Matthew Cambell: You collected your poems in 2012, and in the same year published a book on 19th century poetry, Sound Intentions, that you had been working on for a number of years. Since then, you have continued to manage a career as a poet, a translator, a scholar, a reviewer and a teacher. I could invoke an old-time profession - man of letters - but it seems a broad-enough notion that is suitable in your case. The translating and editing do seem like jobs for a poet, if time-consuming, and many poets have been critics and editors. But if asked, which would you say was the day-job?

Peter McDonald:so it seemed to me like a good idea to get them back and, in the process, enjoy a little bit of revision. Which I did, by the way. Anyhow, the upshot was a slim enough book and - I figured to myself - the chance to draw a line under my first fifty years on this earth.  I turned fifty in 2012 you see, and had a strong urge to get things tidied up a bit, and finished - hence Sound Intentions, which I’d actually been working on, in one form or another, since the mid-1990s.

As to day-jobs and jobs, poets and men of letters, all that - I’m not at all sure I have a meaningful answer.  I’ve earned a living in universities, and that’s certainly been a job. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that my writing life has to be kept separate from what you might call the life of teaching:  Although I have dabbled in the ‘creative writing’ side of pedagogy, I was never whole-hearted about that, and abandoned it altogether at least ten years ago.  Besides, the grim world of workshopping really did make it harder for me to write poems of my own: how good poets manage to manage that as their job and still produce their own work is frankly beyond me. I admire them - for their courage, apart from anything else. But on the whole, I suspect real work is safer, in terms of keeping the creative spirit going. If more poets were bankers, engineers, taxi-drivers, policemen - or whatever job you can think of - there might be more good poetry around. Well, more poetry that I like: which, in fairness, isn’t quite the same thing. Or perhaps there’d just be less poetry around. A shame, maybe, but I’d settle for that.

I suppose that sounds frivolous, and partly it is. But I’m perfectly serious when I claim that my work as an academic has been undertaken as professionally as was in my power over - what? - the last thirty-five years.  I haven’t been doing it all as a way to boost my profile as a poet. And just as well: I think I was better known as a poet in the late 1980s than I am now, when I am somewhere beyond the little-known, and closer to the completely obscure. Whenever people have asked me about my poetry, I’ve been inclined to play it down. Though the trouble with self-deprecation, I’ve found, is that people are all too willing to take you at your word.  I’m committed to being a literary critic, and am quite proud of what I’ve done in that line; proud, too, of having taught useful things to people, and of having made things happen in university environments that have had positive results, or at least prevented some negative ones. Maybe when I’m sixty I’ll stop having being an academic and - at long bloody last - become ‘a writer’. A man of letters, yes: a nicely out of date term.  Another decade, another line drawn.

Matthew Cambell: Many congratulations on the publication of the first two volumes of the ‘Longman’ (now Routledge) Poems of W.B. Yeats. Such an editing project would be a massive task for any academic, particularly a series which asks for annotations which require allusions or explanatory glosses as much as textual variants. I’d like to ask how difficult that is for your writing as a poet - both in the everyday sense and in the sense of pitting your ongoing career against such a predecessor? Even leaving aside the question of editing a writer as heterodox in his beliefs, how do you as a poet find yourself committing to spending many years trawling through the guts of the text? Who is being modified in whose guts, the living poet or the dead text?

Peter McDonald: You’re kind enough not to point out that WB and I have only got to 1899 together so far. By my reckoning, four or even five more volumes lie ahead -though I’m pretty far along with the next instalment, as it happens. But we need to face facts here: WB and I are in it for the long haul now. Till death do us part.

I thought long and hard before taking on the Longman. I already was well enough aware that WB was central to all I knew about poetry, and thought about poetry; and that he was vital to whatever poetry I might myself try to write - for better or worse: that’s not at all for me to judge. Even so, this was taking such commitments to another level altogether. Every single line he ever wrote would need to be examined and explained. The level of intimacy there is potentially dangerous, and I was on my guard against it, as best as I could be. I hoped, I think, that I had had time enough already to know what I was as a poet, and what he was, and to know how to keep these things in a good working relationship, rather than one side bloodsucking the other.

