Invisible Fireworks: Phil Brown in conversation with Hugo Williams
On the afternoon of 25th August 2009, I conducted an interview with the poet and freelance journalist Hugo Williams. Williams has been publishing poems since his 1965 debut, Symptoms of Loss and has achieved great recognition and acclaim in the 44 years since, most notably the T.S. Eliot Award for his 1999 collection, Billy’s Rain.
His wide body of work can perhaps best be described as ‘lucid’. He is a poet who strives for honesty above all else in his writing. His work, however, is not what one may describe as ‘confessional’, as that would imply some search for forgiveness. What Williams searches for through his work, and achieves in a way that few poets have, is candour.
Taking his work in gestalt, one gets a terrific sense of the dual lives the poet is simultaneously living and reliving — the experienced writer living in London who has seen all manner of what the world has to offer, and the wide-eyed schoolboy learning everything he can about life and sketching the blueprints for human interaction.
As has been the case with many of those who have interviewed Williams over the years, our conversation took place in his Islington house. Within a minute of his friendly welcome into his home, we were in his lounge discussing Philip Larkin and how one should correctly end a poem. Placing my recorder on his glass-topped coffee table, we began to discuss the business of writing.
What materials do you use to write with?
A pen, which never leaves the house; a beautiful Parker. After that I type it out, then handwrite it, and it goes back and forth from typing to writing until I’m happy with it. One thing I do sometimes is type out individual units, bits that stick together. Very often I find though that I don’t know what order things are in, so I have to find that out by getting a beginning and an end. Then, to find the middle bits, I make strips of paper with the text and move them around on a desk. I suppose that’s what people do with computers but I just do it on the desk. I write my articles like that as well.
I once saw a video of David Bowie writing his songs like that.
Well, he used cut-outs, but his idea was to make his songs lose sense, whereas mine is to make them gain sense. My method is to try to find out what I have to say.
Do you have a particular time of day that you like to write in?
I’ve started to use the evenings more, which is an interesting thing. But it’s all random really. I go out, write a bit, pop to the shops, go for a walk, write in between.
Have you ever found a particular country to be the ideal place to write?
Country? My God, no. I can’t even write outside Islington. This is it. This room. I can do it a bit in France, I suppose, but I can’t imagine anywhere else.
On the topic of drafting, how drastically do you find your poems change from their initial incarnation to the version we get on the shelves?
Very radically. There’s often nothing left at all. Some people say ‘I’ve done twelve drafts on this!’ as if you’re supposed to be impressed by that. Several hundred for me, always. And during this process, lots of little things get spun off that don’t get into it. I tend to sweep all those bits up and get another poem out of it. That’s how you often get several poems on a single topic, through off-cuts.
I noticed in Dear Room, there’s a villanelle called ‘No Chance of Sunday’. Was that originally intended as a fixed form poem?
It’s funny you should mention that actually, as that is an example of a sweeping up of bits and pieces, that villanelle. And that involves just as much work as any other method, that sculpting together of different elements; that collage. I realised I could do it because I thought I’d invented an ‘unrhymed villanelle’ … turns out it’s quite an established form. I don’t really approve of the villanelle for myself, though other people do them well. Everybody’s got about two in them, I should think, except Wendy Cope who can just do one before lunch. I sent that one to her, and she wrote back saying ‘Hugo, have you ever seen a villanelle?’ I think she probably wrote that in the villanelle form, now I think of it.
In the next section, I take a series of quotations from Williams’ essay, ‘Leaping Versus Blabbing’, and ask him to explain elements. I recommend that those who wish to read the essay should pick up a copy of Strong Words (Bloodaxe).
“Given that poems themselves are metaphors, I find overt metaphors more and more embarrassing in poems.”
Is your work laced with hidden metaphor?
It seems to me that another word for poetry might be ‘metaphor’. Of course I’m not against similes and metaphors and things, but for myself I like plainness. Someone like Cavafy, who uses no literary devices at all, is terrifically exciting. It’s also a way of being able to see what you’re doing; you’re not blinding yourself with your own beauty. You’re actually seeing this raw thing. You’re seeing the bones of it so you know where you are.
“When you are young and drunk with words you want to read someone who is drunk with words too, and so you read Shelley, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath.”
Can you think of any poetry from your various collections which illustrate you being drunk with words?
