Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Ian     You mention that you wrote Auschwitz June 2, 1942, in 1988, around the time you were concentrating on the poems about your mother. Do you feel that these poems informed the Auschwitz poem?

Seán     That connection had not occurred to me, and now I can’t remember the actual writing of the poem. The holocaust was happening when I was growing up in rural Ireland, totally unaware. Hitler was the good guy in our war games, the role we competed for. I suppose I had to exorcise that.

Actually, I had grown up with few illusions about what doctrinaire politics could lead to. It was a poet, Edmund Spenser, who in the 16th century, had called for the Irish to be expelled from their lands and the English settlers to be banned from marrying or employing them, and for the complete destruction of the Irish language and Irish civilisation. But the Nazis seemed to have taken man’s inhumanity to the ultimate dimension. After this, could the old values ever have meaning again? Carol Rumens has said that on learning of the holocaust, she became an atheist. For me, such a reaction would have been to give evil the victory. It also seems illogical; belief or non-belief seems to me a personal matter, not something to be influenced by the actions of others. But we can’t turn away, pretend it didn’t happen, relegate it to history.

With hindsight I can see that in this poem, I am asking myself, Can gentleness and beauty and caring exist even here (in Auschwitz)? If they can, then this is the victory. Which is why I was so drawn to the writings of Primo Levi, and why his suicide seemed, for a while, such a negation, such an act of despair. But what right do I have to put such responsibility on another? Ultimately we have to understand and come to terms with the good and evil in all of us. Relegating the bits we don’t like to the actions of others, or of that time, is too easy and leaves us where we are, having learned nothing.

Ian     I’m particularly interested in the way your poems seem to operate in an ethical context without pointing a moral or taking an explicit moral stance. Could you say something about this in relation to Witness?

Seán     My approach to writing Witness wasn’t different from how I approach poems generally. In a way it’s in my immediate reaction to your question. When you say ‘pointing a moral’, I become uneasy. I regard the whole business of pointing as rather dangerous, zeal can so easily become tyranny, one conviction finds itself so easily in moral (even mortal) conflict with another, one identity with another. It is also a way of closing off thought; and of course, from their viewpoint every protagonist can find justification. How else can we account for the absolute conviction of the Nazis? Perhaps the poems show the danger of having such unshakeable convictions – or at least the danger of not affording the other a similar right, of believing that one conviction is superior to another. Obviously I do have a moral viewpoint and the poems are framed within it, but I like to leave them at that, so that they seek a response, not an endorsement of any I might have.

Life to me, seems a series of questions. At best the answers are provisional, partial, lead to other questions. We grow along this quest, like children, exploring and moving on. To settle for the immediate answer is to stop growing. If our response to the holocaust is to see the Nazis as inhuman monsters, then we have learned nothing. These people were often devoted sons and husbands, beloved fathers, loved and respected by their children. That is the real horror and the reason we cannot draw a line under it as ‘history’. If it teaches us anything, it must be about ourselves; like that old hymn, Where were you when they crucified my Lord?

I like to presume a sensitive, open-minded readership, which likes to think for itself. This of course, is belied by a nation that chooses as its favourite poem, Kipling’s If – a list of stiff upper lip clichés. Probably a product of an education system which values instruction and memorising above discovery, experiment and imagination. You only have to watch a toddler to see how children learn, it isn’t by being told to sit quietly and listen. Poetry is a reclaiming, a liberation of the child, the imagination, the instinct, the child’s sensitivity to atmosphere – the child’s honesty.

Ian     In a recent article [Witness: the poetry of Seán Body (Pennine Platform #50, December 2001)] I suggested that Witness is central to any discussion of your work. Do you think this is the case?

Seán     Certainly I felt comfortable with that suggestion, and in putting it in pride of place in the in my first collection, I seem to have implied something similar, at least in regard to the early poems. Certainly it is important to me, in that it deals with matters which concern me deeply, not just the suffering, but also the attitudes and philosophies which can make us deaf and blind to others. The closed mind is the real enemy.

These poems (Witness with the other two related poems) were also important in terms of my own development. Up to then, I had written a very personal poetry, these were my first attempt to move outside that. My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up; she was a very vital, very strong woman with a great turn for storytelling. To me, she was the embodiment of centuries of history, which she personalised in her stories. The oppressed, disinherited people she spoke of, lived in the hills and glens I knew. Those early stories
kindled a deep seated mistrust of social, political and cultural groupings and institutions, which I have never shaken off. (Flags, to me, proclaim divisions.) They kindled also an understanding of what it is to be a non-person, especially in your own country, to survive on your wits or not at all – the despair of desperate situations, and yet the need to hope, to look evil in the eye. She could never have acknowledged defeat. These poems were a convenient and immediate way of addressing this. Through them, I also learned how little needs to be said, if I can lock into the knowledge and experience of the reader.

Ian     I know you admire Shelley. Of contemporary poets I see affinities with Michael Longley, John Montague and R S Thomas. Could you say something about the influence of each?

Seán     I expect I am influenced by every poem I have ever enjoyed – excited by the possibilities – but I can’t point to particular influences. I love poetry, enjoy a wide range, but have never felt inclined to emulate anyone. The poet whose work first sparked my love of poetry was Shelley and he is still a favourite. But rather than being influenced by him, I am awed by the skill, beauty and power of his work. Plagiarising Ozymandias, he seems to be saying to me, ‘Look on my works pretender and despair’. Which is perhaps one reason why I took so long to commit myself to writing poetry.

Shelley shines like a rare star, the unattainable. But while I love and appreciate his poetry, it does not impact on me the way a John Montague poem can. I came to Montague late. I picked up his Collected Poems (Gallery Press 1995) in Dublin, on a short visit in 1996, and was immediately hooked. This, for me, remains the outstanding poetry collection on my shelves. A lifetime’s work arranged with hindsight into a cohesive lyrical memoir of a uniquely sensitive and gifted poet, his experiences, relationships, and his reclaiming of his history and his culture. Perhaps it is the experience of finding himself initially an outsider in Ireland (having been brought as a child from America to his ancestral and cultural home) that gives him that clear incisive vision, the ability to see from within and without at once – that absolute honesty. Apart from the lyrical beauty and skill of his poetry, the quality I most admire is its truthfulness; it speaks directly to me, I recognise its context and its imagery, its disavowals and its attachments, its flights and its rootedness. But to say that he is an influence would imply more than I can honestly claim. Perhaps it is more that related experiences have shaped our responses.

Michael Longley is also gifted lyrically and has something of the same sensibility. With him, it is tone above all that appeals to me, the quiet intensity of that gentle voice. From him I probably have learned the power of economy, of suggestion, how little needs to be said and how said quietly it is twice as effective.

Perhaps now that R S Thomas is dead – no longer the untamed dragon of Welshness and Christianity – his poetry might begin to receive its proper recognition. For me he is a giant of modern English poetry, lyrical, economic, powerful, deeply committed but not flinching from the uncomfortable (and unanswerable) questions. In a post holocaust world the Christian position can never again be (if it ever was) God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world. All is far from right and the cosy platitudes ring very hollow.

To contradict myself, Thomas has been a conscious influence, in the sense that his work has encouraged me, made me feel comfortable ploughing my own furrow; the committed Christian is not necessarily an anomaly. But in his case, despite the admiration, I can feel very uncomfortable with what I read as condescension in a number of otherwise very fine poems.

Ian     Your new poems seem to exhibit a new openness – to form and subject matter. Do you see your work moving in these directions?

Seán     I’m very aware that what I’ve said so far is with hindsight; much easier to say where my poems have gone than where they might be going, particularly as they don’t seem to move consistently in any direction. Someone recently pointed out that new poems like Daughter of Jairus and Nativity could be seen as a departure, but also fit with poems, like Witness. So I suppose all that has changed is that I have become a little more ambitious in what I’m trying to achieve. The truth is that I seldom have any idea where the next poem might come from, or indeed if there will be one, and can only hope that if one should come along, I’ll be alert and waiting.

Form is a two-edged sword. It is the carrier of the poem, but sometimes can be more interesting than the poem. Sometimes poems seem to be all technique and no substance, or to be so engrossed with form that interest is diverted from the poem’s substance. I’m against consigning poems to paper too soon. I believe they should be given their period of incubation. When this is allowed to happen, the form and the language seem to develop side by side with the ideas and imagery. By the time I come to type a first draft, the poem is usually fairly well formed.

I give a lot of attention to correct grammar and punctuation, having come under the influence of an obsessive at a very young age. But too strict an adherence, even to something like punctuation, can be the death of a poem. In some poems I have tried to dispense with punctuation, but this can make a poem unnecessarily confusing, so there is always a balancing act.

Economy has always appealed to me, I think it is a necessary quality for a poet, but in a poem like Nativity, which attempts to encapsulate 8,000 years of human suffering and aspiration in a few meditations on a single phrase, I am conscious of pushing it to the limit – even beyond the limit perhaps. This is a direction I would like my work to take – but I’ll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Ian     I certainly look forward to that. Thank you very much Seán.

Seán     And thank you, it’s been a pleasure. I would also like to thank you for the article in Pennine Platform, for its encouragement and generosity, but especially for the insight it has given me into my own work. It is very flattering to feel I have been read so closely and with such empathy. Thank you.