Transcript
Speaker: Hello everybody, just a a little message from me up top to say two things. One, in this episode I mentioned Plato and Plato's cave and I meant to say shadows not silhouettes. I don't know, I got the word silhouette stuck in my head but I really meant shadows, just pretend I'm saying shadow is instead a silhouette. That's number one. Number two is that after this episode there's gonna be a little break until October. i need a little time to reset and to record some new episodes and get some things in order. So new episodes will drop in October, be back on the fortnightly schedule up until Christmas, and then we'll have a little bit of a break before season three. So please do look out for new episodes when they drop in autumn. There's some exciting things coming up. We've got our usual...
Speaker: Halloween episode and Christmas episode planned as well as something a little bit different so be ready for those when they drop make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss anything in the meantime please do keep sharing your favorite episodes with people directly or on social media it really helps and do rate the show five stars on Apple if you can it will really make a difference leave a quick review even if you just say great that would be really helpful I'm also going to be dropping a new trailer for the show with some great clips from some of my guests.
Speaker: ah So that will be appearing in the feed as well. So please do share that with people as well as a little teaser for what Books Up Close is all about. Okay, that's enough preamble from me. Here is the episode.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. I'm Chris Lloyd. This is The Close Reading Show for readers, writers, and anyone interested in how texts get made. In today's episode, I talk to Wayne Holloway-Smith about Rabbit Box. Wayne is the author of three books, Alarum and Love Minus Love, both published by Bloodaxe Books and Rabbit Box, recently published by Scribner UK. He's been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, won the National Poetry Competition, and the Geoffrey Diemer Prize. He teaches and lives in London.
Speaker: Welcome Wayne, good to see you. Hey Chris, how you doing? I'm good, I hope you appreciate I'm wearing orange in solidarity with your book cover. Yeah, is it orange do you think?
Speaker: Well, as opposed to what, red? Yeah, i mean maybe I've just found out that I'm colourblind. I saw someone else and he said something like, um I don't normally like orange covers, but I like this one. And I was thinking, would it it's not orange though, is it? not orange.
Speaker: But yeah, it turns out everyone else is right and I'm wrong, which is not the first time that I found that out. So... um But yeah, also, like, I don't like orange books. Like, what is that? Anyway. I said i don't want to, I don't want to slightly say Let's not unpack that.
Speaker: But listeners, if you're choosing books based on the colour it is, like, maybe Touchgrass. But anyway. just to or just choose the orange ones with a weird shadow puppet on the front cover. Exactly. I mean, it is a pretty great cover, to be honest. And the extract we're going to talk about is about the shadow. so we're going get into that in a little bit. Readers, if you have it, it's on page 60 to 61. We're going to come back to the extract in a minute. But if you want to go get your book and read along, it's there.
Speaker: But before we talk about Rabbit Box, which I know from knowing you, there's been a number of years in the making. We can talk about that. How do you feel about close reading? Like obviously you teach, you edit. The poetry of you, like reading closely is central to lots of your work, but how do you feel about it?
Speaker: I think when people say close reading, they that often the people mean sort of different things. What do you mean? Wow, turning it back on the interviewer straight away.
Speaker: I mean, attending to the text in in kind of detail. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily, though it could do. but not necessarily like decontextualized, right? I'm not necessarily a you know, a new criticism, get rid of the author, get rid of the title kind of person. Although i think there is fun in doing that and it can yield particular results. But close reading for this show, at least, is can we read a small section?
Speaker: Can we attend to the language and the form? And what emerges from that? that' That's my like gentle answer. Well, in that case, I'm super in favor of it which which option do you not like no i don i mean i think that there's merit in all of the options i think that it's um it only becomes less fun if you just choose one and double triple down on it so that i think there's more than one way of doing stuff right and like often there's more than one true way of doing stuff like two or three approaches can be true
Speaker: I don't know if people can, you're only showing a tiny clip of this, aren't you? Like, so I, I did true in like scare quotes or whatever. Yeah. In the scare quotes. Yep. Yeah. Like I think that two or three things can be true at the same time and, and helpful to read or use different approaches in tension. Right.
Speaker: So I'm not, not in favor of any of those things and they've all produced like interesting stuff over, you know, the last century or so. But maybe I'm what I'm not in favor of is just, yeah, just picking one.
Speaker: And that's the only way you can do it. you know Yeah. And I think that um hesitation has been voiced by a number of people on the show so far about like, because I think a lot of people I've spoken to, you like did have to do one of those practical criticism courses at uni, where it's like, this is how you close read, right? Or or the other end is like, I did an A level and you know,
Speaker: why are the curtains blue kind of vibe, right? Which I often get from people who don't study literature in this kind of way, right? they're like, they could just be blue, Chris. I'm like, yeah, maybe. But also i'm not I'm not interested in saying they are blue and therefore the character is sad, but rather like, what does that evoke? What does it do to you as a reader? What does it pull up, right? yeah, I'm interested in doing that with Rabbit Box, which is, what are we calling it? A novel in verse? Are we calling it?
Speaker: i think we're kind of resistant to putting it in a... sort of genre box or whatever. Okay. And it's funny because I've seen it like, you know, you do like the, one of the the people that kind of runs Scribner called Sophie kind of took me around a few bookshops, so like sign books and meet the booksellers and stuff. And that's very nice. And, but it was funny because like, it was on the front tables in some bookshops and then in others was in like the poetry section. Yeah.
Speaker: I quite like that. Like, yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be the i wouldn't be the first book to be called any of those things or hybrid or poetic novel or whatever. I think i the way that I started thinking about it initially was like, obviously, you know, Jack Underwood.
