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 1 was published yesterday.
C: You combine being a poet with being a critic and an academic, yet a lot of your poetry seems to struggle with its attitude towards academics and the sometimes arrogance and meaninglessness that creep into the academic world ('We'll ask you to defend yourself/ Using words we already hold as meaningless') Are the jobs complimentary or are they antagonistic?
L: I guess I've always felt the old axe that academia destroys anything beautiful about a work of art to be lazy thinking, a shorthand for a more general anti-intellectualism, especially now that literary theory takes its place alongside several other methods of inquiry. But I suppose the elevated status of the poet can be applied to academia as well, and I think satire should always start with yourself before you dare to turn it outwards. All of the academics I've worked alongside have been inspiring people, in love with their subjects, even if that love is occasionally a frustrating thing. So I guess my ire is directed more towards a slightly blasé relativism symptomatic of certain disciplines. A committed relativist is always pretty good at taking umbrage when criticised; he's an absolutist about some things, you know?
C: We tend to think of Americans as conservative and lacking irony and yet there is a massive love and understanding for surrealist poetry there. What's is it about the British psyche that people are still uncomfortable with lack of restraint and surface logic?
L: It's hilarious that people still think that about American culture. And the moment you question them about it, if they're even borderline literate, they start listing American films and TV shows and novels and short story collections and poetry collections they love, as if they're the exception, and three hours later they're still going, but still trying to pass off this encyclopaedia of the American Writer's Sophisticated Grasp of Irony and Humour as an exception. It's kind of a 'What have the Romans done for us?' moment. It's pretty obvious from our mainstream poetry journals who the conservative ones are in the equation. But I'm not really sure it's representative of the British psyche or British popular culture; it's representative of something narrow, guarded and threatened; views held by people who think the barbarians are at the gate, when the gate is actually the last remaining bit of a crumbled wall on a National Trust funded property. And they're sitting in the gift shop drinking Earl Gray. I think most readers would prefer a little more variety, at the very least. But then we're still babies in terms of popular culture. Look at how we've killed a form like the short story which, in the states, continues to totally thrive, as a high-literary but ultimately popular art form. Short stories are published in Esquire and Playboy, for goodnesss sake! The result: writers can publish a collection of literary short stories as their first book and it can be a commercial success. I've just been reading Wells Tower's first collection - it's stunning. The British equivalents of these magazines are designed to prop on your chest and masturbate over. Or under. 'Over' metaphorically. And we're the ones protecting high culture. Right.
I've just re-read this answer. Actually I quite like Earl Gray. I intended nothing against tea.
C: You were the youngest poet ever to be short-listed for the Forward Prize for best collection, and you've been massively successful at an early age. What do you think is the importance of young poets, under thirty, being published and read? Do you think a young generation is actually making itself heard in the world of published poetry? Do you think age makes a difference?
L: It's a non-debate. We underrate age and wisdom in our culture, that's more or less beyond argument, I think, so I can understand why some people look on in horror at poetry promotion, maybe feeling that it's being turned into another empty, fashionable, minor wing of pop culture, and talk about the ridiculous number of prizes for young poets when there supposedly aren't any for older poets. But on the other hand I guess I feel that we all spend more or less the same amount of time being young, so what the hell is there to be jealous about? We're all going to die in a few decades anyway, and if it makes you feel any better the young are mostly spending their youths feeling angsty and drinking too much, contemplating a future of debt, spirtual isolation and maybe being able to afford the deposit for their first flats in their early 60s, thanks to your generation's Monopoly board fantasies and kicking the free university education ladder out behind you and shoring up the debilitating ailments which will destroy our health when we're your age. Maybe that has something to do with our underrating age and wisdom, I don't know. We're feeling a little bitter. I mean, there's a tradition of poets starting to publish young, so I don't think it's anything new. You only need to look at the number of excellent writers who've emerged from something like the Foyle Younger Poets awards to see how important that early encouragement and mentoring is. I've recently been totally delighted by Emily Berry's
The Tall Lighthouse pamphlet, and Jack Underwood and Sam Riviere's pamphlets from the new Faber series. There are too many to name here, I guess, but those are three that come immediately to mind as making me murderously jealous at how good they are.
C: In your author descriptions in both The Solex Brothers and The Migraine Hotel, you describe yourself as 'quite tall.' Do you think, with future success, you'll gain the confidence to remove the word 'quite'?
L: 5'8" up to but not including 6'2" is quite tall, 6'2" to 6'4" is tall enough to comment on and any taller is really tall. I'm almost 6'2". That said, tallness has little to do with height and a lot to do with the way you carry yourself, so maybe.
Previously: Rachel Trezise talks with Caroline Bird