It’s hard work. On a purely technical level, I’ve had to learn how to do a lot of things, and how to look in some very dark corners. I have spent more time editing these poems than he spent writing them, and I’ve annotated things that I’m sure he forgot ever having written or read. I haven’t come to worship Yeats. The arcana of magic and the like are a real challenge, I will admit. Temperamentally, I find such things very alien and - to be frank - a bit boring. They worked for the poet, so we certainly need to know about them. But really, they couldn’t have worked for anyone else, in my opinion. Naturally, I might be quite wrong about thousands of things in the edition; I hope, though, that I’m right about a few things too, and that I’m starting to make it possible for people to see Yeats in a new light. Yet another new light. And there will be other, newer sources of illumination on the poetry after my time, I’m sure. But then again, I do believe that he’s worth that kind of attention.  Few poets are, really. I mean, in English there are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Yeats. That’s just how it is. It’s indecent to set limits to the gratitude each one of them is owed: you can’t study them too much. Many other great and important poets, yes; but these are the ones to whom most is owed. Scholarship, I think, is my way of starting to pay this particular debt which, as a poet, I have run up with Yeats. It won’t be enough - of course it won’t - but that’s no reason not to give what I can.

Matthew Cambell: You have also recently published a number of translations from the not so recent past, from what we understand as the Classics.  within at least a century of translating in the Irish poetic and scholarly involvement with classicism, a number of poets and professors have been there before you: E.R. Dodds appears in “Mud” one of the poems in Gifts of Fortune, but Michael Longley, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Seamus Heaney have been had long and rich engagements with versions of Homer and Virgil. Leontia Flynn has recently brought together her versions of Catullus. These are Irish Classics derived from the classics - although the interest may very well be accidental, international even, in the way that the ‘classical world’ is a sort of lingua franca (albeit disappearing) for ‘world literature’. And you have been for some time, a supporter of the writing of the American poet AE Stallings. Do you think your own versions of antiquity, of Homer or the Psalms fit into that lineage -- modern, contemporary - or can they be like a Tennysonian monologue, a sort of prosopopoeia? 

Peter McDonald: In the end, I’ve a feeling that it’s difficult for me to separate translation from original poetry. I suppose that in a translation the poetry’s sources are more directly acknowledged, and in plain view. Translating a poem means - to put it very bluntly - that you don’t have to make the poem up. The meaning, the theme, the references, the turns of thought - you can blame all of these on the other guy. You get to be the cuckoo in the nest, which is fun, and I think you get to discover things creatively in the process.

I’m aware of a lot of the discussion which has taken place about Irish poets and the classics: I’ve even engaged in it from time to time. My own orientation was inevitably towards Greek and Latin, owing simply to my having been educated in these languages (though my Latin is and always has been very poor: nota bene). As a reader, as a critic also, I am deeply aware of how fundamental classical material has been for really significant Irish poets: I’m thinking here especially of Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. They knew the languages they translated, and knew them well. (Longley’s pose as a ‘lapsed classicist’ has never convinced me: he hasn’t lapsed all that far, and he approaches Homer, for example, with a lot of (well-hidden) scholarly training.  Heaney’s grasp of Latin was excellent, and his intellectual acuity about Greek drama, to go no further, was very considerable. And MacNeice, as we know, was for a time a functioning academic classicist - Dodds’s protégé, indeed. Dodds was a decent minor poet, but a very major classical scholar. I’m fascinated by him, and impressed. Yes, he does turn up in that sequence of mine called ׃Mud”. I should perhaps point out that I never met him - and that’s something I very much regret, for I only just missed him. Is it too much to claim some kind of affinity?  I mean yes, obviously in many ways it’s much too much: in terms of Greek, he was alpha double plus to my gamma double minus, and in terms of social background he was from a world that was a long way above mine. But in other ways, I sense a bit of a kindred spirit.  Well, that’s fanciful really, but I think there’s something about the Ulster/Classics/poetry interface (horrible term, but you know what I mean) that resonates. Plus biographical coincidence (very much the point of “Mud”): Belfast, then my undergraduate college, University College Oxford (where he was brilliant, but prone to getting into trouble), ultimately Christ Church, Oxford, where I’ve worked now for over twenty years, and where in his day as regius Professor of Greek the nastiest kind of English snobbery enjoyed sneering at him. Dodds’s autobiography, Missing Persons, is a wonderful book: self-aware, humble, affectionate, wise

