Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

 

Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/84_Alchemy_by_Gregory_Leadbetter.mp3 This poem is from:

The Infernal Garden by Gregory Leadbetter

Available from:

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

 

Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Gregory, where did this poem come from?

Gregory: Well, it probably reaches right back to my teen years in some strange way, because when I was a teenager, I discovered a pleasure in reading all kinds of esoterica. And among that material was, of course, things about alchemy and the idea of the whole story of alchemy really, the idea that this was, I don’t know, among the most learned in the land, that these people were actually in pursuit of something that has since proved, well, let’s say, elusive, if not impossible, the idea that there might be this substance, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir, that might actually transmute base materials into gold, but also that this was, in fact, a metaphor for something about our search for knowledge and wisdom. The fact that that had been part of European and Arabic intellectual history, should we say, for so long, always fascinated me. And so that’s one strand.

And then, actually, I think the other strand is really to do with thinking about poetry itself and art itself and how often alchemy is used as this kind of metaphor for the transfiguring that goes on in the work of art and the work of poetry. So the poem has deep roots in my reading and thinking and the splicing together of that interest in, if you like, the esoteric tradition and poetry itself. I think that’s where it came from.

As to the timing, why now? I mean, why did I write this? Why did it take me so long if it’s been a lifelong interest? I think it’s quite difficult to write compellingly about these things. And that’s part of the interest in them, in some ways. Of course, it’s this idea that the occult and the esoteric is also a strange thing to sort of spend, to end a strange realm to enter, if you like. But for me, something just clicked. The time felt right to actually tackle this. And you know what, I wanted to do it in a very concise way, an intensely focused way. So, yeah, it’s those two strands in my interests, really. I think that’s where the origin story of the poem lies.

Mark: Well, thank you for such a concise introduction to a vast subject. I mean, alchemy is one of those things that really is endless. And you’re right about the fact that it was the learned, not the…maybe they were credulous, I don’t know, but we tend to think of alchemy and the occult now in terms of credulous superstition. But it really was the elite who were practising this. And it’s maybe not massively well known that Sir Isaac Newton spent more time studying alchemy than he did what we would consider physics.

Gregory: Absolutely.

Mark: So the idea of the Newtonian universe being devoid of magic would have been news to Newton.

Gregory: Exactly.

Mark: And I think it’s a really good point that, okay, on the one level, the quest continues to find the philosopher’s stone that’s going to turn these base metals into gold in a literal, concrete sense. But as you say, it’s always been a metaphorical, spiritual form of transformation for the practitioner.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: And I think it’s interesting that there’s a lot of poetry written about alchemy and magic in general. And my theory is that they have a lot in common. You know, metaphorical thinking was integral to magic. And guess what, it’s integral to poetry as well.

Gregory: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Poetry, for me, is a form of magic, perhaps the most compelling form, as far as I’m concerned. And what I mean by that is really that it’s something also that I suppose I’ve spent so long with it, it just feels so entirely natural to me to think this way. But working with poetry, you’re really working with what I think of as the psychoactive properties of language. You know, it really is a work of transfiguration. Even moment to moment, people talk about, ‘Oh, well, a poem is not going to change the world,’ but it does have a palpable effect on consciousness. And that is a change. That is a change that enters the fabric of reality. And working with language in the way that a poem requires you to work really is the work of transfiguration in that magical sense, as far as I’m concerned.

Mark: So that is a big, bold idea. And what I like about this poem, and also the whole collection, by the way, is the fact that you’re able to, have these weighty concepts that maybe some poets would shy away from these days, but you do it with real precision.

Gregory: Thank you.

Mark: I mean, obviously, a big danger in writing about magic is it’s such a colossal cliché.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: But in every poem, you bring a freshness. You bring a clarity of thought. So in this one, for instance, I mean, you might say that the thesis of it is ‘to separate the subtle from the gross’. I mean, I guess that’s what you’re doing as a poet here. And then you really have got this fascinating etymological rabbit hole. So you go to the Arabic and then the Late Greek and Coptic and then the ancient Egyptian. Are these languages an enthusiasm of yours?

Gregory: Well, I don’t speak Arabic or Greek or Coptic or ancient Egyptian, alas, but I do have a profound interest in language and etymology, in particular. I mean, it’s a sort of obsession of mine, really. And so it’s a great delight to be able to work with words in this way. And again, I suppose there’s a reference in the poem to all that a word contains, but it’s not necessarily that obvious. So there’s a history to every word that we don’t always think about, but that history travels with the word. And it’s there whether we’re thinking about it consciously or not, that history has arrived with that word. And I suppose that’s another principle that kind of emerged in the composition of this poem. Yeah.

So the etymology and the way that etymology can yield these connections across cultures and actually complicate our sense of the language that we’re just working with day in and day out and can enrich that, that is a wonderful thing to me. And something that it’s great for everybody to bear in mind, the promiscuity of language, as it were, and these connections that it makes across time and space and peoples. It travels in the most unpredictable ways, and I find that very, very exciting.

