Interview with Richard Price

Richard Price's collection Lucky Day (Carcanet) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2005. He was born in 1966 and grew up in Renfrewshire. At the University of Strathclyde, he did his doctoral thesis on the novels and plays of Neil M. Gunn. He is now the Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library. Before Lucky Day, Richard had published several small press publications with fine small imprints such as Akros and Diehard. His new collection Greenfields, also from Carcanet, mixes older poems with newer work, including a sequence of poems inspired by the London Underground. Price is a protean writer whose work ranges from delicate, ballad-like poems to fractured, impressionistic work in a modernist tradition.

Let's start with the future – what are you currently working on – anything interesting in the offing? New projects, new publications?

I’m working on a number of different things at the moment. I’ve collaborated with artists quite a few times over the years and I’m currently working with Ronald King and Caroline Isgar on two separate artist’s books. With Ron I’ve produced a text for his alphabet pop-up book which we’re calling little but often and will be out from Circle Press in time for Christmas. It’s a sequence of minimalist love poems. As you know Ron is a genius of paper engineering, among other things, so it’s been a delight working with him again.

With Caroline I’m working on a text that was originally commissioned by The Royal Society of Medicine and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and which is three-text piece about sleeplessness, a surprisingly common and very damaging medical condition. Caroline’s sense of colour and delicate composition is going to make Wake Up and Sleep just the most beautiful thing.

I’m gradually building my third collection for Carcanet, too, though that’s a couple of years off I think, and I’ve been working with musicians on another project. More about that later.

Does your work in the British Library feed in to your writing life?

Yes, in lots of ways. One is technological – the Library aspires to be at the leading edge of technology that delivers information to various research communities and I’ve been lucky to be in a section that is about modern publication, printed or digital. The web archiving project at the Library, for instance, in which we are attempting to archive websites within the UK domain, is a cutting edge project in certain ways and I’ve been proud to have that collections project as part of the department I head here, Modern British Collections. I’ve already mention artists’ book – again, British artists’ books come into the Library through my department and it has made me think more and more about the visual possibilities of poetry, as has the remarkable small press tradition in the UK. The exhibitions I’ve been able to mount, such as the Ted Hughes one in 2005 or the recent Migrant Press one, help develop a historic sense of modern British poetry, too, a return to the structured reading I thought I’d left behind at university but which I actually miss, up to a point, and like (though I revel in the random, too).

So those are special things that are part of the work. But there are also the textures of any workplace, and the curious situation of being a middle manager – though I’m never autobiographical about my work, knowledge of everything from the special sound of air-conditioning and the shot light of the computer screen to nuances of people-to-people relationships up,down and across a hierarchy can inform the poetry now and again.

Both Greenfields and your last collection Lucky Day mix new work with older poems – there are poems here going back to the late 1980s. What's the thinking behind this unconventional method?

I’m not sure that it’s as unconventional as you might think. For me there have been both practical and artistic reasons for it. The practical ones are to do with the limited edition nature of most of the small and fine print books that I was published in prior to Lucky Day. As the success of Lucky Day showed – comparatively few had read my poems over the previous ten years or so: when they got a better chance to do so, they seemed to like them (if that’s not blowing my own trumpet too much). I feel the same for Greenfields: that urge to let folk actually read things they weren’t easily able to beforehand. That said, I don’t take an oppositional view of the relationship between small press and mainstream – I think there is a symbiosis, and I don’t mean that a poet just forgets about the small presses once they think they’ve ‘made it’ (made it in poetry! – that’s a good one!) with a bigger publisher. I still continue to publish with presses I like, if they like my work and there’s some sense of shared purpose there; there’s a lot to be said about shorter books having a quality that is quite different (not necessarily better or worse) than the bigger presses, and I hope I’ll always publish with a range of publishers in that way.

There is a larger, artistic reason about using older and newer work as well. It maybe sounds pompous or something worse but I find my poems build together across sequences that actually take many years to make. This is to do with not over-forcing a narrative but nevertheless allowing it to happen, guiding it - or a shared atmosphere or purpose – building that across a sequence and then, slowly, forming those sequences into a larger architecture for the longer collection. Greenfields is a human book about a human’s life in a time of immense change – you can’t jettison bits of it for that reason. I have faith in a good deal of my older work – I don’t accept the idea that a poet just gets better and better (though I always hope I will!) – and I also know that my themes are played out not only in single poems but my accumulation. So in that way, yes, older work has its place – though, as I say, to most readers, they won’t know it’s older at all.

I'm curious to know why certain poems in Greenfields are printed in 'sections' of their own.

Breathing spaces, intervals, the cut-through between one gallery room and another? That’s what the section breaks are doing, I think.