Still, you want to know about translation, and not hero-worship. Maybe the point lurking beneath what I’ve just said is that I think good poetic translation means you have to know the language, and be willing to know it more and more well. That’s how the cuckoo can get into the nest. You don’t just bring your ‘poet’ qualifications to bear, and transform something in a language you don’t know into poetry.  I know there are exceptions, yes. But that’s the rule. And I’ve taken advantage of exceptions myself, for Five Psalms isn’t done from any real knowledge of Hebrew: I did go over the poetry word by word, and tried to gauge the vocabulary and diction, while I also took pains to hear the lines read aloud, measuring this against the Hebrew texts; but I had no real insider feel for the dynamics involved.  As I say though, that was my exception, and I still hold to the general rule about having to know the language. I feel bad about how few languages I know; but it’s too late to mend these things now. As a translator, I have to work with what I’ve got.

The working, though, is hard to describe. I’m glad you mentioned Stallings: I think of Alicia as someone whose poetic reflexes, when it comes to translation, are similar to my own. She’s a very, very good poet quite apart from her translation work, I should say. But her version of Hesiod in rhyming couplets is a marvel, and it gave me the confidence to push on with what I think may take most of my effort in poetry over the coming few years, a version of the Odyssey, also in couplets.  I wake up at night thinking this is a completely mad thing to do. I’ve finished about a quarter - some people who have read this are very enthusiastic, others much less so. And it’s a risk, a big gamble.  But I’m pretty certain I have no choice but to see it through: I’m sure that it’s linked somehow to my ‘original’ poetry, though how exactly I have no way to know.

The Homeric Hymns felt to me like a turning point for my writing life, my poetry life. I think that having seen that through - which required a good deal of hard-nosed, head-down, solid labour - my old daydream of one day having a crack at the Odyssey had to be realised, somehow or other. Yet if I never in fact get further than the Hymns, I think I’ll have left behind something pretty durable, and worthwhile.  I like to imagine that my Greek translations are into a kind of Ulster English: and with Longley, Heaney, and MacNeice hanging around, that’s no easy thing to make your own. They don’t need to be ‘relevant’ to today, or to Ireland at all: the relevance is in the language, in the rhythms, in the diction and cadence. I really think that counts for everything.

Good translation, I want to opine, isn’t much about spotting similarities between this language and that, this time and some other time, one place and another, and playing up to them. It’s about making a real poem out of another real poem, when the distances and gaps of language, history, culture and all the rest of it are not to be denied or disguised. So, for me, that means inhabiting the forms of English poetry, and not trying to create a mock-up of classical form.  Rhyme - which Greek and Latin didn’t really have - is in an important sense all we have in English verse, the key to everything. (A great bugbear of mine is people who refer to rhyme as though it were no more than a tool, and who talk casually about ‘using’ it or not. They have missed the point about poetry entirely.) Well, I like writing rhymed translations of non-rhyming ancient poetry, because I like writing poems, and I think the originals deserve no less. If you want to really know that original ancient poetry in and for itself, you will just have to go away and learn the languages. You don’t need me: get on with it.

Oh, but this will all sound so ‘elitist’, won’t it? I wish I could find the words to express how wrong that interpretation of what I’m saying really is; but I can’t, and it suits so many people to believe that they’re being somehow hoodwinked by a culture designed to exclude them, that they won’t or can’t listen to what is really being said here. Can I tell you an anecdote instead?

I must be eleven years old, maybe twelve - so this is about 1973 or 1974.  I am in the ground-floor council flat we lived in then, in a housing estate in east Belfast called the Braniel. It’s a rough place: I’ve written about this in a good few poems since. As a family, we really have next to nothing, and prospects are bleak. But I’ve been very lucky, and have managed to get a place to go to a good grammar school on the other side of town.  I’m not actually very clever, and am already falling behind. However, I’ve been allowed to start the Greek class: Greek!  And of course I’m already finding it painfully difficult, so I’m at the bottom of this particular class, but I’ve never been so enthusiastic about anything. I keep gazing and gazing at the textbook, willing the squiggly letters to make sense, and fantasizing about becoming fluent. Anyhow, this culminates one afternoon in a vivid hallucination, where a single ancient Greek - cloak, helmet, crest and all - appears by my bedroom window. He just looks at me and looks at me, and his eyes are dark, alien, not unkindly. Then he goes, but I know what I have to do.  I’m glad to say this is the only time I have ever had an hallucination: but it was so powerful that, in many ways, I’m still having it. If it was a vision, let me just say that I can’t accept it was a vision of elitism, of cultural exclusivity, or social advantage. If only the Spirit of Property Law or Advanced Accountancy had appeared instead, I’d be a much more advantaged man now. But not a happier one, I would guess.

