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It was only through needing something to browse through on my fifteen minute tea-break while working at a large bookshop that I rather randomly plucked Chris Greenhalgh’s Of Love, Death and the Sea-Squirt from the shelf one afternoon in 1999. I had subjected many poets previously unknown to me to the tea-break examination, and had seldom wanted to pick the book up again. On this occasion, however, I found myself not merely impressed but struggling to contain laughter at one or two poems.

   I discovered that the book was the author’s second - its predecessor was Stealing the Mona Lisa (1994), both having been published by Bloodaxe Books. I bought the earlier book and was again delighted by a highly individual and compelling collection of short poems. What surprised me was that I had never heard of this poet before; he had won no major prizes, not even been shortlisted, nor received PBS recommendations, or any reviews that I could recall. Determined to find out more, I eventually contacted Bloodaxe’s Neil Astley with a view to arranging an interview with Greenhalgh. I learnt that he works as a teacher at a school in Sevenoaks, Kent, where he also lives with his wife Ruth and their two young sons.

   I was also told that Greenhalgh had just had a novel accepted for publication. The novel is Coco and Igor - extrapolated from the real-life affair between Chanel and Stravinsky - and it appeared last summer to deservedly positive reviews in, amongst others, The Observer and The Guardian. Yet I do feel that, whereas the novel is an accomplished and enjoyable work, it is not outstanding in the way that I believe his poems to be. While his poetry and prose have much in common - economy, precision, lack of sentimentality, unpretentious wordiness - the poems also have an exuberance or playfulness that invites and rewards repeated readings. One might say that, whereas John Updike is a fine poet and a magnificent novelist, Greenhalgh is a fine novelist and a magnificent poet.

   The Updike comparison is apposite: the epigraphs in the two Bloodaxe collections are both quotations from John Updike, and on visiting Greenhalgh at his home I soon learnt that Updike is a special interest. Greenhalgh owns each of Updike’s fifty or so books, and has read them all, typically two or three times. A photograph of Updike hangs in Greenhalgh’s study. An Updike enthusiast myself, I began the interview with Greenhalgh after a lengthy discussion of the great man’s works. For those that are interested, Greenhalgh leans more towards Bech than towards Rabbit . . .


H.I. Now that you’ve completed a novel, I wonder whether you think of yourself as essentially a poet who happens to have written a novel; or, like Updike, a writer in whatever genre you happen to be working on currently.

C.G. I did see myself exclusively as a poet a few years ago, and now I see myself probably more as a prose writer. But it’s very difficult to be both at the same time. I mean, one just tends to take over for a while. The other thing which is disheartening about poetry is that you don’t reach people; you get no response, the interest in your work is pretty negligible. You crave a slightly wider audience. That’s what prose offers you, I suppose.

I tend to think that it’s very rare to find someone who’s great at both - I think if you’re a very good poet you’re going to be able to write pretty good prose, and I’m not sure it necessarily applies the other way round. Eliot says, in the introduction to his selection from Kipling’s poems, that Kipling is notable for being great both as a fiction writer and as a poet.

Updike is certainly not a great poet. I think I’m a very different writer from Updike. Updike is far more copious. But also, he’s essentially autobiographical. He has done those other things, but they’re less convincing. He is, in a sense, an autobiographical writer, whereas I am not. Most of my work is deliberately other. And that’s a big difference in the poetry, I think - I’m often perplexed that a lot of people see poetry as truth, and fiction as fiction, and I don’t understand that. Because, for me, poetry is just as fictive and playful as prose can be. Whenever you use first person singular in a poem people automatically, in my experience, tend to assume that it’s you. I find that astonishing, because it’s very rarely me.

Well, there have been a lot of confessional poets; no-one says at the outset ‘I’m a confessional poet’, but it does have a bearing on the work of some writers. I think it’s impossible to read Plath without knowing her life. In any case, one does build up an idea of the author when one’s reading a book.

I think that’s true, but I try hard to - especially in the second book -juxtapose poems to create deliberate contradictions and tensions between them; to write from different people’s points of view. So, yes, some are based around autobiography but most are not.

But if we take a poem like ‘As a Matter of Fact’, now this is one where one thinks, not that everything here happened to you, but the basic scheme.

