Is it a Good Place for Poetry?
A Conversation between Jo Bratten and Jeremy Wikeley
Jeremy Wikeley, Jo Bratten
Jeremy Wikeley: The change in the season keeps sending me back to ‘Sunset over Watford’, the last poem in Climacteric, which is also one of my favourites – love as the love of “small things”, the dying daffodils, the sun setting over Metroland. I’ve been thinking about London a lot recently – my London (I can see the mobile mast at Crystal Palace from my window, though right now it’s shrouded in mist) and other people’s London’s – and the city comes across as such a strong character in your poems, much more than just a backdrop. Sometimes, it’s an antagonist, its streets “paved with blood”. I’m thinking about poems like ‘Realism’ too, that unforgettable Pizza Express. What does the city mean to you? Is it a good place for poetry?
Jo Bratten: Thanks for those kind comments on my Metroland poem. I wrote it an age ago, in 2012, which was my first year living in London – if Zone 5 counts as London. I now live in Zone 2 (and am much poorer) and feel I can consider myself a Londoner of sorts, as I’ve lived longer here than any other place in my life. If pressed to identify as either a poet of the city or of the country, my automatic response would be the latter as I was raised in the country and feel a sort of atavistic affinity with certain rural landscapes (moors, fells, bogs), but I wonder if I might be kidding myself. I’m interested in your idea about London as a strong character in my poems and wonder if it has something to do with living alone in London during the pandemic and literally not seeing anyone I knew for weeks at a time: I sort of fell in love with a silent, empty London during lockdown and walked and wrote and walked and wrote. I think a lot of us did this. You explore something like this in your poem ‘Another Time’, I think? A familiar place made suddenly so strange, and kind of beautiful and sad. How many people became poets during lockdown? London is definitely a potent muse and commuting in London particularly; my notes app is where most of my poems start and they’re almost always triggered by something I see, hear or read on the way to work. I think having a fairly pressurised workday is also a potent muse. Ideas gather and coalesce steadily while your mind is too occupied with other things to give them space so eventually, they come bursting through and demand attention, sometimes almost fully formed. If I take myself on a writing retreat to some idyllic rural setting, I write very little, and I mostly write garbage in workshops. Is this because of self-consciousness? ‘I am going to sit at this desk with this notebook and be a poet now’? I wonder if your experience is similar? Is the workshop or the retreat a vital part of your creative process?
JW: Atavistic affinities are important! And moors (and fells and bogs) have a fair claim to being the most poetic landscape, don’t they? All that work going on underneath the surface. Auden said that every writer has their own ideal landscape. There’s a pressure on poets to have a “place”, to be “from” somewhere, even though so many of us live with some kind of dislocation, whether we’ve moved across the world or just within a country. I suppose that’s why the pressure’s there? One of the things I like about London is that you don’t really have to pretend that it means anything more than what it is, but maybe that’s an argument for not overthinking it as a place.
And yes, absolutely, like you I “write” poems on the move, or else when I sit down meaning to write something else. Anything to bypass the mind’s defences! There was a time, during the pandemic, when I wrote in a notebook for an hour every morning, bathed in perfect sunlight, but in retrospect that was more useful as a kind of therapeutic ritual than a source of poems. These days I find most of my poems in a diary. When I first moved to London, I had a lot of time to myself, which meant a lot of wandering around self-consciously writing poems: I remember doing a couple of writing workshops around the same time. I appreciated the introductions to poems and poets I hadn’t read before, but it was a world away from the way in which I was used to making poems and perhaps for that reason I rarely look out for them now. But I do get a great deal from ‘workshopping’ poems I’ve already written and I’m fortunate enough to be able to do that informally, with friends.
So, I may not be the best person to ask. In many ways I think more people should do creative writing workshops – perhaps especially if they don’t write much already, in the same way that it’s good to spend a few hours making a clay pot if you don’t already make clay pots. Writing is genuinely therapeutic in unique ways. It’s a different thing, but I know workshops in places like prisons can be really valuable. Some people who encounter writing in those spaces might go on to write more, but that isn’t the purpose of them. But the truth is I’m a little (possibly too) cynical about the ubiquity of the paid-for writing workshop, when it’s marketed as a place to ‘produce’ poems. Maybe it’s just because they haven’t worked for me, but I wonder if they aren’t in danger of becoming a convenient replacement for something less convenient? And why this constant pressure to ‘produce’ poems in the first place? Is that something you’ve ever felt? How do you go about putting a book together?
JB: So many things here to think about! (Am scribbling down a mental note about bog as metaphor for poem.) Yes, there is something particularly poetic about a landscape where so much is taking place underneath the surface. Perhaps this also accounts for the appeal of London? Most Londoners go underneath its surface every day for a protracted period, yanked through the guts of the city and its thousands of years of layers. I got a bit obsessed with the new ‘super sewer’ a few years ago when it was just finished, and there were these extraordinary photos of it like some sort of vast art installation or a set for an insane production of the Ring Cycle. I saved loads of pictures of it on my phone and look at them sometimes and think of its beautiful clean curves (what its designer called its ‘sinuous kinks’) filled now with excrement. I think I’m still a bit obsessed.
I don’t mean to diss creative writing workshops: they can be really encouraging, generative spaces and warm up the writing muscles beautifully. And I agree about more people doing creative writing workshops. I’m thinking of a workshop as where a thing is crafted or made (and about the etymology of the word ‘poem’, as ‘thing made or created’). My grandfather was a woodworker and his workshop, in the basement, was this magical place of possibility, and blonde curls of wood. I think everyone should learn to make and craft things, whether it’s a poem or a clay pot or a rug or a bench. Not only because it is therapeutic (and it is) but also because when you make a thing – or try to make a thing, or make a thing badly – you gain so much more appreciation of how things come to be made and of the people who are skilled at making and might just be a less passive consumer. I bang on to my students all the time about the ‘means of production’ and how dead our culture will be if the vast majority of us just consume without making, or consume without thinking about or appreciating how a thing has been made and the person who has made it. And more people writing matters because writing is how we think, how we work out what we think. I think it was Joan Didion who said she didn’t know what she thought about something until she wrote about it. I bang on to my students about this all the time as well: if you farm out your writing to AI, how do you even know who you are?
Which is an interesting jump to the poetry industrial complex and the drive to ‘produce’. Social media is surely a part of this? Writers now seem expected to be literary ‘influencers’ and generate regular ‘content’ for a body of consumers. I can see it’s sort of exhausting, especially for poets who are, by nature arguably, rather solitary creatures. So many poets are – laudably, I think – trying to earn their living from being ‘a writer’ rather than having a ‘day job’ and writing on the side: I guess this is the way, or a way, to do that? The constant pressure to ‘produce’ poems stems from this, perhaps. I’ve noticed a trend lately of poets getting agents, or trying to, as it’s difficult to get your manuscript in front of the editors of the bigger publishing houses without one. And to get an agent you’ve got to do a lot more than just write poetry, unless you find an agent who’s keen to pocket 15% of £500 and a couple of bottles of lukewarm white wine.
We’re both poets without a ‘collection’, of course. I don’t feel particular pressure to ‘produce’ – and I ‘produce’ quite slowly – but do acutely feel the lack of a collection. I have 60 or so poems that I’ve been playing with and trying to wrest into a coherent sort of shape. I’ve been trying to work out what the ideal shape is and keep returning to two collections that have the sort loosely threaded thematic shape that I really enjoy reading: Niall Campbell’s The Island in the Sound and Victoria Kennefick’s Eat or We Both Starve. In both books, the unifying idea threads itself through the different poems fairly subtly and both take a series of poems with the same title (Niall’s Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage and Victoria’s Hunger Strikes) and disperse them through the book as a kind of punctuation.
You write a lot of reviews, so probably read more collections than I do, and possibly read in a more acutely critical way. What are your feelings about ‘themed’ collections? How do the best collections manage their ‘theme’? And what is your approach to putting a book together?
JW: Possibly being the key word there! I sympathise with the subterranean obsession. I once got fixated on the fact that there was a hill under Pentonville Road, the same as any other hill and presumably still a great heap of real earth. And no sign of it beside the road rising, which of course in theory is a hill but somehow doesn’t feel the same. Not even a tree, a landscape draped in concrete and still there somewhere beneath the tarmac. I completely agree about the importance of making, of understanding the ‘means of production’. I wonder if it’s particularly important to poets, who might otherwise drift off into abstraction. Though, yes, I do think that contemporary notion of the workshop as a place to produce must in part be about social media. I don’t want to diss workshops, either, I just get queasy when I see adverts saying, “you will come away with new poems”. As if they’d offer a refund if I didn’t.
As for themes… we all have subjects that we can’t help but write about, don’t we? Usually, they are what brought us to poetry in the first place. I think it’s good to be aware of them, to an extent, even to lean into them. But when it comes to packaging poems up in collections, I think the pressure on poets to make themselves legible through a theme is another example of the “industry” outsourcing something which is really outside the work of writing itself. In an ideal world, it would be something editors and reviewers and marketers worried about. Obviously, it’s a great deal more nuanced than that and even if it wasn’t, the world doesn’t work like that anymore, if it ever did. And, like you say, when a theme does works it really does work: another recent example is Graeme Richardson’s Dirt Rich (which is also very subterranean).
It’s funny, I really admired those letters in The Island in the Sound. I admired their honesty and maturity, but also the way in which they made poetry out of the letter form itself, the places they took the language. I’ve been reading Niall’s poetry since Moontide – which was one of the first books of contemporary poetry I bought – and these poems felt like a new direction. I kept wanting to get back to them. I wondered, greedily, if there were more, and I wondered what a book which made them more central might have read like. I think one of the unfortunate side effects of that pressure to “produce” is that poets underestimate, or, since that’s patronising, are pressured into underplaying, the strength of what they’ve already got. Every time I write a review, I feel like I complain that collections are “too long”, so much longer, on average, than they used to be (at least it feels like that). I’ve become tired of myself saying it, and it’s beginning to sound churlish or impatient. But forty or so good poems, of which a few, if we’re lucky, will be zingers, is a book. Most of Larkin’s books were what we’d now think of as “pamphlet” length. A pamphlet is an achievement. As a reviewer, I don’t really think of them that differently. Papers should review pamphlets, if they’re worth reviewing.
I have a slightly perverse relationship with not having a book myself. I was never a bright young poet, but I did well in a couple of competitions in my early twenties. I began to feel I should therefore publish something. I never did. I had plenty of poems, but I didn’t know how to, or didn’t want to, package or manage them. I also went to a couple of events that were bad for me at that age, where I felt like I was being sized up. Should I lean into writing about identity? Nature? Masculinity? Work out how they were all connected? I know a lot of poets say that they feel that the different sides of their work don’t “fit” together, that they must suppress some part of the whole to make a book make sense. It seems such a shame (Gavin Ewart used to divide his later collections into “serious” and “less serious” sections, which is one solution). Then I got a job, and started a family, and now publishing doesn’t feel so urgent. Until occasionally I remember how long I’ve been doing this and think: where’s my book? But I still don’t know how to go about putting one together. You have to be so focused on that goal, and I have this childish notion that one day it will just happen. Equally, ideally, that’s how all books would happen. Someone would say: nice poems, do you have any more? But to come back to making and the means of production, it’s not the reason I’m doing it, but I do have a not-so-secret hope that publishing other people’s will help me think about my own in a different way.
I’m not sure how much space we have left but before we run out, I had to ask about your “Chekhov” poems, which I just love – and which would make such a strong spine to a book in their own right. Did you know there would be a sequence? Are there more? Who made the first move?
JB: I think the burden of being a ‘bright young poet’ would be a tough one to carry. Too much expectation for too long. Let’s normalise waiting. Let’s normalise poets publishing their debuts in mid-life (à la Graeme Richardson).
The ‘industrialisation’ of poetry has done it many favours but probably as many disservices. I agree with you about book length. Maybe I’m a bad reader, in the same way that I’m a bad workshoppee but even when I love a collection, it’s rare for me to not get poem-fatigue after 30 or so pages, which is why I love pamphlets. I do think we should start thinking differently about them: I know so many brilliant poets who will say they have ‘only’ published a pamphlet. Even calling them ‘pamphlets’ seems to somehow diminish their significance, as if they are something disposable or slight. The American ‘chapbook’ is a little better, I think. My pamphlet has 29 poems in it, which is just five fewer than the collection I always hold up as the collection of collections: Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist (talk about zingers – just look at the five poems that he opens with). Let’s normalise collections of 34 poems. I like the idea of dividing a collection into ‘serious and ‘less serious’: this might be a good editing exercise. One of my favourite types of poem is the serious poem that doesn’t take itself too seriously: this is my aim with almost every poem I write, and I maybe succeed 30% of the time. Which is perhaps a good place for a segue to your question about the Chekhov poems.
After I wrote the first one – set in a Pizza Express on Hammersmith Road that’s no longer there (RIP) – I knew it would be a sequence, but I hadn’t planned it as a sequence because I tend to think I’m rubbish at sustaining anything. I’ve got ten finished, plus a handful still in utero, or early embryo. I worry that if I try to force them out, I’ll mangle them. I tend to kneel quietly before an idea of a poem for a while and ask it to tell me how to write it, so it’s quite slow going. I do imagine them as a spine, or perhaps a coda of sorts, to a book: I definitely don’t want a whole book of Chekhov poems, but I’ve loved writing them and seeing where each one takes me. Although, in the poems, I make the first move, in reality it was him. I was reading his collected letters during a rather dark and lonely period a few years ago and just felt utterly seduced. I’ve always loved his plays, the way they walk that wobbly tightrope between hilarity and misery, the way his characters are unafraid of saying big things like ‘let’s talk about the unbearable pain and beauty of being alive’. I just suddenly felt that the only person I wanted to have dinner with was Chekhov. I went and stayed in his room in the old Pension Russe in Nice last year; I thought it would be a spiritual experience, and I’d get haunted and write loads but, predictably, I couldn’t write a thing and didn’t get haunted even a little bit. I like to think he’d be amused by this.
Jeremy Wikeley is a poet and critic, with recent work in The London Magazine, Bad Lilies and Poetry Birmingham. He runs Headless Poet, a small press devoted to the art of the introduction, writes A Poetry Notebook, and is a trustee of the Winchester Poetry Festival. He lives in London.
Jo Bratten is a poet and teacher based in London. Her pamphlet, Climacteric, was published in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Bad Lilies, The London Magazine, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor at The Interpreter’s House.
