Don Paterson’s most recent books are Toy Fights: A Boyhood, a memoir published in 2023 by Liveright, and two poetry collections, The Arctic and Zonal, published consecutively by Faber & Faber in 2020 and 2022. Lauded in The Observer as “one of the greatest poets now writing anywhere,” Paterson has authored over sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, and poetic theory, while also pursuing a successful career as a jazz guitarist. His honors include the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, three Forward Prizes, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and he is the only poet to hold the distinction of receiving the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paterson is Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews. For twenty-five years, he served as Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan.
I corresponded with Paterson about an array of subjects, including the role of class in both his own work and the wider literary sphere, the influence of late-capitalist imperatives and political ideology on contemporary writing and publishing, and the impact of his career as a jazz guitarist on his approach to poetry. We also discussed how the conscious and unconscious interact during the writing process, the role of memory and memorability in poetry (as Paterson says, because we can memorize poems and carry them inside of us, “poetry is the one art form that you can possess outright”), and the relationship between talent and work ethic on the page, among numerous other topics.
CD: In your recently published memoir Toy Fights: A Boyhood, you write about growing up in the working-class community of Dundee, Scotland. One of the most striking aspects of the book is your clear-eyed examination of class. Reading Toy Fights brought to mind for me an article published in The Observer last year, titled “Huge Decline of Working-Class People in the Arts Reflects Fall in Wider Society.” The article cites a study, conducted by researchers from various UK universities, showing that “the proportion of musicians, writers, and artists with working class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970’s.” What are some of your thoughts about the role of class in the literary world, past and present?
DP: I’m afraid your questions are way too thoughtful and probing to allow me any short answers. I swear, I’m usually monosyllabic. But this one, especially, will run long. Let me set the scene. Maybe it’s normal in a pre-war culture, but currently most art isn’t about excellence. The arts have become the cheap indulgence late capitalism buys in the hope of getting out of its material purgatory more quickly. Most publishing lists are commercially driven, and sustained by popular books that may or may not claim to be “literary,” but generally are not.
Back in the day, publishers could sleep at night by using money from these bestselling books to cross-subsidize high-end literary publishing. These good books, for the most part, sold badly, but they were bought for peanuts. When I say “back in the day,” I’m referring mostly to the period before the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in the UK. It’s a long story, but basically the decision to abolish it was philistine Thatcherism on steroids, and even Thatcher ended up regretting it. These days, many publishers use the spare cash generated by their bestsellers to overpay for mostly bad books, which also sell badly. They can sleep because of the peer-prestige points these books win for anyone involved in their production or subsequent reward.
All of this started with a genuinely good-faith aim, which was to make sure talent from underrepresented groups got a fair shake. We had learned that the suppression of female voices was driven by sexism and institutional misogyny, and we made a reasonable assumption that other kinds of proportional underrepresentation probably had their roots in similar systemic prejudice. We took action. But as this virtuous performance became highly competitive, its values slowly shifted. The prestige-based, loss-making wing of publishing is now run to promote the work not of actually underrepresented or disadvantaged talents, but of the sectionalities the gatekeepers would prefer to stand in for them.
CD: Would you talk more about how and why, in your view, the good-faith aim you’ve described has led to the particular forms of gatekeeping that you’ve observed in the contemporary literary world?
DP: Demand for “deserving talents” outstripped supply, so the talent-bar had to be lowered, and the class of the deserving somehow widened while remaining narrowly defined; proportionality, for one thing, was quietly dropped. But intelligent, talented authors were still too thinly and evenly distributed over the entire demographic to reflect the preferred reality of the gatekeepers, so it was simpler to call out such standards as “elitist.” As a result, we now have a gatekeeping class in publishing, education, and arts funding that sees its primary role as politically corrective, and that places more importance on identity than talent. Members of this class incentivize writing that meets their low bar, then attempt to gaslight everyone else into agreeing that the work is good. The authors they promote are subsequently embedded within the system. High-end publishing that places intrinsic value on books being well written and intelligent is now in deep decline.
Instead of shared literary values, we have an extraordinary, unholy alliance of late-capitalist imperatives and bourgeois leftist ideology, the latter used as moral licensing for the former. I’d argue that the taxpayer-subsidised presses are often just maintaining that alliance on behalf of the state; from a right-wing perspective, subsidising bad art is also a superb way of neutralising its effectiveness. Occasionally, you get the hilarious spectacle of confused souls muddling the two, and shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars on some agent-inflated piece of twaddle you know only has a few hundred sales in it, and even those dishonestly attained. The subsequent unemployability of such editors should make me feel slightly better about the death of the hundred good books they might otherwise have published, but it makes me completely miserable.
We were supposed to level the playing field so that we didn’t miss good books from disadvantaged constituencies. Instead, we’ve suppressed real talent in every constituency, and the newly embedded mediocracy regards talent like Covid 1.0. Meanwhile, fantastic grow the evening gowns. My sense is that “class” was an early poster boy for all this in the 1980s and ‘90s.
CD: What are some of your thoughts on the subject of class in the context of your own experience as a poet, and also in relation to the larger socioeconomic realities that surround writers and their work?
DP: The literary world’s attitude toward class has been in a constant state of fluctuation since the eighteenth century, when working-class voices were seen as distinctively interesting or authentic. There have been periods when readers were genuinely engaged with working-class experience, though it might be more accurate to say that working-class writers have “busked the middle classes for a living.” The interest of the latter is often mixed with condescension, but overall, it helps society at large balance its moral budget.
I caught the end of one such wave, and benefitted from the attention, but I was swiftly made aware that a few of my patrons would prefer me to stay in my lane and repeat the poor-mouth performance that sustained their charitable buzz. The situation is much the same with the current poetry of performed identity: We’ll keep the prizes coming if you keep doing the dance. But I’d argue that the situation is even more sinister than that. Charitable frisson is also index-linked to how bad the work is, a trend that has effectively become a paraphilia now. Within the set of “deserving cases,” the talentless will often receive the greatest rewards, in return for having most exquisitely and painfully exercised the largesse of their benefactors.
Scots are mostly wise to the limits of the Burnsian “heaven-taught ploughman” noble savage shtick, and they know when to stop. I used the career boost to parley my newfound visibility into paid employment and to join the middle classes. What I did was pretty much what all working-class parents want for their kids, despite the fantasies of the funding bodies and the bourgeois left, whose state education policies in the UK were designed to actively discourage working-class talent and intellect from leaving the sink estates. These policies were derived from the ideas of middle-class Marxist educationalists, and predicated on the solidarity of the workers—something the cultural or material aspirations of individual working-class intellectuals and artists actively threatened. This is a matter of record.
CD: In what ways do you think, if at all, the value system of the funding bodies and gatekeepers you’ve mentioned has impacted your own approach to forging a path as a poet?
DP: I mostly avoided being patronized by not being visibly working class in my choice of subject matter, bar maybe one or two early poems. It was a conscious decision. There was a ‘lad-lit’ movement underway at the time, courtesy of Nick Hornby et al, and I cheerfully allowed myself to be co-opted into that instead. But I saw others fold the dancing-bear routine into their style, and I came very close to following suit.
Later, of course, you realize it doesn’t matter if the letters around your name are longer than your actual name. You’ll always smell poor to some folk. It is worth mentioning, though, that the only reviews of Toy Fight that came close to “the monkey is speaking and I am confused” were from the bourgeois left, of course. I’m afraid I’m in “the Left left me” camp of centrism. A growing and increasingly influential sector of the left has become too racist, classist, sexist, and stupid to justify the risk of continued association with them.
Support for working class writers is over. Now that class inequality is something we’re all obviously very much against, it’s essential to ignore it, as it would be way too difficult to fix. If we did fix it, the economics of elite overproduction would then guarantee about a quarter as much work for the children of the middle classes, which is not something that the parents of those children could countenance.
Society still needs literature to go on playing its role as an affordable and marginal conscience, but other forms of symbolic equity, mostly directed at small sectionalities of the middle class, are newer, shinier, cheaper, and easier tokens to trade on the peer-prestige Nasdaq. Certainly, engaging in these forms of symbolic equity is cheaper than covering the real costs required to support the many demonstrably disadvantaged segments of contemporary UK society, such as the poor, women, the disabled, the Celtic fringe, and those living in cash-starved non-metropolitan regions.
It’s the old story: Equality of opportunity is hard, so let’s try equality of outcome. And lo, it turns out the latter is quite hard as well, so the literary world has decided to pretend that it’s been achieved, via a handful of carefully distributed golden tickets designed to give us the right optics. Let’s pretend that youth, race, LGBTQ+, ADHD, and so on, are reliable and straightforward proxies for disadvantage, though in the UK they are demonstrably not, and certainly not in publishing right now.
But one side screaming Wokemaggedon! and the other screaming Nazi! isn’t getting us anywhere. I just read an infantile article in The Guardian that called “centrism” the “c-word.” One throws up one’s hands in despair at some of the children currently leading the debate. Sorry to kick off with such a bleak message, but here’s how it goes down: If you fail to reward merit for one generation, you embed mediocrity in the next. The mediocre will then get the teaching gig, judge the prize, run the institution, and call the shots.
There have always been people inclined to measure themselves against talent, and hate it—not for what it is, but for what they are not. If they run the show, the only recognition given to excellence is envy. Any demonstration of talent will now literally see you fail your English A-levels in the UK, and, in many institutions, blow your distinction on your MFA. If we keep going on like this, we’ll be booting kids out of kindergarten for being able to speak. We can still rescue the situation, but the answers will have to come from the radical center, which is to say a place accommodating to the heterodox and well away from the tribal echo-chambers, where the best ideas from either side can be stress-tested and refined.
CD: It’s fascinating and often very funny to read in Toy Fights about your conflicted relationship with formal schooling. What is it like for you, as someone who struggled from the very start with the structures, hierarchies, and customs of a traditional education, and who left school at age sixteen, to have ended up holding multiple esteemed positions in academia? What challenges have you faced in balancing your own instincts as reader, writer, and teacher with the imperatives that accompany teaching within a traditional university system?
DP: I haven’t faced many challenges, to be honest. I just wasn’t suited to formal education, mainly because the things that I needed to know urgently were too highly specialized, so it was quicker to learn them myself. Of course, no one gets to skip the reading curriculum, as it were, so I had to go back and do all of that later. But I was a professional musician first, so university would’ve been an interruption. Poetry came later.
My professorship was won via a centuries-old, unofficial entry route they keep open in St Andrews for unqualified specialists. They let you sneak in the tradesman’s entrance, operate the photocopier and the cake trolley for a year, then work your way up the ladder from junior lecturer to Prof over a couple of decades, if it turns out that you can teach and publish in your area of specialization, however narrow that might be. On every promo application, under “education,” I dutifully listed “N/A.” No one ever said anything. I was once proud of this, and later very ashamed. Now I have no feelings on the matter, which is the correct position to take on matters about which you can do nothing.
CD: When it comes to the training and mentoring of young poets, what are some of the truths that you most wish to impart to them, and do you see any of those truths as existing at odds with the way that writing and literature are taught in contemporary educational settings?
DP: My teaching centers mostly on communicating the active, conscious technique and skill that go into making a good poem. I also encourage students to see that every poem is an unconsciously produced artifact of its time and place, of its creator’s psychology, and to a certain extent, of the expectations and projections of its readership. I’ve always viewed my job as defending the notion of craft and skill as elements of writing that are oriented toward the idea of “excellence.”
In more recent times, I’ve found that this approach has set me at odds with some folk. We’ve all heard certain academics in the humanities describe as offensive the idea that some paintings or poems are “better” than others. Often, this offence comes courtesy of a confused postcolonial viewpoint that relies on such a trivial acquaintance with non-western cultures that it can’t see they’re all founded on analogous gold-standards of excellence.
In this worldview, if something is seen as “better,” it’s only morally better, either in its authenticity or in its politically corrective stance. I think there’s some role in poetry for the latter, but the authenticity tests are all horseshit, and are quickly turned into purity tests demanding a certain formulaic performance. I can’t help thinking of the hand-semiotics of spoken word poetry. My favorite move involves raising your shoulders and circling your hands like giant twiddled thumbs, in what I think is intended as a gesture of intense sincerity. The temptation to copy it is almost overwhelming. I really like good spoken word, but no one falls for that routine outside the church. We have our page-poetry analogues, primarily in the solemn invocation of that sinister redundancy, “lived experience.”
As a teacher, I liked to talk about Keats, or how a word changes its meaning in a metrically strong position, or how an understanding of metonymy can halve the length of your poem and double its intensity, or how the sonnet and the twelve-bar blues are argumentatively identical. All of that stuff. I’m too old to help kids calibrate their voices to assuage the pangs of the social conscience du jour. I refuse to train the materially advantaged for combat in the arena of the “sufferingist,” all the while teaching fewer and fewer kids from poor or genuinely disadvantaged backgrounds.
CD: Toy Fights ends with you at the age of twenty, and since poetry didn’t come into your life until later, the book doesn’t include any details about your trajectory as a poet. You’ve spoken in past interviews about the fact that, once you decided to become a poet, you dedicated a year to reading as much poetry as possible before embarking on your own literary path. During your year of self-education, did you structure your reading in a specific manner, or did you just follow your interests as they unfolded? At that time, did you have any meaningful literary relationships with mentors or peers, or any especially notable poetic influences?
DP: When I was twenty-one, I was lucky enough to experience a planetary alignment that set off some mechanism inside me that was already wound up and ready to go. I was completely alone for the first time, I had discovered poetry, and I had something to say to a woman that, somehow, only poetry could express.
The first poet I “got” was Tony Harrison, who was a huge influence on my generation, less because he was a “working-class voice” than because he was a working-class man who had stolen poetry for himself, along with the entire English literary canon and a classical education. Tony has probably forgotten more Greek that Eliot ever knew. Tony essentially just told us: Remember, Keats was a cockney. All of this posh stuff is also yours for the taking, if you want it.
I was and still am a jazz musician by trade, a realm in which the notion of “finding a voice” is meaningless if one has no technique or understanding of the art form’s history. So you study the flower of Black genius, you learn the Real Book, and you do your Aebersold and Slonimsky. My background in jazz impacted the way I structured my reading during the period you’ve mentioned. Because it reflected their relative status in Anglophone poetry at the time, I went and read all of the Irish, then all of the Americans, then the Scots, and finally the English, and I worked backward through time. I figured poets probably had to know the dictionary, and the etymology of the words they used, and I also read manuals about compositional practice.
Unfashionable things like Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form were very important to me. That phase lasted a lot longer than a year. But I’m no more self-educated than any other poet of my generation. We all were, and we weren’t. Because I was living in London, I was extremely fortunate in the friends I made. It was that simple: We are the company we keep. I joined an adult education class run by the English poet Christopher Reid, and I attended a workshop in Hampstead where I met the American poets Eva Salzman and Michael Donaghy. Following that, I moved to Brighton with Eva, and I met Sean O’Brien. I contacted Douglas Dunn back home in Scotland. All of these people were influences as peers and mentors, but especially Michael, to whom I was very close and whose early death devastated me.
I was the beneficiary of a time when people from the provinces could move to the metropolis and survive on nothing. These days, an artist born in Hartlepool, Arbroath, or Newport faces an insurmountable disadvantage, and is unlikely to get anywhere near the cultural and social riches Edinburgh or Bristol has to offer, never mind London. The regions are now immeasurably impoverished, and the gap can’t be bridged. Back then, we had a fairer and kinder welfare system, and the arts received far better support. Society still unquestioningly accepted the Victorian axiom that the arts improve the moral condition of the populace. Even under Thatcher, whom I loathed, the arts didn’t die. She even had a decent poet, Grey Gowrie, as her Minister of the Arts.
CD: In Toy Fights, readers encounter a profusion of laugh-out-loud footnotes that introduce additional nuances to the material in the memoir. As far as the relationship between form and content in the book, what do the footnotes allow you to do that differs from what you’re able to render within the text itself?
DP: In poetry, every word makes an unreasonably exorbitant claim on the reader’s attention. Footnotes allow me to say stuff without appearing to make any. The footnote is a kind of anti-poem, an explicit invitation for readers not to bother unless they really feel like it. I enjoy the idea that different tiers of readerly commitment are available. The footnotes may be the only readable part of The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre, my endless treatise on poetics. Arguably, my books of aphorism are no more than collections of footnotes to a text that’s gone MIA. The readers who stray into the footer are maybe looking for something more immediate, some intimacy behind the performance, which I’m wary of giving in the body of the text. It’s an East Coast Scots thing: Glaswegians blurt out everything, but we’re too busy breathing through our teeth from the cold off the North Sea while we silently compile a list of your moral failings.
CD: Given that your poems about personal experience have long been recognized for their subtlety and restraint, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on handling biographical material in prose as compared to poetry. What was it like for you to write so directly and openly, and in such sprawling detail, about your personal experience in prose?
DP: “Sprawling” is accurate. I had to face the possibility that my full-length appearance in prose might be as undignified as that word suggests. In some ways, writing prose is exactly that, facing the risk, even the likelihood, of sprawl—and embracing it. To write a memoir while trying to exclude that risk is as perverse as writing poetry without trying to minimize it. Who wants to spend eight hours with someone who won’t spill the beans and risk some kind of mess? I’m a slow writer, but it’s not because I’m in the careful pursuit of … poise. That would be even more annoying than whatever bloated travesty I end up with.
I’ve never directly explored my life in poetry—of course one does, but obliquely. Zonal is as close as I’ve gotten to confession, though mostly the fictive side of autofiction. The poetry I’ve written since Toy Fights has determinedly been “work of the imagination.” I like the idea of delegating one’s various personae to different forms. They benefit from good bulkheads. Otherwise, they’re less useful because they become diffuse, and their aims blur. You try to use the same joke in three different books.
CD: Continuing our discussion of autobiographical material, it would be illuminating to hear you talk about how you handle personal experience in your two most recent poetry collections, Zonal and The Arctic. In both books, you frequently blur the line between autobiography and fictive versions of reality. For example, almost all of the poems in Zonal draw their source material from the first season of the classic television series The Twilight Zone, while many of the poems in The Arctic center on a post-apocalyptic narrative world inhabited by bargoers whose favorite watering hole shares its name with the book’s title.
DP: The Twilight Zone conceit in my book Zonal is easily explained. Most TZ episodes depend on a breach in physical law: Suddenly, we see a strange tweak in reality’s equations, a shift in a single value, usually with catastrophic consequences. The Twilight Zone always reminded me of that idea we all obsessed over twenty years ago, the “anthropic principle,” which posits that the universe appears to be fine-tuned to permit the existence of its own observers. So we can chalk it up to a trick of perspective, maybe, but it’s still astonishing that we’re here at all, when it would take nothing for everything to fly apart at lightspeed instead. These days, we have things like “Roko’s Basilisk” to torment us instead (don’t even look up that one; it’s inconceivably horrible).
As one gets older, things start to happen in your life that seem like the paranormal glitches in Twilight Zone episodes. “This cannot be!” you scream inwardly, as you confront the reality of your own impending death in the broad light of the post-nap afternoon, or your best mate suddenly vanishes from spacetime, or someone with whom you were in love turns out not to have a soul. When the stakes are high it’s often best to keep your voice low, so by way of a formal solution I found myself drawn toward writing in a long-lined style, half-borrowed from C.K. Williams. Long lines liberated me from the feeling that everything in the poem must aspire to the hysterical level of the symbolic.
Anyway, I find the self miserably easy to access. But the unconscious is unconscious for a damn good reason; it requires us to find more devious points of entry, round the back of the house. Both Zonal and The Arctic are “second Saturn return” books. The Arctic was a stock-taking, a headcount of the Russian doll of selves I’d become. They all got a crack at the keyboard. Some of those assholes hadn’t typed a word in decades.
I believe that we’re everyone we ever were, but the realization that we don’t progress—that this current iteration of myself isn’t Don 5.3 with the bugs squashed and cool new features—is fairly depressing. For that reason, poets tend to write solely as their latest self, when in reality you’re still hosting all the previous guys too. The bar metaphor in The Arctic was a way of uniting them, but in truth that wasn’t really developed beyond the cover copy. (It’s a real bar, by the way—an old whaling tavern in Dundee, with coffin-shaped windows that commemorate its drowned clientele, and a Roman road in the cellar.)
CD: In “Feeling Things,” a poem that appears in Zonal, the speaker observes, while strumming his guitar, that “a lot / of jazz-related practice / is callisthenic or repetitive in nature, and mostly pattern-/learning.” How can a musician, or by extension a poet, know for certain when he or she has transitioned from callisthenic “pattern-learning” to innovative “patternmaking,” and do you see that as a transition of which any dedicated person is capable? Another way of framing the latter question is this: What are your thoughts on the role of talent and work ethic, whether as separate entities and in relation to each other, in the life of an artist?
DP: They obviously are separate in the sense that neither one is sufficient, and both are necessary, though some folks compensate for less of the one with more of the other. The distinction you’re describing also relates to Kahneman’s distinction between systems one and two. What you learn from intentional practice and explicit judgement can eventually be moved over to the realm of motor skill, heuristic thinking, and intuitive decision-making. That’s the brain’s way of creating bandwidth for even more explicit learning and practice.
Since Romanticism we’ve been a bit conflicted about this. We want to privilege intuition, system one, over the slower learning processes of system two, without seeing that practice, repetition, and pattern-learning are the route to faster and more intuitive patternmaking. For example, in jazz, it means you learn to improvise in larger syntactic units. You don’t need to consciously think about motifs of tension and resolution within a phrase anymore. You can concentrate instead on the argumentative or emotional logic that the phrase proposes. Every musician understands the importance of repetitive practice and copying. No amount of talent is going to let you do anything cool with a trumpet the first time you pick one up. This was once understood in art and literature as well.
Training in painting involved the more-or-less mechanical copying of classical work. Informal literary apprenticeship usually involved writing in the manner of others. The classical heritage, and the subsequent expanded notions of “classics,” played the role of providing a body of work from which we could quickly learn the forms, techniques, and tropes. You can get sick of those, as you do of the songs every kid tries out in the guitar shop, but you move on from there. Our ambitions should always outstrip our talent, and that woodshedding is how we make up the shortfall.
In the field of Creative Writing now, there’s a feeling that to demand an earnest reading of the poetic “tradition,” or insist on the hard graft of learning form and technique, is somehow elitist, exclusionary, or discriminatory. Well, of course it is. We once saw the need for some method of selection. Hard work and the skilled use of tools were regarded as fair, progressive, and healthy signs of commitment, given that all individuals with the inclination to “apply themselves” can do so. But that idea is gone. I’m not sure that we can spot talent without encouraging the systematic reading and mechanical practice that allows its expression, any more than we can spot scientific talent without teaching science.
The idea that anyone can just pick up a pen and pour everything out, the less inhibited by reading or training the better, is a recent one, and not one I understand. Why should literature, alone within the entire realm of human endeavour, require no learning, technique, or practice? That seems unlikely. Maybe we can blame the 1960s for the apparently spontaneous ease with which genius presented itself, but O’Hara, just to throw out one representative example, was a learned and disciplined guy. The same goes in art. Look at what De Kooning was drawing when he was seventeen.
CD: In “The Old White Male Poet: An Allegory,” another poem from Zonal, you suggest that writers exist in a perpetual intergenerational battle. The poem’s allegorical world evokes a classic Western film:
We were both so quick you’d swear
………………………….you heard one shot. And hear this:
we both nailed the other’s pistol hand like we were
………………………….in a looking glass, like it was the same hand,
like the hand was the only thing the hand could aim for.
………………………….And then it was finished for the both of us,
but goddamn, the trouble I saved that kid. Damn!
………………………….The trouble. Yep.
You invite us to see the “pistol hand” as representative of the hand with which a writer holds a pen. Would you talk further about the ideas that you’re exploring in this poem?
DP: Poetry should be a great deal of trouble. If it isn’t, you’re not doing it right. I’ve frightened students by telling them I didn’t want to read anything that hasn’t half-killed them. I had to explain that I was half-joking, which only half-helped. I guess I’m still something of a Calvinist, and intuitively distrustful of things produced with ease and enjoyment. It might lead to dancing.
Writing a poem has to be trouble, in order to guarantee the strength of the compulsion to write in the first place, and to justify speaking with so much self-importance. The trouble incurred is somehow a test of the legitimacy of the compulsion. Such compulsions really should be ignored unless they absolutely won’t allow themselves that luxury. There are plenty of good poems in the world that folk should probably just reread, rather than looking at yours.
“The Old White Male Poet: An Allegory,” though, is really about testosterone, and the ridiculous ways in which it impacts male ambition over the course of a career, which is something of a taboo subject. The male of the species left the savannah five minutes ago, and guys are often obsessed with destroying the male opposition, which later becomes an obsession with fighting off the threat of replacement by the younger generation. The poem also talks about the positive feminization of the cultural space, and how it’s rendered a lot of these top-dog shootouts a kind of historical embarrassment.
CD: “The Old White Male Poet: An Allegory” also relates in provocative ways to a poem in your book The Arctic titled “Letters to a Young Poet,” and the two pieces echo an earlier poem of yours titled “The Rat.” All three poems merge humor with more serious implications about intergenerational discord between writers. Would you describe for us some of the continuities and differences you’ve observed between the poetry of your generation and that of younger generations?
DP: There’s very little continuity. Some of the ways I write are generally regarded as having been superseded. That’s fair enough. But the progressive paradigm has become a more culturally broad and accelerationist one, which seems to be hastening some fundamental phase-shift. There’s still terrific stuff being written, and I read great poems every week. But fighting through the post-MFA noise of it all is almost impossible. Mostly poetry has become staggeringly self-absorbed, just when we desperately needed it to recruit a general readership.
Poetry is that function of language which makes it adequate to a new or changing reality. Some contemporary poetry takes this increasingly urgent responsibility seriously. But mostly, that kind of writing is being pushed into the margins by the poetry of identity, the New Whimsy, and what I think of as “Vibism,” all of which are styles that have some genuine capitalist value within the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme, namely the Creative Writing MFA.
CD: Would you elaborate for us on the idea of the Creative Writing MFA as the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme?
DP: I thought I was being tongue-in-cheek. Now that I think carefully about it, I’m less sure. The MFA in its present incarnation is a brilliant cash-cow: an unfailable degree, one that rejects almost no applicants, that anyone with the money can buy, and that will grant you the formal accreditation you need to go forth and preach the CW gospel. It’s almost the Scientology business model. But to make the degree unfailable, we had to ensure poetry was something that everyone could do. The current house style could not be more democratic: twenty-five lines of loosely related stuff adduced in evidence of a “vibe,” with “vibe” being the dominant aesthetic and often the sole organizing principle. This kind of work cannot be genuinely criticized, given that “vibes” are personal things and continuous with their hosts.
The pernicious circularity of such writing means that even the better poems often seem to be written in some kind of endless present, free of either historical perspective or future proposition. They start, keep going a while, and then stop, often having forgotten where they began, and millions of folk are writing them. We did our best to run a rigorous program at St Andrews. I admired the old Vanderbilt model: a straightforward emphasis on excellence, the admission of just a small group of hand-picked students, and scholarships for them all.
I still quaintly define poems as verbal units with a deep, overdetermined internal coherence of form, sound, and meaning. Writing that kind of poem used to be like trying to make a watch that would run for centuries. Writing a poem as it is currently defined is more like decorating: You pick a vibe, choose the appropriate wallpaper, get out your tchotchke shaker, and fill the mantelpieces with random shit, bits of recognition comedy, and tokens of your tribal allegiance. But our tiny quota of talented poets has not miraculously changed. They’re just very hard to find in the snowstorm. Kevin Young at The New Yorker does a pretty good job. Elsewhere, we may need twenty years to let the free economy go to work. Poets should not be their own market. At present, there’s far more in the way of healthy, bar-raising competition within rap and hip-hop than within poetry. They enjoy a critical public.
CD: The Arctic contains a long sectional piece titled “The Alexandrian Library, Part IV: Citizen Science,” a new addition to the dream-like and darkly funny “Alexandrian Library” series that you started in your first book and continued in your subsequent collections. The speaker imagines a holograph of Charles Lyell, the revered Scottish geologist:
I heard Lyell to me or to no one
…the present is key to the past…
but short of its memory the present daren’t sleep
and the past marches off down the old Roman road
and into the forest’s immediate dark
as lost as that future the ancients declared
was behind us. Christ knows ours is.
Lyell guttered and vanished. The portal is closed.
I have to move fast, while I can.
Would you talk about the process of composing a series that spans multiple books across decades, and what are some of your thoughts about technology’s impact on the way that contemporary writers interact with both the present and the past?
DP: Aye, I have this career-long poem called “The Alexandrian Library,” which is a sort of ludic (ugh) contribution to the metaphysics of the imagination, or something along those lines. I thought I was done with it twenty years ago, but it roared back. I think I missed writing in triple metre, which is a technical means of getting carried away. The latest installment just reflects current concerns, principal among them the importance of the local. “Coverage” is set on the outskirts of Kirriemuir, where I live; Lyell did indeed haunt these woods (along with J.M. Barrie and Bon Scott of AC/DC, incidentally). The other concerns include collective enterprise (there’s a lot about citizen science), the tetrafecta of existential threats to the species (climate change, plague, nukes, and AI), and an unfashionable defense of nationalism as an extension of the family unit. Just to be clear, though, my definition of family member is literally anyone who really wants to be part of it. I was raised as an MLK universalist.
The poem ends in an attempt to reconstitute all human knowledge from scratch in a post-digital world, a process that doesn’t go well. Mostly it’s traybake recipes and football. I’m troubled by the extent to which we currently outsource the work of human brain: First it was storage, then memory, and now it’s thinking. “Feeling” is next, which AGI might well cover. I don’t think silicon has the same view of time, so in the process of merging with our iPhones and softening ourselves up for our robot overlords, there’s also a dimensional collapse underway that’s a bit more fundamental than the mere human inconvenience of never being able to outrun your past.
The collapse to which I’m referring isn’t just due to cultural factors such as “the shortness of the news cycle” and the tightening loop of our conception of the present. My sense is that we’re also experiencing a psychologically necessary disavowal of both history and the future because they have become impossible to for us to reconcile. The past is unbearably dull, when held up to the infinite earthly delights of our present distractions, and unbearably corrupt from the perspective of our present moral perfection. The future is just too horrible to contemplate.
Many of us only feel safe in the present, which is a zone of political ephemera, circularly-constructed identity, contextless data, and dopamine-driven like-buttons—a little arena where we can make the world apprehensible, tameable, and conquerable. Our desire to inhabit this arena also comes from a transparently late-capitalist impulse, a need to commodify the world to optimize our experience in the moment.
All the same, I love having access to Gutenberg, all of the digitalized Victoriana of the internet archive, and the Historical Thesaurus. But I belong to the most hideously transitional generation in history, and I doubt another will witness such an accelerated rate of change. The things I’ve seen! Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. So my work is both pre- and post-internet.
Original IT was designed precisely for reaching back through time or carrying the past into the present. Contemporary IT (and now AI) has the effect of trapping us in a circular hell that exists only as an eternal present. Looking into the past now, attempting to bring things back, feels like an undercover activity, akin to smuggling. But our increasingly desperate confidence, self-conception, and sense of value seems premised on dismissing everything that has come before us as permanently superseded. This isn’t just incredibly dangerous. By definition, it’s suicidal. Thank God for my native joie de vivre.
CD: Related to your thoughts on our shifting perception of time, your poems bristle with moments in which the past, present, and future seem to exist simultaneously. For example, your poem “Tattoo,” which appears toward the latter half of The Arctic, contains the following lines:
I was a boy inside this skin
…………………………………….this good suit I’ll be buried in
as we were so we will be
………………………………………mark these words as they mark me
Would you elaborate for us on the relationship between poetry and memory? I’m thinking here of your much-quoted assertion that a “poem is a little machine for remembering itself.” What is it that makes a poem last? Do you see any connections between the way that you depict time in many of your poems and your conception of poetry’s capacities as an art form?
DP: I guess we can only say what makes poetry last by trying to work out what the poems in our human set of “keepers” have in common. I’m often struck at how many are so identifiably of their time—and, in contrast, how deliberate attempts to write sub specie aeternitatis result in something ephemeral or dated. Readers don’t like having to deny that time is a thing, and being themselves products of their own time, they’re drawn to poems with which their own experience can sympathetically resonate, and in which they can hear the dead poet in his or her own living present. One can’t help thinking of the horse-skulls that flamenco guitarists used to place in the room as a kind of “bone reverb.”
The example I always think of is Derek Mahon’s “correction” at the end of “Beyond Howth Head.” He changed “and I put out the light / on Mailer’s Armies of the Night,” which is beautiful and timeless, to the awful and generic “encroaching shadows of the night.” It’s interesting to note, by the way, that when I do a google search to check on the correction, I can barely find any mention of “Beyond Howth Head,” a poem that I foolishly thought held minor classic status.
I think we want to feel that all places and times have contained experiences of eternity and interconnectedness, in whatever cultural guise they may have arrived, analogous to our own. That which we experience as eternal stays that way by definition, and poets are traditionally good at capturing those moments. Keats’s “This Living Hand” never fails to shock me into my own wakeful present, for that reason. As far the collapsing of time in my own work, I hadn’t noticed it was such a strong motif, but I think many of us were permanently traumatized by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (and Borges, to be honest), and we have never really recovered.
It’s hard to talk about poetry’s capacities as an art form, since these have been drastically curtailed of late, and most of poetry’s previous cultural responsibilities have been delegated to other arts. As we head more deeply into the simulacrum, poetry starts to believe that the mere flagging of its concerns is the same as their address. But there’s no new shortcut. One still has to attempt to write a moving, mind-blowing, memorable poem, and often such work will upset, distress, or perplex readers. A poem can’t merely recycle whatever edgy tune has been this season’s smash hit, then pretend the delighted pearl-clutching it provokes is really outrage.
At the moment, the role of traditional poetry in the culture is increasingly symbolic. It does little work. There are a ton of great poems that could do that work, but the change in the signal-to-noise ratio leaves them drowned out. It’s a sign of the times that it takes something obviously bad, such as “This Hill We Climb,” to cut through the noise and have any sort of “inspirational” impact on the general population.
Poets now think almost exclusively about their own constituency. Rap and hip-hop do most of the work that poetry used to do, and often blindingly well. I think that spoken word poetry at least addresses concerns around poetry’s irrelevance, and its practitioners should get far more respect than we “page poets” are inclined to grant them, for all I find some of it a bit simplistic and emotionally coercive. But as I always say, poetry is the one art form that you can possess outright. If you can remember a great poem, you’ve stolen the Mona Lisa. It’s now part of your body. You’d think for that reason alone we’d have continued to make a fetish of its memorability.
CD: You’ve often talked in past interviews about poets and poetry as being obsessive in nature. What are some of the subjects, events, literary works, cultural figures, movies, TV shows, songs, and/or craft-related matters that are currently obsessing you as a poet?
DP: I’m rewatching Mad Men and marvelling at how miserably contemporary it is. It’s about a thousand times more honest about the actual tensions between the sexes than most of the wish-fulfilment fantasies currently available. Some things get more, not less, relevant. I loved Swarm. Justified came back for a short season and we punched the air. It was brilliant, of course. I also watch a ton of YouTube, which is the one platform that can sustain entirely wholesome communities, and there I can pursue my stupid obsessions with videogames, AI, US billiards, and music theory.
All my music-nut stuff seems to feed directly into the poetry, almost intravenously. Music is unusual in that its artists mature astonishing early, and I learned a long time ago to feed off the young. I love JD Beck and Domi. Pedro Martins seems to have been sent from heaven. I find myself deeply moved by everything he does. He reminds me of the truth of that line of Schlegel’s, about every great artist having their own individual religion, their own unique take on the infinite. There are a couple of wonderful records with him and Daniel Santiago, and I love all his Brazilian pop stuff. Amazing.
Pop-wise, Magdalena Bay are terribly good at the moment. I’ve followed Let’s Eat Grandma, Louis Cole, Genevieve Artadi, and Mohini Dey since they were kids, which is a creepy thing to say, I know, but not like that. Kids remind you that boldness is everything, a rule that gets harder and harder to remember as you age and grow more fearful. What else this year? Probably nothing that won’t make me sound desperate. Oneohtrix Point Never, Solange, all of Robert Glasper’s Black Radio stuff, and the Punch Brothers. My kids recently got me into Pile. Jazz-wise, all the old stuff. This week, Craig Taborn and Shai Maestro. Guitar-wise, I love Kurt Rosenwinkel and Nelson Veras.
As far as what I’m reading these days, I’m soaking up a lot of music theory, especially the astonishing work of the late Philip Tagg. When it comes to poetry, I may have overdone it. For years I read poetry for a living. I demitted both of my professional roles last year, in the academy and in publishing, which is, I realize, why I’m currently in stock-taking mode and have been sitting here typing away to my heart’s contented discontent. But I’m enjoying the work of my friends Kathleen Jamie, Karen Solie, Nick Laird, and Sean O’Brien as much as ever. I admire the poetry of Diane Seuss, Yusef Komunyakaa, Denise Riley, and Timothy Donnelly, and I still love Jack Gilbert, Paul Muldoon, Sharon Olds, Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Michael Donaghy, and David Berman. Somebody has to stage a Berman revival, though he missed the vival, to be honest.
I read Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, Bishop, Plath, Larkin, and Heaney, over and over. You slowly realize you don’t have forever to re-read the pantheon. In terms of the pitifully undervalued, I’ve been catching up on mid-to-late twentieth century American women like Bogan, Garrigue, Hoskins, Miles, and Lang. Deborah Digges is in danger of being forgotten too quickly.
I get obsessed with crazy Victoriana like Chamber’s Book of Days and Brewer’s Dictionary of Miracles (his failed bonkers sequel to my trusty Phrase and Fable), the early editions of which are the best. I love Peter Schjeldahl’s writing on art. As far as contemporary artists go, I’ve been unfashionably obsessed with Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain squiggles for some time. The Sugimoto at the Hayward was probably the best exhibition we went to last year. Feininger is underrated, the seascapes especially. I’m fascinated by so-called transitional figures that fall between the school-stools, such as Millay or Merrill in poetry, and Koechlin or Tournemire in music, and so on.
English-language cinema may be over until directors stop thinking they can write. Why is this a thing suddenly? I mean, sure, once in a while a Jordan Peele appears, but mostly I get about three minutes into Oppenheimer, or whatever, and I look at my wife because no one in the history of the race has ever spoken like that. Then we go check, and lo and behold, the director has written the screenplay. I assume directors think it’s easy because writers are dirt cheap. The reality is that hardly anyone can do the really specific jobs. We need to bring back the medieval guilds. The robots may soon have no other use for us.
CD: You’ve certainly given our editorial staff and the journal’s readers plenty of compelling ideas for our must-read, must-watch, and must-listen lists! We’d also love to know what you’re working on at present. Are you in the process of putting together a new poetry collection? Do you think that you might eventually pen a sequel to Toy Fights, one that deals with your life after the age of twenty?
DP: “Eventually” would have been more sensible, but I’m already more than a hundred thousand words into the sequel, which will take us to 1999, when the blinds will be firmly drawn. I suffer from an inability to pay attention to one thing for more than five minutes at a time, so I need to keep a bunch of projects in constant rotation.
One is always writing a new collection, alas. Symphosius wrote one hundred after-dinner riddles, the Aenigmata, and I’m trying to write a hundred sixteen-line poems that use the solutions to those riddles as the titles. I expect I’ll fall short of the goal somewhere around the sixty-four-page extent zone. The book has nothing to do with riddles or Symphosius at all, but the list of pre-determined subjects that I’ve stolen from Aenigmata is weirdly comprehensive.
I’m also writing some long katabatic thing about the soul of man as it faces a posthuman future, but who isn’t? I’m also trying to make a short ‘popular’ digest of The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre that might be of some practical use to folk, and a very niche little book on an obscure area of jazz harmony for the guitar. On the musical front, I have a new quartet called Good Dog, for which I’ve written a bunch of music.
CD: We’re excited to learn that you’re currently writing a sequel to Toy Fights, and your poetry manuscript-in-progress based on the riddles of Symphosius strikes us as a project ideally suited to your signature mixture of wit and profundity. It has been a pleasure to talk with you about your most recent books Toy Fights: A Boyhood, The Arctic, and Zonal, your larger body of work, and your views on a sweeping range of subjects. In our discussion, you’ve characterized poetry as “that function of language which makes it adequate to a new or changing reality,” and we’re grateful to you for your decades of making language adequate, and more than adequate, to our new and changing reality. Thank you for taking the time to converse with Literary Matters.