'Texts jolt, / accrue – // fragments only...' begins one of your poems – some of your poems and sequences seem to build themselves up in such a fashion, via notes, thoughts, observations.

Yes, that’s true… but I hesitate because it sounds like they have just been dashed down. They are always rhythmically sprung, worked and worked, measured, analysed, polished, cut and re-cut. And then placed carefully so the reader will get that almost subliminal effect of re-appearances of ideas, you know the idea of it washing over and also into you! Well, that’s the idea… I hope it works now and again!

Family life is what might be called your 'flood subject'. A quote about your work on the book cover suggests it is not a subject much associated with innovative writing.

Yes, if that is the case (and I’m no expert) I think that’s a mistake. Contrast the works of Eavan Boland with Denise Riley – both can be read within a feminist discourse, though not in the same way, but it’s more complicated when you start to read them with a sensitivity to “innovative writing” (by this you and I mean I think avant-garde / modernist tradition etc, whatever the provisional phrase is). Riley is very much an experimental writer in a way that Boland just isn’t – that’s OK, of course, I’m not saying that’s a problem for me, I’m just saying that Riley’s example proves that you don’t need a small c conservative aesthetic for so-called domestic issues. Riley is also writing about the construction of womanness and motherness: her poetry is an innovative poetry of love and family life, among other things. Look at Tom Leonard’s nora’s place: exactly the same could be said.

You and I have both lived in London for many years, far from Scotland where we grew up – do you still feel accepted as a Scottish writer?

Yes, or, I hope so, but I think I’ll wait for the YouGov poll just to make sure… More trustworthy than recent ballots?

How do you feel about the description of you as a 'late modernist'? I prefer to describe you as a pluralist – is that fair? And while we are on the '-ists', do you still consider yourself an Informationist?

I feel fine with both (ah – a pluralist would say that!), but I think the “late modernist” tag is the one I like better. To be implicitly compared with Samuel Beckett can’t be bad in my book and I think there is actually some truth in it, at least in terms of what I’m trying to do with the language, and that sense of trying, openly, artfully as if showing attempts, implying feeling, not demonstrating thoughts for the day. Pluralism sounds as if I’m spreading myself rather too thinly and I’m not willing to brim with false modesty on that one – I do cover quite a bit of formal ground, yeah, that’s true, but the poetry’s soulful, all the voices are bound by a kind of musical soulfulness (I don’t mean spirituality) and that’s the later modernism I like. Ach, you’ve got me going now. Warned you about the pompous thing.

Informationist? Well, that was a particular period in the early nineties when Peter McCarey, David Kinloch, W. N. Herbert, Alan Riach and Robert Crawford and I were asserting the group and its ideas. In that sense it’s over, but informationism as a poetic tactic – if you like, to do what John Donne did with new subject matter but also to find formal analogues, you know, informationist works that not only engaged with new developments but changed the poem’s form by so engaging, well, that’d be an ideal. That’s one strand I don’t intend giving up, even if it’s not easy to produce those kind of poems.

I think of the neoteri of Catullus’s day and Cavalcanti’s poeti nuovi, the Language poets even, the Informationists identified with those kinds of groupings (though we were usually more sociable, perhaps too sociable, even though we got a bit of criticism from traditionalists and avant-garde alike at the time; prophet in your own country etc…?!).

Something you have done on and off over the years is write in song-like forms. Have you ever written 'actual' songs?

Yes. My first to be set to music was years ago by Donny O’Rourke, “Two Halves of Nothing”, though I just have one tape of that and we didn’t take it further. In the last year I’ve been working with the musicians Caroline Trettine and Ian Kearey and the poet Nancy Campbell to form a band called The Squares – we’ve recorded some tracks already in a studio and we’ll be doing more soon, with an album out, we hope, sometime in 2008 or 9. It’s been one of the best experiences of my life, and I’m extremely excited by the results. Watch myspace for further news.

Finally, I thought this paragraph from a recent essay in Poetry might interest you. I recall you once taking issue with Keats' suggestion that 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever'... do you think beauty in poetry is a misplaced aspiration?

I don’t remember this! But it’s sadly quite possible. Anyway, no I think beauty is a very very important thing. It’s the “forever” bit that I’d still take issue with: limits define beauty, eternity doesn’t. Eternity is neither here nor there. And I’m not as pessimistic as you are about the place of beauty in contemporary poetry: there is beauty in all kinds of poetic form and beauty in all kinds of observation and near abstraction. Don’t give up on beauty, Roddy! – as the strapline for the Joan as Policewoman album has it, “Beauty is the New Punk”.