photo credit: Adrian Mealing

The retiring Poet Laureate, ANDREW MOTION on getting over writer’s block, the royal poems he regrets writing and his hopes on behalf of the next laureate.

Kit Toda

Any interview with Andrew Motion which describes the poet in person invariably mention his charm and his gentle voice. It is rather disappointing for an interviewer when she cannot write anything new or contrary about her subject. He is, I concur, charming with a mellifluous voice and impeccable manners.

As he shows me in to his small and surprisingly bare office in Bloomsbury, he treats me as if I were an unknown guest brought by a friend to his dinner party, rather than the thousandth interviewer he has had to smile at since he began his stint as poet laureate ten years ago. As a case in point, there is another man coming to see him straight after me: ‘It’s rather like a dentist’s waiting room, I’m afraid.’

He has been one of the most visible and active poet laureates to have ever held the post, having completely ignored the assurance that was given to him by Tony Blair that he ‘didn’t have to do anything’. Instead he has worked as a tireless drum-beater for poetry while trying (often with great difficulty) to write commemorative poems for the royals. One of his legacies is The Poetry Archive, a web-based project he started with a recording producer, that presents poems by a long list of famous poets along with recordings of them reading their works. Considering the emphasis on recordings in this scheme, I ask him whether he considered poetry as primarily an aural medium:

Andrew Motion: No it’s not primarily that but there is a much needed effort to re-balance, in my view, the relationship between the acoustic value of the poem and whatever the words mean when we see it written down on the page. Increasingly – though I am about to overstate it – there will be a way of looking at the last thousand odd years of writing as a sort of loop line, which the internet has managed to end or reconnect where we started many years ago, when we had a much better balance of how meaning communicates itself (perhaps particularly in poems) in a mixture of what the words mean when we read them and what they mean when we hear them.

The Literateur: Poetry used to be recited of course.

Yes that’s what I mean. Paradoxically, the new-fangled thing – the net- has managed to re-establish a v ancient truth about poetry which is that these two components do have a more or less equal importance in our consideration of what the meaning or value or even existence of a poem might be.

TL: Can we learn something from the way poets read their own work which we cannot from an actor reading it?

AM: Very much so in my view. Of course there are some actors who read poems well and many more who read them badly. But there are various levels of advantages from hearing a poet reading their own poems. You might get a degree of exciting insight into what the poem means.

My favourite example of this is a poem by Larkin called ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ in which the line appears: ‘But o, photography! as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing!’

I remember reading it at school having not heard Larkin reading it. He is not a poet whom we usually associate with difficulty in any way but it seemed to me a difficult line. But when you hear him read it what he does is, he says ‘But o, photography! as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing!’ In other words Larkin in his Larkin-like way doesn’t think photography is an art. And it is only really by hearing him stress the word that we are allowed to understand it in that way. So there are these local advantages.

More generally I think, to hear how quickly they read it, what kind of accent they might or might not have, everything about pacing, everything about the way they might suggest line endings – the whole caboodle in fact, is incredibly interesting. However as it were “badly” the poet reads – and poets have a reputation for reading badly but they never do – the poet has rights on a poem that no actor has.

TL: What advice can you give to the next poet laureate whoever that may be?

AM: Whoever that may be! Two kinds of advice really and both is about protecting yourself. The fact is, it’s extremely weird being promoted suddenly from being a more or less private person to a public person. However much you try to prepare yourself for it, the reality of it is nothing like it. It is much more complicated, you feel much more invaded – or at least I felt much more invaded than I expected. So I suppose my advice would be, don’t do anything you don’t want to do even if it means disappointing some people and don’t write the stuff that you feel you have to write because you almost invariably won’t do it very well if there’s as sense of aggravated co-ercion about it. And make sure that you keep enough time for your own work.

TL: The laureateship did, of course, give you writer’s block.

AM: Yes it did – it wasn’t the only reason for it, I think, but it did contribute to it.

TL: Looking back, do you sometimes regret accepting the post?