Mark: Amen. My children are at the stage of rolling their eyes when daddy starts on about etymology again. It’s not far before we get into a conversation with whatever the subject is, I’ll say, ‘Well, what does the etymology tell us?’ And they’re like, ‘Do we have to, Dad?’ But I think, like most poets, I’m just fascinated by… obviously, we’re fascinated by words. A couple of episodes ago, I was talking to Peter Gizzi about Auden’s slightly throwaway but wise comment that poets should be humble because our raw materials are public property.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: That’s that promiscuity that you talk about. And I think it’s natural to be thinking, well, what are these things? Where did they come from? And why is that one so similar to and resonant and redolent of that other word?

Gregory: Yes, exactly.

Mark: And it’s like, here, you deconstruct the word ‘alchemy’. So you’re going into ‘black: / the dark root of the art of elixir.’ And, of course, it can go back to that, but it also goes forward into ‘chemistry’. It’s the same root, isn’t it, for modern chemistry?

Gregory: It is. It is. Yeah.

Mark: And you talk about, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’, I think that’s a very key phrase. So ‘umbrage’, obviously, literally meaning shadow, but here, picking up the connotations, the history, kind of the whole penumbra of meanings that constellate around it. Maybe you could say something about that.

Gregory: Yes, that’s right. And again, I think this idea of… in the poem, I suppose, is this idea of that scepticism, actually, as well, about the power of language to work this magic. And I think that scepticism is absolutely essential here. You mentioned earlier, credulity. And so I think scepticism is our friend in all dealings with anything with that word magic. Because it also forces us to really, really think about what’s going on here.

And I suppose, with that idea of the umbrage being conveyed with the word and to sound it, both literally sounding it, uttering it, but also exploring it in the moment of utterance as well, to sound both the word and its umbrage, the idea of exploring the dark root of language in the very act of working with an uttering language and drawing upon that, the well, the darkness, the central fire, as it were, that goes all the way back, with ‘the darkness conducting the central fire’, as in the words of the poem, to working with all those, the mystery that is inherent to the use of language itself, and touching the common roots of life and language, the common roots of organic life and this seemingly insubstantial thing that works invisibly, that is words, that is language as well, and actually working with that common root.

Mark: Okay. So, okay, I’m imagining a listener listening to this and going, ‘Okay, that’s all fascinating, chaps. We get that you two are geeking out on language.’ What’s it got to do with alchemy, though?

Gregory: Yeah. So that is to do with… so again, that’s where the etymology comes in a little bit. So you go back to the Arabic, al-kimiya, and then all the way back to kemet. Now, that blackness… so kemet was actually the ancient Egyptian name for what we now think of as ancient Egyptian civilisation. It’s the black land. The black land. And that blackness was associated with the Nile flood and the rich black earth that was immensely fertile. So here, we’re getting to the idea of something that emerges, that is transformative, a darkness or blackness that is transformative and also almost infinitely and miraculously, you might say, fertile. So this idea of regenerative cycles, the generation of something that seems to transcend death, death is a part of it, that is recognised, but there’s also the regenerative principle at work in that moment.

And so that’s why it goes all the way back. I’m taking that alchemical idea of transformation and fresh generation and the search for the elixir back to this mysterious root in kind of the principle of life itself, really, sort of the emergence of self-regeneration. And I suppose that’s where it really connects and goes right back to the action at the start of the poem. We should say, perhaps, something about the greenness of this alchemy, the fact that I’m connecting it there with this pruning.

Mark: Well, that was a question I had: what are flowers doing in a poem about alchemy?

Gregory: Yeah. I mean that’s a swerve on my part towards, I suppose, again, connecting that process to organic life. And just something as simple as pruning, the gardener’s process of pruning, and again, I suppose, thinking of working with poetry is a kind of pruning as well. And the separation of the subtle from the gross, you can see that in terms of both what you do when you deadhead a plant when you’re pruning and you’re encouraging new growth. And I think working with language in a poem, you’re pruning in a way to encourage new growth. So I’m drawing these kind of analogies in this admittedly hyper condensed way across those three things, really.

Mark: And that hyper-condensed quality, that is really integral to alchemy, isn’t it? Because you’ve got the idea of the crucible wherein the transformation was supposed to be forged. And turning to the form of the poem, you’re using a very particular and quite familiar form of poetic crucible for this poem, are you not?

Gregory: I am, indeed, yeah, the sonnet, which is a form very close to my heart. And again, I suppose, one of the things I’m interested in when I’m working with received forms, in poetry, we sometimes have these debates about received forms and, resistance to received forms as well. But to me, language itself is a received form. We’re always working with received forms.

Mark: Good point. Good point. I will remember that.

Gregory: Literally, we can’t get away from it. So one of the things I love about the sonnet is the way it travels across time and space. As a form, it has its own cultural history, but it’s also immensely pliable, actually, even though, sort of, it has its kind of patterns, which are very familiar, as you know. But I find working within that crucible, within the intensity of that small space, to be immensely productive and far from limiting. I find that it actually enables things to happen that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise happen because of the pressures within the crucible of the sonnet and the materials that you’re putting into it and the processes that you’re enabling through the blend of words, through the ingredients, as it were, that are going into that crucible.

You know, that’s really where the magic is happening. It has to happen in the fabric of the poem itself or not at all. I think this is… again, we talked a little bit earlier about the difficulty of talking about alchemy and magic in productive ways. You can’t just dress up as a wizard and say, ‘Oh, I’m doing magic now.’