No. Never drunk. I’m afraid I was never drunk with words; it’s a terrible admission. It’s partly because I came in on the ‘non-drunk with words’ Movement, those poets were quite plainly trying to get rid of that Dylan Thomas-ish flurry of writing and trying to make it sensible and rational which appealed to me because it was so tough. I was a weakling schoolboy not wanting to be limp-wristed about poetry and so reading Thom Gunn. At the time it just seemed to be how poetry was written. My exploration of poetry moves outwards from The Movement, for modern poetry anyway. It was always forward and back from The Movement.
So do you happily align yourself with The Movement?
I’m always bunched with the Ian Hamilton crowd, aren’t I? And honoured to be really. It was a great thing for me when Ian liked my work, it was one of my moments of triumph. So you’ve got Ian Hamilton, David Harsent, John Fuller, Colin Falck, Douglas Dunn, that generation. We’ve all gone our separate ways now, we’re very different.
You said once that your poem ‘The Butcher’ was the first of your poems that Ian Hamilton liked. Was his approval an important thing for you back then?
Not with [‘The Butcher’] because that was before I met him, but I did seek his approval afterwards. I spent a long time trying to do another ‘Butcher’. I thought I’d do all the other shopkeepers, you know, ‘The Greengrocer’, etc. and it didn’t work. I was planning to do a whole lot of other ones, but there was just something about the butcher. That awful sort of cannibalism of the whole situation, vis-à-vis marriage and the veal and the horror of the butcher’s shop and him writing the price on the greaseproof packet seemed so sinister. And the fact that I put ‘marriage’ in at the end, I thought ‘ooh, that’s exciting’. I suppose that was a bit of self-discovery for me. I remember when Ian liked that, I started looking at what he liked, as well as his own stuff, and trying to copy him.
“It seems to me that there is more, not less, intensity in plainness, because simple stuff operates without the basic safety net of the poetical.”
In this passage, what is it that you are referring to when you say ‘the poetical’, and do you feel that it is something you deliberately omit from your work?
I’m referring to the rich adjectives and the exciting similes that ‘only poets could think of’. That’s what sets my nerves on edge. That idea that suddenly the talent is being presented at you, or the specialness of the poet is being promoted. I don’t like that. I like the style to be invisible. It’s not what everybody likes, I’m aware of that. People like a few fireworks. I prefer the fireworks to be invisible.
When you began writing …
Hang on a minute — you can’t have invisible fireworks, can you?
I think it’s quite a nice soundbite. It might even make a good title for this interview.
Well, as long as you put all this in as well.
Done.
If you’d had your time again and writing wasn’t an option, what career path would you have gone down?
I’ve often wanted to do something physical. Maybe farming. I’m often happier when I’m not thinking. That would have been better possibly. I tend to come and go on these thoughts but I remember wanting to be a farmer as a child. That, or doing nothing. I pass the days quite happily pottering around reading and walking. Poetry was always one way of doing that really and not working. Then I realised that this little hobby I had was something I could perhaps hide behind and make a whole fuss about — maybe get a life out of it. And I think it was all part of a major retreat on my part of not getting a sensible job. With poetry you learn how to write and you teach yourself. Most poets can do decent articles without too much difficulty because they know about pace, which is what happened to me. Quite a long time ago I started writing articles.
With that knowledge of pace and how to write, have you ever felt tempted to try your hand at a novel?
Not really. It would be awfully nice to have a novel to your name and everything but what on earth would it be? I’ve never been able to imagine. I get about ten poems a year, if I’m lucky, so a novel might take up ten years or something.
You once wrote in the TLS “Anything will do [in performance poetry], so long as it is properly signalled and allows the poem to go up in a puff of laughter … ”
Have you ever written a poem exclusively for performance, and do you have any poems which you would never read to an audience?
There are lots of super-short things that I would never read to an audience, in fact the majority. There are certain ones that sort themselves out as being assimilable at a single hearing. There has been a huge swing in style in poetry during my lifetime from the poem that exists outside time to the poem that exists inside time. So with the kind of poem that goes down well at a reading it tends to be the sort that might be printed on a turning barrel so that you see the first line then each one disappears as it’s spoken. That’s what a reading does and you’re left with a rather over-emphasised ending and possibly a dim recollection of a title.
This has probably come from the rise of readings, pop-poetry and the spoken word. All that. It certainly has had a big effect. When I began there were very few readings. I didn’t get one until I’d been at it at least ten years. I saw poems exclusively as things on the page and I still do. Although there are a few [of mine] that go down well you get sick of hearing them because they’re the ones that go down well.
