Interview with Mario Petrucci

for The Grove   conducted by Matthew Griffiths, 31/10/09  (edited transcript)

Listening to your reading tonight, I noticed how you contrasted the two halves.   In the second half, you used other people’s voices [Heavy Water], so there’s almost a plain style, but the imagery is very rich ...
I agree.  It’s the vernacular.

Yes.  But then did you feel that you were consciously striving to find an idiom of your own in the other stuff [i.e. Flowers of Sulphur]?    I presume you were writing those [poems] at the same time?
It might sound a little banal, but I try less and less “striving”, and more and more to listen to what the language is doing.  

As you were saying in your reading about Charles Olson...
Yes, and there’s Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, others.  It’s more a case of language writing you – and that’s an old idea.  There was lots of theory in the ’80s – structuralism and so on – about the language being merely links; and then you have Chomsky’s generative grammar and the rest.  It’s just the infinity of ways of language expressing itself through us.  Then you’ve got the selfish gene...  I don’t mean that.  What I’m talking about here is listening to the way language works in and with the verse-line.  It’s about being receptive.

To where it’s taking you?
Yes.   To the possibilities language expresses, even if you’re not entirely sure yourself where those possibilities are going or what they mean in the moment that you’re experiencing them.  So it’s not post-hoc writing.   It’s not writing where you’ve had the experience and already thought it through…

It’s not emotion recollected in tranquillity?
Not really, no.  But it might be, if that’s part of the process; I don’t preclude it.  But what we’re discussing is more than paraphrase.  Because emotion recollected in tranquillity is a species of paraphrase, it’s not really what the thing was, or is.  A sense of this other path might be: “Let’s get to the heart of it.  What’s the heart of this?” It’s treating language as the vehicle for something you’ve got to get somewhere, or it’s seeing language as the journey itself – and the originating point, and the destination.  In fact, language becomes the passenger as well, and you’re witness to all of that.  It’s what happens when you start thinking, feeling, expressing, reading and writing through that consciousness of language, rather than language as the modifier to the experience.  It’s not the photograph that one takes during or afterwards and repeatedly shows and repeatedly shows ...  “This is my baby boy at 7 months, 9 months…” and everyone sees the same thing.  This is language that would express itself very differently if you’d entered that relationship with it slightly differently, maybe slightly earlier or slightly later than you had.  This is more akin to fractals and chaos than it is to the grid, the Cartesian grid and its lines, the gridding of lines of experience...

So you’ve got the language over here and the experience over there, that would be the Cartesian way of seeing it?
That would be the Cartesian way, as I said.  An anti-Cartesian mode of poetry is able to carry all of these possibilities with it as it proceeds.   So, there are aleatory factors in there, things happen by chance, there are things you don’t actually agree with, things you might not precisely want to say; but the insistences pushing through are ones that you’re feeling through and thinking through and expressing through a different relationship to language than that conventional mode of “This is what I wanted to say; what’s the best (most precise, most accessible, etc.) way of saying it?”  Rather, it’s language itself as participant, as agent.

And this has informed your ecological sense of poetry, if you like, because in this approach to composition things are connecting themselves like an ecosystem?
Yes.  In a sense, it also reflects what’s gone wrong with our relationship to ecology.  We see ourselves as separate from it, as merely responding to changes in it, asking ourselves – how are we going to fix it?

So it’s an instrumental thing?
Yes.  Yes.  We’re all Benthamites.  But what ecology (or language, for that matter) needs is for us to get back into a right relationship with it, and live it as it is.  And that means perhaps living it in a degraded mode over the next century, but being fully involved and immersed – let’s not even call it “environment”.

So, if we can call it ‘the environment’ then it’s just what’s around us, whereas if we talk about ecology then… what?
Well, wait… all those labels are in themselves deficient, because it’s not “ecology” and it’s not “environment”.  It’s the whole of creation, consciousness, perception and utilities, and the causalities that link all those things up.  Ecosystems don’t think of themselves in terms of species.  They exist in complex relationship to what the sources of energy and consciousness are for the creatures living at the level they happen to be at.  And we’re somewhere on that continuum.  

Do you see poetry, then, as a way – is it the best way – of using language to express that kind of relationship?
I don’t know if it’s the best.  It has the… the resources?  Those resources we now need, especially post modernism (and I don’t mean postmodernism – I mean, post-gap-modernism).  After modernism (and is it really over yet?) we’ve got very considerable resources, templates and exemplars of how to work more fluidly with language, to reach the deeper truths of how it functions and expresses our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with creation and perception.

Because if we only think of life representationally ...
… Well, then, the representation becomes a falsity, at least in some respects.  After all, that photograph isn’t the boy.  And this photograph isn’t the sun.  What you want with language in relationship – whether it’s poetry, whether it’s running a farm, running a business – what you want is the living, breathing expression: in my metaphor, just for this moment, the child that you’ve had (or, actually, you transmuting to child) and not the photograph or the video footage that’s the substitute.  And sometimes a very damaging substitute, because it becomes manipulated, and edited, and turned towards the false.

