Caroline Bird (who was interviewed in September) talks with Luke Kennard, a Birmingham-based writer and academic. His three collections, The Solex Brothers, The Harbour Beyond the Movie and The Migraine Hotel, are published by Salt. This interview is published in two parts — part 2 of the interview will be published tomorrow.
C: You seem to me to have this very particular vision of the world in which daily hypocrisies are viciously and comically mocked, yet still the world remains a fascinating, often-miraculous place for the people in your poems. Also, the speaker seems to allow the world to hurt him continually due to a frustrated love for it. Do you find that by putting the troubles of daily life inside your own surrealist world it becomes more hopeful than a straightforward naturalistic account of events? Or do daily problems become tragedies when you place them in a surreal world?
L: That's an annoyingly good question. This is going to take ages, isn't it? I think there has to be an essential restraint in a surreal world, or in a world created by a surreal narrative, so that it operates under its own logic. What's at stake for the narrator has to be as recognisable as it is in something ultimately prescriptive like an action movie screenplay. I think daily problems are tragedies. I don't think we know what our words and actions mean yet. There's too many of them. But I think poetry always gives us more than a straightforward account of events, even if it's just via the isolation of that straightforward account. You've cut it out of the surrounding events and stimuli and we're supposed to approach it as a poem, which is already something other than reality; it's already something kind of surreal. And I think you can do that in a vanilla way, or you can think, well, I'm already putting this on a plinth, so why not make it some kind of Baroque monstrosity based on the initial thing I carved out. I think I've got lost between ice cream and plinths. Anyway, I guess some people find that intensely irritating and some people find it delightful. But it still comes from the same place - the same daily matter of having a mind and trying to do stuff with it, even when it seems so arbitrary.
I guess the way I try to retain the sense of wonder is through the imagination, through the more deliberately surreal elements, sure, but surreal elements which I hope are anchored to the everyday - for the reader as well as for me. There are times when it's probably too self-referential for some people's palates, but I'm always a little confused by that. Don't these people live in the same world, flooded by the same hydra-like arguments and counter-arguments afforded us by something like the internet? I think we underrate how unique a curse that is, historically speaking. So in 'The Six Times My Heart Broke' the fact that the narrator is ultimately unable to help someone, specifically to help them overcome their artistic insecurity, is supposed to be a genuine thing, a genuinely sad thing, but its undercut by the ridiculous way in which he's unable to speak: he swallowed a duck-call while swimming in a crater created by the war he unwittingly started. And if you like and trust my work you're not just going to read that as a daft concatenation of silly events and images. The whole poem's absurdly stupid, but it's supposed to hit its target, too, and it does that through that absurd stupidity. I mean, for goodness' sake, I'm not just going to write, 'Isn't it sad that we find it hard to really help one another?' Craters full of rain water are real. The terrorist's horror at the decadence of conceptual art is real. Duck-calls are real. These things are in the world, you know? Just like magpies and lakes. I'm a nature poet, really. So the poem, pretty obviously in my opinion, is about our inability to help one another and to communicate honestly, especially in something like art where we're a little uncomfortable admitting just how much we care. Are you going to get anywhere trying to argue your case in an online forum, for conceptual art in this poem's case? No. Because if you're bothering to enter the so-called debate you're already limiting yours and everyone else's intellectual capacity by point-scoring - accruing acolytes and detractors like powerups in a computer game. All you're doing is making shadow puppets with your own thoughts, because the argument automatically turns into an argument about arguing, and the more reasonable and measured you try to sound in your responses, the more of a condescending prick you actually do sound. Look at any godforsaken comments stream after even the most innocuous news story. It's the Tower of fucking Babel. All you're going to do is quack, having accidentally swallowed a duck-call. Gosh, when I put it like that even I find it annoying. I really hate my work sometimes.
I heard an old man on the train yesterday say into his phone, 'We're really just children with bank accounts.' And he was saying it in this slightly smug voice; he was obviously giving advice to the person on the other end of the line, but he definitely wanted me and the other people near him on the train to hear it, too (which is the sort of way I communicate when I'm drunk - at my most arrogant and insecure) but that in itself actually bears out his thesis pretty well, right? All we have, really, is the mess we create. A few years ago I read this long article by a writer agonising over the publication of a poem in a reasonably high-profile forum which obliquely insulted another writer he used to be friends with. He'd been trying to get a poem in the particular place - it was the Times Literary Supplement, probably - for years, decades even, and the one they took from him was a poem that caused him to stay up all night agonising over what suddenly seemed like a horrible betrayal of this friend, who probably wouldn't have read the poem and probably wouldn't have cared if he had, but eventually he (the writer) called the paper in question and asked them not to publish the poem, which they didn't. And the whole article was hilariously funny, sort of unwittingly, and in kind of a painful way. The tone was so monumentally self-absorbed it could have been a pastiche of writerly self-regard, but it was very human, too, to get so worked up about it. To me the parody is often indistinguishable from the reality. So art is such a beautiful, elevating thing, but it's a driving, obsessing thing (we want desperately for the beauty and elevation to be apparent to everyone and for them to say well done, well done, to us, which in itself is neither beautiful nor elevating desire) and it's actually as likely to turn us inward, to make us this clown of our own creation. A clown who's too depressed to even work on his plate spinning and pie throwing. Actually I guess we all turn into that, no matter what.
I've just read a moderately damning review of The Migraine Hotel, so I'm in a funny mood to be answering this question. Or indeed any question other than, 'Would you like a cup of tea? No? Would you like to stop chewing that ornament and change out of your dressing gown?'
C: There is a poem written by James Tate called 'I Take Back All My Kisses,' where the first line is 'They got me because if the forest has no end I'll go naked.' To me, this doesn't feel like a surreal thing to say. I've just always felt like I understood that line. How do you enjoy a sense of meaning from visual images? Do you even look for meaning? And has that world always made sense to you, since you were a child?
L: Yeah! Again, I think there's an assumption in this country that (if you choose the aesthetic I've chosen) that you're just saying haphazard 'surreal' stuff, that the whole point is being spontaneously weird which, well, it just isn't. The most fist-gnawingly annoying, and most frequent, critical misreading is that you're trying to shock or unsettle the reader. Which gives the critic carte-blanche to start making borderline ad hominem attacks about the intentions they've ascribed to you because they don't get the work. So I want it on the record that neither my grandmother nor my little brother is shocked by my work, and neither would I want them to be. Nor anyone elses' grandmother or little brother. In fact the only people who affect to be shocked by it are poetry critics.
I do look for meaning, we all do when reading a poem, but it's a different kind of meaning to the kind we look for in prose, I guess. Take a poem of almost hallucinatory clarity like Lowell's 'Skunk Hour' - what does it actually mean? Does it mean a clinically depressed man looking at the hills, thinking about driving and then describing some skunks in a bin? That's like saying a painting means paint. I think America's advantage is Wallace Stevens. You know, "A poem must resist the intelligence / almost successfully." There's such a weird, brilliant generosity to that phrase. We got kind of lost in Eliot's secondary citations, as if that was the point of Eliot, and then we used them as a big Elitism stick to beat Eliot with. Sometimes it feels like we've lost a lot of ambition and imagination. We ran with the New Criticism thing that a poem should be a small, perfectible object. Well, sure, but that doesn't mean it has to be a porcelain ballerina with glitter tears.
C: Would you call yourself a love poet?
L: Absolutely. There's a Lee Harwood poem where he talks about the landscape and then says, almost irritably, "This isn't nature poetry." In interview he talks about how stupid it is to carve the world up into cateogries and call nature poetry some sub-section of literature. A tree is part of the world as much as a bowling alley. More recently Tom Chivers in How to Build a City kind of comes from the opposite direction, writing about London with this kind of fearless concentration on the adverts just as much as the architecture. (After spending just a week in a retreat a few years ago it was the adverts, when I got back to the city, that really dominated and horrified me, their shrieking prevalence). And at one point he says: "I don't care what you think / this is landscape." And I guess the way I hijack and modulate both of those excellent thoughts is to apply them to the imagination, to our minds, to every thought, because every thought matters, even if it seems kind of absurd. And that's my landscape. It's not postmodernist or surrealist poetry, it's just part of the world. And it seems silly to divide that from love. I guess the sense of wonder in my work comes from the fact that we love eachother in spite of all this bullshit. In spite of being broken and almost incapable of a single, unselfconscious act of kindness. Like that Rushdie thing about the only word that can't feature in a riddle to which the answer is 'knife' (it's 'knife', obviously). So, again, I get so cross when a critic accuses me of wanting to "shock" some imaginary Daily Mail kind of audience. What they should be accusing me of is being a sentimental old moralist.
