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Tag: poetry

  • Clive James: Interview reflections from his friend Sir Tom Stoppard

    Christopher Jackson hears from the 83-year-old playwright about his old friend Clive James, and finds evidence of a moving friendship

    I’m sometimes surprised by how quickly dead writers recede. It amazes me that John Updike will be 13 years dead in January 2022; Philip Roth departed four years ago. The same with VS Naipaul. Christopher Hitchens has been dead nearly a decade.

    In each instance, you find the writer’s profile declines at their death; for one thing they’re not around to promote their books. Dead poets need advocates. Two year on from Clive James’ departure, it’s very soon to worry about his posthumous reputation – and too soon to reappraise.

    But as these two years have passed, and the world been changed utterly by the pandemic, I’ve found myself thinking about his work. But then that’s no surprise. As readers know, poems like “Japanese Maple”, “Holding Court”, and “Leçons des Ténèbres” have a habit, as Larkin’s did, of loitering in the memory.

    I never met him, though I did get to interview him over e-mail towards the end of his life. What Clive would have thought of the pandemic is anyone’s guess. Housebound in Cambridge for his last decade or so, it seems likely that he would have found the humour in the pandemic just as he did in so much else. But the fact that he never clapped eyes on the words Covid-19 and coronavirus is now the principal distance between us and him. Perhaps it’s the first hurdle his poetry has to traverse: it needs to touch us now.

    The memory of Clive can still stir people into action who don’t usually feel like doing media. One is Sir Tom Stoppard who was friends with Clive. Having been through Hermione Lee’s monumental biography of Stoppard and found little but passing reference to Clive, I decide to see if Stoppard is in the mood to reminisce.

    To my mild surprise, an email comes back. “You’ve sent me back into Clive’s “Collected” for an afternoon,” he says. “I’m grateful because the reading rebuked me for not having read so many of these poems before (and forgetting many I had read).”

    If you want to imagine where Stoppard is writing from, it’s worth watching Alan Yentob’s recent Imagine documentary, which shows the playwright in a country house with enviable gardens, and a number of pet tortoises.

    The Stoppard-James friendship is an intriguing one: of writers working in the late 20th and early 21st century their work seems to me the most likely to last, not just because of the richness of their output, but because of their infectious quotability.

    Here – plucked at random from his oeuvre – is the James voice for those who might have missed it: “Santyana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it too.” On Peter Cook: “He wasn’t just a genius, he had the genius’ impatience with the whole idea of doing something again.”

    And here he is on Stoppard: “The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead is the perception – surely a compassionate one – that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.”

    So how far do they go back? Stoppard says he finds it hard to remember his first associations with Clive. “The past is mostly fog. I can’t remember how I first met Clive. Early on, he took me to join in one of those “famous” literary lunchings (Amis, McEwan et al).”

    I note how from Stoppard’s perspective, these lunches, which sometimes form a slightly obligatory part of our literary lore, have vanished into the ether.

    Clive and Tom have both spoken publicly about the way in which Clive used to send the playwright his poems – but again there is no mention of it in Lee’s book.

    So did Clive send Stoppard his poems? “Yes he did, during his last few years, send me some poems for comment.” And did Stoppard ever offer suggestions, and if so did Clive ever accept them? “He sometimes accepted the point,” Stoppard continues. “But I haven’t kept my letters and remember no instances. I don’t think I sent him my plays.”

    In plays like Arcadia, the action turns on a hapless biographer desperate to get at the truth of the past, only to find that the past hasn’t been properly preserved. It’s interesting to find that the playwright is himself cavalier with preserving communiqués of obvious literary interest. Stoppard has pulled off the trick of making me feel like a Stoppard character.

    But what comes across instead is that Stoppard genuinely admired Clive’s work: “I hugely enjoyed his writing, poems and prose,” he continues. “What I enjoyed, aside from his craft, was the way his store of cultural trivia (about Hollywood, machines, films, sport, etc) was intermixed with the real erudition.”

    But has Clive’s reputation suffered a bit precisely because he could do so much? “I guess that this connects with that: a lowbrow intellectual with a highbrow appreciation of the commonplace.  From Auden to Weissmuller.”

    I have to look up Weissmuller who, though he sounds like he ought to be a philosopher, turns an Olympic swimmer, the subject of a Clive poem ‘Johnny Weissmuller dead in Acapulco’. It’s in the Collected, so no doubt it popped into Tom’s mind because he’d read it that day. It’s a very Clive thing, to visit his poetry then find yourself sent back to your laptop to look up a forgotten athlete. I’m not sure if there’s another writer who so often sends me to Google.

    We tend to punish people sometimes for knowing too much; we suspect the heart is losing out to the head, and sometimes as in poems like ‘Jet lag in Tokyo’ (“Flat feet kept Einstein out of the army”) or Whitman and the Moth (‘Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age/ Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat’) it might be that Clive is too concerned to tell you what he knows before he tells you what we really want to know: how he feels.