Speaker: Yeah. When I was first thinking about what to do next, like ages ago, and he was like, oh, just write an epic. Why don't you write an epic? And I was like, well, well, I'm not just going knock one of those out. And I was an epic look like.
Speaker: Yeah. So I did, but I did think about that a bit and thought, well, yeah, maybe this is a kind of my version of like an epic, but I wonder how, like,
Speaker: homer might have been marketed nowadays you know like with that would he have made more money if yeah maybe be like i don't know i yeah i'm happy for people to talk or think of it how they want to talk or think for about i just i'm thinking about it more as yeah like an ah attempt to sort of like an epic piece of work it's not much i mean it's not like the great American thing is it's not like 900 pages and like but it's quite an interesting thing to try and sustain what I guess you could understand as a sort of poetic piece of writing over 144 pages that was the challenge that I enjoyed and it just kept sort of growing as I thought it needed to
Speaker: I guess it has, you know, there is a contained narrative across those pages that a poetry collection wouldn't have necessarily. So narrative is here, but formally on the page, it's most often looks like poetry, right? Yeah. Because it was, you know, it makes me think of like, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, right? Which is like, this is a lyric, but it doesn't look like poetry most often on the page. It's almost a kind of inversion of that, right? I'm calling it poetry, but it's mostly prose. And this is like, it looks like poetry, but it's actually doing something else.
Speaker: I'm always interested in those instabilities, I suppose. Yeah, i think it's interesting in that, like, well, it looks like poetry, but it's doing something else. Like, what's poetry supposed to do yeah in the first place, you know? yeah i And before we get to, like, that else, I'm quite interested in asking those questions or at least testing those boundaries. I don't know, it's hard to, because I you don't want to sort of, like... come out and say i'm testing some bank like i'm you know people will always be able to find an example of someone that did something like you've done now before you did it and that's fine i'm not saying i was ever the first or will ever be the first to do something i'm just
Speaker: i'm ah I'm only really interested in progressing as a writer myself. And I thought this might be one of the ways that might stretch me as a writer. Yeah. So the new Homer, that's what we're calling you, right? You can call me the new Homer. Well, look, there is a Christopher Nolan version of the Odyssey coming out, right, this month. So as we are I mean, it's probably set to rival that, at least in the box office. Yeah, quite well, you know.
Speaker: So we're going to talk about this little section from page 60. the book is kind of broken up into these titled sections that kind of recur, right? I'm interested in recurrence as like a motif that we might talk about in this extract. But there are, you know, there are a few sections of she, there are a few sections of a question.
Speaker: and then you have shadowgraphy, I don't even know how to say that word. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Because it it sounds like it should be shadography, but it's yeah about shadography. Yeah. yeah i I was reading about it towards the end of a period of time where you sort of like get given these deadlines, don't you, by publishers. so The book was bought in, I can't even remember what the year was, but it was like it the September.
Speaker: And then I didn't do anything else with it until the January. That was when we had our first editorial meeting, in me and brilliant editor called Joanna Lee. And then between January and April, I just rewrote the whole thing. And this was the last bit that I wrote. So ah yeah. So I guess the only reason mentioned is that probably around April or late March a year ago.
Speaker: I was like reading and writing and crying and maniacally laughing and trying to get this thing finished. it So yeah, it was quite an interesting process.
Speaker: But yeah, charography is the the last section. So you're talking about, I think, what the, I don't know my own book that was, is there like three or four charography sections? Mm-hmm. This was like the first, literally, I didn't really change any of this. It's sort of like, the there were some slight editorial suggestions after I'd submitted it, but it pretty much, it just sort of like happened how it happened. and And then I didn't plan to write another one until I felt like the section needed another one. And then I didn't plan.
Speaker: It sort of like, I guess, finishes on a section like this as well, but it's not called Shaggle Freezer, but in the same kind of register. So yeah, maybe like three of these, but I didn't ever plan to write a second or third one. They just, right it was when I felt like,
Speaker: it needed it so and then then none of this was sort of I didn't I still subscribed so ages and ages ago I read this book an anthology of new American poetry called legitimate dangers and in the the introduction written by the editors they they said I don't know if it was something that they that they fully believed or if it was like for this anthology or something but basically if you know how a poem is going to finish before if you know it's going to finish before you start writing it then it doesn't count as a poem or something and i think that was so for me at that time I was like wow and it's kind of something that I've always thought of now so it's literally this this whole thing was kind of written line by line in a way but not necessarily in the right in the order that it ended up appearing in it
Speaker: That's really interesting, actually. You know, this book is so interested in voice and perspective, I would say, in certain ways, right? We can talk about what it's about if you want to frame this little section, but in terms of, you know, in a novel, you'd call it like focalisation, maybe, right? Moving between the child's perspective, the mother's perspective.
Speaker: And then this shadowgraphy section is like it pulls out even further in a way, right? it or Or pulls to a side, if not out, of thinking about like the narrator or speaker or author, say, and their kind of position in relation to the the story that's being told.
Speaker: So that's why i was kind of interested in this, because it also seems to say something about like, not a thesis of the book, but a some kind of framework for it. So it's interesting that that came like really late in the process. that's that was Yeah, I felt like that needed, it still needed a little bit of a principle of organisation somewhere, you know, but also it just needed, i felt like it needed like another note.
Speaker: I guess the first half of the book sort of oscillates between the lens of a mind or the lens that a mind sort of lends the text through which we can, we see snapshots of like this boy, young boy's experience.
Speaker: And the young boy it's is's often referred to as a rabbit based upon another bit of the text, which is just that the the mum kind of used to tell him a bedtime story about a rabbit and his imaginary friend that sort of ran off to a a magical river. Right.