MC. Beware the Greek bearing the gift of poetry. You mention the scholarship of Dodds and the well-trained Longley, and certainly in the latter instance what can appear like classical translating exercises are exercises not so much in rhyming poetry, but poetry which has the voice of a contemporary speaking in English and speaking in metre, a regular rhythmic mutter, a haunting by something suddenly heard from the past from another (dead) language. In recent Longley this rhythm or metre engages with the fragment or the fragmentary, deliberately small-scale, up-close linguistic and botanical seeing in little fugitive tunes of partial loss, not so much last man standing as last man humming. But Longley has also used this for serious matter indeed - the hexameters in his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, in the ‘Ceasefire’ sonnet (a Greek sonnet if there could be such a thing) and ‘The Butchers’.  I agree with you about the awful locution -- the poet uses rhyme -- and we can blame well-meaning teachers or not-so-well-meaning exam setters when students reach for it, but if the matter of style starts off as just the way things turn out, poets like you or Stallings, are also doing this deliberately, aren’t you? That is, it’s more than habit, there is stylistic deliberation and intent?
  
Peter McDonald: In one way, certainly, everything’s deliberate, and has been deliberated usually over long periods.. But yes, I do take your point: however a formal shape is arrived at, or wherever that decision to write in a particular form originates, once there are patterns they become parts of the thinking-up, the imagining, the shaping of things into cadenced sound. Experience in poetry means that you get better at working with rules - that includes, of course, working around them. Ideally, it becomes very hard to tell the ‘rules’ and your imagination apart. Or so I think. Hostile perspectives would depict this as a damning admission that I have no imagination, only a set of absurd ‘rules’. But I don’t want to start running on about Robert Frost and nets on tennis-courts: all I’m really saying is that these things are ultimately mysteries - not least that mystery of a poetic voice being, as Edward Thomas puts it, ‘Fixed and free | In a rhyme’.  I tried to explore that critically, and with a bit of historical specificity, in my book Sound Intentions. I don’t suppose that now I can  frame things any better than I did there.

I do like ‘last man humming’! Michael might, too, as a matter of fact. Not in any way, though, to underrate humming. Wordsworth and Yeats both composed with a lot of humming, apparently. A line of poetry makes a sound, and you can describe that sound in terms of patterning and all the rest of it, yes. But it is a human sound in origin, and therefore as various in its realisations as people are. The human hum. It’s not just that, though, for it’s a written thing, trying to imbed itself like a virus in other people’s memories, by way of their voicings.  The tension between these things is a poetic tension, sometimes even a source of inspiration I think.  I’m doing no more here than reaffirming a central idea of the late Eric Griffiths: his book on The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry is critically essential, but speaks also to what is artistically true. 

This is really the kind of question I ask and ask myself, never being able to answer it: how far can that singular, geographically and historically specific thing that is Peter McDonald’s ‘voice’ establish a real presence in the lines of poetry he makes into his poems? As I say, I can’t come up with an answer, but I know it’s the right question to be asking. I suspect, too, that measures of ‘value’ - which ideally shouldn’t trouble a poet at all - reside in the answer to that ‘how far?’

