Adam Fieled Interviews Todd Swift, author, "Rue Du Regard"
Todd Swift is often referred to as the leading Canadian poet of his generation. His latest release, "Rue Du Regard" (DC Books, 2004), features poems remarkable for their humor, poignancy, formal acuity and willingness to experiment. Swift is a hard poet to pin down; he's "all over the place" in the best po-mo tradition, even as his poems display polished surfaces and honed diction. One could characterize him (if forced)as a Modern Formalist. He has internalized the po-mo revolution, and irony-layering, skewed perspectives, tinges of frivolity are taken for granted. Yet his sensitivity to linguistic nuance adds a touch of the classic to his work, of the enduring. Swift also works as an editor at the British online journal "Nth Position", and has won a slew of prizes over the years. I caught up with him recently and picked his capacious brain, hoping to gain some insight into the contradictions that animate his work. I was amply rewarded.
Adam Fieled: You’re a poet who seems equally interested in form and experimentation. How do you balance these? Do you premeditate before you write or does this happen in the revision process, or somewhere else?
Todd Swift: I think that every poetry generation (or epoch) has its particular crisis to resolve - such as Eliot trying to work out where to move on from the late Victorians (via the French and Donne as it turns out) - or Auden figuring out that Icelandic sagas and music hall ballads would help him shift High Modernist diction away from Eliot - or Lowell, with LIFE STUDIES, navigating between the confessional bent and free verse of the Beats, his own intense personal needs, and the urge to retain Eliot's and Auden's formal intelligence; all this to say, the first decade of the 21st century has its own poetic tensions that need to be resolved. The major one is the conflict between the schools often called mainstream and experimental (traditional and innovative is another formulation). What this really boils down to is a debate about what poetry is, and does - so, it's a vital struggle for the heart and soul of poetry. The key is how a poet thinks about poetry - is it primarily a thing made for or by language? This is the form and experiment tension, then. If a poem is made by language, the text of a poem will flow as thinking or being itself does, and open up into the kind of writing that, say, Charles Bernstein or Denise Riley makes. If the poem is made for language (that is, to set words like a diamond from Cartier) then formalism will be central - the shape of the poem will be structured by traditional, often lyric, imperatives - as in the work of Larkin or George Szirtes. I am fortunate to have had both Riley and Szirtes - both master stylists in their own ways - as tutor at university.
So, I think a lot about these issues. They matter, both in terms of what you are going to write every time you do - and also, where you will publish (a secondary concern but a real one for a poet who has a career and readers). Lovely rhyming couplets about birds seen in Wessex usually enrage people like Ron Silliman - and Wendy Cope isn't going to enjoy reading a 200-page poem about bio-chemistry mainly in Sanskrit and Japanese; oddly, I like the work of both Cope and Silliman. Perhaps I am schizoid. At the base of it, I love writing poems, and reading them, and find there are too many voices, styles, manners, and ways of being a poet, that I enjoy playing with. I must have been formed by Mr. Dressup, when young - his tickle trunk was filled with so many hats and capes. I want to be prince and princess (and Prince, the musician I suppose), wizard, postman, nurse, nun, chef and dog-catcher. This is considered post-modern playfulness, but I think it harkens back to Eliot's first stage of Modernism also. Basically, I refuse to be limited in the poetic act, by fashion now or then; and I am fetishist of poetry circa 1890-1939, especially by little known and often Edwardian poets.
Sometimes the lighting of a lamp at a lonely train station in autumn can break the heart, especially if a woman steps on to the platform in a summer dress. This turns me on, this haunting of poetry, the way a poem can be like antique furniture as burnished as the day it was bought. I digress. I write poems as they please me. I write often out of words, phrases or images that come to me. And I revise a great deal afterwards. I think my aim is to combine form and experiment, finally, by allowing traces of lyric tradition to skiter across very contemporary surfaces, or sometimes, inversely, present seemingly new surfaces troubled by issues and concerns old as the hills, the heart. I like to think through, past and back to form, as one aspect of language then, but also consider mood and image (in a cinematic way); my poems are often layered places, where moments from many sorts of poem and times meet, embrace, and part, like on the platform in 1917. This may be a dandy's poetics of eros, or an “erotics of poetry”.
