Jack Underwood Interview

Hattie Hawksworth, writer and editor extraordinaire and general all round good- person conducted an interview with Faber poet Jack Underwood to mark our competition with Ideas Tap. He

What was the first poem you ever wrote? Was it rubbish?

My first poem was about a pair of Adidas Gazelle trainers I wore at Sixth Form. They had a lot of graffiti in biro on them. The ‘squeeze me macaroni' sticks out. The poem itself was very arch and clunky, though I don’t have a copy of it anywhere so couldn’t tell you exactly how bad it was or why. I remember being pleased enough with it to want to write another poem though, which I suppose is the most important thing.

 

You¹ve said that ³we see so much poetry but very few poems² what makes a

successful poem?

Poetry is writing which aims to be poetic: all those fluffy, wordy, overly descriptive verses which make a lot of colourful fuss, but don’t actually get anywhere. A ‘poem’ shapes-out a new idea, is an enquiry according to its own unique terms. You can read endless poetry and not get anywhere, but a good poem digs into something and you can feel it happen. I like to think of a poem existing neither in the mind nor the body, but by locating itself simultaneously in both, it undermines the fallacy of those distinctions; of course, the mind is an extension of the body, the brain a bodily organ, and I think poems remind us of this because they enable to ‘feel’ ideas happening.

Surely we¹re all going to use ourselves as reference point when we¹re

writing. How can we escape the cliché of narcissistic poetry?

 

Yes, all language depends on our experiences; words are inhabited, furnished, distorted or expanded by the associations we use to make them meaningful, so of course when you write you import your subjectivity. But there is a difference between that and simply writing about yourself all the time. The question any writer or artist should ask themselves, gravely in the mirror every morning, is “why on earth should anyone else find what I have to say interesting?” If you can ask that question and find an honest answer in your work then you’re entering into a genuine artistic bargain, that is, you are seeking to communicate rather than express.

Do you feel the need to write poetry, or is it something you have

deliberately set out to master?

I enjoy writing and I feel guilty when I neglect it. But in terms of need…that’s a strange concept. At worst, claiming that you absolutely ‘need’ to write is pretentious, and vaguely offensive to those people who really do have needs – who seriously need something to eat, or need somewhere to sleep, or someone to talk to – but I do think that writing poems is a genuinely philosophical undertaking, in that it allows you to poke at things and frame questions and entertain the miraculous wonder of a godless universe, and I think I’d find myself unbearably frustrated if I didn’t have an vehicle to articulate and explore these doubts, or ask these questions. And yes, it helps firm up the old ego and I think that too is addictive, or results in some kind of reliance.

 

Can you ever be satisfied with your work? Do you think it is good?

I would find (and have found) it difficult to get up in the morning when work isn’t going well and so I think on a certain, private level you have to believe your poems warrant an audience, are at least good enough or interesting enough to be offered out as a contribution to the tradition. Otherwise you’d be happy scribbling them down in your dream journal and then burning them in a bowl by the window. Whether, in terms of the canon, you think you’re sitting up in first class with Shakespeare and Lorca, or are cramped in economy next to some dreadful spoken word artist whose ‘poems’ involve self-harm and shaving themselves, well, that’s probably a separate point. 

 

Would you still write poems, even if you knew no-one was ever going to see

them?

I think part of what makes a poem a poem is the desire to communicate the nerve/brain business of being alive to another human being in the hope that you might unknowingly and miraculously achieve some kind of overlap, so I guess you wouldn’t be writing a poem if you didn’t conceive of a ‘reader’. Lots has been made about someone like Dickenson and how reclusive she was and how little she was actually read in her lifetime, but her poems clearly show someone engaging with a tradition of communication, not being ignorant of it or obtuse to its concerns. The material fact of no one reading your work is different from the conceptual lack of readership. I suspect the mysterious figure of ‘the reader’ is probably a sort of ghost version of yourself anyway, but I’ve no proof.

Who is a good poet and why?

 

I’m pretty dubious about the idea of great poets actually. I prefer to talk about great poems. Great poets can write duffs line or stanzas or books, but you have a better idea of where you are with a good poem, sitting their in its entirety. ‘The Fish’ by Elizabeth Bishop, for example, is a good poem. So is her poem ‘Filling Station’.   ‘HAVING A COKE WITH YOU’ by Frank O’Hara is a good poem, with its title in capital letters. His poem ‘FOR GRACE, AFTER A PARTY’ is also very good. I’ll do six more good poems:

‘Stone’ by Charles Simic is a good poem.

‘Dreamsong 4’ by John Berryman is a good poem.

‘Leave the Door Open’ by Peter Scupham is a good poem.

‘The Excuse’ by Michael Donaghy is a good poem.

‘Goat’ by Jo Shapcott is a good poem.

‘A Hill’ by Anthony Hecht is a good poem.

And while we’re on the subject of good poems, ‘I ♥ NY’ by Emily Berry is a good poem, so too Sam Riviere’s ‘Myself Included’ or Heather Philipson’s ‘Relational Epistemology’ or for that matter any poem by Matthew Gregory tends to be a good poem. And these are for starters! What makes these poems good? Everyone will have their unique connection with what each poem seems to be saying and how it goes about saying it. Generally this connection comes down to a feeling that something has been pitched just right, or expressed with a thrilling newness. Often it will describe a feeling you’ve had but didn’t yet have the terms for or a figurative situation in which to position and understand it. Isn’t the feeling of a reading a brilliant poem similar to the feeling of remembering something brilliant, or sad? It feels the same as remembering, doesn’t it? 

On a closing note also I hold the slightly wobbly opinion that the best poems are beautiful poems.