Philip Gross talks to Isobel Norris and Katie Allen
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
Philip Gross is a poet, a novelist for young people and Professor in Creative Writing at Glamorgan University. The Wasting Game, a response in poetry to teenage anorexia in the family, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1998. His latest collection is The Egg of Zero (2006) with a new book The Water Table (all from Bloodaxe) due next year. A collaboration with photographer Simon Denison, I Spy Pinhole Eye is also due next year, from Cinnamon Press. His latest novel The Storm Garden (OUP, 2006) is a tense and atmospheric foray into Narcissistic Personality Disorder, risk, celebrity and love.
- It’s the holidays. What’s your favourite flavour of ice cream?
- Cloudberry. The best thing about cloudberries is that people think you’ve made it up, but they really exist. Almost impossible to get outside of far northern places like Scandinavia (…though IKEA – not advertising here, just being factual – do sell cloudberry jam.) Imagine a blend of smoke and honey…
- Does it ever bother you that your initials are PG? Would you rather be rated a 15, or perhaps a Universal?
- PG is fine, as long as we agree that it’s the parents who need guidance. My novels for young people (like the latest, The Storm Garden) tend to be about the ragged borderline between childhood and… (I’m resisting the word ‘grown-up’ as if it’s ever done) the stage when the buck for our lives stops with us. ‘Children’s books’ should be for everyone who’s ever been the age in question, whatever age they are now. I can’t stand that I’m just a big kid so let’s get giggly and don’t tell the grown-ups act some children’s writers put on. I know it’s a job, but it gives me a queasy feeling on several levels.
- Poetry is one of your best friends. You go to lunch together, you help fix each others’ cars, sometimes you even go for a jog together at the seaside. You talk, you bond; you’ve told Poetry things you’ve never told anyone. But sometimes he really gets on your nerves… Tell us about it. Like that time when…
- Incredible assumption in this question: that Poetry’s a bloke… And that, just because I’m male, so am I. There is this character called The Poetry Biz who’s mainly male, full of ego and self-advertisement, creepily manoeuvring to talk to (and be seen with) influential people, always glancing over your shoulder at parties to see if anyone more important has entered the room. Can’t stand him, though we have to pass the time of day sometimes. The most annoying thing is the way he claims to be really close buddies with Poetry – sort of literary agent, therapist and best friend all in one. Poetry, though… S/he leaves me little notes from time to time. Or comes in, clears the air in the house – leaves a window open so that I can get a better view.
- Fast forward three years: Poetry is getting married, and you, you lucky thing, are his best man. Best man speech, now! Tell us why he’s so great.
- Because nothing I can say explains him. Because he could equally be the bride or the groom, or the assembled witnesses. Or maybe the ceremony (of whatever form) itself.
- Teaching poetry. How’s that working out for you?
- For me? In fact I spend more of my time teaching writing for young people, at least at university – just because there are several poets on the staff, and I do both. But I’ve just come back from teaching a course that blended poetry and visual art, at the Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, with my wife Zélie, and that was a delight. The serious things that get set free by playfulness – especially real collaboration – that’s what gives me more energy back than it takes out. As for teaching in general… Would I write more or write better if I didn’t have a day job? I’m not sure. I think jostling for the space to write, working to deadlines, never having time to stop and worry about writer’s block… all that might liberate more than it constrains. But I would like a spare life, sometime, so I could do both.
- You’re in the North Pole, surrounded by ravenous polar bears. They are beginning to sharpen their teeth on nearby seal corpses. They are, however, quite intelligent. You have one chance to impress them so much that they will not eat you, and instead make you the Polar Poet Laureate. Which of your poems would you read in order to impress them?
This one might speak to them. Postmodernism for polar bears…
Glass House Days
There are days when the sky
is cold blue glass. OK,
you know there’s nothing
really blue up there,
it’s in our eyes, us blue-eyed boys and girls,
but the sunshine looks
so hard and near
you could throw a stone
on impulse, smash: midday
in splinters all round, and off the world’s
edge, vertigo, the not
of up and down. So care-
ful, on brittle particular
snow, we pick our way
with blue shadows. There must be Inuit words
to help us but we have no way of saying.
- A tree falls in the forest. You’re not there. Neither is anyone else. Not even the polar bears. Did the tree make a sound? Similarly, if a poet reads to an empty room, did they really read? Was it worth doing?
- I had a dream in which a man built the finest artwork he was capable of on a beach, from wonderfully sea-sculpted driftwood, chosen and combined with creative brilliance by him. It was perfect. He built it just below high tide mark. That was part of its perfection. Does that answer your question?
- The polar bears have indeed made you their Polar Poet Laureate. Go you! Now there’s a new problem: they want some new poems, only you’re a bit stressed from still being stuck in the North Pole, and you’re quite sure you just saw Jeremy Clarkson drive past in a Toyota pick- up. You have no ideas, and the polar bears may still eat you. The only solution is to find a cure for writer’s block. What is it?
- The writer’s block is a block of ice. Climb on it. Cast adrift. By the time the bears realize it’s not a poem, you’ll be drifting southwards on your personal ice floe. With any luck, even then they’ll be so busy debating the exact meaning of this piece of performance art that they’ll forget they could just jump in, swim, and eat you. (And I notice I’ve shifted quietly from ‘me’ to ‘you’. That might be part of the answer – take a step back, outside yourself, your wish to impress, your fear of failure. There are all kinds of ways to do that, but playfulness is one good way. Also collaboration. Also simply doing it, so fast and recklessly you don’t have time to think. You’ll stumble on something, just like I’ve just stumbled on a serious answer, after all.)
