John Stammers Interviews Alison Fell
Alison Fell is a Scottish poet and novelist. Her first volume of poems, Kisses for Mayakovsky, won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award (National Poetry Society) in 1984. Her stories, poems and essays are widely anthologised and she edited and contributed to the experimental prose-fiction collections, Seven Deadly Sins, The Seven Cardinal Virtues, and Serious Hysterics, all published by Serpent’s Tail. Her five novels include Mer de Glace, winner of the Boardman Tasker Award (1991), and The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro (1994). Her work was featured in the BBC Scotland TV film, Whispers in the Dark. She has recently been short-listed for the Paul Hamlyn fellowship. Her latest collection of poems, Dreams Like Heretics - New and Selected Poems, is published by Serpent’s Tail. |
How was it you started writing poetry? Well, I started when I was about sixteen, not because of anything to do with learning poetry at school which I greatly disliked. I hated English literature although I loved writing. I came across an image in an American novel which was quite banal really, something about blind windows, and this, for some reason, set me off in terms of pursuing images. They seemed to be the only way that could really express anything that was going on inside oneself. So I never wrote those adolescent poems full of abstract words about emotions, I couldn’t think like that. So I leapt straight into imagist type things. Then there was a competition at school which I entered and wrote a poem about Africa, which I didn’t know anything about and I think that won. After that, when I was about seventeen, I was commissioned, through the school, to do something for Scotland Magazine . So I wrote a poem about the Solway, again purely imagistic but I just knew that this stuff was good, but I didn’t know why, it kind of sang to me. So that’s how I started. You say you hated studying English literature at school. Why was that I wonder? Well, it might have been the teaching. I do remember the way we learnt Shakespeare was that we had to read Macbeth round the class; not even taking parts, just reading. And I got told off for having a glottal stop, having rather a broad accent, and it’s a Scottish play! I quite liked Keats, I quite liked The Eve of St Agnes, I remember that got me. But I think that’s about it. I think I just had such a chip on my shoulder, a working class Scottish chip, so that I wouldn’t take it in. It was like an alien tongue almost and an alien set of values. I really didn’t start until I was about twenty-two. I was still writing but it was a completely schizophrenic thing which I think maybe quite a lot of Scottish born, and certainly, Scottish working class, writers did have to get themselves through in various ways. Do think this was because the literature you were taught was English rather than Scottish or British? Well, I think that if I had been introduced some of the more lyrical Gaelic poets that I would have tapped into that very easily. But it was an Englishness that’s not quite the same music, not quite the same intonation somehow. Also, I think, if I had been introduced to other kinds of writing, modern American writers for example, I could have got into them. Nowadays, it’s very different and teaching literature in Scotland is very self-consciously Scottish and, although I really do have my reservations about cultural nationalism of that sort, I guess it might have helped. That leads me on to the question of your influences. I wonder what you feel are your general influences that make you write poetry and more specifically the other poets that have influenced you? I really wasn’t a poetry reader, even after I’d started writing poetry. e e cummings was the fashion then. He was a good imagist so, yes, I’d say him. Scottish songs really affected me and then Bob Dylan and people like him. But I didn’t have a proper poetic education at all. In recent times since I’ve started reading more poetry. My big hero is WS Graham who I think was from Dumfriesshire like me. I think he’s a genius actually, that man. Also Emily Dickinson is a poet who is not given enough credit for her genius. Apart from that Lorca; Enzensberger I liked a lot to begin with although I don’t now. I like a number of American poets: Tess Gallagher for example, and usually things that are not quite English - Kathleen Jamie, of course. So what is it about WS Graham, say, that is important for you? He makes such great leaps and yet his body is always there in the language and in the landscape. Yet these great mysteries are encapsulated without using too many words. He’s stunningly brave in his articulation: because it is Scottish and yet it’s not. He doesn’t do so much dialect, as far as I can see, but it always makes me feel that I’m completely in the landscape and it is just absolutely power packed with mystery and presence. To me that answers a lot of things, that’s what makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. That’s always been my test for poetry. It’s a physical, visceral test and I’m afraid a lot of poetry doesn’t pass it. It can be very good; a lot of English poetry at the moment is ever so well crafted but I sit there and think, yes, that’s a very nice line, very well done, very intelligent, but my body’s unmoved. I think I’m a real primitive about poetry. I think I always will be, in the sense that I have little patience for reading poetry that’s current or very good if it doesn’t make me catch my breath. Then I pass on, I don’t stick with it. You haven’t mentioned Mayakovsky who appears in the title of your first collection, Kisses for Mayakovsky. Yes, although he’s usually translated horribly badly, or what I think is horribly badly. Of course, because he’s such a big left wing icon and generally a marvellous person, he was one of my heroes - but as much the man, the moral life, as the poems. I just use one of his little quotes from a poem to Yesenin after he had committed suicide. Yesenin was another great romantic radical poet. Mayakovsky was very angry that he should have committed suicide. The poem contained the line “One must tear happiness from the days to come”. Which I thought was fabulous so I used it. But, of course, Mayakovsky himself committed suicide eventually, ground down by Stalin and an ill-fated love affair. I’d like to ask you now about your own writing. You’ve recently had your new and selected poems published under the title Dreams like Heretics. I’m Interested in your own style, how that developed. Well, I never went to a writing course or anything like that. So I never applied myself to poetry really in any way. I did use to subscribe to American Poetry Review and read that with great interest. I was in a writers group with six other women for about five years which was very serious. We did try to criticise each others work, but by instinct rather than by learning. I blundered around, I’ve always done that when it come to poetry. So what style I have, I don’t know really what it is. But I know when