C: Tony Harrison wrote in a recent article that 'poetry has to be the whole venture of my life' and he collects statues of famous poets along with thousands of their books. In your work, you often mock the role of a poet, focusing on the potential delusion and vanity of the poet as a social character - for instance, for describing seagulls as 'tiny flying cathedrals' (from 'The Murderer.') What's your version of Tony Harrison's statement about what poetry means to your life and the lives of others?
L: I think someone like Harrison can say things like that without it sounding hubristic because he's already kind of a legend. And his work is so much about that - that cultural struggle, class expectation, that kind of thing. So the Romantic notion of, I don't know, giving yourself to poetry, martyring yourself for poetry, for something other people might think ridiculous, feels genuine.
I think someone of my generation saying it would feel more like a pose. Is that because that sort of struggle was over by the time I was doing my English Lit A-level and starting to really read contemporary poetry? I don't know. The New Poetry was (and still is) an admirably catholic textbook, so I'd be raving about Frank Kuppner and John Ash in lessons and most of my contemporaries were like, 'Huh? It's nonsense.' It makes me kind of well-up that I could one day be one of the writers that the weird kid at secondary school likes in an anthology. Okay, we didn't have anyone advocating Projectionism or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, so it's not that catholic, although I've always felt there's something quite Protestant about experimental poetry anyway. It's not as if poetry looked like this accessible career path or anything horrible like that, but it certainly looked like something strange and interesting, something you might want to write. Also I worked in this brilliant second-hand bookshop which had a massive contemporary poetry section due to poetry publishers' habit of sending out far too many promo copies to places which aren't going to review them. So this was just a little second-hand shop in the south west, but we tended to have all the new stuff from Faber, Cape, Carcanet, just stacked alongside the small press and experimental stuff. I didn't draw a distinction, I guess, which was healthy. You know, it was a much better poetry section than you'd ever find in a big city bookshop, even back then. (This was basically just pre-Amazon, more or less pre-internet). And reading John Ash got me into a whole lot of American stuff, which is where I draw most of my energy from to this day.
I guess I have specific targets in mind, including myself, when I'm writing about delusion, writerly delusion. I hate the tendency to elevate the poet whereby everything they touch is intrinsically interesting, from their marriage to their holidays to what they think about what they've just seen on the 10'o'clock news. God, you know, I'm always telling my students to focus on the specifics, to write about the minutiae, but not like that. The sense of entitlement, I guess. I mean for me that's what Nabokov's Pale Fire is all about. John Shade writing a whole canto about how difficult he finds it to shave in the bath. I mean it's a fucking awful poem, but it's still more fun to read, even without the notes, than contemporary verse at its most complacent. It's difficult to be sincere. If you don't find it difficult, maybe you're not really being sincere. I'm quite happy with "delusion and vanity have to be the sole ventures of my life", actually.
A friend of mine once started getting these weird tension headaches that made him feel like he was wearing a really tight hat all the time. He'd never worn a hat in his life and, as you can imagine, the sensation drove him totally crazy. To be honest it made him pretty difficult to be around and most of us started avoiding him, which is mean, but there you go. Then one day I ran into him in town and he was wearing a really small hat - which was visibly too tight for his head. He could see my consternation and explained that now he actually did wear a small hat all the time, the sensation of wearing a small all the time hat didn't bother him anymore. And that pretty much sums up my modus operandi. Nobody asked for it, it serves no purpose, but by god, it exists. I hate it when writers say they write because they have to (that's as maybe, but nobody's forcing them to publish). But poetry is the actual small hat to my sensation of constantly wearing a small hat; so in that sense I need it.
C: How important to you is the ability to make people laugh and to be funny on the page?
L: I refuse to answer that question. It would reveal too much about my personality and paint me in an unflattering light before people whose opinions are of professional significance to me.