MC. It strikes me that in your most recent pamphlet, the Five Psalms you are doing something akin to Longley, aware of the style of the past and setting a more fragmented poetry alongside it, but in this case not so much lyric as satiric. By that I mean that the controversy, rage, satire of the psalmist is sounded in your own fragmented accompanying poems - or ‘Paraphrases’ as you call them. It is as if you are working through a parallel text as in old translations, except adding in now a third parallel, as it were. That is immured in a tone I might call savage indignation directed at institutions - not just in any given controversy but also in places that go bad (You say in another poem, ‘Two Salmon’, ‘Know all the worst and see the worst thing whole’.) Regardless of the specifics, in your other poems about Dodds and Bowra and Spender in the ‘Mud’ poem, where in Dodds’s case integrity was eventually rewarded, there is a turning in these Psalms / paraphrases on the bogus or the ‘clever’, a certain institutional bad faith, a place where power rhymes with PR, or stupid with putrid. I hear what you say about the shortcomings of Griffiths, but his book mounted a strong analytic attack on the cleverness of those theoretical positions which would relegate the poetic ‘voice’ to mere ‘discourse’. You say in the ‘Paraphrase on Psalm 94’,

If there is a question here, it is about the challenge for you in how the figure that the Psalmist strikes, like that of the Dean of St Patricks, can bear honest witness in the face of linguistic scepticism and the corporate meanings of the word ‘disrepute’.
  
Peter McDonald: I’m pleased as Punch that you’ve heard ‘disrepute’ between ‘stupid’ and ‘putrid’.  ‘Disrepute’ was undoubtedly a word I kept hearing when I was writing the poems. Like all corporate or official language, it’s dead: dead and dangerous.  In that poem, it’s simply unspeakable. The occasion for Five Psalms was an occasion of disrepute: toxic personal animosities - not primarily directed against me, I should stress - were being let rip. Of course there were - and are - rights and wrongs on both sides. But a poet is not the chair of a panel of judges, though the responsibility he has to right language is every bit as serious as a judge’s responsibility to the law.  There can be no ‘honest witness’ without honest language.  No bearer of witness, especially one calling himself a poet, should ever be swayed by the fact that he is in a minority of one.  Five Psalms  says simply, about the institutional situation that provoked it, Well, not in my name.  I really don’t know where all that will end, and have no active role to play, but I do consider it wasteful and disgraceful, deserving of public attention and reproof.

So, Five Psalms is a private sequence that knows it’s inevitably speaking in public, and that its language is subject to public testing and scrutiny. I hope there’s not too much Swift in the mix (though I’ll admit to finding Swift’s poetry absorbing and energising); I did have Milton in mind, though, not least in tackling the Psalms themselves. That sounds absurdly self-important and arrogant!  And of course, I shouldn’t say such things.  But he did feel like a contemporary when I was writing those poems.

As a brief coda, or a last word to ruminations like these, let me just say I’m fully aware of the dangers relating to mountains and molehills.  It looks odd, I don’t doubt, for a poet like me who has been (let’s say) sceptical about the relations between poetry and the public realm in terms of political commitment to be writing a sequence about a squalid bust-up in one of the dustier corridors of largely forgotten power. I think it’s important to take that one on the chin. Nobody cares, and I don’t say they’re at all wrong not to care; I also acknowledge readily that the world has larger and much more important evils to address. But as a poet, I have to react honestly to what is in front of my nose. In a way, it’s as simple as that.  I hope the poems, or something in the poems, will outlive their occasion.

MC. If I can just follow up in a more general way, can we think about the engagement of poets with public issues in their own personal ways. Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney are figures about whom you have written much, and whose loss you mourn in recent poems. Hill’s later poetry seemed fairly unequivocal in its gathering impatience with the idiocy that surrounded it, from Powellism to Thatcherism to Brexit. But Seamus Heaney ploughed another furrow - if I may be forgiven the cliché. He is more an example of someone working his way through to a balanced mode for addressing these issues - in his own even-handed way. The settling into balance and then working away from it in the later poems is something about which you have spoken beautifully in your criticism. And I find that the counterweight of the two salmon in the poem of that name, bears out the Heaneyesque mode: an the beautiful effect of sonic involvement which is the ottava rima stanza, you too seem to be seeking a sort of spirit level as a tool for measuring what look like fairly difficult personal as well as social circumstances. Can you say something about how you resolve - or even don’t resolve - those two recent influences on your work?

