British Council Author Interview: David Morley

Your poem is a mesmerising meditation on the nature of whiteness. What drew you to this theme?

My next collection of poems is called The Invisible Kings and a lot of the poems are about Romany culture and these poems use Romany language. While writing it, I had my head wrapped around a very long and dark narrative poem, and had been writing continually for about thirty hard days during which I did not ‘know myself’. That long poem is called ‘Kings’ and subsequently appeared in PN Review.  It is the central poem of the new book. However, when that long poem “ended” I felt bereft: by which I mean the effect of finishing a long, intense piece of writing is that you feel almost posthumous. I also felt that the process of writing at that length and over such a period of time had heated up some mental kiln to a critical temperature; and that I would have problems trying to switch it off. So Whitethroat came from a further firing of the kiln, but during its cooling. I had continued writing, and produced about fifteen other shorter poems which had a lot of light and playfulness in them. Whitethroat is typical of this batch. The imagery is, I think, gentler and very precise; but it is super-compressed like a kind of dark matter left by the explosion of the long poem’s composition. ‘Kings’ was a story of a Romany tribe of blacksmiths; it also contained a great many species of birds; and a tree played a very important role towards the end – and you can see ‘aftershocks’ of those bigger images in the compressed poem Whitethroat. I liked writing it, and now I would like to know how I wrote it, and when I can have that time again. Shortly after writing it, my baby son was born; and that whole month seems quite magical, capped as it was by the birth of this amazing boy after all those poems.

A suggestion has been made in our Readers’ Notes that the poem is reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Do you feel that this is an accurate comparison?

The connection between the two poems is, I think, a coincidence of their candour about the mercilessness of time; and possibly the mental correlation between the making of intricate poems and the making of intricate metal artwork. Yeats is a great poet; he is a writer I read a great deal of when I was young; and was one those poetic “parents” from which you first learn in order to unlearn: in this case to unlearn the artifice of poetry and see it as more of a natural process – part of life in fact.

Whitethroat is an evocative reminder of times long gone. Was the poem a deliberate

attempt to remind readers of vanishing skills?

Metal and words have always been the same kind of thing from my point of view. My father was a metal-worker, and I was completely beguiled by his work when I was a small boy. I am still drawn to making new shapes or things out of barely tractable matter or material. Not so much then a ‘vanishing skill’ as a change in medium: for metal, read language.

Does your former work in environmental science inform your writing greatly?

It informs my choice of language, my choice of subject, and my choice of genre – poetry. I regard the kind of science I did as a kind of poetry. Let me explain why. My research focused on a family of lake midges whose species number in their thousands, and new sub-species and variants evolve regularly like minute but dynamic elements of a lake’s language. You identify these species by a carapace deposited on a lake surface on emergence as winged adults; and use a “key”, a book that explores and relates what you see under a powerful microscope to what has been seen by others in your field. This key represents current knowledge. Occasionally, you reach a zone where the current knowledge simply tapers to nothing, for the variant is completely new, unrecognizable. You stare at it, or part of it, not seen before by the human eye, and not described or drawn by the human mind. With the key, you reach the point where its lake runs dry. How like poetry this is.

When scientists reach this point, this moving edge of knowledge, they surf forwards by a combination of previous knowledge, guesswork, and intuition. With a species, you describe and classify it according to its likeness to something already described: you use simile to compare it, and you use metaphor to name it. The Latin names of insects are a spectrum of metaphoric and descriptive acuity. They are little, related images which represent an entire life form, a species, however temporary its moment of evolved presence. Its unseen worlds are metaphorized into recognition; its invisibility released by simile. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative and collaborative writing. The physicist Neils Bohr observed, ‘When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images’. I could not agree more.

The concentration of attention required for identifying species is heightened even further when the numerical presence of these species is factored alongside other data, such as oxygen level, acidity, and thirty or more other physico-chemical variants, all of which make up the natural, but invisible, world of that species. The final piece of data would be time itself, the measure of a season, say. To make any kind of testable judgement about these creatures required these data to be crunched by powerful multivariate statistical programmes. Depictions of correlation would unfold; thousands of permutations of relatable factors would be played against each other; and the significance of any connectivity (for example, the surface area of a lake and the diversity of species) might feed out. The creative magic of numbers, not words, is the language of the natural world.

When such data are swung across time, they seem to swarm like bees in a moving rope of migration. You hypothesize there must be a common purpose somewhere, but you would have to be a bee to understand the language of the movement, in this case the dance, noise and destination of the natural data. What you have to do is think yourself inside a natural ballroom of numbers, its walls and ceilings made up of moving and sliding microelements. In understanding the multivariate nature of an invisible world, an intuition, strongly informed by practice, played a part that sometime seemed as strong as the role given to statistical significance. I have never felt closer to that balance of perception and imagination than when I am writing poetry well, or watching students in a creative writing class making discoveries for themselves among the swarm, noise and dance of language.

I am aware that you write a blog on creative writing. What do you feel that the impact of blogging is on the current literary scene?

Many writers and students maintain a regular weblog or blog: an online journal. I believe this form of  writing is a huge ally to creative writing, and an open space for creativity and cross-artform practice. Writing a blog provides excellent discipline, like keeping a diary or notebook. They are ways of keeping your hand in. The difference is that this diary of experience, imagination and observation is online and public, and this alters the way you write, even though the audience is invisible - as when writing a book. Other positive aspects of blogs are that they need to be written concisely and entertainingly—they require the inevitable spices of art and ecomony to become very good—and they assist fluency and variation of expression since they are in effect highly visible performances of writing. You can also rapidly incorporate visual images that subvert or interfere with what you are saying in the text. Blogs are changing the face of writing. They are beginning to alter the face of literature—especially creative nonfiction—and the speed at which we write, read and respond to what we are reading, for many blogs allow for written interaction from and with the reader. Blogs may even begin to change the nature of global politics as the network of political and social thought grows locally, but spreads globally. All students of creative writing should maintain blogs; teachers of writing may consider setting up a blog for any course in writing to which tutor and students contribute.

You refer to an anthology you edited called The Gift: New Writing for the NHS, published by Stride as “Writing as an act of community”. Do you feel that this kind of writing has its own intrinsic value or is only significant within the context of the community?

Naïve politics in writing generally makes for etiolated writing, or writing that has, as Keats said, ‘a palpable design on the reader’. The objective of The Gift was literary, not political. Made well and shaped well, writing ceases to feel like artifice and becomes alive; and the moment that happens it ceases to be your own and becomes communal. Joyce Carol Oates declares in The Faith of a Writer, ‘Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice’. In essence, a writer is a community whose story is told through their books.

Writing is solitary work some of the time, but even writing can be a social process through the living of regular life, discussions, and workshops. Writing can be an act of community even if the writer does not stir from their room at all, even if they choose never to meet a reader or give a performance of their work. Books, if they are made well, are communal—‘energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it’ as Oates goes on to say. Communication engenders community; and a creative communication implies a heightened regard for community, however unknown (or unknowing) that community may be. All writers should write for themselves—I write for myself—and doing this to the best of your powers makes you a good member of a community, even if your point is to subvert that community. This seems a lot of words of prose for four lines of poetry, but that is poetry for you.

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