Speaker: So there's the kind of mind's lens through which we see this snapshots of the boy's experience. and then you see this kind of more chronological retelling of like the mum's experience, which is called like a history. Those are the sections that begin with she.
Speaker: yeah And then somewhere towards the middle of the text, those two aspects kind of bring the mum and the boy into a more temporal proximity, a greater a temporal proximity.
Speaker: And there's a kind of hopefully a little bit of a crossing over or something like that. Yeah. yeah And, but I didn't think it was enough to just have those two all the way through the book. It kind of, you know, like when you feel like that energy might run out if it's just the same thing. So needed I felt like I needed to introduce another one. And like i was saying, that you kind of feel your way through the writing from literally from line to line. And then you realise kind of what it is that you're doing.
Speaker: And then when you take a step back, you think how that might function or contribute to the kind of wider organising principle of the text, which is hopefully what I've managed. But that's for everyone else to decide. Nothing I can do about it now, you know.
Speaker: No, not now. Okay, why don't you read this little bit for us and then we can talk about it. Okay. Shadow Graphic. Imagine the mind as a single wall, a memory, a single light shone directly onto its two-dimensional surface.
Speaker: Imagine the mind's walled surface and its singular beam of light constructs a type of ocular theatre in which all memory can be performed.
Speaker: Could be the whirring background noise is an old projector. It's skittishness inferring perhaps the nervousness on the part of the narrator here seeking as he is an alternative way to articulate the thing he needs to say.
Speaker: Imagine the theatre of the mind with its two-dimensional surface and its moon-like light. with the nervy projector in the background are the conditions onto which a story can be induced through the use of silhouette.
Speaker: And though the use of silhouette, a vocabulary itself in part of absence, a blocking out in part of light, is a way this story doesn't have to look itself directly in the eye.
Speaker: Thank you so much. Hard to even know where to begin because I have so many thoughts about this book. I read it in a frenzy on the train journey from Manchester to Cardiff. So I had like a two three hour block of time and I just like started and read almost to the end and was like, actually, i feel quite overwhelmed. I put it down, like started it, I picked it back up again. But there's something about, yeah, I don't know when i approach, like if we're calling it poetry, right? If,
Speaker: when i read it When I read a collection, i tend not to read straight through, right? I might read one, i might put it down, I might pick you know a bit later. I'm reading them as like discrete units. as poems, but here ah you kind of move through with the narrative, even while formally there's all stuff going on that I'm like, oh, I feel like I should be slowing down or paying attention differently here, you know?
Speaker: And then when the book kind of tells us this is a different section and visually on the page, it's different because we've got these thin columns of text, right? Which I've seen in some of your other poetry. So I'm like contextualizing that outwards, but it's not just in these thin columns, but they're also like,
Speaker: write justified kind of on the page too like we're you do this a lot in the book like shifting where things appear on the page as if well to do multiple things I guess but that there is something about perspective I think that's happening there right like we need to move our like aperture or something back and forth a little bit But here the voice is different from the what's come before, as you say, right? We're in a different like register, different voice. Imagine the mind is a single wall and memory. Like, okay, these are not the words of the two people we've just been experiencing, the mother and the son. so then you sound like, well, who is who is this? Is this Wayne in quote marks? Or is this some narrator, speaker, person? And it's the imagine the mind, imagine the minds, imagine the theatre. There's kind of like imagine, imagine, which feels like a like you're telling the reader to do something, right? Like here is, it's but it's both a kind of direct address and also a interior address to me, for the speaker.
Speaker: yeah that's interesting. I was thinking of, I was reading some a book that Simon Critchley and his partner wrote on Hamlet.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. And there's this whole section on like nothing. I hear, I've seen no no thing, whatever, and how nothing recurs time and again through Hamlet. And I've been really interested recently.
Speaker: And I guess when I was writing this to some extent, thinking about that. And then what is it, Auden? Was it Auden? Like poetry makes nothing happen. Yeah. and what that nothing is and how far you can kind of like conjure nothing from nothing or something or you know ultimately in one way the text is admitting by just asking you to imagine that it's that nothing actually is there yeah so i you know might be an interesting way of thinking about it i think that the register is is very is kind of a like leaning towards like an attempt uh objectivity isn't it but then it very quickly if you read all the way through because it's
Speaker: It's consistently talking about how the reader or we as a readership might project our own kind of knowing onto the text and so infer particular emotions and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. o And I guess in that way, there was an attempt to some degree, yeah, it's to sort of like frame, I guess, what the book was attempting to do itself You know, not looking itself directly in the eye. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And thought that might have been quite important. And then also like talking about, you know, the narrator here, which... Because the intro, one thing is obviously like for me, it's quite important to think of this, the whole book in some respects, as a kind of work of imagination as opposed to just like another confessional. Yep.
Speaker: And so like, trying to work out what that means in this context. And I knew, you know, because of, like, some of the subject areas the book covers, I knew i was going to be asked loads of autobiographical questions. yeah People now just assume, don't they, that yep that every collection of poetry is, and to some degree, like,
Speaker: it seems to get its authenticity from being yeah autobiographical. And it's almost like, I guess, to be fair, in some respects, you could say it's selling point is like, you know, if you look at, I don't know, like I've read a stack of reviews of some, you know, some of the more well-known writers, like, and a lot of the ones that appear in like the newspapers aren't really reviews. They're just like,
Speaker: articles about the person's life and then they use like three or four citations from the book to supplement this biographical information and i was quite sort of keen that that wouldn't happen to this book in a way but it's still yeah like you said is it wayne is it and i'm like well like i don't know No, but and i like when I say like Wayne in quote marks, it makes me think of your poem from Alarm, Some Waynes, right? which is Which is both the kind of, here I am, like Wayne as poet, as author, and like as person, but also like go away with your ridiculous biographical readings, right? The poem is kind of theorizing both the multiplicity of self and the kind of singularity of self. And even if you had those like one-to-one, like real person and character in poem,
Speaker: Yeah. It's like, well, then they're not the same, right? Because this is a poem. by By its nature, it is a thing that isn't just direct biography. It's like a constructed yeah object. Yeah. And that's I think that's the kind of guess the questions that I was more keenly asking myself as I was writing this are along those lines, really. Like whereas some Wayne's was...
