LIDIA VIANU

Critics

ROBERT HAMPSON

I would be very happy to avoid the term ‘postmodern’: it has been used in such different senses as to be no longer useful.
 

2. POETRY
 

Interview with ROBERT HAMPSON (born 26 November 1948), British literary critic, academic and poet
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006;
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Hampson%20interview.htm
© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: Your poetry is an intellectual adventure, and an intellectual treat at the same time. You devour space with your thought-tentacles. Your poems go places the reader would not dream of associating. Since your have also written about contemporary poetry, what makes a poet contemporary to this beginning of the third millennium?

ROBERT HAMPSON: Thank you for these comments. I have had one reviewer complain that the work was intellectual, but it is designed to be intellectually playful and an adventure. Frank O’Hara and the English poet John James were important early influences. The influence of Pound and Olson is more evident in Seaport, which you haven’t seen.

I think a poet has to be as aware as possible of the range of contemporary writing – and, for me, that would include various ‘border-areas’ such as poetry as installation, event, or performance. It would include an awareness of sonic, graphic and performative aspects of poetry – all of which have been explored during the last century – as well as an awareness of new technologies, such as digital poetics. It is not that the poet has to then work in all these areas, but some knowledge of what Pound called ‘the scope of the possible’ is an important part of the poet’s training. Poets such as cris cheek, Caroline Bergvall and Redell Olsen have all been important for me in this area. Being aware of contemporary developments in the other arts also helps the poet to be alive in one’s own time.

For the same reason, I think the poet has also to be aware of contemporary philosophical and theoretical issues. From the very outset, I was aware of issues around ‘race’ and gender. When I set up the magazine Alembic with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards in 1973, our explicit programme was anti-racist, anti-sexist and international. It was not that we wrote poems explicitly outlining this programme, but these values were implicit in our writing and editorial practices. More recently, my involvement with the department’s MA in Postmodernism led to an intensive reading of a range of theoretical writing which had a direct impact on my poetry. It encouraged me to write in a different way and also impacted on the language and content of the poetry. Finally, I think the poet has also to be aware of contemporary political developments. I write poems which are love poems, but I am also conscious of how the moment is penetrated by multiple events, dynamics, discourses. The poetry of Allen Fisher has been very important for me in understanding this sense of the multiplicity of the moment. The private space is permeated by public events, codes, discourses.


LV. I have a word of my own for postmodern poets: I call them Desperado. One of the reasons is proved by your poems: you write gun (language) in hand. You wield words like bullets. Impressing the reader becomes wounding him into awareness with you. Is poetry still an effective intellectual weapon in our times?

RH. I would be very happy to avoid the term ‘postmodern’: it has been used in such different senses as to be no longer useful. (I have an essay on this, which I won’t repeat here.) ‘Desperado’ is very flattering: there is a song of that title by Linda Ronstadt, which plays to a certain male romantic posturing … However, I take your response to the poems (here and elsewhere) seriously. The poetry is designed to move quickly and to have shocks and surprises – and traps. O’Hara writes in his ‘Manifesto’: You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’’ I think your critical comments make an effective case for the personal response.

Is poetry still an effective intellectual weapon? I would like to think so, though I don’t know how to measure the effect. Some of my more recent work – in a recent Poetry Review and on various websites/e-zines – is very much engaged with British and North American foreign policy. It isn’t effective in the sense of stopping things happening – I was disconcerted to see that work I had published in relation to the First Gulf War could have been recycled for the Second, but I think it is vitally important for poetry (and intellectuals generally) to attempt to occupy the public sphere. I think it is effective in relation to individual readers, and it has a vital role to play in relation to destabilizing, deconstructing, estranging the dishonest language of politics. (The killing of the young Brazilian by the police with several bullets to the head was described by the former Prime Minister John Major as a ‘shoot to protect’ policy.)


LV. You call poetry ‘catching the moment’... With you ‘the word/ travels’. Your poems all ‘tell their tale’. In very few words you create a universe of innumerable planets for the understanding. Although you are crystal clear – how I appreciate this respect for language – you can be endlessly interpreted. This is what I call true poetry, the poetry which, if we take Eliot’s words for granted, ‘can communicate before it is understood.’ Although you write specialized criticism, you can be, just like Eliot, a wonderful practitioner. How do these two sides coexist in you?

RH. I like the idea of a few words working to create their own universe. The phrase ‘catching the moment’ very much sums up what I was attempting in that particular poem: it was like a photograph or quick sketch, but in words. The early poetry is highly visual – film and photography were important points of reference for me. With ‘the word/travels’, I was exploring the ‘cross-cultural encounter’ of a particular relationship, but I was also drawing on academic research I had been doing on Joyce and Homer. With ‘tell their tale’, I was engaged with the idea of narrative and poetry, and I was writing a series of poems that explored narrative through responding to the films of Godard. In some of these poems, I was interested in playing games with the audience: the assumption is often made that poems are autobiographical; in these poems I wanted to create first-person narratives which couldn’t possibly be me. Later poetry is much more based in language than in the visual, and here the principle of sharp cutting between discourses both respects language but also opens out interpretation. Again, an important early influence was the work of Lee Harwood. Harwood’s combination of precision and incompleteness was very powerful. His poem ‘Linen’ ends:

touching you like the
and soft as
like the scent of flowers and
like an approaching festival
whose promise is failed through carelessness

Harwood’s work, too, ‘communicates before it is understood’, which (I suspect) is partly why it has been so little written about. What is there to say?

How do the two sides co-exist? Sometimes, as in the Joyce example, one feeds directly into the other. As time has gone by, I have had to find ways of drawing creatively on various aspects of academic practice. Sometimes, this has been a matter of using the language of theory and turning it for other purposes. Sometimes, as in C for Security, it was a matter of taking the practice of producing handbooks for students and subverting it.


LV. You talk in a poem about the ‘survivalist desert’ and the title of your collected is ‘assembled fugitives’. What a wonderful description of the dystopia we live in, and which is the Desperadoes’ favourite environment. One of the major Desperado features – as I see it – is their sense for the dystopic. They relish fear, alienation, the death of love/the couple, the death of the nineteen-century-long fairy tale tradition (which died with the advent of Modernism). You yourself are in love with the mind, not necessarily with anyone in flesh and blood. If you were to describe the poetic essence of your existence, how would you put it into words?

RH. That poem is a response to a film by John Cameron, Terminator, where the dystopic future is resituated in contemporary USA. I hadn’t thought of my work as dystopic – I had hoped there was a utopian drive behind it. Perhaps the two are intertwined in a dance: ‘pessimism of analysis , optimism of the will’ (or should that be the other way round). I would like to think there is a sense of risk or adventure rather than fear. I guess what comes across as alienation is a sense of critical distance and what I would see as a more positive assertion of non-belonging. There is a lot of moving between cultures, a refusal of nostalgia or sense of originary identity, and part of the use of America is as a destabilizing of ideas of belonging. Identity is in flux.

I don’t think there is a sense of the death of love: there are some poems (such as ‘alphaville’) where that is part of a dystopic urban image, but, more generally, love and the erotic are very positive features of the various worlds in the poems – and various flesh-and-blood women are behind a number of them.


LV. In one poem you confess yourself to be ‘caught between/ sign & sign.’ Is poetry a trap or a liberation? What exactly do you feel when you write it? The prisoner of your gift or its master?

RH. In that poem, I was thinking about the signs on the US freeways but also linguistic signs (and living in language). So, there is partly a sense of exhilaration, the pleasure of travel and the enjoyment of the speed and tricks of the poem – there is a wonderful book by the American poet, Rosmarie Waldrop, The Road is Everywhere or Stop This Body, which uses car journeys and actually incorporates a road-sign into each poem, and that was probably in my mind. At the same time, there is the frustration of being trapped within language – and pushing in various ways against that limit – but there is no outside to language .What is important is the irresolvable co-existence of the two. If there is mastery, there is also imprisonment.


LV. Most Desperado poets see themselves driving or roaming down a street. Nature is a lost realm. It comes back in your lines, but as a cosmic nature, if I can say so: you devise a picturesqueness of the universe. It feels as if you were travelling among stars. Considering this view of space, what poet do you feel closer to? It can’t be Whitman – but I suspect you do appreciate him, or you would avoid accumulation of images in his manner. What do you think of Peter Ackroyd, who (in his The Plato Papers) has the same view of an uncomfortable, exhilarating yet scary truth?

RH. Since becoming aware of Roy Fisher’s ‘City’ and Allen Fisher’s ‘Place ‘ early in the 1970s (at a time when I had recently moved from Liverpool and was now settled in London), I have been very consciously working to develop an urban poetics. The clearest sign of that was my volume Seaport. I am very conscious of myself as primarily urban in orientation, though ‘over the bridge’ is located on the English/Welsh border. But I am also conscious of being an internationalist. I have no patience with the ‘Little Englandism’ of some poets of the 1950s. The great advantage of Modernism was that it was an international movement and involved international affiliations.

I see what you mean about nature coming back as cosmic nature. I think of ‘the planet traverses / multi-dimensional spaces’. That poem is routed in travel and the cross-cultural encounters in which I am interested as both poet and critic, but the internationalism there has become a global awareness. Again, I am conscious of that cosmic concern as an element in Allen Fisher’s work.. For myself, I am interested in sudden changes of scale or perspective – and that would be found also in the Renaissance poetry of John Donne, a poet who has always interested and excited me. Another example, ‘planets suspended in space/on silver wires’ uses the line-break to produce that shift of scale and perspective – from the cosmic to the toy or model. Again, I feel this is very close to the contractions and expansions of space in Donne.

Charles Olson, of course, whom I came at through Allen Fisher, would be crucial for my thinking about space. More recently, I have been interested in space, travel and cartography through post-modern geographers such as my former colleague Dennis Cosgrove and spatial thinkers such as de Certeau and Lefebvre.


LV. You are anti-conventional. You give up punctuation, even words (using 4 for ‘for’, for instance), and you make me think of the American tradition in poetry (e.e. cummings). Where is poetry going today? What are its new conventions, in your opinion? Is it still the most national of arts, as Eliot called it?

RH. Yes, the lack of punctuation and the use of lower case do come out of the American tradition. I read some cummings thirty or forty years ago, but the important influences at the outset of my career were Pound, Olson, Williams and the traditions of American poetry that come out of them. Olson, in particular, has been important in terms of the use of the page space and treating the space of the page as a compositional field.

Subsequently, I have been very conscious of the LANGUAGE school as my US contemporaries – Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian – and others such as Rosmarie Waldrop and Kathleen Fraser. I have had a sense of dialogue with their work. At the same time, it should be said that I would see my work as situated within a community of ‘London-based’ poets (many have since moved out of London), who would describe similar influences and would see themselves as part of a similar dialogue. I am thinking of people like Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clark, cris cheek, Harry Gilonis, Gavin Selerie, Peter Middleton, Caroline Bergvall …

More recently, I have been brought into contact with a younger group of poets (and other writing practices) through my colleague, Redell Olsen. As a result of exposure to her work and her concerns, I have become interested in the relationships between the verbal and the visual, the performative aspects of poetry, and new digital technologies of writing. My own work has been influenced by bookarts, installations, and performance. I think this I one of the directions in which poetry is going today. I have been very impressed by the performance and installation work of Redell’s students, Gilbert & Grape, and by the digital poetry of her student, John Sparrow .

I find it hard to think of poetry as a ‘national’ art. My own practice has always been ready to learn from other European and North American poetries, and, at different times, I have also been in dialogue with poets in New Zealand and Australia. With email, all of this dialogue is even easier. HOW2, the electronic journal that is currently edited by Redell, has an editorial board that includes Australian and North American poets, and has world-wide poetry as its constituency.


LV. All Desperado writers are solitary. Poetry is itself a solitary game. Would you be willing to state that you belong to a group of poets similar to you, to a trend? Because I have this feeling that you are a trend in yourself, the same as Alan Brownjohn (whom I have also interviewed and about whose work I have written a book) has created what I like to call Brownjohnism. Would Hampsonism shock you?

RH. As I suggested in the previous answer, I am very conscious of my poetry being produced within a community that is both local (in so far as my immediate contacts are in London) and global (through meetings and regular email conversations with poets in Europe, in the US and in Australia). An exhibition about Dada in the mid-60s had an important impact on me, and then I grew up in Liverpool at the time of the ‘Liverpool Scene’ and was part of the audience for Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten and others – so the idea of poetry NOT being solitary was always very attractive to me.

Through Olson, I came to know about Black Mountain College and was also conscious of the Bauhaus, so I have always been interested in the idea of poetry and the arts as part of a collective experiment and inquiry. Even if we think of the Romantics, Wordsworth learned from Coleridge; Byron and Shelley were in dialogue; Keats was part of a supportive group.


LV. What do you think is the future of poetry? Will anyone but the poets themselves read it? Will literature survive this terrible fight with the (tele)screen? Is the internet good or bad for the future of poetry?

RH. I think poetry has a range of futures. There will be at least one kind of poetry read largely by other poets. This is most obvious in relation to various avant-garde poetries, but it also applies to commercial poetry as well. Poets are perhaps the most attentive readers of other poets’ work – whether that poetry is unconventional or highly commercial. But I suspect the same goes for musicians: Bob Dylan’s account of his encounters with other people’s work shows a very close attention to the structure of songs, the relation to precursors, the range of possible musical treatments. The same goes for jazz musicians talking, for example, about the work of Joe Harriot.

I think the fight is not so much with the telescreen as with digital media, but, as I have suggested above, I think there are also things to be done with digital media and performance – and that might be where the future of poetry lies.

June 2005