Hill and Heaney - yes. Great opposites, perhaps. I knew Geoffrey much better than I did Seamus, but both of them meant a great deal to me. I read both of them regularly; I’m always finding new things. I do have a sense, as a critic, that late Heaney still awaits his proper celebration. Seamus had a whole life full of improper celebration as a poet, I think. But the white-hot core never dimmed (in the 1980s maybe it did come close to fading from time to time), and it flared out amazingly at the end. Human Chain is a great book, and will only become greater with time. Where Seamus was reconciliation personified, Geoffrey was in many ways the spirit of division. He didn’t set out to be that, and the man was often every bit as humanly warm as Seamus, but that was part of the creative charge. It was Geoffrey, notice, who did go down the road of innovation, ever more fearlessly, right to almost the day of his death. It will take years - decades, centuries maybe - for people to take the whole measure of what he achieved. Needless to say - but I’ll say it anyway - I can’t take that measure. I know what I love, and what bewilders me. He was the last Modernist giant, and bigger in my view than many of those who came before him. But he contained hilarity as well as intense seriousness - the poetry, too, has that in its DNA, as too few of his acolytes seem to admit. In person, Geoffrey could always make me laugh.

I’m glad you’ve mentioned ‘Two Salmon’. If I was forced to say - and I know you’re too polite to force any such thing - which of my poems I feel proudest about, then that would be my candidate. Writing it broke me to pieces, almost: I felt the poem’s disapproval for me, its accusatory payload if you like, as something quite final, more than just a punch in the gut. I really thought I wouldn’t write another poem again - and perhaps I oughn’t to have done.  And in other senses it’s so harmlessly literary - there’s Yeats in the DNA there, and the whole thing is a kind of complicated homage to Heaney, which time quickly turned into an elegy - but I did feel I’d grabbed hold of a live cable, and the shock might finish me.  If anything saves the day, it’s the form - ottava rima  to summon the ghost of Yeats, but actually my ottava rima, not his; and the poem takes care of itself, even if it is bearing only bad news for its own author.  It left me wondering whether poetry might really be a kind of second soul, and… but the nonsense kicks in there, once you start to discuss this kind of thing: best not to.  That poem, though, made the whole book (Herne the Hunter) ‘click’: I knew from it how to allow contraries to become formal, organisational forces, and I had a feeling that they needed to be given free rein, allowed to run riot, to do their worst.  Insofar as I write with my ego (who doesn’t?), that poem and its book left me shredded. ‘The worst thing’ tempts fate inevitably, doesn’t it?  Remember Lear: ‘The worst is not | So long as we can say ‘this is the worst”. 

MC. ‘Speaking with the accents of the dead’, the Herne the Hunter volume seemed to turn around a worst thing - the two mirrored sonnet sequences in the book both have the word in the second line. (If I were a keen grad student I’d run it through Literature Online.) Then the second sequence also says, ‘I know that I should say the better thing’. Of course, talk about positioning of mirrored sonnet sequences and volume order and considerations of villanelle and ottava rima or whatever sound like the ‘higher formalism’. And drawing attention to the shape and structure of books and individual lyric or sequence also suggests we think about things that are a little bigger than can be perceived in the reader’s moment of understanding of word or line, or the localities of hearing a metrical or rhyming effect. It might even go back to numerological patterns in medieval and Renaissance long poems - though it’s there in Yeats as well as Paul Muldoon’s repeated patterns of rhyme over what are now decades of his writing. So, I can see why you say that setting up ‘formal, organisational forces’ are needed to let things ‘run riot’. I suppose I would like to argue that what you are doing is in one way actually ‘experimental’, albeit working with the already-given periodic table of poetic elements. It was fascinating to see the typographical design of a sequence in your most recent book, The Gifts of Fortune, ‘Blindness’, modelled, I guess, on the optician’s test for field of sight, treating also, I guess, both with one’s own memory and the witness of the memory dysfunction of dementia. One could argue that the sequence is mimetic, and of course Milton and Blake are in there, but nevertheless it doesn’t look like a ‘Peter McDonald’ poem. To phrase this as a question, can you say something about that sequence and maybe about how innovation isn’t wholly in the domain of the ‘innovative’?

