Prac Crit

Hey, hey

by Matthew Welton

Interview

by Alex MacDonald

Alongside prepping for my interview, I spent the week leading up to it organising an event celebrating the anniversary of ‘Outrage’ – an edition of the Architectural Review famous for its vociferous takedown of post-World War Two British town planning. The issue was edited (and mostly written) by the critic Ian Nairn, who was dubbed ‘the poet of place’. So as I headed to Nottingham to meet Matthew Welton, a poet I had admired since reading his pamphlet Waffles from Eggbox Publishing (with its tactile blue seersucker textured cover), I had in my mind what Nairn said about the place, that the city had ‘a black veined soul of its own’.

On arriving, I saw that soul pulsing, but in the people, not the buildings. A man dressed as an alien from Aliens dancing on a podium (with no hat or bag to put change in – was he doing it for fun?), a man dressed as a predator from Predator (this time with a bag for money) and, when I visited the library to print out my questions and a copy of ‘Hey, hey’, a man wandered up to the counter with an Oxford English Dictionary to complain that he had come across the word ‘fuck’.

I can’t say I spent any time looking at Matthew’s veins (which I imagine to be a blue not dissimilar to my much-loved pamphlet of his), but I had spent a lot of time with his work, which is as unique as the city he lecturers and lives in. His forms – both in his poems and his way of structuring that work – are fascinating: a series of short poems for every match played in the 2002 Fifa World Cup; poems that mimic ‘the telephone game’ where a line is repeated and continually distorted as the poem continues; 12 line poems which are exactly that – twelve lines. He is a poet who thinks in sequences – whether it’s repeating words or phrases, writing poems only using four letter words, or the same number of words – and concerns himself with finding the extremities of the structure he has built.

When we met by the stone lions in Market Square, Matthew was concerned with finding us a pub to talk in. We spent much of the walk there discussing music, good bookshops and, of course, coffee, which features heavily in his work. When we find the pub – The Barrel Drop – I give him a small present: a green textured tin of coffee from Fortnum and Masons. He gives me a gift, too, a manuscript for his next book The Number Poems. Throughout our talk, and the lunch we share afterwards, Matthew is generous and inquisitive. He’s excited about the way British poetry is heading and he’s an avid reader, even admitting he read some of my work before the interview. Thankfully, though, I wasn’t on the spot – gladly, because I wanted to find out more about his curious poem ‘Hey, hey’.

AM

I want to start where the poem starts: the title. You often have really imaginative and discursive titles – ‘the fundament of wonderment’, ‘an ABC of American Suicide’, your 101-word title of your second collection. I found this title quite perfunctory, immediate – getting someone’s attention. I also thought about Krusty the Clown, but I don’t suppose that’s in the poem.

MW

I don’t really know The Simpsons, how does Krusty use ‘Hey Hey’?

AM

He uses it as a way to greet people, to say ‘hi’.

MW

It’s a low key title. I used to know someone who would say ‘hey, hey’ in the way we now use ‘whatever’. I don’t tend to give a poem a title like ‘Church Going’ and then write a poem about going to church. I like the title for meaning nothing. I really like interjections and how versatile they often are, so ‘Hey’ is a call for someone’s attention but ‘Hey, hey’ is kind of pushing someone away. But ultimately it means nothing and the poem doesn’t really mean anything.

AM

You talk a lot about coffee throughout your work, do you like it? It permeates so much of your work and I wonder why that is – can you not write poetry without it? Is it to you what opium was to the romantics?

MW

I like coffee a lot, I’ve drunk a few cups of coffee a day for most my adult life. It’s one of a range of objects I put in poems – there’s three coffees in there, there’s a fruit bowl and lemons. I’ve got a small vocabulary of things that I put in poems and I like to put them in in different combinations to see how I can make poems out of them. I’m not really interested in subject matter, I’m interested in form and the question of what we call poetry. I’m happy for anything to be considered a poem. None of it is factual or autobiographical – I wasn’t sitting on an empty train looking at an empty road but I use things that are to hand. Michael Craig Martin, who’s a wonderful artist, has a small number of objects he often portrays in outlines as if in a picture book – step ladders, light bulbs, pencil sharpeners – and puts them in different combinations. When I was writing this poem there was an exhibition of his work in Nottingham. I don’t want to have a bigger vocabulary than I already have in my poems, I want to be making things out of a small number of nouns. Coffee is so great – it’s a colour, it’s a taste, it’s a smell, it means a set of things and you can do loads of things to it without it being complicated.

AM

The reader is incredibly grounded in the real world here – fruit bowls, trains, empty roads. But there is a constant displacement, you manage to make everything relatable and foreign at the same time. It reminds me of 20th Century avant garde composers, using a standard orchestra but creating an alienating sonic landscape.  Do you think poetry has a duty to make us uncomfortable, to not give us easy answers, to be difficult?

MW

I don’t really know what to say about difficulty. I’m interested in the properties of things. I like the analogy of the composers. They would say to themselves ‘well, I’ll use twelve notes instead of eight’ and that’s obvious, but people were leaving concert halls in droves. All those innovations aren’t very complicated – you can do different things with something very recognisable and still make something new out of it. I’ve done a lot of fairly conventional things, I’ve written metrically, I’ve written with end rhymes and I really care about the sounds of words and what we call imagery. I’ve always been uncomfortable about the word ‘imagery’ because literary imagery is different from visual imagery, and we’re using it metaphorically. I’ve always been more comfortable with the word ‘noun’. In previous interviews I’ve been described as part of the mainstream, and it’s a controversial phrase, but I don’t feel I’m doing anything complicated. If you met someone who is artistically literate – who was interested in painting or theatre – but didn’t know a thing about poetry, and they were interested in wanting to read a collection of poetry, if you sent them what I do, I don’t think they would think it’s any more unusual or difficult than what Michael Symmons Roberts or Alice Oswald does. I’ve got a friend who talks about contemporary poetry as ‘I was doing something and then something happened’ and so many poets write in that idiom. What I’m not trying to do is create my objects and find the metaphor that is hiding – my cups of coffee aren’t telling us about anything, they’re not telling us anything about society, or our relation to one another, they’re just convenient.

AM

I think in the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s debut, people were so incensed by the simplicity of the piece that someone ran to the front of the hall and repeatedly banged their head on stage saying ‘I confess, I confess’. There’s a sense that this type of work is an interrogation to people’s sensibilities.

MW

I relate to that in my poems – most of the simple things are already there in a work of music, but composers might be making a smaller distance between the rhythm and the metre of a piece. The complexity is in its simplicity; its being resourceful – its saying ‘here’s a nice phrase’. I like that beauty, I like it in poetry – especially in the work of Thomas A. Clark or Lisa Jarnot.

AM

There seems to be an anxiety or a preoccupation with communication in the poem – voice messages are deleted, a distinction is made between speech and telephone talk, someone is rehearsing what they’ll say about what they did with the money. It seems that the poem itself eschews any previous utterance, honesty, truth or autobiography. How important are these sensibilities in your work?

MW

There’s loads of ways of answering this question. This poem isn’t autobiographical, it’s not a poem that’s about my life, but of course I take trains, I drink coffee, I have a fruit bowl. There’s not a message but I do try and say things, though I don’t feel I’m very good at saying them. My mind likes structure. When I first started writing poetry, which was not long after meeting student photographers at university, I thought ‘I want to do that in writing’. I figured I would learn techniques, I took a lot of poetry books out of the library – and I hadn’t studied poetry since I was sixteen. I took other people’s poems apart, I would write lines with the same number of syllables or patterns. I figured once I figured all that out I would have something to say, but I got so interested in the form and thought ‘well, that’s kind of everything’. I think you are saying something through form: it’s an aesthetic thing. I’m interested in what it means to say something – but I think about what John Cage says, ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.’ And it’s the Wittgenstein quote in the Steve Reich song ‘Proverb’ –  ‘how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life’, which, in itself, is a small thought which could fill a whole life, a whole song. I like the idea that simplicity has a lot of potential. I like the mathematics of that, and the permutations, it quickly escalates. If you approach a poem and say ‘every time I write I want to say “cloud” or “coffee”’ then there’s quite a lot you can do.

AM

Poets seem to do that subconsciously anyway. There’s poets who you read thinking ‘okay they’re talking about birds again’, maybe what you’re doing is creating that world anyway and finding the breadth in which you can discuss those objects.

MW

One poet I met said when he was writing his second book that ‘the trouble is that now I have to find fifty other things I need to say’ and I thought ‘well, I don’t have anything to say’.

AM

I really enjoy the quality these constraints give your work. In your four-letter-word poems, they have this interesting directional feel: ‘lose your door key’, ‘don’t shoo them away’. But in this poem, perhaps the most noticeable constraint is line length. You have all these short statements – like instructions shaping an absent ‘thing’ – but then you have this long sentence, which builds these almost bucolic images on top of each other. It’s disruptive, but creates this harmonious image of the wagtails, sparrows, raspberries, weeds, and then leads to ‘the discontinuity in the discontinuity in things’. It feels like the reader is constantly compromised, unassuaged from finding an over-arching message in the work.

MW

In some ways in writing the next book I got stuck. The Waffles poems are in this book and the idea was to write more of those, but around the time I moved to Nottingham I got stuck. After about three years, I thought ‘well I’m just going to have to write something else’ and there’s a long poem in the book – like in The Book of Matthew – when I finished that, I thought it needs more to make it a book. So ‘Hey, hey’ was the first short poem I wrote in years. I wrote it quite quickly and to write a poem but with lines that don’t have a regular metre wasn’t really something I’ve ever done. There is an orthodoxy to the line endings, they’re about ten syllables each. I also kept thinking ‘how do I make this part of a set?’. Because this poem is 202 words, and We needed coffee was 101 words, I was going to do a series of poems with 202, 303 or 404 words each. I also wanted to write coffee in there three times and I really like those Anglo-Saxon onomatopoeic words like ‘sludgy’ and ‘silty’.

AM

People are often warned off using adjectives in creative writing classes.

MW

Surely be cautious about them, but I hate the idea there should be a consensus. I much prefer the idea of putting words together. I like a range of work and we can all be writing poems at the same time but come up with different poems – and I love that diversity. I also think that one day I’ll write a metrical poem and then one day I’ll write another. It’s good to not be doing the same thing at the same time.

AM

Do you feel that what I guess could be called ‘mainstream poetry’ reaches for the revelation too often, a poetry filled with morals and messages? I mean, life isn’t filled with constant epiphanies, so why should poetry be? There are all these chiming discords within ‘Hey, hey’ and it feels like it refers back to itself, tries to correct itself. Emily Berry, in her editorial for Poetry Review talks about this idea of poets having lists and the idea of poems constantly reflecting and echoing each other.

MW

Emily Berry the poet and Emily Berry the editor are both wonderful. The Best British Poetry 2015 was excellent, what she did last year was exciting. But on revelation – Donald Barthelme has two short story collections out on Penguin, one of which is Forty Stories and the other is Sixty Stories, and in the introduction by David Gates he talks about the convention that there should be ‘minor events in the lives of minor characters leading up to minor epiphanies’. I feel that there is a formula, and if it’s a good formula, and if you can do it interestingly then do it. I had a student – she had a career working in charity sectors and with refugees – and she wanted to write about refugees. She also does workshops and she was in one workshop where she was told you should take objects and then find the metaphor. Yes, that is one way, but there isn’t a ‘should’. The whole excitement of poetry is finding something that no one is doing. There are a lot of creative writing text books that say ‘the worst thing you can do is say something directly’, like ‘he was eighty years old’. But why is that the worst thing? Why do you have to infer all the time? Should you write ‘He was dribbling down his bathrobe as he reached for his pills’? Why not write he was eighty years old so then I can get on to the next sentence?

AM

Poets like Eileen Myles are direct and it is one of the reasons why their work, and hers in particular, continues to be admired and enjoyed.

MW

I think so, it’s an interesting register. A lot of the fiction I enjoy, like Shelia Heti, has this directness, too. We disclose so much more now, through the Internet, which was a big turning point. But my parents’ generation didn’t say things about their lives. When ‘happy slapping’ was a thing, if someone got drunk the night before and threw up over themselves, a recording of that would be on the Internet before they had the chance to clean themselves up. So now, the need to be discreet when talking about these things has gone. There’s an openness. Working in a university as a lecturer and personal tutor, I get some students talk to me about troubling things happening in their lives, and I thought ‘are things getting worse’? A counsellor at the university said ‘in some degree they could be, but people are just more open about things now, there’s less shame’. I think about the ‘Hemingway  Iceberg’ theory, that you only show the surface but have all this depth hidden – but you don’t have to, you can just put it on the table. If you want to tell it how it is in your writing, then that’s really interesting, and we need to figure out the poetic possibilities in that. For me, I’m not trying to tell you a secret without telling you a secret. Words have so many properties to them so the ‘It’ usually is a flexible thing, it could be a poem about death, it could be a poem about the seaside.

AM

One way I was thinking about this poem was imagining someone trying to answer one of the questions you might get when you say you’re a poet: what’s your poetry about? What is poetry? Are these sort of questions in the back of your mind whilst writing? Are they in your mind whilst you’re working at the university? Do you feel in your position you’re expanding the concept of what poetry is, both on the page and in the seminar room? I was taught recently by a creative writing tutor who told us about how his young male students would have this ‘doomy’ verse and their work was quite dramatic, grandiose and full of cliché.

MW

There’s a necessity to open people up to more ideas of what poetry is in my job, but also I need to respect where they are coming from. They need poetry to be whatever it is they need it to be – could be a private thing, could be a thing they want public; it’s about pluralism. When you’re experienced in writing poetry and being very involved in workshops, you often forget what it was that got you where you are. I’m interested in taking an objective view of cliché, which is often spoken about in a disparaging way. If you’re eighteen, and you’re writing in these grandiose terms to explain what is happening around you, that’s exciting, that’s what youth is all about and you have to respect that. There are poets who have written the same poem their whole lives – that’s fine. There are poets that want to try different things – that’s fine, too.

AM

There are two statements I feel are key to this poem: ‘the doodles in the condensation’ and ‘the melody you’ll muddle / on the cello’. I felt these two experiences, two ways of executing an image or an artistic gesture, were ways of getting the so desired ‘it’ in the poem. This reminded me of Waffles, which has its three constructions sections and, also, of Francis Bacon’s paintings, who after a while just called them ‘Studies of…’. It gives a sense of these poems being ones of rigorous circumstances, that perhaps you’re more interested in exploring these circumstances and constraints.

MW

In both of those phrases, there is a meeting of the low and high register. So, ‘doodles’ is an earthy Anglo-Saxon word and ‘melody’ is a higher register. Of course, ‘melody’ isn’t ‘song’ but, ‘muddles’ is right down in the earth. If I have a formula, that’s what it is. I’m interested that we have objects and that we can think about them – that’s my agenda. But of course a lot of it is based on sounds as well – muddle and doodle – there’s so much fun you can have with words. What could be more fun than to just stand around and say ‘doodles, doodles, doodles’ all day? I want the sound to detain you. Like in ‘if I had a yammer’ in my second book, which is the last poem I wrote with end rhymes.

AM

In a previous interview you’ve said you might use rhyme or repetitions for reasons of delight and restraint. I wonder also whether it’s a way of drawing out images or scenes you may not have otherwise written about unprompted. Stravinsky said something to the effect that the more constraints you put on a practice the freer you are. Was there anything in this poem that felt unfamiliar to you?

MW

It was unfamiliar writing a short poem. It’s a short poem, in some ways it’s formulaic – it starts with the short sentences and images, then the long sentence, and it builds on the concrete onomatopoeic nouns and adjectives like ‘rubber’, ‘coffee’, and ‘balloons’. The formula of the poem is that you need those words before you can have ‘condensation’, ‘relent’ or ‘discontinuity’. At the time it felt like a liberation to write this – it was about rearranging things I already had.

AM

Your next book – The Number Poems – weaves mathematical patterns out of language. Are there any number games and codes working throughout this piece? And if so what are they? I noticed that you have three sentences starting with ‘think of it’ then followed by one sentence starting ‘it’s’. You do that sequence twice, then the patterns get harder to discern.

MW

I’m interested in the formal side of poetry – metre and rhyme – and what is sometimes described as ‘local grace’ – elements like alliteration – in contemporary poetry. Something like alliteration is rarely used as a structuring device, which I explore in this poem. There was a point that I began writing it and thought of using the phrase ‘think of it’ and I used that, then thought it might be starting to get a bit tedious. In my old way of thinking I would have thought, you have to use the exact phrase every time – but then I thought there would be more mileage in using the phrase ‘It’s’. Whilst there was a formula, I wasn’t thinking about how many times they have to be there. It’s like a rope – if you have one strand in a rope, it’s flimsy, but if you have three strands it becomes more cohesive and stronger.

AM

How much does the final presentation of your work influence the writing of the material? I ask because in your first book there is a playfulness in there: a poem is titled ‘adidas’ in the contents, but called ‘all day I dream about sex’; the title of your second book is a poem in itself. It feels like you’re constantly pushing at traditional ways of presenting poetry – you’re quite a prolific collaborator with musicians and artists too.

MW

Just because there’s a convention presently used by publishers, that’s probably only a tradition which is about forty years old. There are all kinds of other things people have been doing outside of that. We were talking about Harold Pinter earlier and, in his Nobel citation, they said ‘he’s returned drama to its essential ingredients – it’s people talking on the stage’. Poems are words and patterns, but I don’t think that what I do is any more alien than what others are doing.

AM

On your Twitter account you’ve been talking about the way that patterns are displayed in your work – using coloured pencil annotations – saying that it’s like bell ringing or a maypole. Can you talk about this a little more? I know that when Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he wanted to use different colour inks to show different time periods and speakers.

MW

Well, Luke Kennard beat me to it, didn’t he? The red and the black is absolutely beautiful and exciting that Penned in the Margins did that with Cain. But it’s an obvious thing – if you had someone who hadn’t had their eye on the poetry culture and said ‘in 2016, bearing in mind Duchamp is over 100 years ago, someone is going to write a poem with two coloured inks on the page’ they’d say ‘Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t you do that?’. Poems require two colours of ink. I would hope that other people would now do that. It’s along the lines of Cummings using lower-case letters. I used it to proof read the work and it needed it. It’s a quick way of me seeing where the pattern is. I now think that it’s an obvious and nice thing to do, and it would be nice to print the poems in colour. If you care to work it out, you can see where the patterns are – sentences, phrasing, adjective words that have ‘nt’ in them so the six times there’s an apartment in the poem it’s ‘adjacent’ or ‘city centre’ or ‘vacant’. You can enjoy working out the maths of it and I would hope there is a pleasure in doing that. Some people say that taking a poem apart kills it, but I don’t think it does: it opens up these other possibilities. It’s also, for me, fun. I can see why people don’t like it, but I do.

Hey, hey

by Matthew Welton

Think of it as the rubber ball we’ve hidden
in the fruit bowl. Think of it as sludgy coffee.
Think of it like it’s a bunch of balloons.

Imagine it’s the voices on the recordings
we deleted. Think of it as the empty roads
you see from the empty train.

Think of it as the lull between your morning
at the typewriter and the hour you spend rehearsing
what you’ll say you did with the cash.

Think of it as silty coffee. Imagine it as
telephone talk. It’s the doodles in the condensation.
It’s the bunches of plums overhanging the stream.

Think of it as the moment where our thoughts
thin out or the rain relents or the wagtails
huddle in the midsummer shadows, or, as the sparrows

go spiraling away from us, the raspberries redden
and the yellow weeds wilt, and we think of it
as a discontinuity in the discontinuity between things.

Think of it as a melody you’ll muddle
on the cello – imagine it meandering like
thunder or thought. It’s midsummer moonlight.

It’s a ball of blue twine. Think of it
as gloopy coffee. Imagine it’s imaginable. Think of it
as a lemon, and give it another squeeze.

First Published by Prac Crit.

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