Mark: Tempting as it is! [Laughter]

Gregory: Tempting as it is, you know. And let’s not rule it out. But what I’m saying, it’s not just about, saying, ‘Oh, I’m being magical now.’ That’s actually not good enough. I’d rather say, ‘I’m not doing any magic at all,’ but try and focus on something that’s going on in the fabric of the poem itself. It has to happen there or not at all. And that’s where the real magic happens. It’s not just talking about these things. So again, perhaps a slight digression, but it connects back to what we were talking about. And it is related to this idea of the form of the sonnet and the kind of peculiar pressures that the sonnet applies in its demands that are inherently transformative.

You know, the connections that can be made are, again, I just find them extremely exciting when you find a connection across this, 14-line short thing, but something extraordinary can happen within that space. And of course, the sonnet itself contains a self-transforming principle in the idea of the volta. This is the term for, the turn, of course, the moment where things are changed in some way. And so I love the fact that the sonnet itself has that principle built in, as it were.

Mark: I was saying, in just last month’s episode about Sir Walter Raleigh’s sonnet, ‘To His Son,’ the sonnet has continued because it’s like a really handy thinking device for poets. There’s a certain shape and size of problem or topic or question that you just find yourself reaching for the sonnet before it starts to emerge as you write. And you’re absolutely right, and I think you make very interesting use of the volta, the turn in the sonnet.

So, as we’ve covered quite a few times on the podcast, the sonnet is basically divided into two. You’ve got the first eight lines, the octave, and then there’s the turn, which is a shift of perspective of some kind that leads us into the sestet, which is the final six lines. And I was rereading this poem this morning and noticing, the octave starts ‘To separate the subtle from the gross’. That’s where you begin. And you’ve got gross as the end word. And then, eight lines later, we are at ‘the dark root of the art of elixir’. So you’ve gone from gross to elixir in eight lines.

And as so often in really nicely written sonnets, you can almost read a poem from the end words. And you’ve got some lovely half rhymes here. You’ve got ‘gross’. It goes, ‘gross’, ‘body’, ‘ghosts’, ‘alchemy’, ‘al-kimiya, ‘Coptic’, ‘black’, ‘elixir’. I mean, that’s, like, a little poem in itself, isn’t it? And then the next line, the next word after elixir, which is kind of the ultimate goal of the art of alchemy and transformation, we’ve got ‘Sceptical’ – that word jumps in at the beginning of the sestet – ‘of the power of language’. And then it goes all the way down through ‘language’ – these are the end words – ‘language’, ‘wisdom’, ‘hidden’, ‘umbrage’, ‘fire’, ‘signature’.

In fact, I’m going to read the last two lines: ‘A darkness conducting the central fire: / a form, like a flower, for its signature.’ So obviously, I assume, you’re thinking of poetry in there as well. I mean, what you’ve done here is beautifully realised. I mean, at what point did you start to think, ‘Oh, I’ll write this as a sonnet?’ Was it from the beginning? Did it emerge in the process of writing? How conscious were you of putting sceptical there and, the various beginning and end points?

Gregory: Yeah. I think when I started to want to write about this, I think there were almost two options that seemed possible to me, either something that was really long or something that was really tight. And I opted for something that was really, tight. And so, almost as soon as I started writing, that was what I was conscious of. And then, as I started composing, I did think, ‘How is this going to be?’ and lots of possibilities in front of me. But the sonnet just felt right, almost as soon as I started. And when I started to find… when I started to think in terms of those rhymes and the half rhymes, it really started to catch its own. Its own subtle logic started to emerge in the composition in a way that I wanted to follow.

And with the volta, yes, I think it was really important to me, actually, to get that note of scepticism in, for all the reasons we’ve talked about. Because I was really thinking about the esoteric tradition. Again, as I was saying earlier on, why were they so obsessed, these people, as you say, the learned of those times? Why were they so obsessed with this idea of keeping things hidden, the esoteric, the inner thing? And I think it was something to do with this idea of, actually, if you just blurt this stuff out in an uninformed way or in a half-true way, it could cause more damage than good. It could cause confusion. You know, I think there was this scepticism about the capacity of language, perhaps, to carry these things, the capacity of science to do… science, in the broadest sense of the word, knowledge, to do its work. The scepticism as to knowledge itself, I suppose, as well.

There’s a recognition in the scepticism about language to do this kind of work, an implicit recognition that this kind of work is of a kind of awesome power. And what, therefore, is the right channel? How will this be manifested? How can the elixir be got? And if not by these means available to us. So, again, thinking about language as that medium, as this poem does, I wanted to face that head on really and to find a way through the way of incorporating both this sort of faith in language and the sort of magic of the psychoactive properties of language, a faith in that, but also, I think, a necessary and a healthy scepticism about its capacities that actually becomes kind of an enabling manoeuvre. Because, in recognising the scepticism, it forces us into a solution, in a way, or at least, I hope it does in this poem.

Mark: So what that’s making me think of is, the magician when they’re doing their trick. They always very carefully… now, look, examine everything. You know, you can look up my sleeve. You can see how there’s no kind of hidden things here. And obviously, it’s a way of addressing the scepticism. But inevitably, we know there’s a bit of misdirection going on as well.

Gregory: Indeed.

Mark: And look, there’s a very interesting and subtle shift, where, in the three lines into the sestet, you say, ‘Sceptical of the power of language / ‘to convey the quintessence of wisdom’. So that’s what you were just talking about. But then it kind of shifts: ‘language itself learned how to speak hidden’.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: What’s going on there?

