Almost two decades ago, I met Dannie Abse at a small recording studio in Battersea. He had agreed to be filmed by the English and Media Centre, the publishers of emagazine, for a video publication called The Poetry Pack. His video readings (some of which are also now viewable for free on The Poetry Station), were rich and resonant and highlighted the way in which, for Abse, the sound of the poetry is of great significance; the poem on the page needs to be heard aloud.
Now I am interviewing him for emagazine and, as he greets me at the door of his home in Golders Green, London, I am reminded of his spoken voice, the warmth and rhythms of which can be heard in his poems. At 90, with many collections of poetry and prose works to his name and a new anthology, Speak Old Parrot, just out, he remains one of the most active and important figures in the contemporary British poetry scene. I’m interviewing him about Welsh Retrospective, a collection set for WJEC, alongside the poems of Philip Larkin.
BB: What would you like A Level students to have in
mind when they’re studying your poetry?
DA: I think A Level readers are like any others. I would love
them to pay a great deal of attention and inhabit the poems, re-write them, as
it were, as they go along. I would like them to follow what I am saying, look
out for double meanings and go into each poem sober and come out feeling a
little bit drunk!
BB: Welsh Retrospective focuses strongly on your
poems about Wales and the title alone suggests a strong connection with a Welsh
tradition. Is that tradition important to you?
DA: I’ve said in the past that I feel that, with my Welsh and
Jewish background, I belong to two traditions of poetry, David in the Bible, who
played the harp, and Dafydd ap Gwilym, a fourteenth-century Welsh poet writing
at the same time as Chaucer, who also played the harp. Dafydd is so significant
that he should really be just as well known as Chaucer. Some people think that
the Welsh tradition of poetry is just about the subject matter but it’s also
about the language. People talk about the Welsh language washing down into the
English way of speaking.
Dafydd ap Gwilym invented certain forms of rhyming and I’m
also a poet who uses a lot of internal rhyming. I experiment with rhyme and knit
a poem together, musically. Sometimes when I have given poetry readings and
there are questions afterwards, I am asked, ‘Why don’t you rhyme?’ I take that
as a great compliment. They haven’t noticed that I’m writing them!
BB: Some critics have said that, although the
collection is about Wales, the poems are really much more about you and your
identity and that the poetry is rather like autobiography in verse form. What do
you think about that?
DA: There are autobiographical elements certainly. But some
people write autobiographically when they’re at their most impersonal, saying
‘you’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ instead of ‘I’, and the other way round, so you need to
be aware of that in reading a poet’s work. But one writes out of one’s
experience, true or imagined.
People try to put me into compartments – the Welsh
compartment, the Jewish compartment, the medical compartment, the sports
compartment. It’s easy for critics to do that. I could, of course, bring out a
book of poems all about medical matters, or Jewish matters. In this case, it’s a
Welsh publisher who has asked me to do a book about Welsh matters and I’m
delighted to do that.
BB: What I love about the poetry is that, whatever
the ‘strands’, whatever the ideas or themes, it’s people that come to the
fore.
DA: Well, that’s supposed to be one of the characteristics of
Welsh people, that they’re interested in people. They are curious about their
neighbours and, as Dylan Thomas would have said, you see the curtains twitch
back, as in Under Milk Wood, with people looking at what their neighbours are
doing. Gossip is a great enterprise in Wales. In my poems I gossip about my
relatives, though they might not recognise themselves there. I like to amuse
myself and hope that I amuse other people too, so there’s humour there as well.
We can all sympathetically laugh at our relatives, can’t we?
BB: In some senses, the poems about people work as a
novel would – you introduce your ‘characters’ to the reader.
DA: I’m interested in stories and I’ve written novels. I
think all literature is drama really, with a dramatic impulse, whether it’s
autobiography, or novels or even poetry. I don’t make the distinction between
them.
BB: I’d be interested to hear you talking about the
places that have been important to you and appear in all your poetry
collections, including Welsh Retrospective.
DA: Ogmore-by-Sea and Cardiff are the two places that I’ve
written about most, I guess, especially Ogmore, and I continue to do so. It’s
not that I’ve set out to write about one or the other – it’s that one reacts to
where one’s living and one loves the place, or hates the place, or whatever.
It’s always been interesting to me that Graham Greene actually needed to hate a
place to write about them as the settings for his novels. I don’t hate the
places I write about but they are a strong dimension of the poems.
BB: Ogmore seems more joyful and soaked in childhood,
Cardiff more ambivalent.
DA: But there are some sad things that have happened in
Ogmore as well, and quarrels that I had with my wife. The one where I go
crawling back, using the word ‘crawling’ in both senses. Not only are the waves
crawling back but I’m crawling back towards land and I’m also crawling in the
sense of saying ‘forgive me, kid.’ Going back to Wales is more ambivalent now.
In 2005 we had a car accident and my wife, Joan, was killed, so now going back
is very different from going back when she was alive.
BB: Do you write for yourself, or do you feel that
you need a readership?
DA: In my new book, Speak Old Parrot, I write about the bus
that goes past Ogmore-by-Sea on the coast road and how it goes from Llantwit
Major to Bridgend and back from Bridgend to Llantwit Major. I’ve seen the bus go
by empty both ways. And so I found myself writing a poem about this, as an
allegory about poetry, among other things, about how terrible it must be to have
no passengers, no audience whatsoever, like Manley Hopkins, during his lifetime,
or certain other poets. You need passengers, or at least one passenger.
BB: What about yourself? Do you write for
yourself?
DA: There’s myself as well, and I contain multitudes, as the
poet Walt Whitman said. I have to satisfy myself. If I’m writing a humorous poem
I have to find that I laugh and if I’m writing a sad poem I have to feel sad. I
think feeling is important in poems – they shouldn’t just be cerebral. But by
writing about myself I’m also writing about everybody else as well. When I
mentioned talking humorously about relatives, your eyes lit up because you knew
about that, you thought about your own relatives and have the same universal
feelings. You don’t have to be Welsh and you don’t have to be Jewish to have
relatives!
BB: Do you see yourself more as a poet or a writer of
prose?
DA: No. Inspiration doesn’t come by appointment, so one has
to wait for a poem. It’s easier to write prose, so when I can’t write poetry I
turn to prose. You can work on a poem for such a long time, working on just a
page. You don’t spend four years on a page of a novel but with a poem that’s
possible. One is concerned with language in novels and prose generally but not
in the same way as a poem. I don’t agree with Valèry who said that your poem is
never finished, only abandoned. I do think a poem is finished when you can’t
make it any better, when it’s as good as it can be.
BB: The WJEC exam specification has paired your
collection with Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. Can you tell me your thoughts
about that?
DA: I knew Philip Larkin. He was a very good chairman on a
committee and humorous and witty but he was stingy. He didn’t like taking girls
out in case he had to pay for them, when he was younger. I do admire his poetry
and I admire the sharpness of his images and his ability to actually feel in his
poems, unlike so many of the other Movement poets. [The Movement was a group of
poets in the 1950s and 60s, which included Larkin, Thom Gunn and Elizabeth
Jennings among others.] We’re quite different in many ways. He was right-wing
and I wasn’t. His father was a Nazi sympathiser and he used to take Philip to
Germany to show him how wonderful it was. So Philip had a hell of a background.
I think he had a curious attitude to me. So in a way it’s ironic that we’ve been
linked together, though I can understand it because we have got certain things
in common, when I look at his poems.
I often like to end poems on an image, or leave them
open-ended, rather than shut tight. Larkin does the same. I like the originality
of an image and I hope that I manage that sometimes. He does too. I think he
talks less about the ephemeral than I do. He looks back less, talks a bit less
about transience.
BB: The importance of place perhaps unites you as
well? And something about the way in which you deal with the commonplace and the
ordinary in poetic terms?
DA: Yes that’s true. One thing about Larkin is that I don’t
think he really understood about the sexuality in his poetry – I don’t think he
fully understood what he wrote. Take a poem like ‘Wedding Wind’. I was once on
the radio and talked about how in primitive societies people didn’t know how
babies came along and they thought the wind was the progenitor, a kind of
wedding wind. The wind is, in fact, the male semen really. I remember people
being very upset about my interpretation and phoning in, not happy about that. I
don’t think Larkin was aware of it himself. And if you think of the ending of
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ as well, I don’t think he was conscious of that either,
which is also true of many readers. That’s fine because a poet shouldn’t
necessarily be conscious of the underlying things – they can come from the
unconscious and remain there.
I think with Larkin, if he feels things he doesn’t want to
show that he’s feeling too much. As far as I’m concerned I’ve always remembered
Browning’s injunction:
Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
Let us be unashamed of soul
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
I believe in a kind of openness – you sort of offer up your
relatives, your marriage, your own thinking, in your poetry.
BB: Is there anything else you’d want to say to A
Level students reading your poetry?
DA: Poets ask questions – they don’t give answers. The point
about reading poetry is to get pleasure out of it. I can’t see any other reason
for reading poetry. You might pick up bits of erudition along the way, as a
result of little things said that matter to you, like little mottos. Maybe with
luck, somebody might take bits from my poems. It’s nice to be useful in a poem –
one of my poems called ‘Epithalamion’ is often read at secular weddings and it’s
very nice to think that other people might be making good use of what I’ve
written.
This article first appeared in emagazine 62, December
2013.
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