Interview with Peter Didsbury at his home in Hull, Thursday 29 March 2007

The interview was preceded by a walk around the Avenues, the area of Hull around Pearson Park which is the basis for much of Didsbury’s and Sean O’Brien’s work; Didsbury talked about the area and its relation to his poetic sensibility and practice.

TW: Peter, it seems to me that your work is pastoral in some ways; some aspects of your work seems to be similar to Sean O’Brien’s, not just in the sense of being set in the same place but being interested in things like woodsmoke.

PD: We have the same props, if you like.

TW: Yeah. But on the other hand, you don’t seem to be directly kind of interested in social and political concerns in quite the same way as Sean is, or it’s not a direct interest.

PD: No, it’s not with me. I mean, there are obliquely political things, like the British Museum poem, and that was a dream, and it was only when I’d written it out that I realised it was making a political statement about hunger and the empire and everything. I don’t think as a group of poets and painters and hangers-on and friends we spent a great deal of time discussing politics, except in the way that everybody did. We didn’t have a political agenda. But I think if Sean’s poetry is more overtly political you can probably trace it in the work, the point at which it happened, it was very much the Miners’ Strike.

TW: You mentioned ‘The British Museum’ and the idea of it being a dream. There are other ones, things like ‘At North Villa’, ‘The Globe’ and ‘Back of the House’ and ‘Glimpsed Among Trees’; all of those poems seem to me to have some sort of political dimension. Part of what they’re about is the end of empire; they have an interest in empire, often elegiac.

PD: ‘Back of the House’ certainly, yeah. I’m just trying to remember all the kind of things that came out in ‘Glimpsed Among Trees’; there’s all that stuff about ‘sailed down the estuary’ isn’t there? Yeah, I think you’re right. The area we’ve just walked about, it almost invites you to … These are houses of people of the Victorian middle class of Hull, and the merchant classes. It’s the old thing  about how the ordinary working guy round here might not have a lot going for him, but he had cheap tea — because we were enslaving the people on the Indian tea plantations.

TW: So a sense of empire, a sense of the historical context is in the landscape?

PD: Yeah, I think one of the most important things about ‘Glimpsed Among Trees’ — which came out in the [Metre] interview with David [Wheatley] — was that I was imagining the area of the allotments in a state of nature, you know, the water meadows before all these buildings were built and all the rest of it.

TW: The pastoral interest seems to be related to an interest in classicism — for example the bit in ‘The Classical Farm’ where you say ‘Small fires smoke on every allotment below/but the source of the incandescence/is in the big red eyes of the Academy’ — that seems to contain both those aspects.

PD: Yeah. The person who’s translating Horace in his garden shed is actually me, because although my Latin by then was twenty years out of date I found that with a dictionary — an old Edwardian edition I found in a bookshop — I was out of work and just enjoying reading Horace’s Odes in Latin for the first time, laboriously. And I remember leaving the allotment that particular night, and passing one of these old brick 1870s schools of this area. The sun was setting in the windows of the school. It was the school my son was attending at the time. You just got the feeling that you were being watched. It was this idea of what education as such — the whole of the language, the whole of English literature stretching out behind you — allowed you to apply it and to understand, to use it … A lot of the things that make me write poems are quite inchoate, a sensory kind of longing, excitement. So it’s about trying to find some way of getting them out of you, and it’s education which does it.

TW: So the classics unlock that refined thing … And a classical education provides a means of getting at those feelings.

PD: It did for me. I mean, I was never a classicist in the sense of having a classical route through school; I stopped Latin at O-level. It’s just this interest in etymology. You could talk for hours about ‘Glimpsed Among Trees’. There’s so much in it that’s connected with my life at the time, like washing the button under the tap. I was doing a lot of fieldwork, I was continually digging up Roman pottery and even glass buttons off the allotment. I suppose it was just fantasising about, you know, the glass button unlocks the whole Edwardian past: ploughs being chained across the field, the wild fowl … I was the guy who was writing poems late at night and drinking cheap cider and cooking marsala …

TW: One thing that I’m interested in about ‘Glimpsed Among Trees’ is the way that bits of metre are hidden — or, not hidden, but occur — and especially the way that as it goes on it gets more dactylic; it seems to start off quite iambic and turns dactylic.

PD: It’s unusual for me … I’m very, very much iambic.

TW: With the long line it seems almost to have a classical feel, to be gesturing towards that sort of metre.