Speaker: That was written when I was doing my PhD thesis on representations of working class masculinity. and And also that's kind of interested in the sort of arbitrary higher and lower value that are that are apportioned to different like types of people or yeah names. or And Wayne is like, for whatever reason, seen as like quite a lower value name.
Speaker: i was googling like should i call my son wayne or something like that um and it was just a whole thread on mum's net of course no you know he's the type of person that would steal your hubcaps and beat up his girlfriend or something and it's like you know yeah it's pure katie hopkins shit yeah you can't go to mum's net for anything yeah i didn't really even know what mum's net was that and I think that's the only time I've ever been on it, but it was quite eye opening, right?
Speaker: to To see that, you know, the sort of theory of Pierre Bourdieu like played out on something like Mumsnet was like, well, I guess it's in some ways that quite obvious, but but in other ways, like I hadn't really thought of it like that until Yeah, but even there, like the the language is, you know, that in that reading, like language or names have like value in and of themselves, like outside, like, but there are acculturated, right? Like in this context, Wayne means these things because of the way culture circulated.
Speaker: And that's about what language, what like language can and can't say to people that read into it that aren't even reading into it, right? they're like, they're not doing close reading, but they kind of are because they're attributing meaning to words that like,
Speaker: yeah Yeah. They're not in the word. They're the stuff around it. I guess they're not really asking the questions of why they're attributed. No, quite. Yeah. think Which is kind of like the the sort of secondary level that you hope that you people would get to, right?
Speaker: Yeah. And if we're talking about like, I love this phrase of like principle of organization, right? You're talking about in this book that here is where we kind of zoom out quite literally because we're talking about like visual metaphors here in this section that it's interesting to go from the kind of the work of the imagination of like the kid as rabbit, right? The story that he's told and seeing himself as rabbit to imagine the mind as a single wall and memory, a direct light shone directly onto its surface. and then we move to the singular beam, a kind of ocular theater, yeah which memory can be performed, right? So we're suddenly in a very different cultural like metaphoric world, right? yeah From the linguistic to the visual.
Speaker: and then you've got the old projector and then so and then we get to silhouette, right? So we go through these kind of images and I don't know, I can't help but like, this is me bringing my close reading stuff, is that I see a wall and a light. I'm like thinking Plato, right? Like um like the silhouette, the kind of, you know, the all art is the silhouette on the wall, right? Like the the fire is...
Speaker: All we ever can get of reality is the silhouette, right? The kind of projection, not the the real behind it. And, but interesting that you're thinking like, even like background is an old projector, right? As you know, is that we're in a different kind of temporal universe, right? It's not like a you know, you're not screening some phone onto your projector on the wall, but this is a, you know, it makes me think of like a dusty old theater, right? The nerve, you call it like it's skittish at the beginning that it's like nervy later on where all these human qualities given to the projector.
Speaker: and But even like the silhouette, right? Like the kind of shadow puppet that all this kind of universe is a very, it's a kind of older form of visual storytelling, if you like. And I'm interested in that, in what that's doing here too.
Speaker: Yeah, it's sort of just, you'll probably at least, because we've spoken before, and you like you say, like you were aware that I was writing this over a period of time.
Speaker: You'd be aware of the um Joseph Pintoro's rabbit box, the rabbit box that was part of a series of books that he wrote like for each season. And so that has a a shadow puppet. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So whenever whenever I fully began to sort of realise what I was up to, or at least heading towards here, I always had like shadow puppetry to a certain degree in my head. So I felt like that was always...
Speaker: at least inform the text for me somewhere and yeah it's quite interesting isn't it the way that a hand moves and it performs you know in this respect like that it animates something on a wall and tells a specific kind of slightly disjunctive narrative because shadow puppetry can't necessarily due to its limitations tell like a cohesive one yeah it's like quite i guess aesthetically i always had something like that in mind from when i began to know what i was up to and that yeah it's interesting about the temporal thing but also just aesthetically like
Speaker: an old projector and you can kind of like hear the noise. And also when you say nervy, you're attributing, you know, skittish nervousness to the projector, but even in mentioning them in the same unit of, you know, whatever it is, unit of sense, as you are talking about the beam of light, you're sort of like slyly suggesting to the reader that the beam of light has that skittishness and stuff well. So I guess if the,
Speaker: confessions of sort of like be it attempting some kind of artfulness like if the fact that you can use lines like you can use a descriptive word a few lines away from the thing that you were hoping that this descriptive word would describe or something like that Yeah.
Speaker: And, and that, that's a piece with what I kind of said earlier about like, that you often circle back to certain images and words throughout the whole book, right? That it, there's a certain repetition.
Speaker: It's not even repetition, but i kind of like a revisiting, if you like, in the book of certain terms or certain phrases or certain like images or ideas. and on a formal level that kind of gives some kind of cohesion but on a thematic level there's something about the kind of repeated ah violence that lingers in this book right that the father is doling out to the mother and son the groundwork of the the kind of terror that they're both living in right is is repetition of of of actions coming back around but on the surface of the text
Speaker: you're kind of like, are we moving forward or are we static? you know when you When you have a ah section title on it's like, oh no, we've already had a question or we've already had she, are we moving backwards? are we going you know There's something interesting there about, is this directional or is or are we kind of like are we stuck in time?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's that kind of, well, the sort of feedback that I've had in terms of if you're describing or trying to evoke that type of difficult familial environment, trying to evoke that experience. then people have sort of mentioned that often it it does feel like it's on a bit of a loop or whatever.