Gregory: Well, that’s probably a key line. And I think there’s possibly… I enjoy the possibilities of syntax. And when we ‘speak hidden’, it suggests also that something is being hidden in that act, but also that it is speaking the hidden. The syntax there remains open to both those possibilities. And I think that syntactical doubleness is really crucial to that line and what I’m up to, really, with that line and the poem as a whole, really. So I think this idea that language adapts, again, we’re just talking about, the uses of scepticism in a way, as well as the uses of that faith in the power of language. Language adapts to try and find a way through that kind of dilemma. And I think poetry is almost the quintessence of that adaptation, for me, because it’s both a form of saying and not saying.

It’s not just about travelling from A to B. It’s not just about getting to an endpoint or a punchline. The means, or I should say, the end is in the means. The end itself is in the means. And that, to me, is absolutely fundamental to poetry as an art form. Again, it’s in the process. It’s in spending that time, that space time within the sphere of the poem, within that atmosphere that it is created through its work with language. So I think that’s really what I’m trying to do there, actually, is hold that dilemma open and for language itself to fill the tension between it and find a way.

Mark: So you’re describing language itself doing something, and language itself is doing something through that syntactic doubleness. And I think this is really wonderful, because syntax – when you mention it, people’s eyes glaze over. It’s the worst English lesson ever! ‘Oh, no, we’re doing grammar this Friday afternoon.’ But you’ve hit on something really important, which is that syntax is the way that language becomes supple and flexible, and the meanings can shift. And for a poet, you really get to play with things, as you are doing very delightfully here.

And then that leads us into this wonderful ending, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’. We talked about, the denotation and the connotation, the associations of the word. ‘a darkness conducting the central fire:’ – I have to say, I’m quite envious of that line, Greg. And ‘conducting’, it’s a lovely word because it could be… I guess, thinking of the etymology, it’s got to be related to duct, to pipe, to stuff flowing or being directed in the flow. Maybe there’s an element of the conductor as in the sense of the musical conductor. And of course, conducting, it’s a scientific thing. I was going to say, it’s chemistry, but maybe it’s physics. I don’t know.

Gregory: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: But basically, that word is conducting a lot of different meanings and even disciplines, isn’t it?

Gregory: Yes. Yes. And again, that’s something I’m very keen on, is activating, if you like, as much of the spectrum of possibilities within a word as possible, when I’m using words in poems. And, yes, all of those senses that you described are there for me, certainly. And the idea that conducting is not necessarily entirely controlling, either. I think that’s another really important principle. It’s not about actually having a fixed determinant end, but it’s an enabling act, something that activates, animates. There’s this wonderful phrase in Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, where he talks about ‘kindling the germinal power’. Kindling the germinal power. And these are…

Mark: He’s so good, isn’t he?

Gregory: Yeah. Yeah. And that is what I really want from poetry, really, from a poem, is that, to be kindled. And that is not determinative. You know, that’s not about arriving at a fixed endpoint. It’s about activating and animating and bringing alive, which is not about control. And I’d say that’s another aspect of that word conducting, that it’s not fixing something in place, it’s not determining it, it’s not limiting it, but activating and animating.

Mark: Again, I think that’s a lovely description of the final line. It’s not an endpoint, so much as something that’s been activated, so you say. So you’ve just talked about the central fire, a form like a flower for its signature. So I’m assuming that the form is initially literally the flame of the fire, which is like a flower. Of course, this is a poet writing about form and signature. And there’s signing it maybe with a flourish at the end. There’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?

Gregory: Yes, yes, I think you’re right. Yes. And I did want to make that analogy between a poem and a form of life, like a flower, I suppose. And also the idea that, again, what is the endpoint? What is the quintessence? What is the elixir? What is that ultimate wisdom? And then bringing that back to something. These things are often addressed in very intellectual terms. I suppose I wanted to bring it back to something more physical. And the flower is important there. Again, the idea that, actually, the answer may be something that is just alive, you know. You wouldn’t say, ‘What’s the point of a flower?’ Well, I suppose some people might do that. And, of course, in biological terms, you can say, ‘Oh, well, it’s an adaptation to these conditions that evolved by natural selection.’ And that’s absolutely fine, you know. But also, it is the fact that it simply is. I think that’s the thing that I’m perhaps drawing attention to there, this idea of something that actually is not purely reducible to intellectual terms but is actually much more to do with the fact of, and really, if you like, the miracle of life itself.

Mark: Well, Greg, that feels like a good point to start so that we don’t start reducing anything in your poem into too gross matter. And, yeah, let’s have another listen to the poem and marvel at the marvels of alchemy and poetry. Thank you, Greg.

Gregory: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

 

Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

 

The Infernal Garden

‘Alchemy’ is from The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press.

Available from:

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

 

Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press. His previous books with Nine Arches Press are Maskwork (2020) and The Fetch (2016). His other works include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023); Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His writing for the BBC includes the extended poem for Metal City, broadcast on Radio 3 in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

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Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Peter, where did this poem come from?

Peter: Well, I favour archaeological terms simply because I think they give depth to poetry, and I believe that depth is an important part of this art that it’s been with us forever, from the beginning.