- You’re in the same situation as above, except this time your imagination is wild with ideas, but you’re terribly ill. The polar bears offer you medicinal sushi, but that doesn’t really work for you. What’s your cure for generally feeling eurgh?
- You think I have a cure? Because I’m a poet?! Go ask your doctor to prescribe you a quick villanelle…
- You’re stuck in a hot air balloon trying to get around the world in seventy-nine days and two hours precisely. Your companions are Lance Armstrong, Virginia Woolf, Brendan Foster and a broken egg-timer. They’re afraid they might fail in their mission because the balloon is too heavy, so someone has to go. The egg-timer gets to stay, no questions asked, but everyone else must compete for the right to stay in the balloon. Another speech required! Quickly, sell yourself!
- It’s very simple. What is my profession (in most of their eyes, at least) except hot air? They’ll be heavier without me.
- You’re in a betting office, about to place a bet on a local horse race. The main contenders are: Villanelle, Vixen, Sestina for Britain, the Pride of Bilbao, Sir Rainalot, Peggy Pantoum, Sonic Sonnet and Free Range Greg. Who’s your money on? Why? What have they got over on the others?
- I hate to stare a gift-cliché in the mouth, but what can I possibly say except ‘Horses for courses’? By a strange coincidence, that’s also just what I think. Every poetic form that’s lasted must have done so, evolutionarily-speaking, because it fits a particular shape of experience that people have.
- It’s five years later and you’re still in the North Pole. It is quite chilly, and you miss home. What do you miss most?
- Would it be laughably uncool to give the honest answer? My wife. I think I’m allowed a bit of uncool, after all these Polar bears.
- Also, we hate to tell you this, but you can’t bear the polar bears. You’re sick of censoring your work to be bear-friendly, tired of writing about bear issues. And they make you wear a stupid hat. Do you try to escape and end your days in a small cave, wearing sealskin, but writing about what you want? Or do you stay in your position of wealth and importance, pandering to your bear society?
- Sometimes I dream about being successful enough to find this question a real temptation. I’m quite interested to know how much I would sell my soul for (e.g. a film contract on a novel on condition that I gave it a really fluffy ending). Halfway-seriously: the real bind is not that I want wealth and importance, but that writing is about communication. What makes most working poets mean and rivalrous is that there’s never enough attention round (enough readers, enough time and inclination for slow deep reading) for most of our poems to open in the sunlight. So of course we fight like saplings in a crowded forest for that little glimpse of sky. But the readers who matter most might not need to be flesh and blood and present; they might be people we’ve admired, long dead, or people-shaped shadows cast by the qualities we value most. (I’ve just written in, deleted, then written in again: Like God.) I do have a horror of the airs poets give themselves to compensate for bad reviews, but secretly there is another principle we write to. But the more we think we can explain it, the less I trust it – the more it’s likely to be ego in another guise.
- Bad news. The balloon was punctured by a falling polar bear, and you’ve crashed in the Indian Ocean. Luckily, you and Lance Armstrong have made a raft (the others didn’t make it, not even the egg-timer), but you may each carry only one possession with you. Lance has picked one of his jerseys, and you’ve narrowed it down to a poetry book. You’ve decided it must be poetry, but not an anthology. What do you keep? Decide quickly, as Lance is about to start tearing pages out and eating them for nourishment.
- It mustn’t be a ‘favourite’ in the sense of what I entirely like already. No, something it will take the rest of my life to chew very slowly and digest. Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, maybe. Or the collected poems of Paul Celan.
- You’ve booked a Laser Quest party for eight (including yourself) tonight in Skegness. Sadly, your friends are having polar bear-related issues and cannot make it, and your only option is to call seven poets to take their place. Who do you pick for this grand night out, and – more importantly – who’s on your team?
- First stipulation: these are ‘poets’ in the sense of what is in their poems, the palpable personality their poems reach for, and add up to, as a whole and at their best. Not the flesh-and-blood people who happen to write them; I’ve never believed that the two equate. So: Basho; Elizabeth Bishop; W.S. Graham; William Carlos Williams; Jaan Kaplinski; Edwin Morgan;Rilke; and as substitute, that unknown poet who wrote Sir Gawayne and Pearl. They all shed a different kind of light, so who cares which side anybody’s on… but there will come a random moment when all their laser beams intersect in mid air, and for a moment create a hologram of breathtaking strangeness and simplicity.
- Finally, describe a pomegranate in three words, without using any adjectives, or mentioning polar bears.
- seed bomb, ticking
Katie Allen was raised in the desolate wastes of the North, but due to happenstance is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Warwick, of all places. She is eighteen and has never been published before, but this is okay because she spends all her time daydreaming anyway, usually about pashminas and cherry smoothies. If all else fails, when she eventually grows up she wants to run an ice cream parlour.
Isobel Norris
Isobel Norris is Welsh, and don’t you forget it, cwtch. She’s read at the Dylan Thomas centre and was specially commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition, and even once wrote a poem about a dead sheep, which is about as Welsh as you can get. She likes running, swimming, cycling, Auden and the word ’fantastic’, and dislikes Yeats and things with gluten in them (because they kill her). (Gluten kills her, not Yeats – Ed.) Izzy lives in Swansea, where the highest-quality rain is.