Speaker: yeah But also like for me, they're all just different parts of the same song. So like the different kind of sections that loop back around, of like it's just different kind of bits of, I don't know, is it musical phrasing or something? so yeah it feels like they're all connected in in that way you know and sometimes the the bigger the kind of move um from one moment to the next or one kind of stylistic moment to the next the bigger effect initially but then also the bigger need to circle back yeah and then there was another thing as well i was thinking it I'd never when I was like an undergraduate you know that when you're like I really want to be a poet and I really think I i love like this person, but I don't know why. And I can start you in a conference. Like I ah thought the massive, massive flaws ah personality wise that Wallace Stevens has like, which I didn't really know at the time when I was reading a lot of harmonium until you get to like, you know, his use of a particular word and you're like, what?
Speaker: Yeah. And then you're like, oh, can I, You know, at that stage in when you're writing, just wonder, what is it about though? What is this person doing? What is it about? i need to know what its theme is or something. And like, which is not what I think at all now in many ways, but like, I got all of the academic texts writing about Wallace Stevens out of the library.
Speaker: You know, once you get past the Harold Bloom one, you know, where he basically has one idea that he applies to every author that he's read. yeah I got to like a Frank Commode and there was one that he was talking, he was just talking about this one poem where it has a repeated phrase, but every time the phrase repeats, it moves the poem on somewhere.
Speaker: or it changes. Yeah, the the poem changes direction every time. that And I'd always sort thought about that. and And sometimes I think about that like in Crush by Richard Saiken as well, there's that boot theory.
Speaker: And then there's the other one, the You Are Jeff poem as well, towards the end, Consider the Hairpin Turn, Consider the Hairpin Turn. And this sort of is employed as like a structuring condition of the poem in one way in that we know we're coming back here. So it's cool. You can go off in whatever direction you want. I'm fairly secure as a reader because I know we're coming back here. But also every time we do come back here, it sort pushes us on yeah somewhere else in a way. it I feel like most of my communication takes place in in conversations like this through hand gestures and yeah and slight so slight movement of loose body language and hand gestures, right? yeah Which I think makes, even if what I'm saying doesn't sound like it makes any sense at all, if you watch me, it's convincing in that moment. You might go away and be like, I have no idea that guy's talking about.
Speaker: But within the context of the moment, The loose body language seems to be convincing. So I'm concerned that divorced, devoid of that, that this is going to somehow show me up to be completely empty of any kind of understanding.
Speaker: Yeah, Wayne is a writer for the visual medium, not the audition. That's what we've learned today, if if nothing else. That's really funny. Yeah, the they're coming back to it. I'm not going to go on a Freudian side quest, but like the idea of repetition of like mastery over something, right? Like for, you know, for Freud, there's kind of, we repeat actions to, to remake sense of them, right? Until we can kind of grasp them. And there is something about the reading experience of kind of circling around the images or phrases and being like, oh, I know this thing, but actually no, we're in a slightly different terrain. So actually I feel a little bit, maybe we're not in the same terrain. And I kind of like that about this book that we kind of keep coming back. You know, when you're so talking about motifs, you're talking about different, you coming back to things. that I also wanted to sort of like, I guess, try and limit the palette a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker: What I was, you you know what mean? Instead of just throwing in everything all over the shop, words, words and that, kind of limiting the the sort of, structural palette in some ways as to what I was going to use and stuff like that.
Speaker: There was something about the, you know, these sections of the shotography. Like the first one is quite this kind of simple direct sentence, right? There's no punctuation in it really kind of quite descriptive. The second one, we add in some more kind of more textured language this ocular theater right different from the kind of first one the third one we suddenly get a dash and then we get whirring inferring like nice little rhyme that kind of links both the kind of the work of the projector and the two cut the multiple kinds of work right like the literal material work as well as the kind of imaginative work that we might do but then the here, comma seeking, comma as he is, comma an alternative way. Like this kind of sudden hesitation or, you know like a tentativeness of the speaker of like seeking as he is an alternative way to articulate the thing he needs to say. He needs to say, interesting word.
Speaker: And then the next one, you've got like the moon, like, like the nervy projector, are the conditions into which a story can be induced through use of a syllabate, induced. like mean, it's so interesting that you're, what do you think that does to the text then? Well, because then the the last one of the bit that we've, it's not the end of the section, I should say, carry on reading listeners, but like, and know the use of a silhouette dash, a vocabulary itself, comma, impart, comma of absence, comma, a blocking out, comma, impart, comma of light, dash, is a way, there's this real kind of what starts off as, here's my thesis, not you, but like, one could read it. Imagine the mind is a single wall and a memory, a single light shone directly onto it.
Speaker: becomes it almost unravels as the section goes along or not if unravels it becomes nuanced particularized questioned rethought right the more that the language shifts the more that the punctuation comes in the more that the grammar gets a bit more broken up the more i start to think me as reader huh What started off was maybe ah as a simple kind of thesis statement, mine if you like, becomes way more complicated as the section goes along.
Speaker: So that silhouette is a vocabulary in itself. In part, it's like absence. In part, it's a blocking out. So the story doesn't have to look itself directly in the eye. So suddenly you're like, wait, everything that the book is doing is kind of like, can I look at the thing directly? Can I look at, you know, suddenly everything is a kind of shadow play.