PD: It’s just that once I get going, especially with iambs, I’m just aware of falling in … A lot of my poems start off like you do when you’re starting to walk. You start off with short steps, in a low gear. I’m not at my best in long poems actually. The long ones are relatively formless, but they do build up to a kind of rolling rhetoric, and then it subsides. It gets to a certain point and then just dies. I’m just noticing an iambic here: [reads] ‘I say my prayers and do my certain sums. I like the number ten.’ It just seems to be the natural voice.

TW: There’s that joky line just on from there which has ten stresses, ‘ten sweet farts, ten persons of Belgian nationality, ten fascicles of tens’.

PD: The trouble is you just wonder when you do this kind of thing — it’s great fun — whether … It’s always surprising when people do request things [to be read at readings]; you think ‘Not in a million years would I have thought …’ When you do this kind of thing you wonder whether is it just too referential in one’s own life for anybody to make anything out of. I suppose if the rhetoric carries it off, then it just works like a picture really.

TW: I like this one a lot. Although I can see that lots of references are opaque.

PD: Oh yeah. I don’t know what I would make of, er … ‘the broken bowl of an eighteenth-century clay/inverted as helm upon, and making to seem Mongolian,/the head of …’ My son David was about eight at the time and the house was full of these little metal soldiers. I seem to recall he had a broken eighteenth-century clay pipe-bowl stuck on to the top of one of them which obviously you’ve got to know looked like a Mongolian helm.

TW: The subject of the poem seems to begin as the house and the house being in some sense conscious.

PD: The feeling of being overlooked and watched, yes, by this great Victorian house. In fact this must have been fairly close in time to ‘The Classical Farm’ itself. I can remember what the order was because I only had that allotment for two seasons. It was probably the same summer. I’ve just realised that in both of them one is overlooked, in one case by the school and in the other by this big Victorian house.

TW: It seems like the house is overlooking the man but the man is also the house. There’s a kind of  identification between the individual and the house and also the individual; and, in some sense, ‘tradition’ is overlooking him.

PD: Yeah, there’s something … I was very aware of pulses of information, streams of information going backwards and forwards. I don’t know what school physics books were like in your day, but I remember all kinds of diagrams showing, you know, dotted lines showing the direction of light going into the eye and all this kind of thing. It’s a bit heavy when it starts off in some ways, this feeling that there’s something almost supernatural going on, and it gets much more celebratory as it goes on. And the language becomes clearer. There’s a real joy, I think, about imagining the wild fowl on the drain and ancient evenings and all the rest of it. There’s a different kind of feel to it. I suppose in some ways this is an English version of the New York Ashbery stuff I was trying to write years before. Because everything I was doing at the time comes into it, like Wuthering Heights and so on.

TW: It’s the sort of poem that when I’m thinking about it or trying to write about it it’s constantly inviting you to say something specific about it — how it dabbles in the Gothic with the idea of the  house being alive, for example, — but it isn’t simply a ghost-poem, its tensions can’t be resolved so easily. All you can do is point to various things.

PD: I don’t know what I would write about it either … I think maybe one thing is that some of my poems are really just having fun, indulging, just enjoying rhetoric. Once it builds up, when you know the poem is going to get written, you have a brilliant relationship with what’s going to become; it’s like a third person, you and the poem, it really is. I much prefer people to talk about Muses and divine inspiration than making it fit an academic theory. Lines are given; they appear out of nowhere. It’s a complete joy. One line that happened like that in this poem, I remember it now, is the line about ‘Its stored reflections will always include the poles of the ferry at Hell’. I remember sitting there thinking of the traditional imagery of ferrying across the water, and I thought, yeah, the ferry must have been tied up to poles, waiting. And then — yeah,  a kind of joy.

TW: One of the things you seem to keep going back to is this idea of everyday experience as being somehow special or epiphanic or religious. I don’t want to intrude on the life as opposed to the poems … It seems to me that on the one hand you’ve got the comic poems like ‘That Old Time Religion’ that seems to mock theology and to mock specific theologies, and then they seem to contrast with the ones which insist that any mundane experience can also be religious.

PD: What I always say about the first of those poems — you know, in the brief intro you give to an audience — I always say it’s about the problems of omnipotence, now clearly, when I sat down at the kitchen table writing it … It started off just because I had an image of that old sort of cosmogony where God is a real person in a place, surrounded by angels, and I just thought for some reason they were out of a Noel Coward play, rather petulant and rather effete and all the rest of it. It’s only when you’ve written it and had the fun of writing a comic poem, that you start thinking about what is coming out here. I think what I realised was coming out was this ‘What if we hadn’t moved on, what would God be like if he really were omnipotent in this kind of very simple, real, imperial fashion?’ There’s a serious point but I don’t start out to make points. You don’t write poems to put down what you know, you write poems to find out. But at the other end of the spectrum, yes, it’s just this feeling, absolute joy or chemical reaction or epiphany. It’s certainly still with me, although it was more insistent when I was younger.  I don’t mind intruding on the life. A potted history is that I never had a religious upbringing, but I got interested. I partly got interested in formal religion simply because of those experiences, and was there any way of channelling this or corralling it. There was a brief experience with university Christianity. Later  I got very interested in Zen Buddhism and I was taken by this notion of ‘marvellous emptiness’: there’s nothing you can pin down or grasp, everything is … It’s this phrase, and again I use it in one or two poems, ‘The universe is empty but marvellous, marvellous but empty’. That’s the feeling really behind that poem ‘The Shore’. There is an epiphanic moment. I was stood on a real day on a real beach but it’s only in recollection later when you’re writing it that you realise … I didn’t realise what I’d said till I’d put that barge coming along the estuary with nothing in the hold, and I realised what I was doing was actually concretising that ‘empty but marvellous, marvellous but empty’ thing.

TW: That reminds me of your poem ‘[Part of] the Bridge’, which seems to talk about the bridge not being conscious but then to speak about it as if it is conscious.

PD: I was never quite sure what I think about that poem. There’s one line in it which I don’t quite understand. But again it was just that feeling of being in the presence of … Sometimes things can be so big architecturally that you feel you’re in the presence of something sentient, and that’s really all I wanted to say in that poem. To relate the life to the poems, I became a practising member of the smells-and-bells end of the Church of England for some years. The last couple of years I haven’t attended very well and don’t know where I stand at all. I got picked up in a review [by William Wootten] for using quotation-marks round the word ‘religious’. He seemed to think it was an elaborate joke, or … He asked what kind of religion is it that goes around in quotation marks. What I was trying to say is for want of a better word let’s use the word ‘religious’ despite all its baggage of horror, narrow morality, small-mindedness, everything we know is wrong with formal religion. What particularly irritates me nowadays is the talk about ‘spirituality’, these awful Sunday-morning spiritual programmes with no underpinning of faith.

TW: It’s a strange area of life for a poet to be barred from.

PD: It is, yeah. But I think poets … You know that the kind of excitement that writing a poem can take you into is so close to what might be religious areas — you know, surprise. Just the intensity of the joy of a nature poem, for example.

TW: I suppose what might be unusual is that you’re prepared to recognise it as religious.

PD: Well, what’s the alternative, really? The alternative is the knee-jerk reaction of the awful potted rationalists like, er, what’s his name, whom I rather admire for his absolute atheism.

TW: You talked about the reading of some John Ashbery poems being a turning point in your own work. Were there any other formative influences?

PD: It basically all started off with A-level English at school. It was very plodding, completely useless English teaching, taking some poem and saying ‘you read the next twenty-five lines. What does that word mean?’ And suddenly this new guy came on the scene recently out of Bristol University and he loved poetry. He exposed us particularly to Donne and Hopkins. One particular week he said ‘I’m not setting an essay. I’m going to ask you to try writing a poem in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins’. He wanted to show us it was not just saying whatever came into your head; and I must admit I did it rather glibly, and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s nothing else I want to do’. So really it started off with Donne and Hopkins, then Eliot, Christopher Middleton a couple of years later. But I don’t actually read a great deal of poetry. I never did.

TW: This thing about having fun with language seems to be connected with — something you find in Sean’s work too — a delight in expertise or trivia, the knowledge which can’t really be turned to any purpose.

PD: [laughs] Yes, absolutely.

TW: Is there a joy in knowledge partly because it can’t be used?

PD: It may just be to do with the kind of school we went to, actually, the personae we’ve got. In my case it’s etymology. I’m more interested in the past in many ways than I am in the present or the future. It’s just something constitutional. I suppose it’s equivalent to Auden’s fascination with geology. For something to interest me it simply has to be ancient, ancient or natural. I’m very interested in natural history. I would be much more interested in a valley with a heap of tumbled stones in it than a valley without, although the valley would still speak to me.