So ‘Findspot Unknown’ is something that you’ll find in a museum. In fact, I found it in the British Museum years back. And you’ll go to an artefact, it’ll say ‘Assyria 800 BC.’ And then you’ll come to the next artefact, and it says, ‘Findspot Unknown.’ And that really got me because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an artefact of unknown origin.’ It’s a thing, and it’s a mystery, right? So I began to think, it’s like, ‘Oh, I get it, a poem is an artefact from an unknown origin.’ It’s a mystery, right? But then I wrote the poem, then I was reading it, like, a year later. I was reading it somewhere, and I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m an artefact from an unknown origin, you know.

And the unknown part is really important to me, Mark, because to me, the role of the poet is to remain a mystery in the face of violence. I don’t want to respond in kind to the news. I used to write poems that were more kind of overtly political, but, I began to say, ‘I don’t want to just bang a drum and respond over and over to this heedless noise that comes in.’ And I began to dial in the larger piece. So I am interested in the poem beginning in mystery and ending in mystery. And along the way, it gives features or begins to depict that quality of unknowing to find some other type of meaning rather than the language we use every day to communicate, right? I wanted to communicate something much larger and stranger.

So one last thing about the title poem, or the beginning poem, excuse me, is that every first poem in every one of my collections is the first poem of that collection. And for whatever reason, it creates an enabling fiction, meaning it’s, like, a false engine, but in fact, it’s a real engine that allows me then to imagine an open space that then I can wander into, that I can continue to write into because it has an idea that’s capacious, large enough that I can continue to keep refreshing it.

Mark: I love the fact that it opens, like you say, in mystery, in what we don’t know, and that you’re… I mean, throughout your work, you’re writing into the unknown, into the invisible. Death features very strongly in this collection, obviously being called Fierce Elegy.

Peter: Sadly, in many collections in the last decade or more.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And, I’m just thinking because some listeners to this show are very familiar with contemporary poetry, others are quite new to it. And, if somebody is new to contemporary poetry and they come to this and they’re feeling a little disoriented or maybe even intimidated and trying to find their bearings, could you say anything to them about how to find their way into it and not feel bad?

Peter: Certainly. So when I was young and starting off and the poetry captured my imagination, I always read things that were just ahead of me. Let’s say Emily Dickinson. It’ll always be just ahead of us. And I found that kind of useful because what I realise is, when someone’s reading a poem or hearing a poem, you get what you get. There’s no right, wrong answer ever. You receive what you receive, whatever lights you up at certain moments that make you think, then you’ve got it.

And then, like everything, it needs to be reread. It needs to be revisited because it does create a mystery that’s just ahead of what I might know. And that’s actually a really lovely thing because what that means is the poem is always present. It’s always alive. It’s always signalling to us something new. And the more that I’d read a poem, let’s say by John Ashbery the a great American poet, let’s just… or Emily Dickinson, basically the advanced guard in American poetry, I keep finding things. And I think it’s okay.

And ‘intimidating,’ I don’t accept as a concept. People need to let that go! As though a poem has a kind of lesson it needs to… you know, like, a mathematical equation. That’s never the case. And when it’s taught that way or imagined that way, it instantly shuts it down for someone.

Poetry is about not knowing and accepting the fact that you don’t know and that you don’t get it all at once. And that’s a beautiful thing because if it’s any good, you can keep returning to it. And so poems that I don’t favour that are very popular in culture are the ones where you know where you are at every moment because what happens is the content is delivered, and finally, the poem is disposable. And sadly, that’s true of most popular poetry.

And I find it a real disservice to this profound art that is the human record to make the bar so low for someone to discover their interiority. I just find it… It just makes me so angry. It’s such a disservice to all the women and men for centuries who have worked at this, right? Everybody’s got ideas, everybody’s got feelings, everybody’s got a story to tell, finally, that has absolutely nothing to do with poetry.

Mark: Amen. I think, you know, you mentioned the news. We’re living in a world where there are so many strident and fixed and opposing opinions, where there’s so much pressure to have a position and to feel like you’re on top of things and so many people offering hot takes and very strong viewpoints. To me, I always find poetry a wonderful antidote to all of that because life is a condition of unknowing, of mystery, of being in uncertainties. You know, Keats talked about negative capability, that we don’t know –

Peter: A favourite term of mine. A major, major, term of mine. And I like what you’re saying, Mark. You’re absolutely on it.

So, why elegy then? This leads me into that unknowing, that mystery piece, okay? So elegy, to me… Or particularly, let’s start with this. In the 21st century, in this totally degraded digital age of this culture that’s overtaking us, right, we’re outmatched, it’s not really helpful, because what happens is there is constant noise coming in over the barricades into your soul. And we live in this time of these massive, distorting, accelerated, interlocking crises with zero resolution. Just look at the news each day that’s coming now out of America. It is just a nightmare. I’m outmatched.

So, elegy then, interestingly enough, becomes a very reasonable tool to understand objective reality. And what I mean by that is we can all agree about periodicity. We can all agree that nothing is here forever. We’re just passing through. That we’ve been given this incredible miracle to be on this amazing planet circling around a star in a galaxy of 400 billion stars in a universe that we can just see, our viewable universe, that has something like, I don’t know, three trillion galaxies.

So what am I trying to say? Nothing is here forever. We will lose people, and we too will go. And death does not really frighten me anymore because I’ve helped so many people cross over. What I realise it is, it’s a part of life, not the opposite of life. And we shouldn’t be afraid, right? It’s what it is to be.

But more importantly, we can agree that nothing is here forever. All matter is in a state of constant change. And that’s not just me, or my family, or my loved ones, it’s animal kingdoms, it’s ecosystems, it’s languages, it’s civilisation. Everything’s just passing through, right? And the whole human record from the beginning is not even as long as the life of a gnat or a mosquito in the face of the sun. We are basically a mirage. And to accept that condition of being.

Sure, it’s a mystery and it’s not knowing, but it gives us the opportunity to accept the majesty of being, the gift of consciousness, the gift of being able to be here just for a moment. So it should teach us to be good to one another, to embrace one another, to love in the face of that condition that will be gone. And so that’s why I think the elegy is a reasonable way. We can all agree. The news, nobody can agree, right? But this fact is true. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when I hear you read this poem, what I hear is the voice of a really human voice trying to come to terms with this or speaking his own truth about how this is. There’s also an element of the dramatic monologue.

Peter: Yes.

Mark: I mean, I’m curious about, as a poet, how do you find your way into writing a poem like this? Does it start coming to you? Do you have to go out and look for it?

Peter: Well, I mean, this came to me from the world, and I think the majority of what I write comes from the world. And the beautiful thing is that I get to put these various things for my sensory data and emotional interiority. I get to bring them together in such a way as to create a very unique, way to be in a moment in the world.

And so, it does come to me, Mark, because for me, language is bigger than me. It’s older than me. It doesn’t live in me. We all live in it. It basically rents us. And when I’m writing, I’m an open vessel. I’m an open vessel. So what I mean is when I say ‘fierce’ in this instance, for me, ferocity can be reimagined as an ultimate radical holding open to dilate, right, to be vulnerable and accept that as a beautiful strength because I’m not going to be here forever. I’ve seen my entire family pass through, right? So I’ve accepted that hard fact, but I’ve also seen it as a gift to have me open and basically see. It gives me eyes. Grief gives me eyes. And so in the end, I’ve transformed my sorrow into a joy.

And so when I write, it comes to me. And I use the pronoun ‘I’. I favour it at times. And what I realise is ‘Peter Gizzi’ is just a tiny piece of that pronoun, right? We all share it. It doesn’t even belong to me. It belongs to all of us. And what that means is that pronoun is wound and sprung with so much historical data, with so many affiliated voices. And I’m interested in bringing in that striation, that depth, that layered quality. And that’s what I mean by archaeology, which I mentioned earlier.

Mark: So the ‘I’ can be the reader as much as the poet?

Peter: Absolutely. And Arthur Rimbaud, the great child poet of the 19th century in France, who stopped writing at 19, who’s forever younger than us, forever, you know, he was a child genius, an enfant terrible, but a beautiful letter to the seer that he writes to one of his teachers. He says, ‘The poet must be a seer,’ but then he says, ‘I is an other. I is an other. It’s not me,’ right? I mean, selfhood is random, you know. It’s random to become a self in some ways, you know. And in other ways it’s indelible because we love.

Mark: And I love what you say that language rents us. It reminds me of Auden’s comment. He said, poets should be humble because our raw material is public property.

Peter: That’s lovely. He’s absolutely correct in that, right? Also, the Beat fiction writer, William Burroughs, said, ‘Language is a virus from outer space.’ But I’m saying…

Mark: It probably was for him!

Peter: …if you’re really into this thing from the beginning, right… When I started out, it was an act of will, you know. But as you go along, what this teaches you is how to listen. And as you go along, you learn how to listen. And that’s an amazing gift of a life, right? So that’s what I’ve learnt to do, is to witness and receive, right? But I don’t write autobiographical poems. I don’t name-check my dead because I realise my story is everyone’s story.

And the thing is, my journey, Mark, in poems and in life, and it’s, you know, not easily won, it’s taken a life, is that I want to be the right size. I don’t want to be bigger or smaller than anyone or anything. I just want to be tuned. I want to be the right size.

Mark: When you talk about being tuned, I mean, one of the things I really like about your work is your ability to have so many different registers within a single poem. I mean, we’ve got ‘the codes, / a litany of survival. / Thus spoke the silvered asphodel / next to the factory ruin.’ And then a few lines later you’ve got the humour of ‘to take umbrage at what a tree can do.’ I assume there’s a pun there on shadow. And then we get very kind of…

Peter: We get ‘thou’.

Mark: We get ‘thou’, right!

Peter: That’s massive.

Mark: And then after thou, we’ve got very American demotic. ‘It was kinda real and kinda not./ Can’t see it today.’ Some poets would have a filter, and they’d say, ‘Well, this language needs to go in this poem, and this one can go in this poem.’ but you evidently, you don’t tidy things up.

Peter: I don’t know what my problem is. It’s just how it is for me because… You know, I was thinking about this. People have been asking me this recently, I mean, and throughout my life. But I’m not saying this is a… I’m not, like, writing this in stone about how I work, but you know what I’m beginning to imagine, a nice way to phrase it, is that I am interested in the relocation of the high lyric voice. I’m interested in relocating it into everyday demotic speech. And yet, I don’t want to lose that incredible depth that I am working in the most profound, gifted art of the human record, which is sacred to me. And I don’t want to let any of that go either. It’s important to me to always understand that I am within this medium, which, in fact, Mark, is deathless. And I’m just a piece of this massive song. And what an incredible privilege that is.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, through this, throughout the whole collection and obviously the previous volumes of your work, I don’t think anyone could be in any doubt of the seriousness of intent and the ambition and the sensitivity and the… I don’t know, there’s that indefinable lyric quality that shines through. And yet I love the fact that it can coexist. It can have – ‘It was kinda real and kinda not. / Can’t see it today.’ – that this actually is part of daily life and daily speech as well.

Peter: Poetry is part of daily life, you know. To me, Mark, poetry is the art of being closer. It’s an intimate art. It’s a human art, right? And to me, like, reading a poem that I didn’t quite get at 17 that I keep reading my whole life and I get more and more from it, it’s like poetry is like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over a life. Nobody gets it all at once. I certainly haven’t.

And I’m still learning from this art. I haven’t written in over a year, by the way, or even more. And sadly, that’s my practice. It’s embarrassing to say, but I really don’t know how to write a poem anymore. I’m totally lost. I’ve forgotten. And, it’s embarrassing, right? Because if I were a violin player, I’d just pick it up and play. Sadly, my practice is ungainly and perhaps untutored and a little homespun. But what that means to me is, what I’ve learnt to accept that is when I get that poem that begins a book, I’m starting all over again from the beginning. So what it means is, I guess, the benefit of it, it keeps me green. It keeps me constantly beginning. I’ve learnt to think that’s an okay place to be.

Mark: Yeah. I took a class with Don Paterson once, and he said he spends most of his time not writing poetry.

Peter: Yeah, that’s true.

Mark: And it’s a weird thing about poetry. That’s the thing you can be known for and yet spend… And he said, the other thing is, the better you get at… once you get an idea at knowing how to follow through and capture that, the less time it takes.

Peter: Perhaps, yeah.

Mark: But what I think I’m hearing from both of you as important is to be alive to that moment, not to try and churn it out and fake it at other times but to be absolutely honest.

Peter: Because you know when you fake it, you know when you fake it. I mean, the poetry I read, why do I read it? There’s a wager there. There’s an honesty, there’s a striving, there’s a reaching, and… Can I continue on this thought?

Mark: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Peter: Okay. So what I’ve come to learn is that all the poets that I love, the action for them is just ahead of them. That’s right. They’re just ahead of period style, they’re just ahead of what they can manage, they’re ahead of authorial intention. It’s just ahead of them. They’re reaching, right? They want surprise, they’re discovering something. So in fact, what I’ve come to realise is tradition’s not behind me shoring me up, it’s ahead of me. Tradition is ahead of us. That’s where it lives, that’s where the action is. It’s always just ahead of us. And if I subscribe in this model, which I’ve learnt to do, it means that, for me, writing is just an occasion to rise to.

Mark: I like that. I mean, we’ve got T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ He liked to say that when a new poet comes along, they reconfigure all the poets of the past. But you’re even going further than that. You’re saying those poets from the past are actually ahead of us.

Peter: Always.

Mark: And that we should be looking ahead.

Peter: And that’s what’s beautiful.

Mark: Right? And trying to follow. That’s a lovely way of looking at it.

Peter: You know, I have a poem in Threshold Songs that’s called ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent.’ Yeah, it’s riffing off of… I mean, Eliot is someone you encounter when you’re young, correct? And in the beginning, you’re in high school, they always give you ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ And as a 17-year-old, you’re like, ‘This is weird. I’m trying to tough this out.’ You know, now I read it, I’m like, ‘I don’t really like this poem anymore. It’s okay. It’s a period piece.’

What I really love of Eliot is the Four Quartets. Now there he came to something so magnificent. You know why? He let go. It was no longer ‘T. S. Eliot’. He let go. When he’s young and making that poem, he’s aware of what he’s doing. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an act of will. But where he went is transcendence. It spoke through him. He took anonymous pastoral verse, and he kept it anonymous. He kept it transcended. Now that’s where that gentleman found his art. And I speak as a practitioner of 40-plus years. I do know what I’m speaking about. Now, people can argue with me, I know I’m right.

Mark: Amen to that. No argument here. Four Quartets is one of the cornerstones, but one of those you keep coming back to, as you say.

Peter: Oh my God, yeah.

Mark: And okay. So focusing a little bit more on the formal choices you’ve made here. You’ve got these very short lines, and that’s quite characteristic of several poems in the collection. Could you say something about that choice? Was that there from the beginning? Did that evolve as you were draughting it?

Peter: Well, it’s interesting. That’s the only question I ever get asked in England. Now, America, they never ask that question. Here, all the time. Okay. So what I favour about that particular line, A, it’s my instrument, it’s how it comes to me, it comes to me in lines. Everybody wants me to write a memoir. If I told you my life, you’d be like, ‘Wow, you should really write a memoir.’ It’s not my art. And thought comes to me in pieces, in fragments, right? It comes to me with the constituent parts of the world of seeing and feeling, and then I begin to put them into a rhythm, in a sequence that’s bigger than what I want. It’s bigger than me. Poetry is bigger than me.

