Interview
Andrew Bailey: Why Oystercatcher?
Peter Hughes: I’d written a
sequence called ‘Oystercatcher’
which was concerned with doing up the old
house on the coast where we now live. The
poem appears in my 2007 Shearsman book Nistanimera.
The oystercatchers we often saw from the windows
came to be associated with this new start,
almost in an emblematic way. It seemed natural
to adopt the name for the press.
AB: Your 'mission statement', so to
speak, seems to vary a little in its phrasing
on the backs of the various pamphlets, but
the recurrent urge beneath is to publish "contemporary" and
"significant" poetry. Do you want
to unpack either of those terms?
PH: The text for the second Oystercatcher, The
Week’s Bad Groan by John Hall,
was actually written in about 1971! So not
immediately contemporary, in any very strict
sense. But let me give you a visual analogy.
I love modern painting. It is no accident
that one of my own books is inspired by
Paul Klee, and another by Joan Miró.
But I live on the Norfolk coast. Now every
few miles along the coast you will find
galleries selling watercolours of boats,
and salt-marshes. I love boats and salt-marshes
but I do not love having every gallery selling
acres of watercolours representing them.
It is a conception of art which goes back
to the nineteenth century: it’s as
if the excitements, cross-pollinations,
transformations and fertility of the twentieth
century (let alone the twenty-first) had
never existed.
Well, there are parallels in the poetry world.
Hundreds of books and magazines continue to
print thousands of poems in which a person
wearing sensible shoes modestly observes how
some rhubarb reminds them of their dad. Or
how they are not going to cry over the spilt
milk on the breakfast table. Or how the banana
skin in the recycling bin is a bit like their
relationship to Maureen or Steve.
I am interested in a more adventurous engagement
with language and a poetry of discovery: poems
that at the beginning do not know where they
are going to end up. Poems where the process
is as important as the product
– where, in fact, the process is the
product.
AB: You've mentioned previously that
your reading of A Various Art, the
1987 anthology edited by Andrew Crozier and
Tim Longville, marked the kinds of work you
were interested in exploring with Oystercatcher
Press. Would you also align yourself with
its introduction, where it describes the poetic
culture dominant in the 1950s as being caught
in "a pusillanimous set of conventions" and
finds that "current constructions of
British poetry, to our amusement though not
to our chagrin, persevere with the stylistic
remnants of that attitude" – either
in terms of the 1980s or now?
PH: I guess we all think we know what
we mean when we refer to poetry of the 1950s,
1960s, etc. But those decade labels can be
very misleading. There is interesting, vital
work going on all the time somewhere. But
in the 1950s there was more of interest going
on in American poetry (some of it inspired
by 1940s poetry from this country) and it
took a while for some of that to filter back
through to the British scene. A Various
Art was just an example, of course. There
were many poets working in fascinating ways
who weren’t included in that anthology.
Denise Riley and Barry MacSweeney spring to
mind.
AB: You've published sixteen collections
in the past year or so; can you keep this
rate of releases up? Who are you excited
about including on your forthcoming list?
PH: I don’t have any ambition
to publish a certain number of titles in any
given period of time. They’ve been coming
out at a rate of about one a month. Eventually
I think the rate of production will slow down
to about three or four a year. But I have
work I want to get out there.
I’ve already published some of the
most exciting poets working in English at
the moment: writers such as Kelvin Corcoran,
Peter Riley, Lisa Samuels and Carol Watts,
to name just four. I’ve also published
first books by Alistair Noon and Rufo Quintavalle.
They are both going to be names to look out
for in the future. I’m really looking
forward to doing books by Randolph Healy,
Ken Edwards, Matina Stamatakis, David Chaloner,
Elizabeth James, Michael Haslam, Simon Marsh
and John James. Also others who I haven’t
yet invited, or who haven’t responded
to my invitation so far.
AB: Why purely pamphlets? Is this
a deliberate decision in favour of the staple,
or are you planning a perfect-bound arm to
your enterprise?