something feels right, gives me that sort of catching of the breath. Then I think, well, that’s near it. I think I may be incapable of really applying myself to the study of poetry and all the things one perhaps should know about: versification and so forth. When I’m a writer I’m just a different sort of animal. I like to blunder around, follow my own way, sit up in the park in the cafĂ©, dream around and just go into a hole, burrow, pursue. I don’t show it to anyone or take it to workshops. I don’t give toss what anyone thinks until it’s done and then it’s a nightmare. I think, oh my God what have I done, no-one’s going to publish this! But I’ve become very cocoon-like and I used to not be like that; there used to be more of a connection between group things and writing as there was when I was in the writers group. I was exposing stuff every week or fortnight, but the thought of doing that now fills me with absolute horror. I don’t know how people do it and yet they do and seem to need it. I know it’s different for me because generally I’m lucky enough to publish. So I’ll get some feedback from my agent, publisher, and hopefully the people who read it. In the new collection the first section - In Memoriam DC; Poems 1993-95 - charts your experiences and feelings around the death of your partner. It strikes that me you take a number of risks in these poems, particularly in the symbolism. I wonder if you could say a little more about that? Yes, that sequence does chart the time when my then partner went off on an expedition to cycle round the Mediterranean, to then joining him in Tunisia, to going to Turkey when he had been critically hurt in a traffic accident. Then bringing him back and death, funerals, mourning and so forth. So it’s a very dark sequence indeed. A lot of it is around the terrible silence that does descend on everything in these conditions, even on metaphor: of being shockingly bereaved by a violent incident in the middle of a passion; this was not an old, longstanding relationship. So some of the images are shocking, but then death is very shocking. Some of the poems are very angry and very violent but then that is how it is. And a lot of it was almost like a groping for words round an almost impossible silence, trying to communicate the incommunicable. So that marks that sequence very much. There’s a lot around ugliness, feelings of abandonment, anger at abandonment; the whole gamut is there, which I think often isn’t in poems about bereavement. That’s just how it came out. So, yes, I think some of the ones like Angel/Gargoyle are quite brutish, but I think that my poems often are quite brutal in their language, they’re kind of carved on the page, they do have an awful edge to them. Someone once said that my name fitted my poems because ‘tell’ meant fierce. These are quite fierce and I also think The Field Hospital is very terrible, the metaphors of phosphorous grenades and gangrene and so on. But it’s true, it was true to me and it’s as true a rendering of some of these feelings that I could do. I think that many people would be able to recognise that in their gut as an articulation of things around death that are never articulated in this society. No wonder there was this total, strange, hysterical thing about Princess Diana because it’s an area untapped and unmentioned. So I stand by these poems with all their groping and clumsiness and great leaps. Perhaps I could ask you now about teaching poetry. You run two workshops at the City Lit. You’ve also run Arvon courses which are another form of teaching. I have taught poetry, or rather run workshops, God knows how! I mean I have stimulated people to write and they seem to have found it very useful. But I gave that up in the end because I thought I just don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve managed to set little scenarios that they find useful and they’re managing to write and I’m managing to criticise them a bit and to help. But I thought I really shouldn’t be doing this any more so I stopped. For several years, one of the workshops I ran at the City Lit was specifically a poetry workshop. I would dream up exercises and people would do them and really a great deal of very good work was done in that group. But, in the end, I felt it was very draining for me; that things I should have been writing about I was feeding out as ideas to others. I know I enjoyed the work that was done, but I began to feel that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I should know more about poetry, but mainly that I was stopping writing myself. So I continue to run workshops but they are for both prose and poetry. They’re a different sort of thing. I also do a women’s one, supposedly for beginners although they are usually terribly good. I enjoy those they’re very exploratory. I also do a so-called advanced critical workshop which is a rather intimidating title. In that we read out two or three people’s work a week and we all focus very closely on criticism. I think it can be intimidating for people to be in at first. So I try and run as decent a ship as I can to make it OK for people to expose their work but it’s not something that I could really bear to do. Then there’s Arvon courses. Again I deal with both prose and poetry at those. I do run some crazy workshops at those which I enjoy - not craft, not how you do lineation, but a bit nuttier than that. I might do some collage type things, cutting things up, I love that sort of play. Now I’m also a tutor for The Poetry School. I won’t be running workshops, but I’ll talk to people individually about their manuscripts and sort of feel my way through, perhaps suggest how it might be made better if needs be. I still feel I can do that, help in that way. I gain something when I see people light up, when they come across something they hadn’t realised was in them, or imagery or a new way of putting words together. Those times are very exciting for them so I gain at one remove, as it were, and I like that. I think that if you can do that, if you are quite good at teaching or enabling them it’s an honourable thing to do. It also gives me contact with a lot of nice people because a writers life can be isolated. I think it’s good to be in the social world and to use some of your gifts in that world, put something back. So what can we look forward to from you? I have a novel coming out next year called The Mistress of Lilliput which is a kind of sub-Swiftian extravaganza which is a hilarious, feminine journey, mainly a psychic one. It’s a journey of Mrs Gulliver and her doll in the South Seas. It involves black giants and all manner of unsuitably sized attempts at congress and many crazy things. At the moment I’m a strange phase between books. I’m going to go to my beloved Alps and sit in an old-fashioned chalet and mull over a rather gothic idea that I have. Whether it will be a themed poem or whether it will be a rather brief poetic novella I don’t yet know. I have to get there, sit under Mont Blanc and then I might suss it out. |
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