AF: Fair enough. Perhaps not coincidentally, your work displays a keen awareness of popular culture— movies, popular music, etc. Do you find it useful to keep boundaries between “high” and “low” art in place, or do you buy more into the po-mo, egalitarian approach? Would you or could you, for instance, compare Dylan and Lowell, or Lennon and Auden?
TS: I have no problem enjoying Bob Dylan and Robert Lowell, on their own terms. I don't see this as a matter of high and low, but rather, song-craft and poetry. But I take your point. Can one compare KILL BILL to THE WASTE LAND? Well, yes - both were morally shocking examples of knowing pastiche that expressed considerable mastery of a genre. I enjoy alternative and popular as well as classic(al) music, writing, film and so on. Naturally, I'd like to think I prefer the best of each category, though, and sometimes even the categories blend. In terms of poetry, I'm aware that levels of diction need to be kept separate at times, and handled with care, like the famed duo nitro and glycerine. One doesn't want to mix Geoffrey Hill and HILL STREET BLUES, really - the pastiche value would soon be exhausted. In fact, although I have long advocated a fusion of marginal poetries (B-poetry, which is trash, indie, street or slam poetry, mostly, etc.,) with more established forms, I do think this should be done with admiration and love of what can be achieved when diction is pure. Houseman is delightful.
R.S. Thomas is bracingly austere and high-minded. Mindless barging in to an Anglican linguistic world simply to jazz it up is not poetically satisfying. My goal is not to disrupt texts or tenors or textures, but savor them - as opposed to simply sneering when they are not theoretically advanced or suitably French. I recently had a fascinating conversation with A. Alvarez, the editor of seminal 60s anthology THE NEW POETRY which championed Plath as a genius. He can't find anything to appreciate in Ginsberg, whereas I can. Yet he was one of the first to claim that Lowell was a great writer. His ear is strong. But some levels don't interest him. As I get older, I find myself having more time for levels in art that are high-minded, even sublime, in the sense that would have moved Wallace Stevens. One of the elements of my poetry that I regret sometimes is that my cluttered soul yields much impure ore. My poems may be true to the age, but are rarely as refined as, say, contemporary high-diction practitioners like Alice Oswald.
AF: I notice that you like to write about “place”, and it seems to be a thread running through your work. How is it that places (rather than, for instance, specific people) engage you, emotionally and aesthetically? Has travel been an essential element in your artistic development?
TS: I do write a great deal about place - as you say often instead of people (although this is not in fact the case as I write many love poems, but often not to clearly identifiable persons, as well as family poems) - and I am glad you didn't say travel poems. I do travel - I am an expat writer and have lived in Budapest, Paris and now London for the better part of a decade now - but it isn't really the places, or histories, per se, that excite my interest. Travel to, and through, a place, constitutes a series of complex motions and emotions which create an objective correlative for how existence itself seems to me - sun-dappled, fragmentary, exquisite, threatened, fragile, dangerous, erotic, different, rapid, elusive, and ultimately lost. In fact, I often write about figures in places - sometimes young women or men - whose identity is rather open-ended. My writing is based on the idea of the lyric, or the three-minute power-pop song - it should recall great emotion, capture a moment, a face, a scent, a mood, a trace. I'd say snapshots, but something much more rushing than that, and sensuous. Of course, there is a meta-narrative here: I am also writing about the experience of writing (poems) itself - which is as elusive as any holiday in Croatia, Moscow or Istanbul. The act of making a particular poem is the act of making a memory. How does this cohere, add up? It coheres into a canonized career, or it ends in forgotten postcards, tossed out or given to a charity shop upon one's one demise. To me, the angst of the poet is that her eloquence is up against a great indifference - as if beautiful women diving in to the sea off the rocks on Hydra were ignored. Would it matter? No, but Wallace Stevens saw the genius singing by the sea, and we saw him. His travels were of the mind mainly. Mine are both of the body and mind, fused in the poems.
AF: Beyond being a poet, you’ve written for the stage and are an editor at “Nth Position”. Do you find “multi-tasking” stimulating or annoying? Do you think that it’s a necessary skill in today’s poetry world?
TS: In terms of being a necessary skill (multi-tasking, as you say, or really, wearing hats of editor, activist, impresario) for being a poet: no. For being an engaged poet who gives as much back to the community as he takes: yes. I confess to having a hero or two, and one of them is Ezra Pound. Whatever he lacked in political sensitivity he made up for (almost) in terms of mentoring ability. I have taken a page from his book, and tried to discover and then nurture talent where I find it. This might seem like a basic and self-evident truth, that poets should do no harm, and in fact assist each other in the face of a mostly disengaged prosaic world. Sadly, most poets contribute to their own misery, by establishing a poetry world microcosm which is spiteful, vicious, small-minded, and, most oddly, intolerant. My experience has been, in the UK (but elsewhere too) that poets - especially poets who are editors - make poor listeners and readers. Rather than constantly casting the net wide, to catch new voices and talents, they stick close to their coteries. I won't name and shame, but there are several dozen superb poets, from India to New Zealand, Canada to South Africa, unknown and unpublished in the UK, who should be. On the other hand, very few Americans read British or Canadian poets. My work as editor and anthologist, and activist, while having nothing to do with the practice of writing, does have something to do with the practice of reading (surely publishing should be a branch of reading). And reading is a kind of writing. So: I help my fellow poets, and I learn new ways of making poems happen, in the process.
AF: Speaking of making things happen…how would you like to weigh in on the print vs. online publishing debate? You’ve done a lot of both— do you have a preference or a strong feeling either way? Does the success of a journal like “Jacket” surprise you?
TS: I am not surprised when a well-edited, informed, innovative and open-minded online journal like Jacket does well (whatever doing well in poetry means - I suppose, receives critical respect and a wide and/ or influential readership); Nthposition, the journal which I edit poetry for, is also a highly popular online presence, among certain kinds of writers and readers. What surprises me is actually how few poets use the Internet to either publish poets they admire, to submit their own new work, or to scout for new or familiar talents.
It is still, and somewhat correctly, assumed to be an uneven landscape, but, surely, editors that gain trust over time on the net should be accorded respect when it is due - as with John Tranter, and a few others. What mars the experience, for me, is the way some so-called editors use their virtual "power" to flame on or out, and attack submissions, or fellow poets (this often on blogs too) in ways that seem a tad grandiose or downright immature. The Internet is a bit like heady wine or a little learning - it leads people to act in ways that magnify their weaknesses, and often undermines their strengths. What Internet poetry publishing does (see the Nthposition e-books 100 Poets Against The War, etc.) is create large global communities quickly, and disseminate work ubiquitously and immediately, which, for short bursts of time, is powerful.
More interestingly, it allows for the creation of a demi-monde, a true Beat-like under-generation of writers who, while utterly ignored by mainstream publishing, swim like blind fish a thousand feet below the surface of books and thrive. One day these weird leviathans may rise, if they can get their act together, and overthrow the market-driven tyranny of so much mediocre published work today.
AF: I’d like to end on a light note. I’ve noted that you’re a big fan of Simple Minds. We, in the States, don’t know too much about them. Would you talk a little bit about them, how you discovered them and why they still resonate for you?
TS: I should say that I love music, especially popular and indie music between 1975-1995. Simple MInds were the band that most moved me when I was a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so - albums like SISTER FEELINGS CALL, SONS AND FASCINATION and then their masterpiece, NEW GOLD DREAM, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work - before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post-"Don't You (Forget About Me)" their number one American hit - was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent - in otherwords, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).
Songs like "70 Cities as Love Brings The Fall", "Wonderful in Young Life", "Careful in Career", "The American" and of course "Love Song" were, to me, the epitome of poetry - shimmering, cosmopolitain, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy - Jim Kerr's voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from 20-25 years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran and Duran and Tears for Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (LETTERS FROM PRISON being my favourite) and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me.
This was when the spring came like thunder and the ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn't colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.
Check out Todd's wonderful blog here
Adam Fieled: You’re a poet who seems equally interested in form and experimentation. How do you balance these? Do you premeditate before you write or does this happen in the revision process, or somewhere else?
Todd Swift: I think that every poetry generation (or epoch) has its particular crisis to resolve - such as Eliot trying to work out where to move on from the late Victorians (via the French and Donne as it turns out) - or Auden figuring out that Icelandic sagas and music hall ballads would help him shift High Modernist diction away from Eliot - or Lowell, with LIFE STUDIES, navigating between the confessional bent and free verse of the Beats, his own intense personal needs, and the urge to retain Eliot's and Auden's formal intelligence; all this to say, the first decade of the 21st century has its own poetic tensions that need to be resolved. The major one is the conflict between the schools often called mainstream and experimental (traditional and innovative is another formulation). What this really boils down to is a debate about what poetry is, and does - so, it's a vital struggle for the heart and soul of poetry. The key is how a poet thinks about poetry - is it primarily a thing made for or by language? This is the form and experiment tension, then. If a poem is made by language, the text of a poem will flow as thinking or being itself does, and open up into the kind of writing that, say, Charles Bernstein or Denise Riley makes. If the poem is made for language (that is, to set words like a diamond from Cartier) then formalism will be central - the shape of the poem will be structured by traditional, often lyric, imperatives - as in the work of Larkin or George Szirtes. I am fortunate to have had both Riley and Szirtes - both master stylists in their own ways - as tutor at university.
So, I think a lot about these issues. They matter, both in terms of what you are going to write every time you do - and also, where you will publish (a secondary concern but a real one for a poet who has a career and readers). Lovely rhyming couplets about birds seen in Wessex usually enrage people like Ron Silliman - and Wendy Cope isn't going to enjoy reading a 200-page poem about bio-chemistry mainly in Sanskrit and Japanese; oddly, I like the work of both Cope and Silliman. Perhaps I am schizoid. At the base of it, I love writing poems, and reading them, and find there are too many voices, styles, manners, and ways of being a poet, that I enjoy playing with. I must have been formed by Mr. Dressup, when young - his tickle trunk was filled with so many hats and capes. I want to be prince and princess (and Prince, the musician I suppose), wizard, postman, nurse, nun, chef and dog-catcher. This is considered post-modern playfulness, but I think it harkens back to Eliot's first stage of Modernism also. Basically, I refuse to be limited in the poetic act, by fashion now or then; and I am fetishist of poetry circa 1890-1939, especially by little known and often Edwardian poets.
Sometimes the lighting of a lamp at a lonely train station in autumn can break the heart, especially if a woman steps on to the platform in a summer dress. This turns me on, this haunting of poetry, the way a poem can be like antique furniture as burnished as the day it was bought. I digress. I write poems as they please me. I write often out of words, phrases or images that come to me. And I revise a great deal afterwards. I think my aim is to combine form and experiment, finally, by allowing traces of lyric tradition to skiter across very contemporary surfaces, or sometimes, inversely, present seemingly new surfaces troubled by issues and concerns old as the hills, the heart. I like to think through, past and back to form, as one aspect of language then, but also consider mood and image (in a cinematic way); my poems are often layered places, where moments from many sorts of poem and times meet, embrace, and part, like on the platform in 1917. This may be a dandy's poetics of eros, or an “erotics of poetry”.
AF: Fair enough. Perhaps not coincidentally, your work displays a keen awareness of popular culture— movies, popular music, etc. Do you find it useful to keep boundaries between “high” and “low” art in place, or do you buy more into the po-mo, egalitarian approach? Would you or could you, for instance, compare Dylan and Lowell, or Lennon and Auden?
TS: I have no problem enjoying Bob Dylan and Robert Lowell, on their own terms. I don't see this as a matter of high and low, but rather, song-craft and poetry. But I take your point. Can one compare KILL BILL to THE WASTE LAND? Well, yes - both were morally shocking examples of knowing pastiche that expressed considerable mastery of a genre. I enjoy alternative and popular as well as classic(al) music, writing, film and so on. Naturally, I'd like to think I prefer the best of each category, though, and sometimes even the categories blend. In terms of poetry, I'm aware that levels of diction need to be kept separate at times, and handled with care, like the famed duo nitro and glycerine. One doesn't want to mix Geoffrey Hill and HILL STREET BLUES, really - the pastiche value would soon be exhausted. In fact, although I have long advocated a fusion of marginal poetries (B-poetry, which is trash, indie, street or slam poetry, mostly, etc.,) with more established forms, I do think this should be done with admiration and love of what can be achieved when diction is pure. Houseman is delightful.
R.S. Thomas is bracingly austere and high-minded. Mindless barging in to an Anglican linguistic world simply to jazz it up is not poetically satisfying. My goal is not to disrupt texts or tenors or textures, but savor them - as opposed to simply sneering when they are not theoretically advanced or suitably French. I recently had a fascinating conversation with A. Alvarez, the editor of seminal 60s anthology THE NEW POETRY which championed Plath as a genius. He can't find anything to appreciate in Ginsberg, whereas I can. Yet he was one of the first to claim that Lowell was a great writer. His ear is strong. But some levels don't interest him. As I get older, I find myself having more time for levels in art that are high-minded, even sublime, in the sense that would have moved Wallace Stevens. One of the elements of my poetry that I regret sometimes is that my cluttered soul yields much impure ore. My poems may be true to the age, but are rarely as refined as, say, contemporary high-diction practitioners like Alice Oswald.
AF: I notice that you like to write about “place”, and it seems to be a thread running through your work. How is it that places (rather than, for instance, specific people) engage you, emotionally and aesthetically? Has travel been an essential element in your artistic development?
TS: I do write a great deal about place - as you say often instead of people (although this is not in fact the case as I write many love poems, but often not to clearly identifiable persons, as well as family poems) - and I am glad you didn't say travel poems. I do travel - I am an expat writer and have lived in Budapest, Paris and now London for the better part of a decade now - but it isn't really the places, or histories, per se, that excite my interest. Travel to, and through, a place, constitutes a series of complex motions and emotions which create an objective correlative for how existence itself seems to me - sun-dappled, fragmentary, exquisite, threatened, fragile, dangerous, erotic, different, rapid, elusive, and ultimately lost. In fact, I often write about figures in places - sometimes young women or men - whose identity is rather open-ended. My writing is based on the idea of the lyric, or the three-minute power-pop song - it should recall great emotion, capture a moment, a face, a scent, a mood, a trace. I'd say snapshots, but something much more rushing than that, and sensuous. Of course, there is a meta-narrative here: I am also writing about the experience of writing (poems) itself - which is as elusive as any holiday in Croatia, Moscow or Istanbul. The act of making a particular poem is the act of making a memory. How does this cohere, add up? It coheres into a canonized career, or it ends in forgotten postcards, tossed out or given to a charity shop upon one's one demise. To me, the angst of the poet is that her eloquence is up against a great indifference - as if beautiful women diving in to the sea off the rocks on Hydra were ignored. Would it matter? No, but Wallace Stevens saw the genius singing by the sea, and we saw him. His travels were of the mind mainly. Mine are both of the body and mind, fused in the poems.
AF: Beyond being a poet, you’ve written for the stage and are an editor at “Nth Position”. Do you find “multi-tasking” stimulating or annoying? Do you think that it’s a necessary skill in today’s poetry world?
TS: In terms of being a necessary skill (multi-tasking, as you say, or really, wearing hats of editor, activist, impresario) for being a poet: no. For being an engaged poet who gives as much back to the community as he takes: yes. I confess to having a hero or two, and one of them is Ezra Pound. Whatever he lacked in political sensitivity he made up for (almost) in terms of mentoring ability. I have taken a page from his book, and tried to discover and then nurture talent where I find it. This might seem like a basic and self-evident truth, that poets should do no harm, and in fact assist each other in the face of a mostly disengaged prosaic world. Sadly, most poets contribute to their own misery, by establishing a poetry world microcosm which is spiteful, vicious, small-minded, and, most oddly, intolerant. My experience has been, in the UK (but elsewhere too) that poets - especially poets who are editors - make poor listeners and readers. Rather than constantly casting the net wide, to catch new voices and talents, they stick close to their coteries. I won't name and shame, but there are several dozen superb poets, from India to New Zealand, Canada to South Africa, unknown and unpublished in the UK, who should be. On the other hand, very few Americans read British or Canadian poets. My work as editor and anthologist, and activist, while having nothing to do with the practice of writing, does have something to do with the practice of reading (surely publishing should be a branch of reading). And reading is a kind of writing. So: I help my fellow poets, and I learn new ways of making poems happen, in the process.
AF: Speaking of making things happen…how would you like to weigh in on the print vs. online publishing debate? You’ve done a lot of both— do you have a preference or a strong feeling either way? Does the success of a journal like “Jacket” surprise you?
TS: I am not surprised when a well-edited, informed, innovative and open-minded online journal like Jacket does well (whatever doing well in poetry means - I suppose, receives critical respect and a wide and/ or influential readership); Nthposition, the journal which I edit poetry for, is also a highly popular online presence, among certain kinds of writers and readers. What surprises me is actually how few poets use the Internet to either publish poets they admire, to submit their own new work, or to scout for new or familiar talents.
It is still, and somewhat correctly, assumed to be an uneven landscape, but, surely, editors that gain trust over time on the net should be accorded respect when it is due - as with John Tranter, and a few others. What mars the experience, for me, is the way some so-called editors use their virtual "power" to flame on or out, and attack submissions, or fellow poets (this often on blogs too) in ways that seem a tad grandiose or downright immature. The Internet is a bit like heady wine or a little learning - it leads people to act in ways that magnify their weaknesses, and often undermines their strengths. What Internet poetry publishing does (see the Nthposition e-books 100 Poets Against The War, etc.) is create large global communities quickly, and disseminate work ubiquitously and immediately, which, for short bursts of time, is powerful.
More interestingly, it allows for the creation of a demi-monde, a true Beat-like under-generation of writers who, while utterly ignored by mainstream publishing, swim like blind fish a thousand feet below the surface of books and thrive. One day these weird leviathans may rise, if they can get their act together, and overthrow the market-driven tyranny of so much mediocre published work today.
AF: I’d like to end on a light note. I’ve noted that you’re a big fan of Simple Minds. We, in the States, don’t know too much about them. Would you talk a little bit about them, how you discovered them and why they still resonate for you?
TS: I should say that I love music, especially popular and indie music between 1975-1995. Simple MInds were the band that most moved me when I was a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so - albums like SISTER FEELINGS CALL, SONS AND FASCINATION and then their masterpiece, NEW GOLD DREAM, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work - before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post-"Don't You (Forget About Me)" their number one American hit - was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent - in otherwords, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).
Songs like "70 Cities as Love Brings The Fall", "Wonderful in Young Life", "Careful in Career", "The American" and of course "Love Song" were, to me, the epitome of poetry - shimmering, cosmopolitain, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy - Jim Kerr's voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from 20-25 years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran and Duran and Tears for Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (LETTERS FROM PRISON being my favourite) and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me.
This was when the spring came like thunder and the ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn't colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.
Check out Todd's wonderful blog here
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