Author photo © Asiya Bulatova
Biography
I grew up in a 5,000-person farm town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. When T.S. Eliot went back to St. Louis for a rare visit in the 1950s, he talked about how important it was for him to have grown up beside such a river, the ‘Great River’. Whenever I first spot the Mississippi from an airplane, I’m sure his ‘strong brown god’ also frames my own childhood and continuing sense of home. In some ways, I’ve always felt it following me in disguise – somewhere beneath the icy Charles in Boston, where I studied music for my first degree; the Thames, when I first came to London; hiding in Manchester’s canals, while I spent the past five years there for my doctorate; and now the Ouse, keeping pace as I walked this morning to where I’ve recently started as a lecturer at York St John University. It’s nice to have such a companion when my big family is across the ocean. Our little hometown, buried in Illinois’ endless collective cornfield, proved to be a sturdy launch-pad for each of us; even my parents have moved across to the city, and live just blocks from where writers as different as Eliot, Tennessee Williams, and Marianne Moore grew up. These are my gods, I guess – not these particular writers, but these layers of place and relation. Academia is much more than a day job, but these deeper currents run beneath all of my writing and research.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
I know that when people describe a poem or poet as ‘confessional’ these days, it’s usually not a compliment. There’s an assumption of narcissism, or maybe lack of imagination. But when I read Robert Lowell or other favourite confessionalists, I’m mostly struck by the speaker’s absolute dependence on their ‘confessor’. Whether ‘you’ is the reader, or a specific figure like Dorothy Wordsworth, or even an invented one like Petrarch’s Laura, the underlying drama seems to be the realisation of how contingent the speaker’s very existence is upon this other person, whom they need much more than vice versa, but who turns out to be no less imaginary within the space of language. I think this book began with that relationship and thinking of lyrical poetry in terms of its desperate, dubious address.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
I first came to do my Master’s in London ten years ago, and I finished my PhD at the University of Manchester in 2010. So, aside from losing touch with reality in that way that humanities academics are said to do, it’s been the usual late-twenties stuff: screwing up relationships, replacing lost friends, training my ears to new accents, learning the guitar, worrying about what my parents were doing at my age, and getting even more defensive about all the books and bands and politics I defended in my early twenties. Mostly, I’ve been writing. Now that I finally have a real job, I plan to buy a dog and motorcycle.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
Don’t tell anyone, but I always hope for a happy ending, as a reader and a writer. It’s probably just a carrot, but with a book like this, where so many of the speakers seem so tangled in bad logic, I had to think there was a way out. A lot of times it’s not their fault, and that’s the political element of the book, if there is one – where the language of sexuality or masculinity closes in on itself. But it’s like when Bugs Bunny draws a door on a wall. That’s a kind of poem.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
Well, the oldest draft of the oldest poem is from 2007. So, I guess the short answer is four years.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
All my life, I’ve been blessed with exceptional teachers, including and especially my parents, who showed me what they could, but also bent over backwards to find teachers for what they couldn’t. So, everyone from piano teachers to my PhD supervisor, John McAuliffe. I don’t think writing is an instinct.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m preparing a pamphlet to come out later this spring – (http://www.likethispress.co.uk) It’s a very different project from the longer collection, a single (if broken) narrative sequence, and which will include drawings and images. It’s something I’ve been picking at for ages, so I’m really excited, having found someone to produce a well-made book out of it. I quite like the pamphlet as a form in itself. Aside from that, there are plenty of other projects – poetry, drama, fiction, criticism – at various stages keeping me busy.
Grace
There’s an irony for the woman
who failed, or at least fooled,
his goddamn test, then had one
with someone else. But not for me.
I only lied to the royal surgeon
about a hockey match at school.
The trick isn’t to confront them
with the coherence, cohesion, or
truth of your mimicry, nor assume
the same of them, like they wait
to bridge my playful gaps. Whore?
Virgin? What’s the difference?
It’s what Uncle George might say.
He cared for women no more
than the family for him. Father,
like the prince, has suffered truth.
If the films must go, let it be
because I refused to play them.
Discover more about J.T. Welsch
Links to Welsch’s work online in magazines and other features:
- ‘The Man from the Phone Company’, Boston Review: http://bostonreview.net/BR36.6/j_t_welsch.php
- ‘Hook’, poem of the week, TheThe Poetry: http://www.thethepoetry.com/2011/08/poem-of-the-week-j-t-welsch/
- Three poems, Blackbox Manifold: http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue6/JTWelsch6.html
- Four poems, Manchester Review: http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/content_item.php?issue=5&id=100030
- Feature (with three poems), Peony Moon: http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/j-t-welschs-orchids/
- Interview, Sabotage: http://sabotagereviews.com/2011/08/03/lee-smith-and-claire-trevien-interview-jt-welsch-salt-modern-voices-tour/
- Orchids, Salt profile: http://www.saltpublishing.com/writers/profile.php?recordID=213554
- Reading at Poets & Players, Manchester: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY4wVEuiE9k
