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Jeremy Hooker was born in the south of England and has spent much of his adult life living and working in Wales. He is a poet and
academic. He has eleven collections of poems, his most recent being
Adamah (Enitharmon 2004). In April 2004, he gave a lecture on Poetry and Spirituality for The Poetry School in London, when Jacqueline Gabbitas was delighted to meet up with him for this interview.

JG: Could you tell us a little bit about your influences?

JH: I think the question of influence is a very interesting one because one can feel strong affinities with other writers without being influenced by them. I would say, as far as I’m aware, the strongest  influence on my writing has been Richard Jefferies, through his particular way of looking at the world. Then Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and later David Jones and, to an extent, the American tradition especially William Carlos Williams and George Oppen.

But to what extent these have been an influence I find it very hard to
say. I think once I was reading the Americans I received some influence from imagism and objectivism, but I would also see that as a development of what I found in Jefferies. From David Jones, I
received enormous stimulus in respect of confidence in the way he
was dealing with certain subjects.

It’s not so much a matter of influence but more of finding in other writers confirmation of what one is naturally inclined to do, sort of imaginative support more than influence.

JG: It’s interesting you mention the Americans, because one of the things I’m really attracted to in your poetry is its expansiveness and the generosity in its scope. It’s something I find present in much American poetry.

JH: Well, I received very beneficial supportive influences from the
Americans, as well as from David Jones and from the Welsh literary
tradition. I discovered a number of major Welsh poets, unfortunately in translation because I have no linguistic gift, and was moved and
influenced by their commitments, their seriousness.

JG: Do you think it’s the connection with nature that’s attractive?

JH: It’s the connection with nature, but I think it’s ‘the larger self’.
George Oppen said something like, ‘One wakes simultaneously to
oneself and to the world’. It’s what Wordsworth called the ‘poetry of relationship and love’. One discovers the world and the self
simultaneously. I’m interested in that kind of experience and a poetry
in which one achieves that self-transcendence and becomes aware
of a larger reality of which one may be part. Again I go back to Jefferies. One has a sense of connection to the life of nature, but it is a much larger world than the world of one’s own domestic experience, one’s own ‘small self’. The sort of writing I most admire is that which opens out, people like Melville, Whitman and John Cowper Powys. What you call generosity – I think that’s a
good word – William Carlos Williams has that supremely and it’s not just related to nature – it’s also related to people and reality in all
its dimensions. A philosophical influence that I encountered was
Martin Buber and his philosophy of relationship, ‘I and thou’.

JG: In Welsh Journal, you talk about trying to get away from the ego. We see a lot of ego in poetry being written now and, of course, we’re encouraged in workshops to draw on our own experiences. How then do we step away from the ego? It seems to me that we need the self reference as a starting point but that it doesn’t need
to be the sole world of the poem.

JH: Yes, I agree with that entirely. As a teacher of creative writing, I’ve always tried to direct writers outside themselves, but it’s a
question of making a connection. As a young poet, I lived through the period of confessionalism; when a number of poets had taken their own lives and there was a tremendous emphasis on mental
instability and torment. I found that disturbing and dangerous and
it was something that seemed to me an emphasis upon the small
self and its entrapment. For me a function of writing is to liberate the
self into the world.

JG: Do you think in contemporary poetry there’s still a lot of writing
from this perspective of the self?

JH: Yes, and you try to encourage students to see beyond themselves, but one also has to encourage self-expression. I think it’s necessary, especially when poets are beginning to write, but one would hope that they would be able to connect beyond themselves so that the self doesn’t become a trap. That’s what I think is a risk for a writer and perhaps especially for poets.

JG: You talk about your writing coming from a position not of ‘language over all’ but of ‘silence under all’. I’m intrigued by this idea.

JH: That’s quite possibly the biggest question of all, because I
think it impinges on phenomena such as the religious and spiritual
and sacred reality. I have been described as a religious poet and I
would accept that, but I wouldn’t specifically want to hold forth on
that subject because it would risk the grandiosity and the kind of
vagueness that I would want to avoid. I believe there are poets for
whom language has the priority, who have a passion for words,
perhaps even are intoxicated by language. That’s not the kind of
poet I am. I’m more attracted by a sense of underlying silence. Of
that, within reality, which is the ground of being that sustains it. It’s
something one may be aware of, without finding it easy to talk
about. One wants to use words like ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ with the greatest reservation and hesitation, but the great traditions of religious thinking and literature, east and west, west and east, are tremendously important to me. The idea of silence relates to a certain meditative cast of mind doesn’t it? A contemplative mind. Now the word ‘ground’ – I find it easier to talk about the word ‘ground’…

JG: I’m glad because I was going to ask you about ‘ground’.