AM: No I never regret it, I’m very, very pleased to have done it. I’m unflinchingly, uncompromisingly pleased to have done it. But at the risk of sounding as though I do feel compromised about it, I am also very glad to be giving it up as I want my life…back. Looking at my diary I’m not sure I have got it back! But the idea is I will, in the near future, get it back and be less busy – or differently busy at any rate. I want to be able to say no to things without feeling that I am letting the side down. Not because I don’t think it’s worth doing, but I need to find a way of being more protective about my writing time.


TL: In the poem ‘A Wall’, you describing the wish for ‘messages sent by hand / For signs of life’ rather than ‘by mind’ or ‘heart’ or ‘brain’. Does writing poetry feel for you like a physical process?

AM: Very much so, very much so. It doesn’t have very much to do with my intellect, writing poems. I dare say that bits of my conscious, educated and wired-up brain have a lot to say about things but poetry for me is a very, very primitive thing and arises more, much more from strong feeling than it does from thinking. Indeed I don’t even read poems to think – though of course I do think about them and it’s my job to think about them and say what I think it means and so forth, but I’m much more interested in making people cry than making people think.

TL: Picking up on the phrase ‘signs of life’, is writing poetry for you an affirmation of your existence?

AM: Absolutely. I mean I don’t want to sound pompous about this but it is my existence. And that was the problem about it being taken away from me for the couple of years or so in the middle of my laureateship. It felt as though my entire personality had been catastrophically undermined. And when my poems came back to me, by the same token, it felt wonderfully liberating and re-affirming of my sense of self.

TL: You said after Public Property was published that you “felt a pressure to turn your face to the world” as is suggested by the title…

AM: Or that I had it twisted it to the world. Although admittedly I colluded with that position by accepting the laureateship in the first place.

TL: Your most recent publication is a memoir of your childhood. Is this perhaps a continuation, an answer to this feeling that you needed to present yourself to the world?

AM: That’s a very interesting thing to say. I think it probably was a way of me saying to myself, right a lot of the works I’m having to do now is caught up with fielding requests – which I’m always pleased to get from the outside world to write this, that and the other- but… especially difficult is writing about events in the royal calendar…which we might come back to…

I felt that I could do them best and most authentically when they happened to overlap with something that was, in some sense, pre-existing in me so that I ended up looking on them not so much as commissions but as opportunities to write about something that I would have liked to write about if I had the wit to think of them in the first place.

So to turn away from all that towards very intimate family stuff and concentrate on a very early part of my life was a way of trying to reconnect myself to…myself in the most basic way, exactly as you say.

But again, a paradox emerged from this because it overlapped so much, was so closely akin to things that I generally do when I’m writing poems. Poems, which are by me for me or my ordinary readers, rather than commissioned things – it definitely contributed my being not able to write poems anymore – it was just drawing water out of the same wells and draining those wells.

TL: You mentioned poems for the royal calendar with some trepidation so presumably those were the ones you found most difficult…

AM: Yes I did find them difficult, for two reasons really, one is that… we live in a society, which we know perfectly well has very, very mixed feelings about the royal family. Some people are sort of crazy flag wavers, demented – or I should say – devoted monarchists, many people can just take it or leave it and quite a lot of people are hostile. So you know that the subject of the poem, however good or bad it might be as piece of work, will always have a lot of people not liking it, will always be tainted by the fact of its subject for some people.

The other problem is that for a lyric poet such as myself who depends on emotional contact and impetus to feel that the poem is worthwhile or successful, to write a poem about a collection of people of whom I know no more than you do – I mean it’s not as though I’m hanging out with them or anything – although I dare say I could have done a bit more of that if I had put my mind to it but I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to keep my distance in a respectful way – so I ended up feeling as if I was – speaking as a right handed person – as if I was writing poems with my left hand. I don’t think they are necessarily failures though I think some are better than others – of course I do – but it is to say they felt external to me.

TL: Alan Jenkins mentions that you are ‘a very private poet, a poet of intimate space’ and of course, not being in the intimate sphere of the Royals…

AM: Exactly, exactly. Though mind you even if I had been in their intimate sphere, it raises an interesting question, would it have been possible to write poems that were more like the poems that I ordinarily produce? Who knows? I’m never going to find out.

