The Fortnightly Interview: The Potential Power of the Smallest Poem
Kelvin Corcoran in conversation with poet Peter Riley
‘No amount of erudition or vision raises anyone a centimetre over the heads of the people.’ (Due North)
This interview from 2016 will be included in About Poetry by Peter Riley, to be published by Shearsman in 2026. About Poetry will comprise a collection of interviews, essays on poetry and poetics and autobiography.
Over the last few years Peter, you’ve been prolific: Due North; The Glacial Stairway; XIV Pieces; the online articles for The Fortnightly Review, at the rate of one every four or five weeks over two years, and now the book The Fortnightly Reviews. In eleven years, I think you’ve published seven books including major new collections. Due North, itself is a substantial work, but it also shows a change in style of poetic language. What has driven and joined these different works together?
It felt like a change running alongside a continuity, going back a long way. Maybe a growing need developed, concerning people. Not so much people-in-general as a potential of people (which is what the old campaigners for justice always meant by “the people”). It became a quest of the poetry to reach them, as if they had previously been set aside, which they hadn’t, but it was believed that the word itself would have the strength through poetry to make this connection. There was also a cult of disdain in my apprenticeship, in many ways a necessary and productive disdain, but which could not continue forever and slowly lingered and succumbed. You have to face people sooner or later, and you get fed up with being unable to let them know what it is you do—poetry experts more than anybody.
Most of Due North was written in Cambridge but within the momentum of departure for the North. I feel I have moved out into a much bigger poetry world, even if the poetry itself is generally much smaller. It’s a world which doesn’t have many doubts about what poetry should be like and where its foundation lies, which is not in either Wallace Stevens or John Donne; it is basically “now” with a parental generation of exemplars. It is constantly assumed that I must know and admire a whole host of poets who are everywhere accepted as being what happened since 1950. I am a poet, interested in poetry, so I must know and love these figures. I know next to nothing about most of these poets (they are very well-known) and have not read them, because I didn’t come up in this “central” route, indeed its centrality hardly existed in my time and we denied it when it started to assert itself. I can admire Larkin in various ways, but he will never be central. This doesn’t matter in itself but it is a sign of separation, and makes you realize what little headway all the “different” poetries have made in the last fifty years, except in a few academic or isolate places, but also how the demand made of poetry, how far it might extend into the world, has shrunk. After all, the poetry of people like Larkin has no real political or moral dimension. He was not a moral kind of person; nothing beyond the immediate scope of his senses and their associations enters the process.
Really, do you think so, no moral dimension? What about the insistent lament on mortality or the sense of loss for a disappearing England?
Isn’t it more of a wish for a moral being rather than an embodiment of one? Morality felt as a relief, a release from modernity, a slide into an atavistic satisfaction. The death lament seems more bitter and more helpless than it was with the Victorian atheist poets who had suddenly realized what shifting ground they stood on. And I can never escape the sense of Larkin’s face being pushed into mine as some kind of campaign on behalf of itself, as if it wants my vote. The poetry is an authentic, carefully poised, microscopic representation of that self at a phase of domestic history, including its hauteur.
There is a lot of bright work being done up here within a quotidian ambiance like Larkin’s but without his masked despair, especially by young people, largely working with singularities, and identities, and working well in a practised and thoughtful way and with a lively stand-up technique, but in ignorance or disregard of the potential power of the smallest poem to touch the world nerve at a verbal shift. Questions such as who owns the voice of the poem, or what does a line ending actually mean, or the possibility that poetical language reveals a layered structure by which objective perception might gain contact with an inner life, like that Yeats thing about the misplaced word which ends up exactly where it should be—these questions do not seem to occur. Common humanity is there, but assumed as a presence, or only accessible through a kind of “me-ism”. But some of the poetry leans right out of all these descriptions. The bulk of it comes through the creative writing industry, which is clearly not as homogenizing as is sometimes made out: there isn’t really a common curriculum and people are able to break through such directives as there are. What I have most trouble with is that a lot of the younger poetry now refuses all the qualities of poetical language, and simply is prose, regardless of lineation and even some metrical usages. This particularly shows when it’s read aloud, it’s unmistakable in the rhythm and the tone of address that it is not attempting to be poetry.
Before I was cast into all this, I wanted to move the poetry closer to the lives lived, and the traces left on history. It seems that the only language I can really use, now, is a common language, or a sense of common languages, nothing else works, and this currency should be able to work as an instrument for recognizing poetry without exercising any diktats on behalf of itself, and that the items of poetry most worth recognizing are themselves deeply embedded in a common tongue whether apparent or not; open or masked.
This began with Part V of Alstonefield, which shrugged off the slow moping linguistic idolatry and burst into a gallop of invention, and it has gone on, in fits and starts, with some back-tracking. The way it seems to work out, in Due North, is that there is no mystery, no problematization of what is being said in each unit, or fragment, but how they implicate each other is left to the reader’s resources, whether, that is, they all participate in a “grand theme.” I bring them together by instinct and image.
So there’s an appeal to, and dependence on, the reader in the singular, who is thought of perhaps as optimal, much admired, courted, an “understanding person,” someone who recognizes. The reader recognizes that the places and conditions you offer sight and sense of are where he/she also lives, however distant. In a sense the poetry tries to create its reader.
Has the movement along this trajectory, the move away from what you call the cult of disdain, also led you to abandon previous views and expectations and perhaps changed your perceptions of the potential of poetic language?
Not fundamentally. The thrill, the sheer delight and challenge, of poetical language on the brink of the unknown is not easily cast aside. And I think I always wanted to reach this by means of the common tongue, or in alliance with it. What I’m especially not willing to relinquish is the lateral scope. I think the twentieth century offered wonderful opportunities to learn about human structures all over the world, down to the smallest scale and the furthest distant. In the larger works I feel free, indeed compelled, to cite in passing instances of cultural performances entirely remote. The long walk in Alstonefield is haunted by them. In “The Glacial Stairway” (the poem) I suddenly start quoting fragments in several rare or lost European languages: Italianized Greek, Provençal, Gascon Occitan, Channel Islands French... These are translated in-text and are all lyric fragments, indeed songs are where I find them. It’s a matter of asserting that there is no limit to the wisdom and compassion you can find in the smallest and most remote places, out in the sticks that lie beyond the sticks, where no one ever goes, since lyric surpasses politic and people are basically human. The idea is that you make all these things participate in the same movement. I think the way a poet such as Michael Haslam handles local and historical language as poetical tools, is comparable, though he never moves from West Yorkshire. There’s no way, of course, in which the term “common tongue” excludes the widest and most recherché vocabulary, including dialect, archaisms, neologisms…. In my case it is maybe shy of cultural technicalities or experts on the human condition in general.
I associate this freedom of uptake, which stands on the instinctual base of human commonality, with the freedom to transgress the rational scenario which insists you can never be more than a citizen of the closed circumstance, the predicated and rationalized version of humanity. Whereas I, you know, as in Pennine Tales—ghosts taking bus rides, buzzards talking to each other as they wheel, dead Chartists knocking on the door begging for hope… I don’t think they’re symbols, more like imaginative portrayals of the larger conditions.
I think language is a rather unreliable instrument for knowing the world, especially the world at its optimum. It all passes through human minds on its way to you with their competitive foraging, and is easily narrowed and divided. Language scanning across the world gravitates towards enmities, narratives of war and wrong to be redressed. Music locates what is right, and works. Didn’t Michael Tippett say something like “To write music must be an act of optimism?” And there has to be that, we can’t dedicate our existences to the luxuries of denunciation and resentment, there have to be strategies for survival and recompense too, even here. We also need our indolence. Poetry as lyric in the widest sense partakes of this. That, anyway, is the trust I cling to.
What of the transition between writing poetry and writing about poetry by others? What prompted you to commit yourself to such an intense schedule of reviewing? Was there an element in your own poetry that led to the reviewing or did it come from the work under review itself? It’s led you to a reassessment of recent Anglo-American poets and various groups or movements.
I’ve always written about other poets from time to time, long before I started reviewing regularly for The Fortnightly Review. I think my approach has shifted in response to this but I’m not sure how much. Well, the purpose is less to promote now, more to find out what’s actually taking place in the poem, without allowances for pioneering camaraderie.
The Fortnightly Review is not a poetry organ and I am aware of addressing readers who might be entirely unaware of these poets and these kinds of poetry and possibly puzzled or even threatened by them. But that’s me too! So I’m not going to let these poets have entirely their own way. They don’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt, and there has to be a lot of doubt when you’re dealing with a poetry whose language is more than a singular thread of evidence, which weaves tapestries, you could say, and which assumes the right to transgress normative usage. When it works, when it opens onto greater and unsuspected spaces, it is a wonderful thing. But the opportunities for megalomania, priesthood, revolutionary sniping, etcetera, have trapped many, especially as they get older. My reviewing of Americans I used to pay homage to such as Ed Dorn and Robert Duncan has taken me quite by surprise.
I’m also not interested in nominating the new succession, the poetry leaders. If it reads true that’s all I need. I probably over-praise such as I find but I don’t mind that. The last thing I want to be is an aficionado.
Actually, I don’t find this critical writing so very different from the writing processes in poetry. I don’t understand experience very well just as I don’t understand most contemporary poetry very well. Perhaps this makes me ideally suited to the task. In writing poetry I can reach out for words which enlighten me and connect to distances beyond me. I might attain them or not. It is similar trying to find words for what on earth is going on in these books. I read them again and again, making a lot of notes, until I think I’ve “got it”, then I move over to the laptop and start writing. I write a complete draft of the review, without paying much, or any, attention to the notes I’ve made. I generally use them only in writing the final text, refining, adding points and exceptions and so forth.
Has there been a reconsideration in your own work too, a similar questioning of certain tenets of modernism? I know your view on certain types of poetry hasn’t changed, Language Poetry for instance, your view of it is consistent and emphatic.
I find the word “modernism” difficult to live with and, I find, increasingly a distraction from and interference with the art of reading. Somebody starts writing in a different way, but never totally different. Others do similarly, but differently. So there are things being done of various kinds which might be interesting in various degrees, there are these works of poetry or prose... Then suddenly it is all reified, it becomes a thing. Then you’re expected to have an attitude towards it, to believe in it or not, to subscribe to it or not, you have to treat it not as a work of the mind in process but as a historical monument or gospel. But all you’ve got really is all these written works, most of which will probably be more interesting in themselves than whatever they have in common. And especially with a thing like “modernism,” in no time it is a prescription, for being advanced, or it is something to be avoided because quite possibly it has “died” or failed to continue even while it manifestly continues. To write now in a “modernist” way is not a method of expiring. You can do that more effectively with “Language” or even worse ideas people have had.
I’ve always been defined as belonging in that category, now specifically “late modernism” I think, though at the time it felt quite early, but I’ve never been entirely approved of, and have been attacked and purposefully disregarded wholesale by some of the busiest of the editors, organizers, and pundits of “advanced” or “late modernist” poetry, as opposed to a curiosity and welcoming from less-alienated quarters. The whole “advanced” scene is loaded with underdog resentment and has a constant need to clear a platform for itself by strategic binning. The idea of a “conservative” poetry in conflict with an “advanced” one tends to be a self-serving thesis from either end and unresolvable anyway.
So, is it the case that, in all your recent work, you’re making a clear claim and defense for the capacity of poetry, in which you assert—yes, poetry is this, the essential song, the “thought of a possible speech” as in The Glacial Stairway, but it is not about transforming human consciousness and setting the world right for ever and ever?
I’d like to get to the heart of it, but I don’t know that I do. My apprenticeship was a training in reaching the totality or center through an enhancement of the particulars, down to the words themselves, even to the point where they became unrecognizable. I was obstinate in wanting to draw the utterance back from that apotheosis to a known place, always, from the start I pulled away from that seductive and narrowing doctrine, which was nevertheless immensely useful for becoming aware of how language can create its own theaters of action. Some poets, such as John Wilkinson and Keston Sutherland, have made quite valiant attempts to use advanced symbolist and disrupting techniques to write a poetry which seeks to reach a depth and a totality of what we are. It does it by creating a great complexity and distortion out of experience, which, it is held, can only be made to reveal itself at a negative extremity, in outrage and horror at the harm we do which is intimate to our cultural condition. This, at any rate, is what was going on when I was close to all this, it may have tempered somewhat now.
Surely the simplest or most quietly contemplative poem can reach the totality when it sparks an unexpected verbal relationship on the edge of things. In a lot of this very fervent poetry political outrage is abraded against the person, breaking the skin, a violent attack on the self which is an attack on the reader, and thus everybody, a world circus of outraged clowns shouting and weeping in iron cages and why? For pandemic guilt, anger without border, which must finally come to be an attack on the world and life itself, as I found by pursuing Ed Dorn’s poetry to its sad end. I’m not denying that the world is in an increasingly desperate state. J.H. Prynne launched a lot of this by wanting to maintain the global command of Pound by secreting the very substance of language, in a cloak of horrification, that is, a discourse in which the words are savagely disconnected from each other and stand there bleeding, as a picture of the failure of world and language, self-wound mirrors, specific in a way which always escaped me. In all this kind of poetry the sense of crisis was permanent, as if it couldn’t possibly get worse. But then it did, and it still does. Language does show the world’s failure but poetry’s alliance with song redeems it. That is far too neat. Hill called it “a sad and angry consolation”. To me this means sadness and anger which have transgressed themselves. What does that mean?
Peter Riley was born in Stockport in 1940. He has lived since in the south-east of England, Denmark, the Peak District, Cambridge, and Hebden Bridge. His first book of poetry was published in 1969. His several books of prose have worked out some of these concerns in studies of Transylvanian village music, travel notes in Romania, English village carols and improvised music. From 2012 to 2024 he was the poetry editor of The Fortnightly Review where the purpose of his reviewing has been to establish a way of describing the appearance and results of poetry without recourse to any of the closed or parochial vocabularies.
Peter Riley’s Collected Poems, containing work from 1962 to 2017, was published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2018, followed by Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls from Longbarrow Press in 2019. An earlier book, Due North, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2015. A collection of his ‘Poetry Notes’ columns has been collected in The Fortnightly Reviews: Poetry Notes 2012-2014, and published in 2015 by Odd Volumes, The Fortnightly Review imprint.