JH: (laughs) My first book of essays was called Poetry of Place. Solent Shore and the poems I wrote set in Wales, were very much concerned with places that I explored in various dimensions: geological, historical, personal, social. In the earlier days, the word ‘ground’ for me had a material substance; it was the actual shingle and mud of the shore, the earth, soil and trees of the New Forest, and it still does have that meaning, but I think that what has happened is that I have come to think more of ‘ground’ in the metaphysical or ontological sense of ‘ground of being’. What
underlies it all? Does anything underlie it all? (laughs) Is the material all that we have or does it open onto another dimension that is
metaphysical? And at the same time I have become more conscious of a certain groundlessness.

JG: This is interesting especially in light of the poem ‘Groundless She
Walks’. When I first read the ‘Seven Songs’ sequence in Adamah, I wasn’t sure about what was happening with it.

JH: Nor am I.

JG: (laughs) It’s not a bad place to be in! (laughs) Coming from the
very tangible, very earthy poems that we have early on, to this sequence, is a huge distance to travel as writer and reader.

JH: Yes, but this is also an opening out beyond the smaller self, you
know. In my case it would perhaps be the male self; this is an attempt to expand beyond that. I became interested in the concept of androgeny, that every human being is constitutionally both male and female. I have been drawn to what certain women poets are doing, such as Wendy Mulford and Lorine Niedecker. I have found elements within feminist thought and writing over the last twenty or
thirty years enormously stimulating and for me, probably what women have been thinking and writing have been the most exciting
‘opening-out’ during my lifetime.

I think male and female poets experience different opportunities –
in the Seven Songs I was being drawn towards what I felt was a kind of imaginative sympathy with female experience. I mean it’s noticeable that the woman figure in ‘Groundless She Walks” is pregnant, that’s a very important part of the sequence. I partly knew what I was doing but what was exciting for me was that there was an element of strangeness in it. I think as a poet if you know exactly what you are doing then you probably shouldn’t be doing it because poetry is an exploratory art. It’s always a step beyond the last you
took so you are encountering, if you use an old-fashioned word, mystery. You’ll encounter the ‘strange’ and the ‘other’ and you won’t always know what you are doing until after the event and maybe not even then either. (laughs)

JG: You wrote in Welsh Journal, ‘In the act of writing I want to make the poem more than it probably can be and, if not to say everything, to make a celebration that is the very essence of the lives and places and at the same time the quick of me’.

JH: I have, almost from the beginning of consciousness, had the
sense that reality is more than that which one can grasp. I mean a sense of the ‘uniqueness’ of the person. The more one comes to know of a person, the more one realises that one doesn’t know them because life is larger than one’s concept of it. That’s what it boils down to: life in all its manifestations is larger than the words which one has to try to capture it. So there’s a constant sense of the inadequacy of language – that reality is more than the means at one’s disposal to express it. It’s a sense I value. I wouldn’t want to lose that ever. At the same time it means that within writing there is ultimately always going to be an element of frustration, although this
frustration too is positive and creative. It’s a pursuit that you know is never going to arrive at a destination: you are never going to be able to give adequate praise; you are never going to be able to create
an image that is large enough to contain the reality of life, whether
that’s the life of a fly or the life of the universe. Do you see?

JG: I do, it’s something I often question. Can poetry actually render
this? Can it describe this thing right here and now? But even if you touch on some tiny part of it that’s what poetry can do, what it is.

JH: I think so, I agree. There are certain words that become more
important to you as a poet. I talked earlier about ‘ground’; another
word that over the years has become vitally important to me is the word ‘opening’. If I write a poem that I feel is successful then it’s one that opens beyond itself and conveys to the reader a sense of
whatever the larger reality is. It opens upon that rather than closing
upon the self of the poet or closing upon the poem as something made of words.

JG: One of the things I find quite startling in your poetry is the metamorphoses that happen. I don’t just mean structural metamorphoses, I mean the philosophical changes as well as the physical ones, e.g. stone into sculpture, and man from ground (Adamah) to man (life) to ground (death). Also the synesthaetics in
the poem is a metamorphosis. You have this wonderful line where you talk about ‘a looking that is some kind of touching’.

JH: I think life is essentially metamorphic. The imagination is particularly sensitive to the way in which life is processed and that
involves one thing changing into another. I think it also touches on
my passion for the other arts. My father was a painter and that had a
great influence on me. My friend, Lee Grandjean, is a sculptor. I have been working with him on several collaborations over the years and I’ve learnt a lot about sculpture from him. But I’m also reminded of another sculptor who I once walked around Winchester with. I had the constant sense that he was touching what he was looking at. He might be looking at a building from some distance away but it was as if he was running his hands over the textures and over the surface. I think that’s one of the ways in which imagination works, through a kind of touch. It’s not just about using the eyes to look at the world as if the world was sort of a series of flat surfaces. One’s imagination isn’t limited in that way. The world is all the more real to us if more than one sense is operating at one given time, don’t you think?