PH: My wife Lynn and I were both working
as deputy headteachers in Cambridge primary
schools until we made the decision to move
up here. Our working hours were long and the
pressures considerable. So we exchanged income
for time. Now we have no money but time to
live properly. I cannot invest money in the
press because I do not have any. It has to
pay its own way. This is achievable if I do
all the work myself and do small print runs.
I couldn’t afford to do perfect-bound
books unless it were print-on-demand, perhaps.
Tony Fraser already does a wonderful job with
Shearsman in that field. What I do is smaller
and faster. I can get a pamphlet out in a
couple of weeks – the work still smouldering!
Review
That "smouldering" rapidity is
about right for my experience of the press
so far; these responses came back within hours
of Hughes receiving the questions, and the
pamphlets under review appeared on my doorstep
pretty much as quickly as Royal Mail allows. If
you can judge the professionalism of a press
by its delivery speed, Hughes' enterprise
already scores well. But I should turn
to the contents of the package, which includes
Hughes' own pamphlet, The Sardine Tree.
Hughes has described this sequence as a life
of Miró, and, in as far as it goes,
this is true; the artist and his work are
among the forces that bind the pamphlet. But,
given a prologue that reaches from cave paintings
to global positioning systems, this is more
ambitious than a straight biography.
Part 3's fifth section, while giving something
of a chronology of Miró's paintings
and his age at the time, simultaneously comments
on itself: "reluctantly / I narrate a
version / like an advert / or a hall of mirrors". And
I mean simultaneously; the section, like most
of the pages, runs in two columns, in a way
I can't hope to replicate in HTML. Here's
a scan:
There's no instruction page at the start
in how to read these columns, which shuffle
and overlap in individual ways for each section. Are
we, in the scan above, to read "reluctantly" as
affecting how "I look back at those pictures"? Sometimes
the columns harmonise, sometimes run in counterpoint,
and part of the pleasure in the sequence is
in experiencing how the halves want to interact,
how they pull apart, what it means when a
line spans both columns. Part 5, however,
confirms the sequence's interest in using
the columns to shape a reading process by
adoring "the / idea / of a / verbal /
tide / mark / encouraging / us / to / experience
/ reading / from / right / to / left" in
a slender stroke moving from right to left.
On his Shearsman biography page, Hughes credits
this sequence to the fact that, in 2006, "I
decided to stuff my paints and instruments
in the loft and focus on the writing." The
painter's still there, though – gestures
such as the slender stroke above can turn
the linguistic flow into a brushstroke. This
section previously printed in Shadowtrain uses
that effect by curving its final words so
that they can be read either as "the
unspoken / words / imagining", or as "words
/ imagining / the unspoken". The tension
between the two readings seems to sit neatly
with
"surrealism", whose Dictionary is
the source of Miró being referred to
as the Sardine Tree of the title.
I revelled in this. It packs in an
enormous amount, including questions about
where art comes from, personal memories of
the way Miró affected the author's
life, appreciations of beauty and even a chicken
joke. After several readings it feels like
there's still much that I haven't fully taken
in. "Art has to dazzle like human
beauty", according to part 5, and this
does.
Where Miró provided the figurehead
for The Sardine Tree, Rufo Quintavalle's Make
Nothing Happen has Auden as a guiding
light – with Iceland references, casual
grace and the flashes of humour that animate
many of the poems in this collection. All
three are present in the opening poem, 'Letter
from Iceland', which has Quintavalle in an
Icelandic hot-tub comparing himself to the
extremophile worms in undersea volcanic vents,
whom he toasts as being responsible for the
existence of life on Earth:
"it seems that that there is and not
that there is not / is down, in no small part,
to them."
That pleasurably stretched-but-not-broken
syntax is one of the joys of this publication. 'Rocks',
for example, twice pauses in its single sentence
to refine what has just been said, When the
final line allows the word 'live' to stand
alone, without re-examination, the theme – how
one can live now while thinking of eternal
life – is thrown into strong relief.
There are more uplifting takes on related
themes in 'I went down in the basement', or
in the beachgoers who fail to listen to the
pained poet speaking to them in 'Milosz in
California'. And Quintavalle's closing image,
a redeeming vision of trees from an urban
window bathed in sunlight, leaves this reader,
at least, delightedly optimistic.
