and so we keep on walking, walking’
(‘Suite Americana’)
Kelvin Corcoran: Peter, we’ve spoken before about the recent deaths of poets, ones you grew up reading and who shaped your own work, those poets who introduced to you the very idea of poetry and its possibilities. Can you tell us about those influences, those back bearings perhaps, and how you see the work of those poets then and now?
Peter Robinson: The deaths of poets started early for me with an event organised at York University in 1972 to commemorate Ezra Pound, and I vividly recall being shocked when hearing Elaine Feinstein read ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ in what sounded like an angry growl. For me and my generation around the turn of the 1960s, the great modernists were in the air, but they were passed or passing – though I did get to hear Bunting read on a couple of occasions. The first generation of poets where I met important representatives and was indelibly influenced were those born in the teens of the last century: F. T. Prince and Vittorio Sereni. The latter died soon after I had started collaborating on translating his work, much to my regret. What’s been distressing recently, of course, are the deaths of important figures from the so-called British Poetry Revival – poets such as Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Roy Fisher, and Elaine Feinstein herself. Then there are poets from the so-called Cambridge School, such as Andrew Crozier, Douglas Oliver and John James, with whom I had some contact, and read carefully over many years. I suppose the sense of general bereavement comes from feeling that the culture to which one aspired has all but passed away. Elizabeth Bishop has been distinctly helpful in answering some of my own questions of travel; but though Jo Shapcott, my exact contemporary, did meet and study with her, I only began to understand her work a few years after learning that there was no point inviting her to read at the Festival in Cambridge because she had died. Another poet whose loss I felt sharply, coming around the time of Roy Fisher’s, was that of Mairi MacInnes, who I got to know well in her later life when revisiting York. She was a year older than my mother, who is, rather miraculously, still alive.
So, those poets from what was once a shared sense of poetry’s possibilities make their exits sadly, the ground changes around you, but would you say your poetry belongs to or has any affinities to any particular school? Should anyone’s poetry bear such affinities do you think?
In my experience, the answer to your questions tends to depend on who’s looking. I recently gave a reading in Parma from the bilingual selection Enigmi e dintorni (2024), where, in the discussion at the end, someone stood up and located me in the company of English poets who have taken an interest in, and translated from, Italian poetry. So there I was, and fair enough, placed in the school of Charles Tomlinson with Jamie McKendrick. Someone else, back at the end of the 1980s described me, on the basis of my having co-edited Perfect Bound and published a collection with Carcanet, as once at the heart of the Cambridge School but now in the mainstream. That commentator was noticing an evolution, but the first was never the case and the second a bit of indiscriminate crowd-control. That was all a long time ago, though, and now there are sufficient distinguished and distinguishing articles and reviews of the work for me to feel my poetry has been fairly accurately identified and associated, however loosely, with the manyfold inspiration it has independently drawn upon over the years. But really I’m not sure there’s any ‘should’ about this. Poets can want to be assigned to the Tribe of Ben, or they can be historically associated with Basho’s school, or go their own way and take the consequences.
Perhaps that’s why Roy Fisher in ‘Coat Hanger’, his foreword to Return to Sendai, points out that you’ve ‘never become seriously entangled in the paradoxical world of the often-brilliant dogmatisms of theory driven poetics’. So, Peter, what is it keeps you writing poetry? Where does it come from?
Well, I wouldn’t say I haven’t been entangled in that paradoxical world, because only too aware of it, especially in the last three decades of the twentieth-century. Occasionally I’ve found myself on the margins of skirmishes in it too. But it’s certainly true, as Roy observes, that my poems, when I can write them, don’t tend to be started by ‘dogmatisms of theory’. Take ‘Closure’, for example, a poem which wouldn’t have been written had it not been for one of my favourite restaurants in Parma, the Sant’Ambrogio, suddenly closing, so there I found myself peering into its stripped rooms where many a youthful evening had been spent discussing all and sundry with Marcus Perryman, my co-translator of Vittorio Sereni, and Ornella Trevisan, who would become my wife. But as you’ll know, its title is also the word used in the binary-conflict-driven debates poets and critics had, and perhaps still do, about open and closed form – which my poem then toys with by being composed in three separate sections that close in upon themselves only to open out into the next one, ending up, I hope, somewhere unexpected in that seashell, the other minds, and sound of distant conversation like the sea. If Roy is right, what keeps me writing is that I find myself in conflicted situations, arising from things encountered in the course of daily life, where paradoxes and dogmatisms do arise, which I then address by employing poetry, and such techniques as work for me, loosening and combining them to find a way though or a momentary stay. What keeps me writing is that I don’t seem to have got anywhere near an end of such paradoxical or conflicted situations.
How does this tendency, this awareness relate to Modernism for you? I’m thinking of your poem ‘Afterwards’ on the death of Ezra Pound – Pound, that burning contradiction in the heart of Modernism, and we’ve already mentioned him here, inescapably. A good deal of the current poetry that jumps up here and there seems written in simple ignorance of it, not even contentiously, just blank unawareness.
‘Burning contradiction’ perfectly catches my sense of Pound, and the question remains how someone who could have written such a trilogy as ‘Cathay’, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ and ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, alongside many perfect individual performances, who had such a good ear for a cadence and such an inventive way with linguistic possibilities, should have been so dreadfully deaf when it came to his own times. I was taught by David Moody at York in the early 1970s and so came into contact with the Pound revival at close quarters, having read him in T. S. Eliot’s selection, plus a few anthologized Cantos, while still at school. My little elegy is a first attempt to express simultaneously an indebtedness and the need to keep a distance. Your question raises the issue of whether a contemporary poet can operate, as Larkin and many others had hoped, without taking account of Pound and modernism. But for me there was never such a choice. I was reading Pound and Lowell before I’d even heard of Larkin. I bought High Windows when it came out and, though irritated by the title poem, quickly read his other books. For me there never was a choice, as I say, so I’ve not been inclined to make one.
And behind that question there’s another, related to location and identity, that particularity of living in three countries, Japan, Italy and the UK, three cultures, and how that might relate to what Peter Riley refers to as the fixed unfixed ground in your work? In ‘All Times are Local’ you end the poem with ‘everything everywhere equally here /in world’s present tenses.’ How does that play out in your poetry?
Those lines sound like the expression of a utopian ideal associated in my mind with simultaneity in Cubist poetics, Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ for instance, which I took a great interest in when starting out – despite Pierre Reverdy’s saying in later life there was no such thing as Cubist poetry. My poem’s title comes from what it says on long-distance flight booking schedules, and is associated with jet-lag and how to get over it. In the poem it’s also connected with the way the railways established, for timetabling purposes, that it would be the same time in different parts of the country. Nowadays we encounter this issue every time we have a video-call with a different time zone. Its relation to the kind of poem I’ve been able to write, their attempting to stand securely on unfixed ground, if I understand what Peter was saying, is that my ideal would be to combine the immediacy of individual perception in a lyric with consciousness of what’s happening elsewhere, a consciousness that might also be represented in a lyric’s space. But bringing those two together in a lyric will likely produce such unfixed fixes, which would then engage whatever techniques I can call on by way of response. But my readings in modernism have prompted a caution regarding the short-cut of bricolage or collage, which can only too easily, at least to my ear, descend into arbitrary play.
And do you think for instance, that anyone could write a poem like ‘After Bansui’, without having lived in Japan? What has that experience given you? Or, to take another example, the poem ‘Return to Sendai’, with its paradoxical, ‘we’ve been exiled from our exile’. Does the location somehow write itself for you, with all its pleasures and questions? And is there a similar experience underway in poetry about Europe too – for instance in ‘Ravishing Europa’, with its conclusion, ‘it’s like we’re in the arms of Europe /with Europe in my arms’? And this despite the liars, the myths and bickering you refer to in the poem.
It’s unlikely anyone could have written ‘After Bansui’ if they hadn’t lived in Sendai, I’d say, never mind Japan. I bet there are millions of Japanese people who don’t know who he is, but there’s a street named after their local poet in the city, and a reconstruction of his house which I used to pass almost every day. Living in Japan for eighteen years, quite unexpectedly, taught me how to be a foreigner critically respectful of my hosts’ culture. It taught me how to view European culture as that of an intimately complex family, and how to enjoy the company of the Americans I encountered there, to appreciate their English, I mean, and to live with how they viewed Britain and the British. It opened me up to a whole world of differences and obliged me to adjust innumerable assumptions and expectations. I’m not sure what you might mean by a location writing itself, but what I did try to do in Japan, and Italy, and everywhere else for that matter, is not to view things with my cultural assumptions unquestioned, but rather to build in the viewpoint from which the difference is being registered, and at the same time to avoid the idea that I was somehow a travel poet explaining things with the assumptions and prejudices of a home audience in mind. All that had to be avoided like the plague. So I’ve tried to write poems that establish the terms of their own occasions and include a critically understood view of the lyrical viewpoint among the terms being established. Having learnt such things when writing in Japan, I naturally imported it to writing in and about Europe, as in the ‘Ravishing Europa’ poem when casting my Italian wife in the role of ‘Europe’ for the purposes of those final lines.
Looking at, say, ‘The Truth in New York’ then ‘The Further Losses’ or ‘The Revenants’ and perhaps ‘Manifestos for a Lost Cause’, how would you describe the range or repertoire of your work in Return to Sendai, and what might have prompted it?
Those poems were written fairly close together: ‘The Truth in New York’ is dated 3 March 2017, the day I sketched it out in a little hotel on the corner of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. ‘The Further Losses’ was assembled over a longer period, but first published in Ravishing Europa, so the pieces will have been written during the previous three years. ‘The Revenants’ was inspired by meeting an old friend after many years of lost contact, and that occurred on 20 March 2019, while ‘Manifestos for a Lost Cause’ was evidently written about and during the lockdowns of 2020, so it looks like those poems were composed within the space of three or four years at most. Perhaps the range and repertoire that you notice comes from the fact that they’re occasioned by different kinds of experience: some of it immediate and a result of multiple shocks, cultural and political, as in the New York poem; some of it compacting from related materials experienced on various occasions at separate times, as in the different losses of that sequence; or in a meeting that conjures years of memory for two people renewing a friendship; or the strangely shared experience of a completely unexpected, and unexpectedly solitary ‘social distancing’. Each of my poems has to find a form and voicing that feels appropriate to its occasion, and my interest in and love for a great many kinds of poetry means I’m always hoping to be able to extend, however little, the scope of what I can do.
Am I right in thinking Return to Sendai is not organised chronologically?
The book was assembled as a response to a publishing situation that had emerged around five years ago. I had done a Collected Poems with Tony Frazer at Shearsman in 2017, and then came an unexpected flood of writing published in small press editions prompted in large part by the political and medical crises through which we were living: Ravishing Europa (2019), Bonjour Mr Inshaw (2020), and Retrieved Attachments (2023), and there are two further collections, one entitled Blind Summits scheduled for 2027 and another in progress. The idea was to gather up some of these recent poems in sections, adding in illustrative earlier ones from the Collected to show where, as it were, these had come from. The title derives from the fact that in the spring and early summer of 2017 I returned to Japan for four months and wrote a set of seventeen poems, including the title piece, about the experience. I also published with Isobar Press in Tokyo a bilingual English and Japanese collection, the translations by Miki Iwata, from my eighteen years living in the country. The new book’s theme of encountering places and then returning to them, including returns home after periods away, emerged in that fashion: so, no, Return to Sendai is not organised chronologically, but the individual sections, for the most part, are organised thus, providing a sense of development in a series of arrivals and departures.
But I wonder, Peter, if that experience and rhythm of arriving at and departing from another familiar place is also a version of mortality itself? Or is that an unaskable question?
Not at all, and it immediately made me think of the last poem in the book, the one entitled ‘Speedwell’ prompted by seeing stretches of that blue flower from a taxi on the way from Linate airport, Milan, and associating that experience of arrival after a long English winter with the sudden death of my mother-in-law’s youngest brother, to which the situation in Ukraine became inextricably entangled. So there’s an arrival, a departure, and mortality for you in a single lyric. For various reasons I’m inclined to think – and must resist the thought – that if it can, the worst will happen; so, yes, departures in particular have mortality associated with them, and I can’t help wondering how Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’ uses its form so un-complacently to reassure. I’ve even found myself reading it once as the plane I was in accelerated down the runway for take-off.
So is the language using you, as W. S. Graham would put it? And would it be fair to say one change is that your poetry has become more explicitly political with time?
Graham’s right that the language is using us all, as how could it not, but then, of course, it only gets to use us because we persist in using it. One of the things this implies, for me, is that we don’t master language. Writing poetry doesn’t get any easier with practice. If anything, it gets more difficult, because there are so many more things to take account of when you try to write it. And, yes, the poems did become more explicitly political over those same years, but politics had always been there, as appears in very early ones like ‘The Benefit Forms’ and ‘Going Out to Vote’ (though neither of these are in the selection we’re discussing). But thinking about those early ones, I notice that they are inspired by what you might call a general political atmosphere or condition of society and culture, while the recent poems are both angered and baffled by what look from my perspective like specific mistakes and misjudgements, whether by our leaders or ourselves, and the poems are directly exercised by the specific decisions and how they impact on whole ranges of individual, historical, and transnational experience. I do feel that the moment of near daily madness in parliament and tumbling rota of prime ministers has now thankfully passed, though not that we have escaped from its consequences, if we ever will. What I mean is that I don’t currently feel the troubled exasperation that was prompting words from me so intensively over those five or six years after June 2016.
Is the range or repertoire a matter of writing from more than fifty years gathered in Return to Sendai, or are other considerations at play? Were you aware of such changes and developments at the time or is it a matter of discovery afterwards?
There have been many changes, but perhaps only one of them produced by a conscious decision. This occurred during 1978 and was ramified through 1979 when I concluded that my attempts to write poems in a mildly discontinuous style inspired by following the work of poets who emerged in the 1960s had run out of road, and was as good as preventing me from addressing directly a great deal of haunting material that needed exorcising. It was a subtle shift, in reality, from foregrounding the formality of the style to foregrounding the topic, theme, or occasion of the materials and then adapting a less attention-demanding style to each specific matter that needed addressing. Since then, evolutions have been prompted, I would say, by changes of situation: by living in Japan, spending months in Italy, and days in England for eighteen years; then by returning to live and work in Reading (UK) which has now continued for longer than the Japanese years; and then by the disturbance caused in me and in the body politic by the Brexit referendum, the pandemic, and the sense of being dragged back into a divided world that bears some resemblances to the Cold War era of my first near forty years. These later changes are processes that tended to happen to the poetry by no means entirely consciously. However, I have monitored them as they were emerging, rather than by acts of retrospective evaluation, because there’s the issue of not repeating myself and yet also writing in ways recognisably mine.
One thing that has always struck me in your poetry, recognisably Peter Robinson, as it were, is the degree of referentiality and an emphasis on the given situation which is explored in the poem with no rush towards a conclusion or explanation. Adam Piette has commented on this: ‘each poem an astonishingly fine-tuned gauge for the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.’ Would you say this capacity – it’s more than a feature – tells us something of your understanding of what poetry is about and can do?
This is an especially interesting question to me. Of the very earliest poems of mine in print it is by no means clear that this was going to be so defining a way of going about composing a poem. It’s not the case for ‘Worlds Apart’, for instance, which is almost completely invented from a photograph of and odd snippets of information about my paternal grandfather. The very earliest – included in Return to Sendai – is that little elegy for Pound written in early 1973 when I was twenty. It has a background prompt from the poet’s death, of course, but doesn’t derive from a single lived occasion. ‘A Homage’, from November 1975, refers to Salford, my birthplace, but again has no single lived occasion from which it arises. ‘Overdrawn Account’ and ‘Autobiography’, from autumn 1976, do have occasions, but the former condenses a number of experiences to give the appearance of a single one, while the latter evokes a single occasion but then mildly fictionalises it to bring out its significance. Here we seem to have an intermittent tendency, as it were, but little or no theoretical self-awareness. In 1981, while a temporary lecturer in Aberystwyth, I found a second-hand copy of Montale’s Le occasioni,which a student had got rid of after annotating some of the vocabulary in pencil. This is a classic volume that Sereni reviewed when it came out in 1939, and it indelibly influenced the development of his poetry. From there I began to take note of this ‘occasionality’ as a way of writing, and took heart from Goethe’s saying that all his poetry is occasional in that it has ‘grund und boden’. Perhaps this tendency in finding inspiration is connected to the problem of telling the truth in poetry, because telling the truth depends on who is speaking in what context, why, and what for; so in order to even approach to telling the truth – in lyric poems, that is – it would be necessary to evoke a speech situation and to give a sense of why what is being said arises, where it comes from, and what it’s attempting to do by being said. That’s perhaps something of how a tendency turned into a self-awareness. I recall, for instance, someone saying of my poems that I must know what deictics are since I use them so much; though, at that point in the late eighties, I had never before heard the technical word for them. Now I feel rather pleased and liberated when a poem arises without an occasion, as in the as-yet-uncollected ‘The Resort’, which is a response to reading about Rosemary Tonks’s life in Bournemouth after she gave up writing; yet even that creates a feeling of occasion from my experience of such English south coast seaside towns.
Fifty-one years of work. Congratulations, poet. Do you feel you had much choice in all that?
A very stimulating question, this: I’ve been helped to think about ‘choice’ recently by trying to understand the fact that Spinoza was a determinist, but also believed that the ideal form of government would be a secular democratic republic, because it would provide, within limits, the least constraining conditions for people to be allowed to develop into what they couldn’t help but be or become. Also, being a determined creature, for Spinoza, doesn’t mean having no decision-making power, it rather means that no decision you can ever make is unconditioned by the circumstances in which you are compelled to make it. So do I feel I had much choice? Writing is an inescapably intentional act. Poems cannot be written by accident. But the kinds of poems you come to write are conditioned by, for instance, your native language and the age into which you come to consciousness. Being born into an English-speaking family in the north-west of England in the early 1950s meant that I was slightly too young for the great cultural explosion of the 1960s, but I benefitted greatly from it, and I have continued to write poetry into a situation now that hardly resembles it at all. Which brings us back to those deaths with which we began. So the answer to your question must be that I did exercise some choice in choosing to attempt to write particular poems on the basis of an understanding of what poetry could be when I started out, and choice was certainly exercised in how I revised them, and what I attempted to publish. However, at that point, not only the determining conditions that made me who it was who made those choices, but the determining conditions of that writing’s reception come into play. My archive contains a great deal of evidence for how individual poems were rejected by magazines, books were not taken by publishers, projects were completed but never even submitted for rejection. I have a very full negative-CV, as I believe such documents are called. It’s probably a mistake, though, to think that this material only says something about me. It might characterise quite a lot about the times through which I lived and the conditions for what publicly visible achievements were possible – at which point it feels only right to thank Marc Vincenz, the editor at MadHat Press in Cheshire, Massachusetts, for taking on Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems 1973-2024 and making it available for readers all over the world.
Then let me add my thanks as well, Peter, not least because Return to Sendai has prompted this conversation. And thank you too.