Like ‘When I grow up[1]’, disgusting thing. People often come up to me and say “I liked your reading very much, and I really liked that one about ‘when I grow up’.” It means that they don’t really like the others because that one is so different from most of my work. Michael Donaghy once said he liked that poem once, to which I was grateful. When I asked him why he said ‘I like the way it just goes on and on and on’. I suppose it does go on a bit. It even goes over the page which is practically illegal in my book.
Speaking of going over the page — as time has gone on you have become far less shy of the longer pieces, but you definitely stick primarily to the short poems. Is this a decision you made early on as a writer or just a quirk of your creative process?
Well, one of the hardest things in poetry is to get the poem correctly proportioned to its ‘muscle’ so that it doesn’t outgrow its own strength. So I do a lot of working out how long a poem should be, or how short. I’m quite aware of the need for variety, so when I do see the possibility for expansion in different directions or with a narrative, I do usually go for it. I need to, because most of them don’t even take a third of the page. The object is to fill a whole page as far as I’m concerned. If it goes over, that’s a weakness.
Of course, if it goes on and on then it’s going to be one of those poems which is OK if it’s in a book. It’s nice to have those few poems in a book which you don’t read. People get the feeling of security that there’s this sort of hinterland of printed matter which you might read another day, a mysterious forest over there that you may go in later. Short poems are pretty much me, but I hate them as well. They feel more pretentious in a way, super-short poems, so you have to fight against that sort of sense of this little lyric impulse that has come to me which I offer to you.
I’ve noticed that you have never resorted to going for the ‘super-short’ line breaks to flesh out your collections.
That’s another thing entirely, how long a line should be. It’s a completely personal thing. Where the line breaks is something you literally can’t teach. I’ve taught a bit and I’ll say to a student ‘why not lose the first stanza and the last stanza?’ and they’ll say ‘oh marvellous, what a brilliant idea!’ but if I say ‘this line break here is a little bit awkward!’ they’ll say ‘oh no, I can’t touch that!’
Poets bleed for their line breaks. Part of the skill of the whole thing is getting those line breaks right and quite what it is that makes them work I really don’t know. Some presumably are real breaks and some of them are designed to lead the reader through so the eye naturally travels on. But really, line breaks are to do with time and to do with the sadness of time. As the thing drops down through time, pathos is suggested because time is passing though those line breaks. The broken line releases something like a kind of gas, like breaking open a thermometer and seeing the mercury pearls running around on a desktop.
Do you write the sort of poetry that you would want to read?
Yes. I try to. It’s quite hard to get a fresh blood transfusion of style after a while. It does get sickening sometimes to see the same old rhythms coming out. The thrill would be to find a poem you’d written which you didn’t recognise as you read it. Like it was fresh to you, not completely worn out by its writing, which is how poems always end up, which is why I always have to write another one. The whole idea of spontaneous expression would be so wonderful if only it were possible but it’s not in my case. But I can see it is for lots of people, they just dash down any old thing and it’s fascinating to them that they thought of this and didn’t have to work at it.
Your collection Billy’s Rain was tremendously well–received, earning you the much-coveted T.S. Eliot Prize. Did the attention it received change the way you approached putting together your next collection?
No, it didn’t actually. In my ecological manner I realised I had lots of stuff left over from Billy’s Rain, enough for another book as it happened. Also, when you get the T.S. Eliot prize, you get a beautifully bound copy of the work as part of the presentation. I mean, done by the best book-binder in the world. I think it cost £1200 or something to bind it. But despite this huge amount of money they still managed to put about fifty extra pages in the back. Just bound in gratuitously.
I was very surprised when I saw this and in fact the PBS were extraordinarily surprised when they saw this. They said at the time ‘we’ll give you this book now so you have something to hold in the presentation but you don’t have to accept it, we’ll take it back and get it rebound for you.’ But it would have been such a lot of work for somebody and by that time I’d started to quite like it and think that these extra pages were a sort of hint to me to write in the rest of the Billy’s Rain poems which subsequently became Dear Room. They’re all part of the same impulse, and in fact I can’t separate the poems between one collection or the other in my memory. It’s Billy’s Rain Part I & II really.
Do you ever feel obliged to a particular readership?
I try to write for one or two people whose work I like and imagine them reading it. But other than that I don’t feel obliged to a particular readership because there isn’t one, is there? It’s the same obliging 2000 people who buy everybody’s book as far as I can tell.