By contrast, Alistair Noon opens The Emptying
of Dustbins in a snowbound ex-Soviet
city where they're worried about running
out of bread. His 'Wuhan Incidents'
is written in rubaiyat stanzas, of which ‘/The
East Lake/’
is the first:
When the sky's blue, the far shore's a blur
where
heat, fumes and humidity slur.
Complete with
cloud, the day makes clear
where a smokestack
and cement works confer.
Each of the ‘Incidents’ – most
this grim – holds an instant up for
examination; the recurrent shape gives a sense
these could almost be grimy polaroids. Their
clearly-sighted details, such as the men sifting
through rubbish in the third ‘Incident’ held
against a crow that "pokes about with
its beak," give a picture of a fuming
industrial landscape with prisons and rust
as significant ornament, and - as elsewhere
in the collection - efface the poet’s
presence.
That camera-shy approach allows the 'Facets
of a Soviet Battletank' to draw the
metonymy between the vehicle and the
"Threatened War." elegantly. However,
the personal pronoun makes its appearance
in the final poems. In 'China (Reprise)'
Noon ventures into audience interaction, asking "Of
the things I've seen, the things I've claimed,
/ which would you see?" –
a move that affects not just the hazy lake
and boatman of this poem but the documentary
shape of the preceding poems too.
Hughes' description of his editorial interest
in
"adventurous engagement with language" suggests
an alignment with the avant side of the Silliman
Divide, but – at least on their
showings in these two pamphlets – Noon
and Quintavalle could be described as gateway
poets, with pleasures to tempt those who'd
prefer Staying Alive to try Vanishing
Points (and, presumably, vice-versa).
Moving from these two into Lisa Samuels' Throe,
where a reader meets decontextualised quotation,
colliding registers and self-reflexive analysis,
feels like definite movement into avant country.
I'm lapsing into travel imagery because the
book is packed with physical distance and
separation. In the opening poem, 'This
bus kneels on request', "A man spends
his life in an airship / following the sun";
'True Likeness' remembers a time "when
the country that we live in still existed" (both available
online) and 'Radical empiricist blues'
sets out its sceptical stall with one of the
finest first lines I've read recently: "oh
baby you aren't here so you can't be alive".
The pamphlet's dedication to two loved ones,
and knowing that Samuels travelled abroad
for a Visiting Scholar role at Brown University
last year, suggests these themes had real-life
counterparts. While the sympathy that
suggestion demands probably shouldn't be part
of the poems' final reading, the immediacy
of the pamphlet form makes it harder to ignore. But
do so, and there are great further pleasures
to be had here. The way those ‘Radical
empiricist blues’ turn the sound of
logical argument into music, for example,
is joyfully independent of worries over whether
the author is missing the recipient or not. The
formal variety that Michael Peverett explicitly
enjoyed in his review
of Samuels' Paradise for Everyone, and
implicitly in that
of her Invention of Culture, is here again,
from the channel-surfing single lines of 'Vigil'
to 'The question on everyone's lips', an almost-unrhymed
sonnet.
And there's even a sestina, called 'Says
Tina'. It's a playful piece, gossiping
about art and people, five of the six repeat
words in the envoi being the characters' names. Fun,
yes, but it doesn't seem to sit neatly with
the themes of the other poems in the booklet – although
I'm that sold on the rest of the sequence
that I'm ready to put that down as my failing,
not the author's.
Carol Watts' When blue light falls offers
two entry points to a reader: the explanation
that this is "The first sixteen of a
cyanometric work in progress, a series of
even and odd number sequences,"
and a dedication to "Lydia Devereux Cooper,
1912-2008". Armed with an expectation
of elegy, scientific assessment and plenty
of blue, a reader finds this, from section
2:
that blue light
opening
in absence
of air
would catch you
gaping for
the next
so blue never is
present
how it marks
Coming to this with those expectations means
that the brief, logical precision of the lines
has the effect of throwing forward the sorrow
behind it. Here, for example, the response
to the lasting stain of what seems never-present,
by appearing to be a moment of venting pressure,
underlines the force of the restraint that
the form exerts. In her Zeta
Landscape poems, Watts has been exploring
the ways in which mathematical models can
map onto poetic form, and the way the potentially
cold as-x-then-y structure of this excerpt
is animated by that closing phrase suggests
it's been a productive exploration.