And I love that, that it’s deathless. And somehow, I found my way into this magnificent achievement of the human record. What a gift, what a privilege. You know, it’s great about the prize. I’m very happy, deeply surprised, but it’s kind of, like, a happy accident. It’s not why I do this, right? I do it for this other way of being in the world. It’s such a privilege to be a poet.

Let’s go back. You want me to stay talking about form? Okay. So what happens with a shorter line, right, is that you can take a long thought, a long idea, and by breaking it in this way, it creates momentum. It creates rhythm. It becomes percussive. It becomes physical, and through that physicality, becomes human presence, becomes a body. And so I like that it becomes… it keeps turning, it’s more curvy, it’s more like how consciousness exists in our mind, right, as opposed to this perfect soliloquy. Again, I just combed it all out for you. And then what am I? I’m bored out of my mind. That’s not what I’m interested in. But yeah, I favour that line.

Now, why is it a British question and not an American question? Very simply. This is a lesson for your listeners here as a pedagogical moment from an old poet. Okay. So 1922 is the tsunami of modernism with The Wasteland, tsunami, right? But there’s a doctor in his early thirties practising medicine as a paediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey. And that happens to be the great William Carlos Williams, one of the cornerstones of modernity, master. He had a problem with The Wasteland. He couldn’t stand Eliot, right? But that’s a good thing because that’s called the unavoidable rivalry of contemporaries. And that’s a really useful tool because if somebody writes something that puts you on notice, that’s a good thing. Why? The whole art goes up.

When people write low-bar autobiographical, poor-me bullshit, then nobody’s learning anything. It’s just all about me, right? That’s not what poetry is. That’s what I’m saying, when it’s finally not about your story. Okay. All right. That’s another thing.

But Williams reads it, has a problem with it, and then he writes a book called Spring and All, which comes out in 1923. It’s published in 300 copies, printed in Dijon, France, by Robert McAlpin for Contact Editions. Many of them were destroyed at the border. It’s a paperback book from 1923. And the line that all American poetry lives on is not The Wasteland. It’s Spring and All. When he breaks into that idiomatic American line, which is short and staccato, it’s like a miracle.

You know what they do in history? ‘On this day in history…’ Well, on this day in history, William Carlos Williams, a paediatrician in his third floor, invented what would become contemporary poetry. So I call 1923 the Quiet Revolution of Poetry, as opposed to the tsunami. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Thank you. I love that.

Peter: Was that a clear moment for your listeners?

Mark: Yes, yes. It will be. And I’m sure the American listeners will be more familiar than the British ones, but it’s really… you’re absolutely right because with Williams, what you get is much closer to actual speech.

Peter: And yet what he’s writing about is just out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the other guy I love in ‘23 is Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, another cornerstone. It’s interesting. Those two stateside modernists, a doctor and a lawyer, had everything to do with the shaping of American poetry. It’s interesting. But the gateway drug for me, I’m just going to admit, was Ezra Pound. That was my gateway drug into poetry.

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m just going to say very clearly, he can write. Everyone agrees. Everyone that likes him or not, everyone agrees. And that includes T.S. Eliot. What he writes about Pound is beautiful. He gets it. He sees the achievement despite his insanity, you know. And his unfortunate political views as he got older, that, to me, if you actually read the transcripts or read his time in St. Elizabeth’s, the madhouse they put him into, he is completely paranoid schizophrenic. He’s out of his mind, right? He really is insane. People have Hitler complexes, they have Napoleon complexes, they have Christ complexes. You know, it manifested him in an ugly way, but you know, we live in this age of neurodivergence. We have so much room for PTSD. How about the First and Second World War broke him? How about the fact that he lost his mind?

Plus, his project is so mad, it’s so massive, nobody could contain it. But we need to have a little sympathy for people losing it, right, as opposed to judging them, you know, in this moment of, like, ‘I don’t want to read that person because I didn’t like their politics.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Don’t read them, don’t like their politics. And now you’re just going to let go a whole era and not know about it,’ because we don’t know what the cobbler or the baker or the butcher thought in their era. We know about these people because they were public.

Mark: Well, we would be letting go…

Peter: Sorry, I’ve left the building here. Yeah, go ahead.

Mark: No, we’d be letting go of a lot of poets if we had to put them through that filter.

Peter: And then the real question I tell my students is, what are they going to say about us, Mark? We know that 49% of the planet lives on less than $5 a day. That’s, like, 3.4 billion people. I have shelter, I have food, I have heat, I have mobility, right? That’s not true for the majority of the world. What the hell am I doing about it? I said, ‘What are you doing about it?’ How about nothing? We are all on the wrong side of history, just saying.

I just want to say, Mark, I’m very delighted that you have this podcast and you take the time to really consider what a poem and what poetry can be in our lives. You know, that’s a great service that you’re doing for all of us. And what I would say to your listeners is don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Step into the poem and find a new world. Find a new world in yourself and in others. It’s an amazing tool for opening. So when I say ‘fierce elegy,’ I like to say that the elegy is a mode that can take a broken heart in a fierce world and turn it into a fierce heart in a broken world.

Mark: Thank you, Peter, for sharing your poetry, your world and your passion with us today.

Peter: Thank you for having me.

Mark: It’s been a real eye-opener listening to you just as it is reading the book, Fierce Elegy. So let’s listen again to the poem you read for us today, ‘Findspot Unknown.’

 

Findspot Unknown by Peter Gizzi

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