In the latest collection there’s a poem called ‘Slapstick’ or ‘Grim All Day’ as you have unofficially re-titled it. In this poem you deal with the depression faced by the clown Grimaldi at having to be constantly doing himself public injury to receive adoration. Is this a character you feel you could relate to?
You seem to be the only person to take any interest in this poem and see it as feeding the book, or being fed by the book. Really it was just an attempt on my part to do a Michael Hoffman poem in the sense that he writes wonderful biographical pieces. I asked him how to do these things and he just said, “well, read everything there is on the subject and then try really hard,” or something like that. I couldn’t be bothered with that so much, so I got all my information on the subject from a local paper, as Grimaldi was born round the corner from here and occasionally crops up. There seemed to be enough facts in there. I probably should have done more research.
But self-destruction and poetry? It certainly isn’t a very healthy life as you have to confront misery and the past all the time. Farming would be better for one’s health. Also, there’s the smoking and the sitting, isn’t there? It gives you quite a Spartan life, I suppose. People say ‘it must have been so brave of you to write that and confront that situation.’ But if you like poems and like writing, then you’re excited to have found material, so you’re not suffering at all when you write it.
Some people need some paint or some stone to work with; writers have their memory. I mean, what are you going to do? Read the Guardian and get something out of there? I don’t think so. Much better to look at your life and write out of that. I am reminded of that anecdote I put in a poem about my father teaching us to walk out of a room backwards saying ‘goodnight my liege’. It always got a round of applause from his slightly drunk friends.
Is your daughter a fan of your poetry?
Yes. Obviously not fan in the ‘fanatic’ sense but she enjoys it. I’m working on her daughter though. I feel that she’s turning out to be a poet. She’s only five but she can rap. She did a rap in public, it was a beautiful moment, rhythmical and everything. It was about how if you want to do something and you’re afraid to, you should do it anyway because you might regret not doing it. Pretty sophisticated stuff for a five and a half year old.
I read once that you like to work with music playing in the background. What is top of your playlist for writing at the moment?
The first two Kings of Leon albums I like. I was playing The Strokes today actually. I’m very straight down the middle with music, if someone tells me something is good I generally agree with them and go and buy it. I’ve got a ridiculous amount of albums. I like it playing though because it turns writing into more of something that’s agreeable. You can sit there being entertained while working as it were.
I have a sort of on/off concentration. Like AC and DC, if you think of them as the two types of concentration. Direct Current would burn me out, but Alternating Current, off-on-off-on, I can keep going longer. It might even make it more intense and provide multiple viewpoints.
If you could be reborn into any era, when would you like to have lived?
The Elizabethan period, when poetry was just being born. I wouldn’t want to be Thomas Wyatt but he’s the best of the bunch I think. There were some wonderful people to meet in those days. People like Walter Raleigh, who this street’s named after actually, I’m very proud of that. There’s a pub round the corner with the Elizabethan fireplace still in place and I picture Walter smoking his pipe at this fireplace. Of course Raleigh is one of the last great poets to be close to the seat of power. You could be a great man then and fight in the war and be welcomed back at court and of course poets were still great men and celebrated. It obviously wasn’t the last moment of poets being celebrated but they weren’t ever quite celebrated in the same way ever again.
With Wyatt all those monosyllables are so powerful, I try and do that. I like to think I’ve taken a transfusion from ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, his great schizophrenic proto-modern poem.
Your most widely quoted poem is called ‘Prayer’. Are you a religious man?
No, I don’t go to church or anything like that. That was just a literary title. It was originally called ‘Muttered Lines’. I don’t know why I gave up that title … It certainly was born of a line I muttered to myself one day.
What’s the best poetry-reading venue you’ve ever been to?
The ideal place was at the Port Eliot lit-fest where they have that famous round room in the old house by some famous architect whose name I’ve forgotten. The acoustics are terrific — there’s this beautiful chandelier there that you can stand under and you needn’t do more than mutter to make yourself heard. Plus there’s an incredible diorama painted on the circular walls that is quite dramatic.
Do you have your next collection of poems beginning to gestate?
In a way I suppose I should die now. If you think about it, ‘West End Final’ is just three words for ‘The End’ isn’t it? I was shocked really when I re-read it. Looking at the finished thing, realising that the title combined with the poems has an air of finality about it. But it certainly won’t be my last. I think I need to roughen up a bit, that’s my general feeling and get more of a spontaneous tone into my work. West End Final is a clearing of the decks.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited