JACOB POLLEY

Jacob Polley has published two well-received collections of poetry (The Brink and Little Gods), and his debut novel, Talk of the Town, came out this summer. This interview took place in October 2009, with questions from EnCompass readers around the world, and Reader in Residence Susan Tranter.

Photo: Sandi Friend

Susan Tranter:
Welcome Jacob, and thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Can I start by asking if you've read anything lately which you'd like to recommend to EnCompass readers?

Jacob Polley:

Hi there, and thanks for having me. I’ve recently re-read Hilary Mantel’s wonderful memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Actually, I’ve had a fit of memoir and diary reading, during which I loved Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls, Richard Eyre’s National Service (his diaries, covering his time as director of the National Theatre), and A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, which is a meditative and compelling mixture of memoir, art writing and nature writing, and a celebration generally of all that won’t be categorised. I’m extremely lucky that I get to read what I want, so I tend to wander through all sorts, finding, among many other things this year, Gerard Woodward’s exquisite first novel, August, and the short stories of Wells Tower. And, of course, I have shelves of poetry that I turn to all the time...

Tanguene:
Hello Jacob. When you started writing did you take it as a serious work or pleasure activity?

JP:

Hi Tanguene. I started writing when I was young enough to love it, very simply, as a way to make something out of my getting to grips with the world. I think this love has deepened, but also become necessarily more complicated, and sometimes troubled. I’ve found that, to make anything worthwhile, I must be completely serious about the work, while trying to maintain all the playfulness and pleasure in language, and in making something out of it, that I felt as a teenager.

Tanguene:

What were your feelings before being a published writer and now. Has it influenced or changed greatly your life and relationships with friends, family and all the people around you?

JP:

Most people who write want to reach a readership, whether that’s a small circle of friends, or interested associates, or a larger group of strangers. I’m a stranger, reached by books written by people from different times and from all over the world, and before I was published I suppose I wanted to be a writer whose words might reach a stranger and give them the same pleasure I’d been given by reading. For me, nothing much has changed. I’m still the same person, but I suppose this odd thing – writing – which might have looked to those around me like a hobby or a slightly illegitimate compulsion is now ‘approved’ because I’ve published books. And been paid.

JackyC:
I'm currently reading through my copy of Little Gods, and think that it's fantastic, with wonderfully varied and inspired poetry. For me, you combine the natural and very human in a magnificent, emotive style. My questions for you are relating to your ideas. What inspires you to write your poems? Does your inspiration come from the same pools or areas, depending on times etc, or are your poems connected otherwise or generally related, with a few random non-starters thrown in? And do you try to tie the ideas together to make a very cohesive collection, or is that a natural thing?

JP:

Thank you, JackyC. I don’t know what inspires me. If I did, I don’t think I’d write any poems, as they wouldn’t then feel like the kind of exploratory, slightly fumbling-in-the-dark, though nonetheless compelling, procedure that I’ve come to recognise as ‘inspiration’. I have to feel, when I’m writing anything, that the writing will lead somewhere unexpected, that it’s a kind of improvisation: if the writing of a poem feels too determined, it will inevitably end up lifeless to me. The poems are connected only in the sense that they’re all written by me and, as such, must circle around various themes and obsessions. But I’m not sure I want to know what they might be. I don’t write linked poems, but when I put a book together, like Little Gods, I try to stand back from the work and think about an arrangement of poems that I hope might intrigue a reader. I look for echoes, places where poems might face one another interestingly from opposite pages, or possible points where a later poem might offer a different reading or telling or view of things as might have been presented in an earlier poem. So any tying together of ideas is an odd mixture of purposelessness and purposefulness, which I think characterises, for me, the experience of writing itself.
 

JackyC:
I enjoyed reading every poem in Little Gods, particularly 'The Owls', 'April' and 'Mirror'. Most enjoyable though, was 'Decree', with its insightful, magical description. Was there anything in particular that inspired this poem, and how long did it take to write? Is there a 'normal' time, and has it changed as you've become more experienced?

JP:
Thank you again – it’s great to have the work enjoyed. I tend to write poems in clusters, or clumps, over a very short and intense period of time. This period is followed by another long, hard period of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, so there’s really no measurable length of time that it takes to write a poem: the first draft might be very quick – a matter of hours or minutes – but the poem might not be ‘finished’ for another two or three or four years, having been put away, and then brought back out to be fiddled with, and then put away again. This is all a roundabout way of saying that I don’t remember what triggered ‘Decree’, except that I wrote it in the very early morning, like the early morning described in the poem, and that before I wrote it I’d been thinking about the resonantly-named Eden Street, in my hometown of Carlisle, and how I might mention the street in something, and this may have led to the obsessive rhymes that I found drove me down the length of the poem. I don’t feel any more experienced as a writer. I still write, as I always have, lots of poems that don’t work, I still spend ages picking away fruitlessly at incomplete lines and broken verses, and I’m still surprised when I find I’ve sat down and a poem has just ‘happened’, out of nowhere and, very often, despite myself.
 

JackyC:
When did your interest in writing really begin, and when did you know that it was something which you wanted to do wholeheartedly? I think that many poets with potential never make writing anything more than a hobby, perhaps because they don't devote themselves fully. What do you think of this? 

JP: 
I scribbled as a teenager but, more importantly, I read obsessively. It was reading that compelled me to write, and, although I began to write young, I didn’t really knuckle down and realise until I was in my twenties that if I wanted to produce a book – a whole book! – I had to commit time – time on my backside, crouched at a desk – and, as you so nicely put it, my whole heart. I think there are, throughout life, people with potential who might not go on to do lots of things they might, very successfully, have done. Talent for something is, I think, only one (crucial) quality of the many qualities one might need to do what one wants or has to do.

JackyC:

Finally, what advice that perhaps helped you, or that you would have benefited from hearing yourself, would you give to an aspiring poet?
 
JP:

Read widely, broadly and continuously. When writing, try to cultivate a routine in which you exercise, paradoxically, complete freedom. And, finally, your sense of yourself – your goodness or badness, worth or worthlessness – should be as little dependent on the success of your work, or its lack of success, as possible.

Anu:
Hello Jacob. Can you tell us what made you want to write a novel after having started with poetry? And how difficult was it to do?

JP:

Hi Anu. A few years ago I began to write ‘something that wasn’t a poem’. I knew no more than this, but I found I was hooked on writing these pages, and wanted to know what it was I was writing, and what would happen to these characters, particularly Chris, who narrates the book [Talk of the Town], and his best friend, Arthur, who I realised was missing. I kept writing the book to find out what had happened to Arthur and why it mattered, as well as to explore Chris’s unusual perceptions and thoughts, and the language in which he expresses them. So, as I’ve said above, I tend to start writing something with a sense of exploratory purposelessness: I didn’t want to write a novel, though I was very happy when the pages started to accumulate and I allowed myself to dare to think that I might be on the way to a novel, but I didn’t have a plan. I loved writing pages and pages of the book. The hard work came when I then had to craft a novel out of all these pages: I had to rewrite and rewrite, and change things around, and add pages and cut still more pages, and revise the beginning of the book in the light of the ending I had eventually found, and really get to grips with an enormous story – an enormous structure – and try to make it do all the things I felt an enormous story absolutely had to do. Poems are supremely demanding structures to get to grips with too, but they are, quite simply, made of fewer words, which can be memorised and worked on, almost subconsciously...

DavidR:
Are you still writing poetry, or have you devoted yourself to the novel wholeheartedly?

JP:

I’m still very much writing poems. I’d like to write another novel, which I would devote myself to wholeheartedly, but I’m fascinated by, and wholeheartedly committed to, poetry’s unique and very different way of expressing something of the world, and connecting in its uniquely distilled and musical way with readers and listeners.

MB31:
I really enjoyed Talk of the Town. At which point did you decide to use the rich local language in the book, and did that come before or after the story itself? And how difficult was it to be sure you'd got it right?

JP:

Hi MB31, so glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the question. The book was written in the phonetic, slang-filled language you read in the finished book: I didn’t write it ‘conventionally’ and then convert it, as the language was there right from the start, so much so that I only remember very hazily my thoughts or decisions about its use. It just felt utterly right, and beginning to use it led me to feel that it might be possible – in an important way that’s quite hard to describe – that I would find out what was going to happen, that I would tell a whole story in a voice I was finding exciting and a challenge, that it was really the only way I could write the book. So the story very much came out of the language. In terms of getting that language right: every book is a linguistic version of reality, an artifice, and my book is no different. As I was writing and rewriting I thought a lot about slang, demotic grammar and ways of phonetically rendering the sound, or accent, of speech from Carlisle and its outlying areas, and I thought about the ways in which Chris might render his perceptions of the world, and his problems in the world, in a language which rang true. Although it quickly became clear that his was going to be a special way of perceiving, as he himself was a special young man, and all my thinking about what might or might not be authentic was going to be subordinated to his visionary way of taking account of his life and surroundings. The book rings true to me, after the years of working on it, and that was my challenge. There’s not much I can do about the rightness beyond this, and I’m afraid I’m sure of very little in my life as a writer, a life that’s characterised, in my experience, by great uncertainty and semi-permanent doubt...

Katri:
Which authors do you think of as your inspiration, and which do you like to read just for fun?

JP:

Hi Katri. I wouldn’t really draw a distinction. I read for fun, even if it’s serious fun, and brilliant writing usually inspires me, wherever I find it. I’ll always go back to Shakespeare, again and again, and Emily Dickinson, and E.B. White’s essays, and Ken Smith’s poems, and Joseph Roth’s books in Michael Hofmann’s translations, and much more, and I hope I never lose what is basically an enthusiast’s appetite for all sorts of powerful things barely contained between all sorts of covers.

Susan Tranter:
Thanks again for taking part Jacob. Can I just close by asking what you're working on at the moment, and what's next for you?

JP:

Thanks, Susan. I’m in that horrible limbo between projects, I’m ashamed to say, waiting to be grabbed by something unexpected. But I have a few new poems, a few ideas I’m letting season in the dark of me not doing anything with them. I hope a book of poems might be next, in a couple of years, but I hardly dare hope...

Find out more about Jacob and his work at www.jacobpolley.com.

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