But it still purports to be representational.  So you think that if we step away from that representational ethos, we’ve got a way of actually getting back to the truth?
Well, a truth.  The indefinite article.  And not getting back, but going forward into it, into it as it is now.  Because it’s not the same, it’s changed, even in our speaking of it or making art of it (as T.S. Eliot, for one, understood).  We’re not going to be living over the next hundred years in a world that will bear resemblance in all respects to the one we had in the last hundred years.  Clearly, there are going to be some fundamental shifts.  Some of those are utilitarian – oil, water, food – but a lot of them will be cognitive, perceptual, value-driven.  And where do you form values?  You form them in the processes of perception and representation.  And if those are marred and distorted by being trammelled into certain stock ways of expressing oneself and understanding oneself, then how can you experience – or voice – the gamut, the full depth and range, of all the things one has to understand, know, experiment with (along with those we can’t know, or at best merely glimpse) in order to be completely human, to be fully related to everything that happens to us?  Probably no individual ever achieves that; but there are closer approximations.

Should we be trying to head that way as a culture?
I don’t know if a culture achieves it; I think individuals do.  That is, individuals work towards it.  To the extent that those various modes expressed and achieved through the individual then knit together and define something in a particular age, to that extent you can say a ‘culture’ has done it.  Of course, collective culture has a role too – those aspects of human and individual culture stored and expressed through programmes, objects, machines… that gets us into intricate terrain.  In any case, I think we’re probably talking counter-culturally, what we’re discussing just at this moment.  

In the Marriott – which seems an odd place to be discussing counter-culture!  But this is interesting; I mean how far do you think that the futuristic world vision portrayed in the poem ‘in hay waist-deep was’ [i tulips, 2010] is something we’re now working towards?  Have you worked that future out?
The precise vision isn’t so important: the key concern here is that it’s a possible future.  The fact of whether or not it turns out to be the (f)actual future is irrelevant.  The necessary act of that poem is to embark on a visualisation of what consequences there are, possibly, to actions, thoughts, perceptions one has now, and has been having culturally, collectively, over the last… well, since the industrial revolution.  It’s the ability to imagine that leads us to empathy, consciousness, conscience, and the desire to change.  There’s a wonderful protest letter by Siegfried Sassoon, which he got into a lot of trouble for.  If I remember rightly, he describes many of the people back home as callous and complacent, associating those attitudes with their inability to imagine – to picture, visualise and therefore understand – what was actually going on in the trenches.

This is why he had that wonderful poem with the tank coming into the music hall…
Is that ‘Blighters’?  I’m not sure.  Anyway, in his protest letter, he’s talking about the shortfall in imagination, at the time, for its reality.  Do we have the imagination, now, and a language, equal to the realities of our own time?  Given that Eliot and Pound and others were struggling with that very question in 1910, 1920, 1930… how is it we’ve gone back in many respects to a more conventional, confessional, lyrical mode of writing, while the world’s moved on? – if anything, has become more complex ...

It’s because we’re all, kind of, resisting the present, because the present is so much around us in the media; but if we can’t face up to the present it’s going to be much more difficult to face up to the future.
We substitute real thinking with entertainment… so we have great comics – I mean comedians – and television shows, very captivating stuff… and then on page seven of the Metro there’s a one-inch column, one inch wide, that says a great ice shelf has just fallen off Greenland, fifty years ahead of schedule.  Wow, and here’s a great image of it the size of a postage stamp.  Well, you know, this is not new.

Even Eliot said “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.
He was saying we’d go out with a whimper rather than a bang.

That’s also quite an interesting idea in this context.
And there’s another author [MP later recalls it’s Milan Kundera in ‘The Art of The Novel’] who said “There may be nothing so quiet as the end”, that when the end comes we’ll be looking elsewhere.  Maybe no one will know the end has come because we’ll be too busy pressing our button.  Or writing poems, perhaps.

But what, then, of the act of imagination that takes place when you’re writing a poem ...?
I said what I just said rather provocatively because, of course, everything will depend on the energy that’s being deployed when the poem’s written.  There are ways of writing that are just as dull and dead as the holiday snapshots you take that everyone else has taken.  But that’s not the same process as the one that you’re suggesting opens us up to greater things.

But doesn’t all poetry offer us that possibility? Isn’t that one of poetry’s strengths – this ability, this potential?
We tend to talk about poetry in this monolithic way.  “Poetry”.  There isn’t a singular poetry.  There are poetries.  And there are as many ways of conceiving and understanding poetry as there are people who are interested in it.  Of course, you can pick out strands or models and methods.  You can say there’s such a thing as Georgian verse, and briefly outline its main characteristics.  But it doesn’t mean that any individual in that time is necessarily operating in that mode, or working with it all the time.  Wilfred Owen began with it and then made a departure.  So this idea of ‘poetry’...  it’s a bit like describing a forest in terms of the dominant tree, when there’s this whole web of interactions – the hydrological cycle, other species.  Even a commercial pine ‘forest’ is not monolithic; it has variation.  So, one of the problems is that we think about cultural art forms as singular, rather like our increasingly non-heterogeneous way of growing food.  

So we put the art forms on the grid, in some ways.  Possibly as a result of having to market things as “poetry” or “drama” and put them in nice easy boxes?
Marketing is key here.  I mean, if you can’t market it, it doesn’t exist, in a sense, to our age.  So the drive is to market poetry more and more emphatically.  To be clearer and clearer on what it is.  That’s dangerous to poetry, and to us.

©  Mario Petrucci / Matthew Griffiths  2009/ 2010