TL: Which poem did you find most difficult?

AM: The ones about the most minor events were the most difficult. I mean I don’t mean to say this in a disrespectful spirit but…Prince William’s 18^th birthday. The wedding of Prince Edward… Those were the difficult ones. And with hindsight I probably shouldn’t have done them.

But they were both a bit difficult to avoid, not because I felt any pressure coming from Buckingham palace I certainly did not feel that, it’s important that people know that there’s never any direct interference from the palace. I mean the newspapers want you to write this stuff. They ring you up, ring you up, ring you up and you know that if you don’t do it, they’re going to kind of get at you. But the real reason they want it is so that they can laugh at it. I mean thanks a lot. That’s the only difficulty about doing it.

I’m very clear about this – I’m writing an article in the Guardian on Saturday where I say that I think we should all grow up and whoever succeeds me really should not feel obliged to write any of these poems anymore unless by common consent an event in the life of the royal family coincides with something significant in the nation. I mean if the queen were to die – may she not – but if so, there would be good reasons why the poet laureate should write about that. But no more 18^th birthdays or weddings of minor royals.

TL: I don’t think many people care that prince Edward married…

AM: No exactly, exactly.

TL: So how can you as an ordinary citizen write about it?

AM: That’s exactly my view. I want to say that in a respectful spirit because I am a monarchist, though I am on the reformist end of the spectrum. But I just think that we should play that side of things down and play up the opportunity for the poet laureate to do national things and indeed be helped to do it.

I wish for instance that someone had sent me to Iraq or Afghanistan so I could have written about that first-hand but there is no mechanism for that to happen at the moment and I think they should introduce it. The situation that has evolved is that over the ten years that I was in the job, I revised it quite dramatically, making it much less like a courtier role and more a drum-beater for poetry. More engaged with national life, if you like and less engaged with royal life. There seems to be an appetite for that. Many people say they like this and I’m very pleased that they do. It makes me feel like I can stand up and say I made sense of the job. But if they do have an appetite for it then they’ve got to help it to happen. They’ve probably got to pay the laureate a bit more and they’ve got give them access to a publicity department in the Department of Culture or something, which is after all the body that organises all this. There’s a slight disconnection at the moment I think between the way in which the job has evolved and the support structure that would allow it to fulfil itself more completely.

TL: How successful do you feel you have been in popularising poetry?

AM: Well…it’s not really for me to answer that but I can certainly hang up my quill feeling that I gave it my best shot. The poetry scene is not the same as it was ten years ago and I like to think that part of it is to do with things that I’ve done. The archive, getting writers into schools on a more regular basis, making poetry more visible and audible in the media, trying to – god knows I’ve worked at this – trying to break down some of the old hierarchies that existed ten years ago. The establishment, the not-establishment…in other words to de-centre, de-centralise the idea of poetry. To make it as diverse as the culture we live in, in fact.

TL: Going into a bit more detail about your previous works, in ‘Judgement’ in Love in a Life the atheist or agnostic speaker “even” turns to God in his despair. You once said that there is ’something permanent in art which is compatible with the goal of religious faith’.

AM: Oh did I? Well yes I do think that.

TL: Can art, including poetry, ever replace religion?

AM: Well it has for me! Are you religious?

TL: No.

AM: No neither am I. I don’t believe in it at all. Though I respect people who do. But I’m very struck by how nevertheless there is a good degree of overlap between the experience that you suppose a religious person might have and what poems are able to do. It connects you to the numinous, it’s a way of embracing mystery. It’s allows a concentration, a distillation of language and also of the self. And these are similarities. But the crucial difference is that I think prayer and poetry have a completely different sense of audience. The audience of poetry is, to a greater or lesser extent, social. And the audience of prayer is God isn’t it? Otherwise what are you doing?

TL: Philip Sidney talks about how poets were called vates in Latin, which means ‘diviner’ or ‘prophet’ and so I suppose there has always been a religious aspect to poetry – beyond just religious poetry.

AM: Yes. Yes I would translate that, as many have done before me into a more sort of humanist version, I think and end up saying something like the great Dr Johnson’s phrase that literature – and poetry for me especially – helps us ‘to enjoy and endure’.

TL: So…do you fancy yourself a priest?

AM:(smiling) I’m glad you mentioned that because I’m so wary of coming on as a poet in a sort of cape-twirling, shamanistic, vatic way. It is deeply not my style that. As a human being or as a writer because I want to write poems that are very simple but have a big emotional hit. What I keep saying – poems that look like a glass of water but turn out to be gin. That’s my ideal. Like Hardy, like Larkin, like Wordsworth. Poets whom I at least intend to belong with – it would be hubristic to say anything more than that. But that’s the sort of tradition which I’m very happy to feel I’m working in. To consider myself as having a priest-like role seems rather…extravagant. And yet, and yet, when people say to me – which they do for a lot of the poems in my new book and a lot of the poems about my recently dead father – say how much it means to them and how much it’s helped them, I feel incredibly grateful for that and really rather moved by it. If that’s the sort of consolation that people might get if they were of a religious disposition then so be it. It’s just I’m not going to be caught showing off about it either in language or in my person.

TL: No… and I suppose in any case most poets would make for rather disrespectable priests.

AM: Yes! And poetry, even when it intends and wishes to help us ‘enjoy and endure’, often depends for its effects and its authority on being rather counter-suggestive. Bloody-minded. Contrary. Not going with the flow.

TL: April is the cruellest month

AM: Exactly, exactly. All that sort of thing. So while wanting to consent to the idea that it can be a comfort to people or an entertainment on a brighter day, I also want to be able to say that there’s something deeply unconsensual about it au fond.

TL: I hear you have a new book coming out.

AM: Yes it’s called The Cinder Path. It’s not very long, only about sixty pages. I wrote almost all the poems in it in the year running up to when I handed it in my editor. After my block got un-blocked.

TL: Was there a moment when you became un-blocked?

AM: Two things happened. One – my dad died. Are your parents alive?

TL: Yes

AM: Good. My father was an old man so it wasn’t a tragedy as it was with my mother. My mother’s death was a tragedy. But my father’s wasn’t a tragedy, it was just very sad. And even though I miss him and wish he weren’t dead, I did feel a weird sort of…lightning…most peculiar… well looking at him dead gave me the shock of my life. Absolutely gave me the shock of my life. It’s like looking at yourself dead. Whether this works for women seeing their dead mothers I don’t know, but it certainly worked for me looking at my dead father. He looked rather like me my father. Actually very like me. So it was like seeing myself dead in a very peculiar way. The effect of all this was to set the world at a different angle, it made me see it differently again and in that surprise, it de-familiarised it for me again and made it writable. So that was one thing.

And then about six months after he died – I’ve been spending the previous few years living more or less alone – I met somebody who made me very happy and does make me very happy and so a sad thing and a wonderful thing happened very close together and it just completely unbound me.

So that was that. I expected when I handed in the new book for what had happened before to happen again, which is that every time I hand in a new book I have a year or two of not writing. But I’ve just gone on writing. I have another fifty pages of poems or something. I don’t know what’s happened to me! I don’t suppose I’ll keep them all but the sense of the next book already being sort of a third of the way there or something is very exciting.

TL: One final question, I expect you won’t allow yourself to answer it but, do you wish for any particular person to succeed you as poet laureate?

AM: I do. I’m not going to name names because I’m very careful to stay away from all this but my wish is that – I’m pretty sure this will happen – whoever does it is given the same opportunity as I am to do good for poetry. They might write wonderful poems while they’re being laureate but it requires a curious act of…not self-surrender but occasionally self-suppression, I might say, so you just make yourself a servant of poetry. All sorts of things become possible that simply wouldn’t be possible if you were just an ordinary Joe. My experience is that it is very well worth doing for poetry.

TL: Andrew Motion, thank you.