Download Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land, Christopher Reid

Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land, Christopher Reid, Rack Press, 2011, 0956101372, 9780956101372, . , , , , . Christopher Reid: I had to be coaxed into it by Paul Keegan, my editor at Faber and Faber, who, ten years ago or more, suggested I might put a Selected together. At the time I was reluctant—I don't have that retrospective urge, really. But then I got the big prize last year and I thought, 'Come on, I've got to do it. There's no point in being precious'. And in the end it wasn't so painful, going back and rereading and coming to judgments about old work. CR: The Hong Kong part was over by the time I was four. My parents came to this country, briefly, at that stage, so my memories of Hong Kong are very vague and probably more photographic than direct. My parents weren't especially bookish, but one of the books they had around the house was a volume of selections from the magazine Punch, which I loved for the cartoons. Then I started to notice that there were these arrangements of words in the corners of some of the pages. They were poems, little vers de société of the kind that Punch in the 1950s used to publish. I found the actual volume the other day, in a secondhand bookshop, and bought it as souvenir. But it's quite hard to be amused by it now. At the time, though, I was enchanted. I thought, 'Gosh, you can play around with words like this, can you?' and started doing so myself. CR: It was. I was sent to a prep school—a boarding school—because my parents went away again to live abroad: not back to Hong Kong, but the Middle East. And so my brother and I were parked at boarding school. It was a very old-fashioned boys' education including at an early age Latin and French, Greek later. And, yes, the English teachers required us to learn verses: bits of Shakespeare, bits of Keats, bits of Henry Newbolt. CR: There was never any 'Martian school'. That was a kind of fiction, an invention of James Fenton's, who wrote a review of my first book and Craig Raine's second. Craig was very helpful to me in my growth as a poet and, in the early days, he and I used to swap poems and pronounce on them. Craig was a very tough critic and therefore an inspiring teacher. I guess it was largely through his predilection for the kind of metaphor that you just described that I got interested in writing like that. So to that extent he egged me on and I followed. But there was never any conscious school or doctrine or manifesto. Nothing of that kind. We were just pleasing ourselves, entertaining each other. CR: The Modernists were hugely important, in particular Eliot and Stevens. Pound less so, though I liked his early lyrics a great deal. More than that, when I was a student at Oxford, I wasn't reading much contemporary British poetry, but I was buying that wonderful series Penguin put out, of Modern European Poets. So poetry from Poland, and what was Yugoslavia, and what was Czechoslovakia, and what was the USSR—they were the stuff I knew about. I'd read much more of Zbigniew Herbert than I had of Philip Larkin. KM: Has your work become more sentimental in recent years? Larkin said he didn't understand the word 'sentimentality' and thought that Dylan Thomas's definition of an alcoholic—'a man you don't like who drinks as much as you do'—could be applied to 'sentimental': 'someone you don't like who feels as much as you do'. How do you view sentimentality? CR: Larkin also said somewhere that the transaction between writer and reader is that you, as the writer, feel something, and you want the reader to feel the same thing. That's more or less my recipe. Maybe sometimes sentimentality—the corruption of sentiment—does creep into it. But I'd hope not. I was very aware when I was writing A Scattering that sentimentality was the trap. KM: Katerina Brac, your third collection, is a pseudo-translation of an invented Eastern European poet. And your fourth collection, In The Echoey Tunnel contains a long poem ('Memres of Alfred Stoker') in which you take on the persona of an old man reflecting on his strange childhood. What was the attraction of assuming different voices? Was it liberating? CR: Yes. In the case of Katerina it was that I'd been writing, after my first two books, more poems and then immediately throwing them away, because they seemed to me stuck in self-imitation and not advancing the game at all. And this went on for a couple of years. Then I had the bright idea that the best way not to sound like myself was to write somebody else's poems for them. So I took an imaginative holiday to a distant part of the world and found Katerina Brac. CR: I'm sure it did. Of course, one of the things that is problematic about reading foreign poetry, from a language you don't have, is that you're taking a great deal on trust, and the person you're trusting is the translator. So I had a sense that I knew what a translator's voice was more clearly than I knew the voices of certain Eastern European poets. What I was trying to catch in Katerina's poems was the hint that behind my inadequate English there was something rather rich and wonderful to which the reader lacked direct access but which was nonetheless present as a kind of ghost or intuition. CR: I had the idea for Mr Mouth when, in the notebook I used to keep in those days, I wrote down the enigmatic words 'Mr Mouth'. This seemed to me rather potent, though I couldn't yet tell how. Then a couple of years later I was editing Ted Hughes's letters and the words came to life. Somebody else noticed it more quickly than I did when I showed them the poems. They said, 'I can see what you're doing: it's your version of Crow.' Which hadn't been my conscious intention, though probably Ted's great, wild book had given me licence to go on a romp of my own. Obviously they're utterly different: Crow is dark, tragic, apocalyptic, about all the finally essential things, whereas Mr Mouth is constantly dodging out of the way and coming up with a clever comment rather than an authentic response. So he is a kind of comic inversion, maybe, of Crow. But I hadn't plotted it like that. Just one summer, whilst I was in the middle of editing the letters, I thought 'I must write something and enjoy myself', and that was the result. CR: That was marvellous. I knew it would be. I actually suggested to Carol Hughes, his widow, at an early stage, that the thing that would most change public understanding of Ted would be a collection of his letters. Because I'd received a fair number myself and knew that the writer of those letters was out of sight for most people—I mean the Ted who was constantly encouraging you, interested in you, always asking questions, totally direct and without any side whatsoever. I thought 'That's the Ted Hughes that people ought to know about'. And there it was in abundance as I gathered the material. KM: Seamus Heaney said, 'I think poets shouldn't work too hard at other jobs, because I think if you commit a lot of your attention and your tension in another place, you close the receiving stations'. That doesn't appear to have been the case for you. You were poetry editor at Faber for several years and, before then, you worked on Crafts, the magazine of the Crafts Council. You were briefly a professor at the University of Hull and you also run a small press, Ondt & Gracehoper. How has your professional life interacted with your poetry? CR: My main aim from the moment I left university was to avoid the sort of job that would be wholly involving and eat up my time and stop me from writing. So I've had occasional full-time employment, but very little. My job at the Crafts Council was full-time and that's why I only lasted two years. Faber employed me half-time, which was fine: I used to do two weeks in the office and then two weeks away. Inevitably you take work home—that's unavoidable—but somewhere in the middle of my two weeks off I would have time wholly to myself and that would allow me to keep going. CR: Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jamie McKendrick, August Kleinzahler, Charles Simic, the wonderful Katherine Pierpoint (I wish she would publish some more poems!), Maurice Riordan, Wislawa Szymborska, a few others. And Fergus Allen. I'm delighted to have spotted him. They all stand for so many different virtues. What was I looking out for generally? Something distinctive, something that had authenticity. But I didn't have a template. I didn't have a platonic model of the Faber Poet that people had to match. CR: The reason I put Universes together was frustration. The maddening thing about being an editor at a place like Faber, and no doubt any bigger publishing firm, is that you're not in charge of every detail of the book as it passes through production and goes out into the world.

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