Section 2 is, of course, the first section;
the sequence of
"even and odd number sequences" referred
to above means that the poems are numbered
evenly from 2 to 16, then drop back to 1 to
fill in the odd numbers to 15. The cyanometric
reference, then, isn't just a warning that
there will be a lot of blueness in the poems – it
matches the Linke scale, a method of measuring
the blueness of the sky that uses a set of
eight cards, graded in levels of blueness
marked evenly from 2 to 16. In that
scale, the odd numbers don't have cards, but
are used if a cyanometrist believes the sky
is between the shades of two.
So when the odd-numbered poems all consist
of eight couplets, this suggests the idealised
form relates to imaginary bluenesses, whereas
the more organically shaped even-numbered
poems are held up to and matched to reality. Perhaps. My
grasping here is a sign of there being more
going on than I'm entirely on top of, but
the space where a full, scholarly understanding
probably ought to be contains awe and joy. It's
reassuring to see that Robert Grenier's glittering-eyed
review of the pamphlet [and Ron
Silliman’s review also – Ed.]
shows a smarter reader than me also being
as full of questions and the desire "that
I might 'come to understand'" the blue
that animates the sequence.
John Welch's Untold Wealth – assuming
those green shoots haven't taken yet – is
bound to come across as being animated by
the credit crunch. The title poem observes
the irreality of modern wealth:
Screen-flicker
translates into riches
Hidden carefully behind
trees.
And here's a coin spun in the air
brief shine
Its lyric gleam
But being entirely without substance
The trick
of it's keeping the thing in the air
"Screen-flicker" wealth is familiar
from any number of bleak news bulletins. In
that "lyric", though, is the sense
of centrifugal financial systems having the
same ability to be as simultaneously false
and effective as poetry; hitting that line
was a neck-hair-raising moment for me.
‘Untold Wealth’ is the last of
the three named poems within the pamphlet.
The other two – 'on "murder mile"'
and 'home ground' – deal with selfhood
and belonging, to force distinctions, but
the connections between all three poems seem
strong enough to argue for this as a triptych
of sorts. It can't be a coincidence,
for example, that I can quote "the shallow
face of a god" from the first, "How
shallow are / the roots of understanding" from
the second and the third's "Shallow wealth", especially
when Welch, winningly, appears to mock himself
(or a version of himself) for being "puffed
with foolish song" and
"Self-quoting".
Reviewing Welch's Collected Poems,
Peter Hughes stated that "The characteristic
Welch poem is out walking through the north
London streets, measuring the presence of
the conscious self in its passing settings,
and making more of this modest and unmistakeable
music." That's very much
the case here in the last lines:
"I who went out walking / As if I had
scarcely begun". Those settings include,
as helpfully noted in the back, the redesignation
of his home city and a street within it as "Londonistan" and "murder
mile". These settings produce a
contemporary urban version of the woodland
that Ted Hughes' 'Wodwo' explored, both shaping
a written self through observation of the
world around them and of how their observing
happens.
There are moments when the self steps back,
however, and lets the observation stand solo. There
is little more lovely in my reading this month
than this tercet, in the image, in the phrasing,
in the grammatical dance that the central
line performs as it detaches from the first
line to attach to the third:
the water comes alive with light
on the underside of
the bridge
is where the water prints itself as light
I didn't set out to write this positively
when I said yes to the review; I didn't, in
fact, set out to write this much. Having
been driven to this length, and such glee,
is a sign of how excited I was by the work,
which does more to confirm Jeremy Noel-Tod's
description of pamphlets as
"the ideal medium for contemporary poetry" for
me than those he was reviewing for Poetry
Review seemed to do for him. On
this showing, six pearls in six oysters, it's
fair to assume a similar hit rate across the
press' publication history, and I find myself,
therefore, a cheerleader for a significant
source of immediate, excellent and – yes – smouldering
poetry.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited