Tony Williams’ first collection of poetry, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, has been shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize for Literature. Sean O’Brien, writing in Poetry Review, said that ‘To read Williams’s work with the best of the others here is to be convinced afresh that this is an exciting time for poetry’.
The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street
More information about the book, and a sample of it, can be found here. The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street Tony blogs about poetry and other literary things here Aye-Lass and his website is here. tonywilliamspoet.co.uk
MARK BURNHOPE: So, how did it all start? Have you been reading and writing poetry ever since you were able to sit up unaided, or did you come to it later? What made you ‘want to be a poet when you grew up’?
TONY WILLIAMS: I’ve been reading poetry since I can remember, although I have never read exclusively poetry – it was always in amongst prose fiction and other things. But the early ones were Edward Lear, AA Milne and so on. Eliot at A-level made me look again – I think I responded in a swotty way to the allusions etc, which I didn’t get but wasn’t scared of. They’re just window dressing really, though, and the music got me. As for writing it – well, I knew I wanted to write, and I think temperamentally I suit shorter forms. Poetry seemed possible, in a way that the novel didn’t. And I think there’s something glamorous too about the sheer futility of a genre that ‘cannot be “done” like Venice/ or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon/ being read or ignored’. That’s Auden, who always interested me a lot – his chattiness, which is something I indirectly and intermittently try to emulate.
You’re also interested in the novel, particularly in Russian literature. Do you consider the forms very different, or does one inform the other? How?
I just love those sharp, intense, sentimental, committed novels that were being written in Russia throughout the nineteenth century. When you compare them to what was being written in England at that time – from Austen through Dickens to Hardy – I know which I prefer. They’re so alive, and mostly modern, in a way the English novel can’t compete with. And they have a treatment of masculinity (the ‘superfluous man’ of Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky) which anticipates the strange position masculinity finds itself in in our culture: apologetic, hesitant, angry. Self-deprecating. And they’re so funny.
I don’t think poetry in English has yet found a way to accommodate it – not those characters, which do crop up, but the tone. Poetry is a liberal art, but it ought to let us forget that sometimes. It wouldn’t do it any harm.
I don’t know how far those novels influence my work. I hope they do: I have a few useless rotters prowling around, and the odd tone that feels related to that sphere.
What would you say to someone who loves reading but has never picked up a poem? Should they? Is there any reason we ‘should’ be reading poetry at all, or can this kind of advocacy be a bit annoying? Where do you draw the line?
I don’t think you can say ‘should’. Would it make them better people? Maybe? Happier? Dunno. But certainly there are lots of people who feel scared by poetry and would like to try it, to have that fear assuaged. We should help them. It’s the feeling that a poem is a puzzle with an answer that they don’t get – there are no answers, just the poems. We need to help people see poems the same way they see songs. There are no answers to a song. And there’s the tone thing again: I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Why should a poem be scared of such a fiction? Fine feeling is all very well, but it doesn’t exhaust the artform’s range; and lots of readers might feel less intimidated if they didn’t think the subtlety of their feelings was continually being tested.
Now, onto the book: could you please talk us through your favourite poem from the collection? Tell us something about its journey from conception to finished product.
One of my favourites is ‘Homage to Julian Metcalf’, partly because I can’t really say where or how it developed. One day the method was just known to me, and I worked at it from then on fairly confidently. But that’s not very helpful. A better choice would be the title poem, ‘The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street’. I like it because I know that its appropriation of tradition is right. It’s a very traditional poem in the sense of drawing on certain forms and interests – mainly those of Andrew Marvell – this rhyming pentameter/tetrameter couplet which limps along seems apt considering the subject matter. It’s a poem about seeing dereliction disappear, how abandoned buildings don’t stay abandoned. It’s elegiac in that sense but – and this is one of the reasons I like the poem – it also has a ghoulish aspect that I never considered until a long time after I had written it. A delight in what it claims to mourn. So it goes beyond my conscious position.
I wrote it on a series of train journeys between Sheffield and Salford, looking out of the window at these sites and landscapes, and thinking of others I knew. It’s a very generalised poem, about lots of places rather than one. Once I had the form and the conceit, it was a case of working it out into a comprehensible structure. I worked a lot with conceits for a while; I think it’s miraculous how productive they are. And then I fell out of the habit, and now I can’t quite work out how to do it. It’ll come, I suppose. The title came last. The poem was written and lacked a title, and one day I was walking through Sheffield and came to the corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street and saw this old cutler’s shop nestling among the glass-fronted blocks and building sites, and thought, ‘That’ll do.’ It’s completely arbitrary, and inaccessible to anyone else – theoretically, a bad title, but I think it works.
On the Very Like a Whale blog you said, ‘The irrelevant poet is someone who is only interested in poetry and not in the relations that poetry might have to the world.’ People like Sean O’Brien have reviewed your work in terms of the contemporary pastoral tradition. It seems to me that in being about landscape and place, the tradition inadvertently speaks to personal, social, historical and political concerns as well. Your collection was written as part of a thesis into this very subject. In writing it, what did you personally hope to contribute to pastoral tradition? What did you feel was missing?
Yes, landscape is a way for me to speak about people, identity (my own and other people’s). I just think in terms of place. Certain texts exist imaginatively as places – for instance, The Death of Socrates is associated with some mature trees in the playground of my primary school. I can’t explain it. So when I write poetry, place is a natural means of getting at the world.
I’m aware of answering to tradition, in that sideways way that Eliot was on about. I’m not sure anything was missing from the work of Virgil, Marvell, Auden, Roy Fisher, and so on that I could supply, but you do have to renew things. There aren’t many shepherds any more, although I have known one or two. What’s the equivalent of a shepherd for me, now, in this area? Fisher says this thing about Birmingham just happened to be the thing to hand when he wanted to write. For a long time I thought that meant he wasn’t really a poet of place, but now I see it’s the opposite – place is what he was given to write through.
What about engaging with the world in terms of human feeling? I read these poems as being about inner as well as outer landscapes. Some of them are concerned with attachment and detachment to these landscapes (‘How Good it Sounded’, ‘The Matlock Elegies’ or ‘The Flowers Singing’); others with travelling outwards, not to escape from the self, but to find a more effective way of speaking about it (‘I Leave Myself’). I’m really interested in ‘Sand’ and ‘Gravel’, in which you use the macro lens to examine the character of raw materials, the stuff of the constructed landscape. Raw materials are a recurring motif in the book. Could you tell us where this interest in ‘stuff’ comes from?
Oh, you know, I’m not that interested in poetry that examines in great detail the way people are feeling. Not in writing it, anyway – I’m not up to it. I have to find something else to talk about, and then as you say the inner landscape naturally emerges. Human feeling is something that my poems see out of the corner of their eye – if they try to look directly, it disappears. So a productive method for me is to take quite literally the ‘no ideas but in things’ and the ‘concrete, specific detail’ slogans and write poems that way. Of course you go beyond the stuff: sand is just sand, and gravel is just gravel. But I hope that poems like that (I’ve got to say that lots of people, including several reviewers, hate those poems) are partly attempts to tease out the wider social ramifications and meaning of, for example, gravel extraction, and partly ironic little jokes which go much further than that remit allows. If they were cops, they’d have to turn in their badges.
In his endorsement of your book, James Sheard comments on your ‘fearlessness in the face of debates about register, diction, rhetoric.’ I couldn’t agree more. You’re not afraid to weave together various tones. The poems are funny, wry and serious all at once. Your speakers are both lyricist and town crier. It’s interesting, considering how we’re sometimes taught to write poems (slavishly maintain your chosen tone; flee from rhetoric and discourse, etc.). How did you arrive at this approach? Should all good writing ‘mix it up’?
You’re very kind to say that. A few years ago I had this ironic mode that I was quite capable with, but irony isn’t everything. Sean O’Brien said to me, ‘Can you use this irony as part of a larger technique?’ and I think that gave me the clue as to how to go on. The Canadian poet Al Purdy does this mixing of tone and register very well. I love his work, although it’s tremendously bad in places. I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to be flawed. And once you accept that, you’re a lot happier varying tone and so on. ‘Tightness’ in the sense we use it in writing can be harmfully constricting. And the world is complicated – how can I write myself into the poems, write as myself, unless I include all the tones, voices, attitudes, poses etc? Now I’m sounding like Whitman!
The poems do have a few literary and philosophical references dotted about. Where this might’ve been off-putting for someone less well-read, they’re also funny and full of inviting imagery. They’re welcoming. Speaking of debates, then, does this whole ‘accessibility vs. obscurity’ thing matter to you, or is it a false dichotomy? Are you just after ‘good poetry’?
We should always be after good poetry. But audiences too – it gives me intense pleasure when people say they’ve read my work (it helps if they liked it, of course). In theory I’d like to write this pure, lyrical stuff which could slot into any page of the Oxford Book – timeless, as they say. But not in practice. I’m not timeless, I’m here and now. You can only write what you write; and I don’t think my stuff is difficult, on the whole. It’s meant to be friendly.
Are you working on anything new?
At the moment I’m finishing off a collection of very short prose fictions for Salt. That will be out in 2012. And in the background I’m working on another book of poems, which I hope will be out in 2013. It might be about a hill in Matlock, but it might not. At the moment I can’t tell if the hill will tie it all together or be the unspoken centre. The latter might be appropriate, because the hill in question is hollow – full of caves and mines. There will be jokes, and other stuff beside the jokes.
Well, thank you for letting me bend your virtual ear on a few things. It’s been a privilege, and I wish you every success with whatever the future holds.
TONY: No, thank you – it’s been a pleasure.
Mark Burnhope writes poetry and occasionally paints and illustrates things. His poetry has appeared in Magma and nthposition.
