Armantrout, Silliman and Howe. Sandeep Parmar and Carcanet Books can only be congratulated for making widely available for the first time this seminal, groundbreaking poem, a suddenly-recovered piece in the Modernist jigsaw.

     Based on her research into the Mirlees archive, Parmar does a good job of tracing some of the other, less obvious intertexts for Paris, such as two French poets Hope was acquainted with personally – Madame Duclaux(also known as Mary Robinson) and Anna de Noailles – both salonnieres and interesting re-interpreters of the flaneuse-figure in their poems. Parmar also cites Cocteau and Mayakovsky as plausible influences. Her own persuasive reading of the poem is as an assertion of the individual, female voice – “the breaking down of identity and individual experience in favour of the life of the city that threatens to destroy the ‘I’” – attempting to find itself within the conflicting onrush of modern Paris (both Classical and demotic, filled with symbols of Religion and Art but also the ‘dreck’ of the contemporary) and ultimately – paradoxically - discovering that “Paris liberates the speaker from individual life and experience...The self returns to its private, secret tongue.” (Julia Briggs’ Notes at the end of this edition are also invaluable signposts for elucidating Paris.)

     After participating in the exhilarating dérive of Paris, it feels like quite a jump to turn the page onto Hope Mirrlees’ 1976 collection Moods and Tensions, so different in form, tone and subject-matter as to seem written by another poet. While it might be futile to entertain the “If only...” hypothesis of wondering what kind of work Mirrlees might have produced had she built on the style of Paris, there must surely be a sense of loss involved in considering that such an exciting and momentous poetic masterpiece – moreover, by a female English poet – remains a one-off, a youthful tour de force by a writer who later turned to novels, biographies and academic essays, as well as these technically-conservative late poems.

    However, Parmar is alert to this kind of denigrating of Paris as a mere flash-in-the-pan period-piece and argues for meaningful links between the early poem, the later ones and the prose-works. She posits that the major turning-point of Mirrlees’ life was the death of Jane Harrison in 1928 and her subsequent conversion to Catholicism, entailing a long-term repudiation of the life she had previously lead, including perhaps the intellectual daring and iconoclasm that had engendered Paris. The late, overtly academic poems – rhymed and metered in most cases, and heavily reliant on literary and Classical allusions – often pivot on the opposition between the resolved stasis of Christian faith (associated with cultural tradition and book-learning) and the enticingly sensuous but less than worthy (or at times “pagan”)appeal of love and desire: an opposition also apparent in a Victorian poet Mirrlees sometimes here resembles, Christina Rossetti. There is a significant passage in ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’- a poem which begins “I have no wish to eat forbidden fruit” – where the strategy of Classical reference seems to encode more worldly sexual temptations :

        “I can watch the droves of little singing maids

         (They are so close, just out of reach!)

         Turning Aeolian lyres upon the Lesbian beach”

  Old-fashioned and generic as these poems undoubtedly are, there are enough well-crafted, resonant lines (“Unharrassed by the voracious dead”, for example, reminds me of early Geoffrey Hill) to make their wistfully ironical tone of reminiscence work effectively. 

 

    Equally, the essays which Parmar places at the end of the book often find Mirrlees both brooding over the past and postulating why she is so drawn to do so – in ‘The Religion of Women’ she concludes that, more than men, “women are the slaves of Time” through being more physically attuned to seasonal cycles. Yet her memories are not necessarily regretful ones: ‘An Earthly Paradise’ is a lively, witty recounting of part of her time in Paris with Jane Harrison and affords a glimpse into the colourful swirl of new experience which fed into Paris the poem. In ‘Listening In to The Past’, again a ludic piece rather than a plaintive one, Mirrlees confesses to being “haunted by the Past” and explores how history can be made to live again through imagination. Her final, brilliant image for this process, of a kind of “ kaleidoscope of sounds” containing one’s own “collection of scraps”, brings us back to the pattern-making ritual of Paris where history and the here-and-now are so strikingly conjoined.