We should probably acknowledge that poetic forms are actually these oddly hybrid things: they have an aural existence, and then a legible, visual one. They’re rhythms and repeating sounds in air, and a series of shapes on a page. I think ‘Blindness’ tries to exploit that - definitely, the visual there is important. Or rather the visual in the act of decaying. I built the thing around squares: the component poems are ten-line tetrameter affairs, squares in themselves; but they start to crumble when gaps in the lines appear, and tiny squares, some wholly black and some empty white little boxes, start floating in from margins, getting in the way of the lines. In the middle, a ten-line space is occupied entirely by those black and white squares. The conceit - conceit is the word I want, in the ‘metaphysical poet’ sense - is to do with a particular kind of macular degeneration from which my mother suffered: eventually, the centre of her vision went away, and she saw all these little squares or grids where images should be. All she could see was what was on the edge, and she had to spend excruciating effort to read the shortest thing.  She spent weeks making her way through the last book I was able to give her (Herne), line by line, word by word, from the edges in.  She loved to read, and for the last ten years or more of her life, that was cruelly put almost completely beyond her. Anyway, that’s the purely personal inspiration for ‘Blindness’: to some extent, its innovation is just mimetic.

May I say I’m bothered, though, as a matter of principle, by ‘formalism’? In much the same way, in fact, as I’m troubled by ‘innovation’ or - that inevitable adjective that always tries to convey value - by ‘innovative’.  It brings out the Thomas Hardy in me! Basically, formal writing (which poetry is) can’t help innovating; no need to make a fuss about it. Hardy barely wrote two poems in the same form, everything was always changing. Yet of course that’s exactly what too many people do: they insist on labelling, pigeonholing.  I’m very much averse to being called a ‘formalist’ - too many overtones of the poem as painting-by-numbers. As for the other end of the spectrum, I’ve little patience with ‘experimental’ either as a description or an aspiration. Scientists experiment. When I’m reading poetry, I don’t want the experiments: I want results. And have you noticed how poetry claimed as ‘experimental’ is always so irritatingly intelligent?  That’s just bogus: real poetry is a kind of intelligence in and of itself; it’s never about being intelligent, and then showing off how intelligent it (or rather its author) is. 

MC. The shattering of wood, the sense of personal crisis that was in Herne the Hunter now seems to have resulted in a shattering of the printed page and syntax and perception. No matter that these recent poems are rooted in the everyday - the building up of pained experience into middle age, remorse, personal disappointment and disillusion, the deaths of friends and parents.  These later books are filled with elegy and childhood memory, with dislocation and odd notions of home. I don’t want to suggest that you are offering life lessons, exactly (I wouldn’t recommend the poems for those seeking mindfulness), but do you feel that you have loosened an emotional persona or speaker, a figure moving between stoicism and anger, between resentment and acceptance?

I’m more myself. Who else could I be? I’ve learned to become more open about that. When I was young I avoided the personal almost on principle; also, I buttoned up the anger. I don’t regret that - actually, I’d say it was just as well: the angry young man was also a very stupid young man, as I see him now. He’s visible (alas) in some of my critical writings from early on, for which basically I deserved a slap! But I suppose I think I’ve grown into a certain maturity: that means I can now be angry, or sad, or whatever, and have the confidence that the poetry can handle it, can expose itself to that, and that it can in turn expose itself to poetry. I hate poems  saying just ‘Look at me!’ At the same time, I want to read (and write) poems that can say simply, and without dramatics, this is who I am. And any good poem says to its author - in the nicest possible way - Get over yourself.

MC. This is a conversation for an issue on Irish poetry, albeit taking place between two people originally from Northern Ireland writing to each other in an England which is moving out of Covid lockdown. And your childhood in the Troubles of the 70s and 80s returns in these recent poems, like the extraordinarily vivid poem addressed to a teenage child which remembers your own teenage self unhurt in an explosion ,‘Club Bar’. So maybe I could end by throwing out a question on England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. We are also conversing while Northern Ireland celebrates its first 100 years, a hundred years since the partition of Ireland, a centenary of much unsettled constitutional business. At the same time, the United Kingdom appears to have been provoked into its own constitutional questioning after a Brexit achieved by English and Welsh votes. These questions could take up all night in a suitably cosy hostelry - when they let finally us in (not, alas, the Club Bar). But I wonder do you think that all that old talk from the 1980s about culture as a Fifth Province might be recycled again for the Fifth Nation of these islands? Irish poetry alone is as likely to take place in Prague or Stanford as in Kinsale or Tubercurry. Then again, the much-mourned poet who never left Belfast, Ciaran Carson, wrote as well about Amsterdam or the Crimea as he did about the Antrim Road. (He too has a poem about another explosion in the Club Bar, published in his last book, Still Life, though in his case it was about not being there.)  As regards this Fifth Nation of poetry, is it perhaps an island somewhere beyond our current predicament of the Houyhnhnms (‘listening to “the science”’) and the Yahoos (‘I think the people have had enough of experts’)?

