Interview by Zoë Brigley
[W]ith every first draft, there are things that need sharpening and shaping, and things that will not fly, and their removal improves it
We need a definite programme
Small birds from several continents sing beneath a high safety net. Soon we must make a move. We need a house, a child, a story; and round the back of the trick of the light, a drop-off point for deliveries. We have a desire for change and a desire for things to stay the same, those things, no, those things. We have seven tablecloths and no table.
This is a short poem that says a lot with very little. They are hard to write! How do you go about writing short poems, or did this begin life as something longer?
There are of course many kinds of short poems. This one is not a short lyric, or an imagist poem, which are different animals. This is part of a recent group, without a common specific theme, but there’s a similar feel to them, a kind of reflective distance though they also aim for a kind of dream immediacy. It comes from a kind of poetry I’ve aspired to all my writing life, and that’s fifty years now, the subversive, reflective, life-affirming, often mischievous work of Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert. Having developed their voices in the prime of Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, they have a subtle moral insight that has always been a model. I could not have started my writing life further from the qualities that made them. It’s been a long learning journey. And then, it must appear effortless. A poetry of ideas deployed with a light, and specific, touch, taking in influences from oriental poetry translations from way back, and among many others, David Harsent’s Versions of Yannis Ritsos, and let’s not forget Nigel Jenkins’ superb haiku. The aim is for the complexity of the present to be subsumed into a brevity of myth.
Perhaps ‘We need a definite programme’, works a bit like a series of linked haiku, where the spaces between them release an energy that allows the reader to internalise the thought and image and wait for the next one to come along, hopefully with some electricity across the blank space, a kind of rhythm that includes suspension, pause. I think of how Keats suggested writing “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Hopefully, there is a fine strand of narrative reaching through the poem, and it’s only partly rational. Stalled impetus is a character in the poem. Its origin, however, is untypical. We are preparing to move house, and I found an abandoned draft when I was sorting out (and chucking out) the vast store I have of folders of drafts, dating from 1967. As I leafed through the desiccated archive, every so often I would come across something interesting, usually discarded. I wrote this draft I think in the mid-eighties.
When I saw it I remembered it, it had an immediacy. The germ of every stanza but the third is in that original draft. I see I dropped various bits of surrealism which were not bad. And as with every first draft, there are things that need sharpening and shaping, and things that will not fly, and their removal improves it. It already had the beginning and the end. You look out for lines and phrases that have a sense of inevitability. I quickly saw where I might have wanted it to go, with the benefit of thirty-five years of hindsight. So this is not a general strategy! One thing I do is to leave gaps between spells of composition, sometimes of months, so that I can come back to it convinced, in my emptied mind, that it’s by someone else, and see it afresh. There is nothing like the discovery that something you have forgotten is half-decent. And finding that a word or a line or a complete stanza or half the poem is redundant. I don’t think I completed a poem anything like this in the mid-eighties. In my life, it was ahead of its time. Or perhaps now’s the time.
The poem seems to tell a story about a banal dystopia. Did something specific inspire you to write it?
I’m very struck by Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘the banality of evil’. I’m not sure that this dystopia is particularly banal: perhaps you’re right, but detail is rarely banal if you look at it hard enough. Utopia / dystopia is an old preoccupation: I am grateful to Robert Minhinnick as editor of Poetry Wales who was the first twenty years ago to publish poems that led to my book An Elusive State: Entering al-Chwm, an exploration of a half-imagined Utopia that flourishes and then fails. They are to be found now in Weathereye: Selected Poems (2019). This poem inhabits the same territory. It speaks in the collective voice of a society, a culture, that has somehow lost its place, is impotent, frustrated, its competence lost. It is a description of a dangerous moment in a society, and I think we are in it. Disempowerment rides alongside disinformation: it became turbo-charged when Rupert Murdoch arrived on these shores with his money and bred with Margaret Thatcher. It’s now rampant, internalised, personal, and decides who governs us. It was predicted by Orwell, and long before that by E.M.Forster, who captured the reality of passivity in the face of oppression, as well as predicting and nailing social media, in The Machine Stops. I was aware of a sense of loss in the eighties, as a welfare rights worker serving some of the most disadvantaged people in society, who were somehow both marginalised and demonised, though the media were amateurs at it then. It has disabled our democracy. In a parallel life, I am writing an essay called Democracy’s Made with Honest News: A Case for Recovery. Raymond Williamns is a touchstone. Poems like this are the little voice turning over how this works psychologically, and increasingly with me, anthropologically. It’s a marriage between the insightful, instinctual part of my brain and the political and intellectual parts. They have cultural exchanges.
The form seems to lend itself to the mood of the poem overall with its sparseness. How do you go about choosing forms for poems or does it happen organically?
Well, the answer to the last question is, yes, absolutely. Nothing is less likely to happen in a Griffiths poem than to start with a form, as some poets apparently do. I start with a line, perhaps a stanza, in my head. Sometimes, over several sittings, I will cover an A4 sheet with lines, written chaotically on the page: it’s more a case of thematic development and seeking out patterns and connections. Then it’s going to be a big poem. A narrative, a tone, and a style will emerge out of what the key lines sound like. There will be variations in the music, and the pace, to reflect shifts of tone. It’s not for nothing that my Dad was a musician, composer and conductor, forgotten now. I do hear a poem in musical terms – though I include minimalism, influenced also by the Tao, which would have horrified my Dad, who regarded anything less than high Victorian as ‘the phraseology of the gutter’. In passages and whole, short poems, for me there’s a seeking after clarity, working my way out of the thicket of my early tendencies. I have been criticised for lack of attention to form in the past: sometimes, I know, I have got so fascinated by the imaginative quality and the thinking of the poem that I have been technically neglectful. I suspect this was sometimes a casualty of my intense working life in social and health policy. A few years ago, I adopted a motto, ‘always go the extra mile’: it’s hard to accept what appears to be a marginal flaw in your own wonderful work, but you must go where you hear a little voice of doubt, admit it. In my defence, my own ear tends to resist regular and obvious rhyme, alliteration and assonance, though I am very interested in the combination of regularity and irregularity. I like hidden rhymes and half-rhymes scattered through a poem that you will pick up if you’re really concentrating, but it will still contribute to the feel of it if you don’t notice.
But on regularity, if I have a poem where I want it to be and it’s in stanzas of 7, 7, 8, 7 lines, then in the last analysis I will not spoil it for symmetry. The consciousness I am working from and the reality I am working towards are profoundly and intensely not symmetrical. We are in asymmetrical times, and my ultimate loyalty is to the integrity of that.