No. Someone told me that story.

Well, that’s the sort of thing that one assumes . . . did happen!

But that’s the odd thing, for me, because if it happened in a novel one wouldn’t assume this had happened to the author. I suppose that’s why - I’ve been influenced by other poets, but my poetry’s been influenced probably more by other prose writers. But I also dislike, intensely, the kind of earnestness that can creep in in poetry which is truthful. I mean, I wholly support Oscar Wilde when he says ‘most bad poetry springs from genuine feeling’.

Yes. Well, that’s very evident in your work: there is a kind of ironic tone. I don’t know whether I’d agree with Oscar Wilde, I just think different things suit different people; I don’t mind a bit of good old-fashioned self-pity if it’s pulled off with style and panache.

Oh, yes, I agree, but I think most bad poetry - I mean you see it when you try and teach students poetry - a lot of it is just an excuse for autobiography. Just because it’s true, they feel that it’s automatically good and that is not the case. There needs to be a sense of style, a sense of form; a sense of technique.

I agree. I’d like to look at one particular poem. Can you tell me about how ‘Reading Between the Lines’ came about? It seems to me there’s a great concentration of ideas here.

It really arose from when Larkin died, and his secretary shredded his diaries. I studied at Hull University, and the philosophy section was on the top floor . . . and then I thought, it is often the case that a couple of biographies come out at the same time. Usually because it’s the centenary of a birth or something. I’ve always been intrigued by this idea that there are two biographers, unbeknown to the other, working on the same life. And the way that they interpret different things. So that’s it really. And - do you know the painter, Andrew Wyeth? He was a landscape artist, and then suddenly he came up with an astonishing series of nudes, of this woman called Helga Testorf. It transpired that, for fifteen years, he’d been painting these nudes, in secret! Just down the road. His wife didn’t know anything about these paintings until they were . . . revealed. That became transposed into ‘there’s talk of a cache of love poems’.

I was intrigued particularly by one thing: using the word ‘executrix’. Was that for a half-rhyme with sex, or -

Yes!

It was; OK! I’ve noticed that you do use rhyme, though infrequently, and very rarely full rhyme.

I’m not a formalist. I think there have been several thousand years of verse which does metrically scan and rhyme. I slightly jib against that; one of the things that attracted me to Plath was this kind of freedom - although she does sometimes rhyme, it’s almost a kind of slapstick rhyme - or people like William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Berryman, Lowell . . . they started to use rhyme much less formally. And Muldoon, too: he uses it as a kind of playful thing.

Yes. But I think of him as quintessentially a rhymer.

But in a very playful way - it’s almost inaudible. You see it more than hear it.

I think he has taken rhyme to another level. It’s wonderful to see someone do that - because rhyme is something that poetry has that prose doesn’t, so I like to see someone using it if they can use it well.

I think he uses it more as an organising device than something that sounds melodious. I suppose I’m more like that. But I don’t choose to rhyme - the poem chooses its own form. It’s not a conscious decision to use rhyme.

What I like in ‘Reading Between the Lines’ is the way the rhyme is building in the course of the poem.

There is an innate harmony you get with a rhyme. Heaney once said his favourite rhyme was Auden’s: Auden rhymed ‘love’ with ‘Diaghilev’! Because the English language has a poverty of rhymes for ‘love’.

In fact, you mention that in ‘After a Certain Silence’; one of the very funny bits, because of the unexpected next line:

‘Love’, for which there exists a poverty
of rhymes in the English language,
though we do have a giant chalk image of a man with an erection
carved into the hills.

This is one of the great joys of the books: some of these poems an very funny indeed. ‘Augustus John’, ‘As a Matter of Fact’, ‘The Big No-No’...

I got a note from Simon Armitage about that poem. He had judged the National Poetry Competition, and ‘The Big No-No’ was one of his choices. But the woman who was judging with him didn’t like it. She was offended by it. As he said in his note, ‘that’s football’!

I have shown ‘The Big No-No’ to a few people, and I can report that, as Gershon Legman might have put it, ‘it never fails to break up even a mixed crowd.’ But judge for yourself, as the poem is reprinted below, with ‘Reading Between the Lines’. For those keen to investigate further, both of the Bloodaxe collections are still available.