Speaker: where suddenly now I'm thinking like is the content of or the the kind of heart of the story the thing I think it is on a line level you are unpicking as you go and I kind of enjoyed that unpicking because it makes me suddenly less sure and that's the thing right it's like the I'm really interested in I guess I suppose lots of people are but like like uncertainty yeah And also like the understanding that I don't have a mastery of language yeah in the way that like perhaps poets of 20 or 30 years kind of understood themselves to have. right
Speaker: Like it's not like a fixed system of representation and I'm not... central to it, making it do everything that I want and mean exactly what I want it to mean all of the time.
Speaker: But actually, there's room for sort of like doubt and second guessing. And perhaps that can become part of the sort of music of what it is that you're producing in a way. And, and then and this pack you know, like I said, it's not something that I've come up with, like loads and loads of people for ages have been thinking about this. ah Even, um I noticed you, the one of the questions you sent for me later was, what are you reading? And I've been reading ah Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley, who talks she talks about quite a few things, but the very interesting thing that that I kind of found
Speaker: Well, she says, like, do I write or am i being written? um And like that kind of idea of language and a kind of I guess a negotiation of the field of language or languages, you know, in terms of every poem you've ever read, bits of a song you heard on the radio when you were six that have stuck in your memory, something shit that your dad said to you, you know, so over here, like a little bit of fit, you know, all of that, yeah I guess could be filtered through. yeah You doing anything, maybe it's more of a filtering thing or, Yeah, whatever. And, and so trying to control all of that, I mean, it's, it's not even as simple as, I can't really reduce it to something that Denise Riley has even said, but like, yeah, trying to control all of that in one way seems ridiculous, doesn't it? Like, yeah.
Speaker: and and trying it and having a full start and trying it again and you know so maybe yeah i know it might be a little bit contrived in one way what i've done on the page because i'm perhaps trying to make that more of a visual representation i guess what we were we were talking about earlier like i don't think it's just one theory practice right yeah you're kind of aware of a bunch of things that are working in tension and perhaps all of them seem to be true when you're doing it you know you can see a lot of different things that you think oh that could be it oh no that is and then you realize oh well it doesn't have to be one of those perhaps yeah yeah not reducing to one singular singular framework or meaning is like a good way to be here
Speaker: I want to ask you about your writing practice. I don't actually know if I've ever asked if i've ever asked you this. I should say listeners, Wayne and I are friends and we do work together. But I don't think I've ever asked you, like, do you have a regularised set up or like a formalised practice? Like, do you write in mornings, afternoons, by hand, on computer, all that kind of stuff? Like, do you have a one approach?
Speaker: And was this book different if you did? I don't have one approach. I mean, you could have guessed that really, couldn't you, from what we've been talking about? but I could, but I didn't want to just throw that out. this I guess like whatever works at the time, what mean? Like there have been certain bits like we've got a book called Love Minus Love.
Speaker: I'd not really written any of it until I couldn't like not write it. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. like so when a poem can sort comes out almost fully formed but it's not because you're a genius or something like it's because it's been going on in your head yeah yeah it's going yeah and that was and on the phone on my phone as well because i was so busy like as i had like a full-time job teaching and um and a younger a young kid and another evening job, but, you know, just trying to make ends meet. So the only time that I could really write was on the train to and from teaching.
Speaker: So that's pretty much how that whole book materialised. Whereas this one, I don't really know. i definitely don't have any set times or, ah you know, like I don't like listen to a particular song and do some press-ups before I some skipping to Eye of the Tiger or something like that.
Speaker: But some days you're just really in the mood for it. aren Yeah. And and sometimes you you are, but you don't really know what to do. And sometimes those are more interesting bits, right? You sit down and you say, well, I'm going to I'm here now, so I'm going to like knock out a line or whatever and then you yeah you do and and you enjoy it and then you enjoy kind of playing with that line for a bit and then when and then that kind of like almost the enjoyment of that sort of runs onto you writing another line and then halfway down the page you sort of begin to get an understanding of what direction yeah you might
Speaker: be working towards and then it kind of just is a little improvisational like that for a lot of it you know and like i said before you kind of get an understanding of when the energy or excitement is running out so you look to shift the direction bring in something else bring you know introduce some kind of tension or predicament or yeah whatever and this story is a little different because like you said there's a bit of a story yeah some ways although the story doesn't really necessarily go anywhere which is i think the kind of coming back to jack's challenge of writing an epic like what would an epic that doesn't go anywhere right like what does that look like and that yeah for me is
Speaker: one of the questions that I held so yeah like you but then certain points I've not really ever done this before but having to sit down and think something is missing from this area of the 10 let me go back and keep reading that out loud to myself and see where I think the gap is and then where and then sort of like try and work in an idea you know but maybe you don't you just you read it back and you hear the gap or you hear like in your head the kind of gap in the music so to speak and then go for a walk and that will be the time that you think about and you you know oh yeah it's mostly my writing practice is just reading and in other people's work reading trying to combine authors in different ways not just poetry but like lots of lots of theory uh there's a couple of people that i've been really sort of enjoying recently you know uh byung choo
Speaker: Hand, you know, the philosopher. Unbelievable. Like, when I first read him, I was like, oh, shit, he's done it. Well, that's... And then... um Yeah, and then lots of yeah lots of different poets, listen to music, whatever, just allowing lots and lots of different, I guess, lots of different things in and seeing how they all combine and stuff like that. It's quite fun. Right.
