Guest appearance 5: W N Herbert

Sally Evans interviews Bill Herbert, and Bill gets a word in edgeways.

Poetry Scotland website readers will know Bill Herbert, or W. N. Herbert, in varying degrees. Most will know him as an excellent poet, a lively performer and speaker, a translator, a traveller, a Scottish poet who hails from Dundee. Many will know he is a poetry academic and the Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. To others he is an acquaintance from Facebook who can hardly not be noticed by poets who frequent that forum.

We asked him a few questions, about writing on the internet, his writing life, about the business of teaching poetry. He replied at length, and in a most generous, inclusive and entertaining fashion. We are very grateful to Bill for giving our readers this fascinating glimpse of his writing life.

Bill Herbert writes:

It took me a long time to get going on this because the slight shift from casual internet posting to actual interview crossed a little border in my head and triggered an Imp Alert. Which Imp? (Great name for a magazine.) One of the fiercer lieutenants of Poe’s mighty Imp of the Perverse, known as the Prince of Procrastination. (I gotta use capitals when I talk about prosopopoeia.)

In other words, when I’m posting nonsense verse and less sensible remarks on Facebook, I’m engaged in that delicate art of the dolittle every poet knows. You have to wait for the poem, but you can’t just wait, you have to do that action between the doodle and the dry run, you have to do the dolittle. The relation between the dolittle and the Earner, the job that that enables you to write, is always problematic, and I have a particular excruciated version of this interface for two reasons.

One is, generally speaking, I write a lot: all the time most of the time, in fact there seems to be a Big Noisy Mouthhole inside my head towards the back spouting out all sorts of stuff constantly that I can’t keep up with, so the dolittle can very rapidly turn into that full-blown thing, a draft. The other is the Earner, for me, is a little more than that, it’s a counter-vocation.

On the one hand there’s writing and all its companions – the review, the translation, the competition, the performance, the commission, the interview. But on the other there’s teaching and all its colleagues – the course design, the lecture, the seminar exercise, the assessment, the application, the essay. Vocation and counter-vocation: one may be major, the love of my life, but the other doesn’t think it’s minor, oh no.

So I carry round lists of things to be done: I live in the Perpetual Fortnight of Deadlines, as though it were a train carriage trundling slowly across the tundra. The sound of the tracks goes: prevaricate, write; prevaricate, teach; prevaricate, write; prevaricate, teach. And the smooth running of the train is dependent on my diplomatic negotiation with that Imp, half border official, half-engineer: the Prince. How did this come about?

When I look at the palm of my left hand there’s a huge gap between the first third of my head line, and the remaining two thirds. It’s like two splayed wires waiting for someone to join them together. Those more expert in palmistry than me will conclude that I went nuts then but I’m alright now (or vice versa), but I generally feel like I’m floating in the space between those two lines, that it takes a concentrated effort to do the sensible thing.

Since I was placed in a stable relationship and given a child to look after, I’ve worked really hard on that, and I believe my background gave me a strong underlying ethic of responsibility – I think of both my grandmothers who I loved very dearly as self-sacrificers. But basically I’m a procrastinator who’s a bit dissociated from his subset of people and focusses on the environs instead – the correct animal with the wrong contents.

I had a typical (for me) anxiety dream the other night: a presentation where I and a few others were handed great sheaves of papers about an artist’s life, documents of all sorts, and told to prepare an assessment – only the instructions got lost upon the table covered in paper. You know the sort of thing.

But then I noticed to my right there was an exhibition of his paintings on the walls of the courtyard in which this was happening. Paintings of a harbour scene, a small village, possibly Cornish, possibly in Fife, with the same buildings viewed from different angles with such precision it began to seem like a set of computer-generated images.

Also in the courtyard, I realised, and also to my right, was his last house, quite an imposing two-story building, possibly Victorian, and I wandered in and through hallways and rooms all uniformly painted by him a peculiar peppermint shade. The atmosphere was highly-charged, haunted with significances. The dream hovered on the lucid.

Why am I doing the literary marmite thing, telling you something which will immediately divide any audience into dream-lovers and dream-haters? Because there’s something about this process which is very characteristic of my laughable attempt at a literary career. That slightly driven combination of guilt and duty, the laborious task that’s only half-understood, are both characteristics of the anxiety dream as we generally understand it, but the development into something further, a whole gallery in the labyrinth, the strange numinous glowing green house – that’s how I work. I’m a procrastinator who has stumbled upon a technique for developing his procrastinations, and sometimes finding a way to transform them into something positive.

This is the attitude I adopt when approaching, lamentably, all work. It seems to have set in when I was in my twenties and couldn’t finish my thesis on MacDiarmid. I’d gone past the three year mark for which I’d received a grant; I was nearly there, in terms of research completed, drafts accumulated. But something was up.

I was writing a great deal of poetry, publishing at a pamphlet level, coming to terms with my heritage as a Scots poet at the same time as I was responding enthusiastically to a whole swathe of American poetry from Carlos Williams through the Beats and the New York School through Berrigan to the Language poets. I wasn't responding at all to the Southern English mainstream, nor did I acknowledge Northern English and Irish writing as a primary source of sensibility as opposed to craft (I'll have to say more about this later).

A major relationship was breaking up, I was indulging in alcohol and chemicals in that way young adults do, I was meditating and doing t’ai chi and…I began to float.

There was this gap between the work I ‘had’ to do and the work I was, copiously, doing, and bringing the two together was like an anxiety dream, though more like my version of an anxiety dream: it made me invent more, write more, theorise more. The pressure of guilt made the freedom to experiment seem deliciously dangerous, and so, understandably, on I went. Another, far more stable relationship, the eventual completion and publication of my doctorate, then a book or two, a residency, a birth, an academic berth… But all through it there has been this balancing of sober duty with irresponsible creation, a sense that one must be pitched to a certain height to enable the other to get to that point of strange freedom.

This is clearly wrong in the bad nutty way. I should be a creature of concerted ambition, working my way to the top by efficient and assiduous networking and publishing. I should regularly send out only the best of the copiousness, meaning by that the best as acknowledged by the two orthodoxies of our poetic era, the poles of which might be characterised as Paterson and Prynne. My volumes, of whichever persuasion, should be slim. I should produce a definitive study of…

Sorry, I drifted off there. The truth is the one time I tried to think like this I ran straight into my first writer’s block ever. The truth is whenever I screw myself up to network the famous writer has always forgotten my face. I’m far too antisocial, and far too passive in relation to the Big Noisy Mouthhole – it and the Imp-Prince tend to do whatever they want, and I just run around trying to keep up.

The sad and sorry truth, then, is that the kind of writing I produce will tend to carry messy traces of process; its music will always threaten feedback; it may come into occasional sudden focus, but it will then trail off into sequence and collaboration; its symbols will seem to have hangovers or even be hangovers from some sunken or half-digested influence.

It will be happier skirting light verse; prefer stupid puns to sententiousness (except, of course, its own); sketch and the extempore to sculpted phrase and perfected form -- but it will still climb in and out of all form like a hermit crab (until she was six, my daughter assumed these were called Herbert Crabs); it will recycle stanzas and melt down vocabularies.

It will be as happy inhabiting negative space as the inanimate object; prefer the voices of insects and animals to the novelistic capture of personae; love dream and cartoon more than must-reads and cutting edges; favour soundtracks over soundbites and mumbles before epigrams.

It will aspire to outsider status, but always revert to Geek Art, the air of the loser will hover over it, neither Prog nor Punk. It will be endlessly self-regarding and ceaselessly self-loathing.

Therefore, to return by secret Urquhartian corridors and swelling Boswellian alleyways to your question, the net is its natural home, and what I write there is, as I believe it is for many of us, a species of anti-autobiography. What theorists deploy such laborious terminology to tell us about the decentering of the subject and what our innovative cousins go to such deliberate lengths to mimic (thereby fundamentally and apparently unwittingly undermining their whole endeavour)…well, duh.

Copyright © W N Herbert 2009