Interviewed by Lauren Winchester and David Yezzi
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Interviewed by Lauren Winchester and David Yezzi
On April 8, 2016, Andrew Motion spoke with The Hopkins Review’s Lauren Winchester and David Yezzi at his home in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. He talked about his latest work, the Poetry Archive, and his recent move to the United States. Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009, he is currently a Homewood Professor of the Arts at John Hopkins.
The title of your forthcoming selected poems is Coming In to Land (Ecco, January 2017), but I understand that your first idea for the title was English Elegies. They both strike me as phrases that embrace the past but also make a valediction.
Well, they do. They both have that element of saying goodbye to England at a personal level, but also of saying goodbye to certain ideas of Englishness. “English Elegies,” incidentally, was one of the phrases that Wilfred Owen was considering using for the title of his book of poems, had he lived to see it.
I was so struck by the poems in the voices of soldiers. I’m interested in your long poem “Peace Talks,” which is based on interviews with soldiers and family members.
The main reason for choosing to base that poem on interviews was the same as shapes several other poems in the collection—poems that could all be described as being in some sense “found.” Which is to say: even the most well intentioned of us, writing about conflicts we’ve not been directly involved in, in which we haven’t worn a uniform, are [End Page 488] likely to get into difficulties. The poems are bound to fall short of the experience they describe, and often parade the sensitivity of the author rather than concentrating on the subject. I thought one of the ways around this difficulty might be to include as much material voiced by the subject as I could, and treat it in such a way that I could make it both theirs and mine. A collaboration. I’m not terribly bothered by the idea of “mineness” in these found poems.
In what sense?
I mean that in these poems I’m not inclined to welcome the idea of the egotistical sublime. Originality, yes. We all want to be original. But I want the originality here to lie in the un-egotistical sublime. And perhaps not to be very sublime either, given the subject. War has its own way of being exhilarating, of course—remember Owen telling his mother “I fought like an angel”—but it’s not exactly sublime.
That’s the Shakespearean sense, where unlike Marlowe or Jonson, you can feel that all throughout. Somehow Shakespeare has magically given the stage to the characters.
That’s always been my ideal, even before I started to evolve this strategy to approach it. It’s the quality that Keats loves: negative capability. I see what I’m trying to do in these poems as a version of negative capability.
How did it work in practical terms? In practical terms, the poem began life as a radio program, for which my producer at the BBC arranged access to some British soldiers at their base in Bad Fallingbostel, in northern Germany. I’d tried to talk to soldiers before, in Afghanistan while the war was still on, but the MoD (the Ministry of Defense) wouldn’t let me go.
Why not? Because you were a figure, and if you were in harm’s way . . . [End Page 489]
I suppose that may have been a part of it: I was Poet Laureate at the time. But they were perfectly happy to let war artists go to Afghanistan. . . . Maybe they were also wary because poetry by its nature is a more articulate, or a more articulating form. Anyway, as soon as I was no longer Laureate (I stood down in 2009 at the end of my ten-year stint), it all became easier. Initially I tried to go to Afghanistan, but by that stage everyone was leaving, so I went...