Speaker: Yeah. No, that's really interesting. I mean, that does make sense. But yeah, I'd never just asked you before. You know, some people have very... I can't give you, Chris. What's your writing? i like I would love to be able to like sit down at the same time every day yeah and just do it. But I don't think our jobs in universities kind of like allow for that kind of working. right Stuff intrudes all the time. Yeah.
Speaker: When I'm writing poetry, I always thought I'm going to write by hand because, you know, I'm an artist. And then like nothing comes out. And then I sit down at a computer and I'm like, oh, wow, I just wrote like 10 lines. like where There's something about the typing, keeping up with my brain almost.
Speaker: And then it was like you can, it's a lot easier to change how it looks on the page. Right. Yep. That's true. i like Even just like you were talking earlier about like singular, like so slimmer columns that you'd see some other work in.
Speaker: And like, I was really interested. they They were quite different to this in the reason why I was doing them. but I remember thinking, in I was thinking about making our but like line breaks kind of arbitrary or like the ah the the shape of a poem could do more than just suggest a sound or whatever, right? So, you know, it's like, oh, this is the line and this is the meter, the feet, whatever. But actually like thinking about it as a shape and, when you kind of like bring those two margins closer together, the energy of the piece is kind of concentrated. So it forces it to be, to to fire off in a different way. you know what And when you have like,
Speaker: a third or yeah three or four lines that start to look like that then it almost the the rhythm and pace of the thing that you've already could get that kind of like suggests the next bit and the next bit so you're sort of almost filling in the words to something that exists i think it's like setting the pace in some kind of way yeah or at least setting the parameters Yeah, again, these are many things like for me, like I don't think that they work for everyone or that everyone even thinks this is right or the way to do things or, you know, someone might listen to this and this will be the proof of their thesis that I'm actually a massive fraud. And that's completely fine. You know, I don't mind. um other people having different approaches. yeah but and And I have different approaches at different periods.
Speaker: Even if they look quite similar, like you were saying, the reason why I did that and the reason why I did this one is is a little different. you yeah and the And the effects have, you know they're very different contexts, right? A poem that's on its own as a singular one versus like this part in a book that also has different movements and visual languages.
Speaker: do you have like a early memory of writing do you do you remember ever being like I want to write not really because like ah I failed all my GCSEs and then like um and then did uh my mum I wanted to be a footballer right so and I was like all right but like I wasn't like so I played for this team and then all the people were like brilliant but they would like go out and get drunk on a we're talking like 14 year olds like staying out all night getting drunk and they turn up to the game with like milk that they just nicked off the back of a milk float right and i'd turn up having gone to bed at like nine you know polished my boots up done all the strategy and i had to do that to keep up with them because i wasn't as good as them but like i felt like um maybe i had like a trial for a couple teams and but they were like so you finish school and then the trials weren't until like halfway through the next year yeah my assumption was well i'll just get in and then i'll just play for that youth team or whatever and my mum and dad was like well you're not sitting around the house and so you get you can go to the building site with your dad if you want or you can um go to college or whatever so i just went to the nearest college which was like um it wasn't the academic one
Speaker: And did like, a ah got to do an access course to get on to do a GMVQ in leisure and tourism. he So that yeah like in terms of like my ambitions ah terms of being a writer, I didn't even know it was an occupation. I didn't know poetry was still a thing that people were doing until I met someone where I was working as a youth worker and I met ah one of this girl I became good friends with called Laura, who just studied at Oxford and she was she knew quite a bit about poetry. so
Speaker: And she was the one that kind of suggested that I went to Roddy Lumson's class. So I actually read a book of poetry till I was 25, I think. So yeah, it wasn't until then that I was like, oh, I really like this and want to do it, but I don't really know.
Speaker: you know, you reading the stuff that's that is out there now, you're like, I'm not really... I don't know how much this makes me want to be a writer, but I know that, you know, and then eventually you find the people that you are really interested in. Oh, shit, i didn't know you were allowed to do that. and Yeah, right. yes and And that kind of opens up a ah whole new world for you.
Speaker: So, yeah, I don't know. No, that's... My memory was... I don't really have um an early... No, no, but this is great. Like, I always want to know, like, how like what brought you to writing or what brought you to books? or isn't It's nice to hear that people come to it when they can in the ways they can, right? There's not like a you have to be a two-year-old writing. Here's my, you know...
Speaker: yeah I was publishing books when I was two and now I'm this novelist or whatever, but there's other ways. of it Yeah, but you do read the, and I always, like, I still think, you know, even in my job now, like, there's got to be kind of, I'm talking about the editor of Poetry Review, not teaching. Well, both, but...
Speaker: there's got to be room to understand that someone is still growing right so some editorial decisions that i might make three years into the job i might not have made in the first issue or second issue or yeah whatever and because i still um in some respects feel like i'm playing catch-up to because i didn't learn all of the stuff that lots of people learned at school you know or university initially you know because i went to university as a mature student so i published a few poems before i got to university so you know kind of learning it the wrong way around in some ways but it's an interesting one thinking about what made you want that or
Speaker: you know, your development in it. Like I've no real idea how to where I am at the moment or where it might go next. Yeah. But that improvisational nature that you talked about earlier about the poem and about the work seems to be at play there as well, right? Like that moving through, not to make this a therapy session.
Speaker: Do you have any quick lessons that you teach that you think listeners could pick up like activities or processes or just ways of thinking about writing or not? The more I think about it, the the less i try and prescribe stuff.
Speaker: because I do like some mentoring sessions as well. I'd less and less kind of send annotated feedback in advance of the group. I would rather do, if you if you say someone pays for you like two hours of your time, right? so they pay for an hour for you to read 10 of their poems and write feedback on it, and then an hour to talk to you about it I'd rather do two hours of talking now because Like, I don't want to bring, i don't want to impose myself or what I want a poem to be on this person's work before we've had a conversation about yeah what they're interested in and what position they're not to be anti-new criticism or whatever. But like, but I also am interested, it's not just about their, that one poem when you're teaching someone, right? It's about their development.