Ah, the dear old Fifth Province. That dates us, you know! But I’ve always had a soft spot for it, and certainly I want to apply for citizenship. It’s true that writers and people deeply into reading inhabit a special kind of place - big, baggy, permeable, hard to define. I - we - they - like it there. How well you can apply that (for it’s a reality, not just a kind of metaphor) to the realities of a cultural and political set of places like Ireland and Britain is, let’s say, open to debate.  Fine with me, as long as debate is just that: airing and interchange of views; thinking, articulating, listening. It might be arrogant to say that the Irish are especially good at all that, but also maybe it’s not untrue. We’re also, alas, good at finding out what happens when debate fails: but as far as I’m concerned - and a lot of my generation, I think - never again. Period. I didn’t know about Ciaran’s Club Bar poem: now that I read it, I see it’s about a separate incident in the same place - a much more serious one. But I hope nobody thinks I stole the idea from him.  I did drink there with him long ago - with him and others. Longley and he - with Muldoon, most likely, for he used to haunt the pool table  - got me horribly drunk there once one afternoon when I was mitching from school and they were all supposedly ‘at work’. Oh, in a way we were all at work though, weren’t we? It all seems a lifetime away, and of course that’s exactly what it is.

As to the ‘Irish’ issue - the eternal question. I don’t really know what ‘Irish’ is (thank God), but I suppose I know it when I feel it.  I sense that at a very fundamental level it’s much more than geographical. The big change in our lifetimes is that the other thing - Britain, Britishness - really did go into a tailspin. Kaput, finito. Surprisingly (well, to me anyway), Britishness sold its soul to nationalism, and in the process became a kind of Englishness Plus (‘Plus’ being Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland: very disposable extra baggage, for an English nationalism). The result is Brexit and all the rest of it - too depressing to dwell on, so let’s not. But I suppose it’s fair to wonder what this means for the likes of me. The truth is, I don’t know (and it doesn’t much matter that I don’t know). I’ll follow my nose.

But the centenary, yes. I wonder how you remember ‘Ulster 71’, the fifty-year Stormont-sponsored jamboree?  I recall it vividly. Well, it won’t be like that. And it feels like marking the birthday of a fantastically old relative: you know that there won’t be too many more. As a matter of fact - and I don’t want to put the blink on what might turn out to be a creative thing for me - my father was born more or less on the day of the first elections to the new parliament of Northern Ireland, in 1921.  He has his centenary in a couple of weeks: unlike Northern Ireland, of course, he’s really dead and buried; but I’m turning over ideas of his life and the state’s life: the times they went through, the ends they met or else now face. It may come to nothing, or it may come to a poem.

I’m so glad I’m not a politician (I was once asked by a party HQ to stand for an unwinnable seat, by the way: a nicely barbed compliment from the party concerned, I thought. The cheek of it!) My political instincts are useless, and whenever I have political opinions - not that often - they turn out to be useless too. Really, better not. But people who are political -  young, intelligent and energetic people - will pretty soon find themselves re-imagining Ireland and Northern Ireland in the wake of what will have happened to Britain, and to the mind and will of nationalist England. There are new possibilities, maybe even good and exciting ones. You never know, and I don’t accept that Irish history is some inevitable and over-determined narrative. I’d love to live long enough to see a freshly-imagined country occupying the island of Ireland. That would be an Irish country in the broadest sense, and would put away the twentieth century - and the centuries before - once and for all. The people I come from - the Protestant, unionist people of the North - have a big role to play in that: they need to step up, and not fall backwards into the past. The past failed us: it failed all of us, on both sides of the sectarian divide. It doesn’t deserve another chance.  Like everybody else, my people have everything to gain, and nothing to lose. Also, of course, once we have a Fifth Nation, it can make me a Senator: I may affect a monocle and top-hat, and make absurd speeches for hours, much to everyone’s amusement. Adding to the general gaiety of life; at least, as best I can.

M C. We might leave this to one who is not usually thought of as wise in this respect, Ezra Pound excusing Yeats’s brief career in actual politics: