'It's All Staked on the Seasonal': An Interview with Luke Roberts
1
At our reading a few months ago you described some of your recent poems as ‘pop songs’. Would you care to elaborate on that description?
Whenever I give a reading I get so nervous about it I come out with all kinds of stupid shit. But the last two years have been very strange for me, equal parts grief and happiness. Equal parts? I can’t believe I just typed that, but maybe it’s true. My dad died last June, after a long period of ill-health, compounded in part by the pandemic. I managed to make it to the hospital in time, and I was with him when he died. It was totally traumatic; but it was also beautiful. I’m the least spiritual person you can imagine, but the intensity of it was almost like a high. And I think in order to make sense of the event I had to give my poems a certain shape. They started being these very boxy and compressed things, all on the left-hand margin, in three-line and four-line stanzas. Before that I’d been writing these very short poems, collected in Act Natural, which were almost like a joke about cutting everything away and seeing what you’re left with. Just a handful of phrases scattered on the page.
But my new poems aren’t like that. When someone you love dies it puts your language in a state of jeopardy: you lose a rhythm and a vocabulary and a voice. But it also produced, at least for me, a wild linguistic freedom, all this bottled-up stuff that comes pouring out. As I was writing these new poems – there are about 30 of them – I felt like I was communicating very clearly, saying exactly what I wanted to say. But at the same time there was a huge amount of sliding around I wasn’t in control of: parts of a poem might break off and start a new one, or the end of one poem might flip and displace another’s starting point. The boundaries were all very porous. And so what I thought was very obvious and pure – like a pop song – turned out to be the usual mess of mangled obscurity and awkwardness.
2
Both these poems and two sequences collected in Home Radio (2021) seem, in part, to be about diurnal and seasonal change. ‘It’s all staked on the seasonal, whatever the edge is, where poetry ends and history muscles in’, as the book’s jacket has it. Tell me more about this ‘edge’.
Again, this is the kind of thing you end up writing if, like me, you refuse to solicit blurbs for your book for reasons you don’t now wholly remember. But let’s say if you’re a Marxist you’re thinking on the one hand about modes of production – hundreds of years – and on the other you’re thinking about the working day, the hour as a unit of exploitation. If you’re interested in psychoanalysis, you’re thinking about the indeterminate temporality of childhood, the span of your life, maybe the life of your parents also. My sense is that the seasonal or diurnal – these patterns of return and change – might be where the different scales could meet. The poem would be where it all registers and lands. Maybe especially so as our experience of the seasonal begins to be permanently distorted by climate change.
The poems in Home Radio were very open to and interested in how history might erupt – I mean history from below – and how it turns alternately from horizon to missed chance and back. The earliest poems in the book are from 2010-11 and the throes and aftermath of the student movement, the Arab Spring, all of that immense optimism and struggle. What is it Baudelaire says? The heart has only one vintage, and after that to live is a curse? I could only ever address those events obliquely. I’ve never felt like a spokesperson. But I’m a fellow traveller through-and-through. I think I’m going to be stuck trying to figure out what it meant to live through all that forever.
3
Seasonal change also seems to be important in Glacial Decoys (2021), both a pandemic diary and a potted history of the 'new poetry’, written on the borderline between poetry and prose. (Section 45. begins: ‘After Brexit all the poems started looking like iPhones: bevelled edges, no hard corners.’) How did you come to write it ?
I had tried writing something like Glacial Decoys a few times before: false starts, always stalled by the sense it was somehow premature. But for several years I’d had this feeling that I’d arrived very late on at a party. The escape routes were all blocked and the air was stale and the conversations had stopped making sense, full of recrimination and bitterness. But when the pandemic arrived it was so clearly over, I felt this urgent need to get everything in order. Like Amiri Baraka says: “Somebody should get this shit down / otherwise no one will believe it.”
I was lucky because in the Department where I work we’d all been out on strike, and could organise a collective walkout for the last weeks of term. And of course I had the kind of job and stable living situation which meant I could just stay at home. But like everyone, I was going totally crazy. So my ritual involved waking up at dawn in a state of strung-out adrenaline-fuelled panic, and I would do my best to translate a poem by Andrea Zanzotto using an Italian dictionary. I did about seven of them. I retain absolutely no knowledge of Italian from this exercise.
And then I would get out all my notebooks and sit at my desk, working all day. It was very exhilarating. I started it on March 16th. It took me about three weeks to get it into shape and to figure it all out. I guess I’d already written it, in fragments and scraps from the previous ten years. I just had to find it.
4
You turn repeatedly to Sean Bonney, who emerges as a kind of hero of the book, and whom you describe as ‘the only poet from the turn of the millennium to rise and meet the long catastrophe of austerity’. Could you talk more about his importance to you as a poet ?
Sean died in November 2019, and for various reasons we didn’t have many occasions to gather collectively to mourn him. So I wanted to name him, and to insist on his importance as an act of fidelity to his memory. I’m wary of heroizing: but he was a vector for lots of different traditions and communities. People converged on him. Loads of meetings and situations that would make no sense otherwise were perfectly logical because of his presence. And above all he was very loveable: hilarious and impossible and generous.
I got to know Sean in 2008 when I moved to London to do my MA, and he and Frances Kruk seemed to be at the centre of everything. It was a great and exciting shock to my system. I’d grown up in rural Cumbria and I’d been at Cambridge for three years. The poetry scene in London was much more working-class and more immediately politically-engaged, however fitfully: I went to fundraisers for prisoners, fundraisers for Palestinian refugee camps, learned the layout of the city itself through protest marches. It was just after the financial crash. We’d go as a poet’s bloc to the G20 protests, things like that. The peace camp at Parliament Square was still there, and you could go and talk to Brian Haw, pay respect to the Tamil hunger strikers.
But with Sean it’s simple, really: he was a great poet and kept getting better. I wish he could have had another ten, twenty years. I guess I’m at the age now where people I know start dying more regularly, and of course this has been hastened by the catastrophic social damage of austerity. It’s true that literary communities are often cemented around the dead – think of Frank O’Hara, Apollinaire – and I have no doubt that Sean’s writing will continue to gather a wide and celebratory readership. But that doesn’t make it any easier; it just disperses the blow.
5
I’ve been struck by the use of personal perspective and reminiscence in your recent critical work; both in your piece on Bonney for Cambridge Literary Review (Issue 13, 2021), where it is perhaps to be expected, but also in ‘Fear of Retribution’ (2020), published last year as part of a special issue on Anna Mendelssohn (eds. Eleanor Careless and Vicky Sparrow)—who, as you say, you never actually managed to meet. Was this a conscious decision on your part ? Do you see yourself as participating in a wider turn towards the personal in (academic) literary criticism ?
I remember being at a well-meaning academic conference about ten years ago. Someone was giving a paper about two poets he knew, and who almost everyone in the room knew. And he was using their work to make what seemed to me to be a minor point about Adorno and lyric poetry. It made me feel like I was losing my mind. It was one of the creeping mystifications of the university poetry scene: as if the highest accolade would be to be addressed by your surname, in impersonal tones, by your friends and ex-lovers. I don’t think that’s what poetry is for.
My favourite critics all admit their personal culpability and partisan interests, and are open to formal experiment: Victor Shklovsky, Muriel Rukeyser, June Jordan, Eve Sedgwick. I’ve always loved William Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’, a kind of blueprint. That line towards the end rattles around in my head: “His return was cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out”.
Certainly the idea of laying bare and interrogating your situated knowledge is something I learned from feminism and queer theory. In 2013, as the student movement definitively fizzled out and I was having one of my periodic personal crises, Rob Halpern introduced a bunch of us to the work of the New Narrative writers. I loved Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds from the off. Who wouldn’t? But reading Bob Glück, in particular – and discussing it with the American poet Jackqueline Frost and my housemate at the time David Grundy – fundamentally changed my approach to writing and my understanding of writing’s relation to politics. A couple of years later Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue – another kind of narrative, encountered again in the midst of personal crisis – rearranged everything for me once more.
Of course, like everything else, the ‘personal’ as a register in literary criticism can be awful. There are plenty of books in that mode that I’ve ended up throwing across the room. But a lot of literary criticism is awful. What I’m attached to is biography and anecdote. I like diaries, notebooks, letters. Those are my favourite books to read.
6
I’d like to discuss your work on another figure who, like Mendelssohn, operated on the margins, and is only now receiving the attention their work deserves: Mark Hyatt, whose Selected Poems (2023) you recently edited with Sam Ladkin. How did you first come across Hyatt’s work, and what about it made you want to undertake the vast editorial labours involved in getting it published ?
I’m pretty sure I first heard about Mark Hyatt from J.H. Prynne. I was working on Barry MacSweeney, who co-published one of Hyatt’s posthumous chapbooks. Prynne and MacSweeney had been responsible for saving a large collection of Hyatt’s manuscripts in the run-up to his suicide in 1972. At the time – the early 2010s – there was a kind of tentative enthusiasm for the ‘lost poet’ as a type: the more obscure the better. Iliassa Sequin is another name I first heard in those years whose work I’ve ended up deeply involved with.
But I can’t take credit for the really serious editorial labour. Hyatt was illiterate until adulthood, and the manuscripts in Prynne’s possession were a really complicated maze of different hands and obscure editorial mediation. Sam Ladkin transcribed it all and went to heroic feats to grasp the central dynamics of Hyatt’s work. When I started doing some research into the queer poets of the British Poetry Revival in 2018, Sam got me involved.
Without the certification of the book, it can be hard to judge a poet’s work sometimes, especially one as idiosyncratic as Hyatt. When you’ve spent hours staring at commas trying to decide if they should stay or go, it becomes hard not to second-guess yourself . What am I doing? Why would anyone care about this? Why do I care about this? Hyatt’s work is so singular it’s easy to fall in love with; but it’s hard to know how anyone else might react. This made our work especially frantic and hilarious.
During the pandemic I worked very intensely with Sam to get the book finished, and to try to find out every possible scrap of information. It was pretty extreme. I remember a day ringing morgues in Lancashire to try and locate an autopsy report, with no luck. But we got some lucky breaks, and the attention the books attracted has meant that we know pretty much the whole story now.
It’s nerve-wracking to me, too, because there are some poets where the myth and the inaccessibility of the work is an important part of the allure. I always remember getting Joe Ceravolo’s Collected Poems and being totally disappointed. It didn’t have the same aura as the pamphlets I’d read in the library. It was as if he was a different poet entirely, the life crushed out of him in the act of preservation. So I hope the Hyatt makes sense, and keeps some of that mystery in play.
7
One final question: Who are you reading at the moment ?
It’s the end of the semester, so I’m flailing around quite happily in about fifteen different books. I started reading Osip Mandelstam, the Voronezh notebooks in two different translations. I’ve tried him before several times and got nowhere, but this time it’s clicking. I just finished Adina Hoffman’s great biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. I’ve been returning to Will Rowe and Helen Dimos’s incredible translations of Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce. Will read at the launch of Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami a couple of months ago along with Nisha Ramayya and it was totally beautiful. I’ve been slowly reading through Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems since being lucky enough to see her reading in Hackney in August last year.
I remain devoted to Ludd Gang, the magazine of the Poets Hardship Fund. The poetry of the editors – Dom Hale, Tom Crompton, Alex Marsh – is always on my mind. And I’ve been totally thrilled by the appearance of Timothy Thornton’s Shapeshifting. I ran a small press with Timothy what feels like a very long time ago and he is one of my favourite poets.
Speaking of small presses: Distance No Object, which I run with Amy Tobin, publishes five pamphlets a year. I realise nobody has any money: but they’re only slightly more expensive than an iced blueberry matcha. And they take longer to drink.
(Photo by Jazmine Linklater)
Luke Roberts is the author of Glacial Decoys (2021), Home Radio (2021) and many other works of poetry. His critical books include Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979 (2024), and his writing has appeared in Sidecar, The Recluse, Chicago Review, Ludd Gang, and elsewhere. He has recently co-edited books by Mark Hyatt and Cecilia Vicuña, and with Amy Tobin he runs the small press Distance No Object. He lives in London.