Speaker: Yeah. as a writer. So often the people that I work with might understand that this poem that we're talking about now is just a vehicle through which can discuss other stuff and that this one might not ever land anywhere. But yeah, I don't know. I'm interested in the way a poem turns.
Speaker: You know, as Gerald said about, and Elliot in fact, we're talking about how, well Elliot said that the the the turn of a poem might be the most important thing to happen since Homer, right? I don't know where Homer's getting so much air time here. know.
Speaker: I didn't think that's where we're going today, but okay. um And then, Jarrell, yeah, saying in the same, you know, a poem starts in one place, like whether that's a location, a physical location, temporal, an emotional location, and ends in an entirely different one, but the unity of the poem doesn't break. so I'm quite interested in thinking about that with people.
Speaker: Yeah. But I know that I could reduce in like two seconds. No, no, that's great. But even that is just like a framework for thinking about. Yeah. Right. It might be as interesting.
Speaker: um I think that like in my job, a lot of the submissions that come in are incredibly linear. they And they they tell like one thing, often from memory, and it's developed in a very linear way and it doesn't deviate or whatever. And then it just finishes. And with like maybe a half epiphany or maybe not.
Speaker: But when you read so many of those, you you become quite interested in other ways of thinking, you know, you become quite interested in yeah other ways that a poem might develop rather than just the literal and the linear.
Speaker: Okay, last question, then I'll let you go. What books do you want to recommend? New things, old things, craft things, whatever you want. I brought these sugar because I i was going to recommend that Denise Riley one.
Speaker: Great. No, I said I think two or more things can be true at the same time. So i ah these are my favorite three books at the moment on poetry. There are others, but these... yeah where books on poetry are available, but these are my favourite ones at the moment, which is A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley, Madness, Rack and Honey by Mary Rufal, and Animal Joy by Noir Halsicure.
Speaker: And I think if you can triangulate those three books, or hold them in tension, like successful or interesting way, you'd be really getting somewhere with with how to write or think about poems, right?
Speaker: Three bangers. I haven't read the Riley, but yeah. I think it just came out like last week that I got the cheeky advance copy. yeah I will be getting immediately. i mean, Animal Joy alone, a this isn't the first shout out to Animal Joy on the show, so that's exciting. Let guess.
Speaker: I don't even who you've spoken to. Did Shone shout it out? No, it wasn't Shone. I think it was P.S. Galpello, but don't quote me on that. It might have been them, but it might.
Speaker: Yeah. Anyway, people offer for great books, but it's really interesting to me when books get and another shout out. Never mind not thinking about Animal Joy. I'm just going to put that out there, listeners. That book is like always on my mind in some kind of way. i know. Noir is also like just the most cleverest person yeah that I've met. like yeah But also like super nice, but like also super intimidating. Like...
Speaker: Because I'm like, well, you know, when you meet those ladies, Denise Riley is the same, actually, like nicest, kindest person. But like, you know, actually, like weirdly and thematically, um one of the only times Denise Riley, we watched an England World Cup game together.
Speaker: rich as with it was a um It was when I read for the Poetry Review launch before I was like, it was like ages and ages ago. yeah he came along and um I was really worried. I was really intimidated to meet her because like, obviously she's Denise Riley and I didn't know what she was like. And I just assumed, was like, this is going to be really scary. And then she's came over chatting and then we, yeah, me, her. And I think Ray Antrobus just watched an England game together. it was really nice.
Speaker: um Yeah, but all of it, yeah, these people are just so clever. Mary Ruthall, so nice and like really humble and like gentle, you know,
Speaker: I don't know what my, my assumptions always that I'm going to get found out and yeah my God, I just need to sit there and listen to these people yeah and not say anything. a because they're more interesting to me and I want to make the most of the time that I have with them by listening to them, but B, don't know can keep up with them.
Speaker: And so like to try and interject anything at that moment, like just might ruin it, you know? Yeah. So, um, ah So I tend to just admire them and read and read their books and recommend them to everyone.
Speaker: But yeah, I was interested in, I think that they're still like, maybe Denise's one will kind of blow up a little bit based on the fact that it's published Picador and Don Patterson's written the forward and whatever.
Speaker: But like Mary Rufus book kind of went under the radar for ages and then Not all, like, Animal Joy is not going to be on every syllabus, you know? maybe pun Yeah, it would certainly be on.
Speaker: And the way that she talks about poetry and the way that she uses the language of ah psychoanalytics to yeah discuss it and the way that then that leads us to understanding about the kind of field of politics and stuff like that. And it kind of, I don't know, those those three anyway. And maybe like a shout out to Ben Lerner's hatred is po of poetry as well, but yeah because he's funny and... he and very clever too.
Speaker: Yeah. Great recommendations, great books. Let's everyone just read some really clever people and let it in. That's like a nice place to end, I think.
Speaker: Wayne, thank you so much for your time. Thanks. Sorry if it if when you hear this back without my physical theatre, this me seems like it seems as empty as it probably was. But thank you for having me, Chris. Of course.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode. You might want to go back to episodes 14 with Richard Scott or 15 with Jane Yeh, two really great poetry episodes where we talk a lot about form and the way that language moves and what poems look like on the page. Some of the stuff we talked about today with Wayne.
Speaker: Please subscribe to the show if you haven't already, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube, share with people in all the places, follow the show and me on Instagram, fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes and basically just make a noise about books up close.
Speaker: You can also get more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show was made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire.