JG: Oh absolutely.

JH: One of the things I was struck by was the way Lee talked with his hands. You know making shapes in the air – this related to the fact that his imagination was a deeply sculptural imagination. My friendship with him also reminded me that from very early on I was looking at landscape in a way that was sculptural. I had a feeling for the rhythms and the texture of, in particular, the chalk landscape of
southern England. The rhythms of the landscape have been tremendously important to me.

JG: I find it’s a very quiet gesture in the actual work, but then when you get to the end of the poem you’re left with the impression of massive change, even when it isn’t explicitly about change. I think the idea of metamorphosis is vast, whereas when we think of ‘change’, it’s as something small. Again, it gets back to the little self, doesn’t it, expanding into the bigger reality? It astonishes me how the reader’s able to see it clearly in the poetry but, because it’s so seamless, it’s the impression of it that makes the impact.

JH: I’m so glad you see it and feel it. I generally try to write poems
that have a slow charge, in which the meaning doesn’t all lie on the
surface. A reader who comes to my poetry expecting immediate sensations is likely to be deeply dissatisfied but ones who approach
them with some patience and attentiveness, I hope, will find something worthwhile.

JG: I love in your poetry this exploration of surface. The juxtaposing
of surfaces, yes, but also tipping the understanding of ‘surface’on its head. So you have these hard surfaces that often have no real stability beneath, like bridges, or you have a firm underground topped by less stable surfaces, such as the beaches, where the pebbles are continually changing. It seems to be saying: look at this
surface and think what this surface is, not what it’s representing but what it’s surrounded by, what it’s sitting on, what it’s working with and against. It’s very physical.

JH: Yes, that’s very kind. I find the way you approach it interesting and sympathetic and revealing for me. You know, what you are seeing in it isn’t always what I’m necessarily aware of is there and that’s good. I’m happy about that.

JG: So, it’s not an intention of yours to deal with surfaces?

JH: Oh yes, certainly but I think of surface always having a surface
below it, and another below that and so on. I remember Southampton after the Blitz, and where there’d been houses there were gravel pits with a bit of wall hanging on the side of it. One saw the various surfaces exposed and that fed into my feeling of geology and history. I was fascinated by things that had been dredged out of the water when the docks had been made – mammoth bones and hand axes. So from childhood, I had the feeling that I was living in a primeval landscape, there was a world under the surfaces I could see. I was drawn to chalk from early on, and my first perception was of something magical, dazzling white and yet at the same time, there were fossil fish under it so the dazzling surface had dark depths.

The shore is something I return to over and over again in my poetry.
It’s liminal, but it’s also very real. It’s where the sea meets the land
and erodes the land. It’s where life came from up onto the land.
It’s magical and dangerous and mysterious and fascinating.

My father was a man who liked the word ‘deep’. I remember my friend Robert Wells once said to me, ‘One of the words you overuse is the word “deep”’. I thought ‘Yes, he’s probably right about that’ (laughs) and if he is I know where it comes from. My father was interested in things that were deep and it was a word he would use more often than most people do – that which lies under, whether emotionally deep or artistically deep. The deeps of the sea, of the earth and what I was saying about shore goes back to your question about metamorphosis. Shore is a place of transition and
fossils of course are metamorphic. Those were the things that captured my imagination.

JG: Listening to you brings to mind ‘Landscape of the Daylight Moon’. As a reader, you’re struck by the connection between the moon and the ground the speaker walks on.

JH: I saw, as a boy, one of the things from which Paul Nash made the painting Totes Meer, which is in the old Tate. During and after the Second World War, in Cowley, Oxfordshire, there was a dump
for wrecked German aeroplanes. Bombers and fighters, all jumbled
together with crosses and swastikas. I saw it and it was amazing. I
later saw Totes Meer, an imagistic rendering of that. Nash also did some wonderful southern landscapes and in them he has correspondence of images, e.g. one of those stone balls on top of a pillar and in the sky the moon, so there would be a correspondence between the terrestrial image and the celestial image. Nash’s magical correspondences were very much in tune with the way I saw things.

You grow up in a landscape where you’re aware of so many historical and mythological processes and in a sense you are fluid, the things that look solid are fluid or have been fluid. I think what you have led me to talk about is what has actually shaped my imagination.