    But Stoppard, who is known for complexity in the theatre, favours simplicity in poetry, and this is why Clive’s poetry has merit for him: “In addition, he is always an “easy” poet, his poems come across wholly at first reading, everything declares itself in one shot, like an Annie Liebowitz photo (as Clive might say).”

    I ask Stoppard which poems in particular he values. Stoppard gives a thoughtful response. “The last long “The River in the Sky” just flows along, doesn’t it, as though dictated, but how difficult to bring it off.”

    This is assessment reminds me for some reason of what Andrew Marr once told me: “I read that poem, and thought how wonderful that there’s somebody on this earth who’s actually read something.”

    This sense of Clive as keeping the lights on on our behalf is perhaps an underestimated aspect of his achievement: there’s always a sense that he was doing it for us all. We felt included in his project and that’s an integral aspect of the affection in which he continues to be held.

    Stoppard has another important point to make. “There’s an exhibitionist in him, and perhaps exhibitionists aren’t really trusted.

    Clive was as much a fan as a star.  Most stars are careful not to show fandom to too many too often. But Clive couldn’t help himself.  He went overboard for those he loved.  I felt overestimated by him, as many did, I hope and suspect. But his approval mattered to me.”

    Stoppard also has some favourites from James’ vast oeuvre: “Although he wrote bigger, greater poems, I love ‘Living Doll’ a lot. The poem I’ve read aloud most to more people is ‘The Book of My Enemy’.”

    This sends me back to ‘Living Doll’ which I hope everyone who reads this will look at. It shows what James was able to do by the end: poems where the performance has receded before the urgency of what has to be said – and said clearly and musically.

    There remain doubters here and there about Clive’s poetry, but my sense is he got awfully good towards the end in a very short space of time. It was an astonishing, courageous old age.

    Of course, you don’t do that without being pretty good to begin with. My sense is that as the years, and centuries go by, no one will mind whether he did his best work late or not – just as we don’t first read ‘The Tower’ as late Yeats. Buttressed by time from the circumstances of his life and death, we’re more likely to read it as Yeats.

    It’s generous of Stoppard, who is extremely busy, and has also earned a right to some peace and quiet, to answer these questions. But it’s clear that the generosity is towards Clive’s ghost, not me. I don’t delete his email as he apparently deleted Clive’s – but as I finish work that day, it’s a pleasant thought to imagine Tom spending the afternoon with Clive like that. May he spend many more. 

  • The Poet at Work I: Tishani Doshi

    The Poet at Work I: Tishani Doshi

    As the government seemingly reduces the importance of poetry on the national curriculum, by making its study optional at the GCSE level, Finito World is introducing this regular series aimed at illustrating the utility of poetry, and examining the relationship between literature and the workplace. Poets are asked to produce a poem which speaks to what our first featured poet, Tishani Doshi, calls ‘ideas of work, leisure, community, labour, decoration, and poetry and the space we create for it all. ‘ After we produce the poem, we then give the reader a Q & A touching on the life of the poet and their relationship with work.


    Tishani Doshi is a poet and novelist born in what was then Madras in 1975. She has built an international reputation on the back of her poetry and novels – for which she has won many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her novels have also been critically acclaimed. Her most recent Small Days and Nights has been shortlisted for the Tata Best Fiction Award 2019 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020.


    In ‘Postcard from Work’ readers will immediately be relieved by the exotic colours – ‘the yellow trumpet flowers’ and the ‘sunbirds…diving in and out of this den of gold.’ It is a poem which begins in a blaze of light. It is a piece ostensibly about work, but where little work is done – except the perhaps more vital work of paying tribute to the natural world, and mulling our place in it. Sometimes the best we have to offer our masters is to take a mental holiday from the tasks they have set us to do.


    Doshi knows that we were not born only to consider ‘the price of milk’ but to find ways of being which let death know we mean to ‘hold on.’ Work has to be done – and someone has to do it, and that will mean taking a break from dreaming. Doshi zooms out to show us what tasks lie unfinished around the narrator: we might be in a seamstress’ (‘someone else will tend the hem’) or even at a vet (‘someone else will pry open the dog’s jaw’). All our leisure, the moments we snatch, must be supported by drudgery elsewhere. Doshi also makes her living as a dancer, and her poems always have something of dance about them – they are miracles of rhythm and movement, and full of a joy which does what poetry should do: her poems are the antidote we didn’t know we needed until they came our way.

     

    Postcard from Work 

     

    Forgive me, I have been busy 

    with the yellow trumpet flowers.

    They dance uselessly, slivers

    of rapture. I know the dishes

    need washing but the sunbirds

    are diving in and out of this den

    of gold. Their dark purple wings

    are soft nets, intimate with the leaves.

    Beaks poised to receive nectar. There are 

    days I neglect my beard. I grow tired 

    of digging. I imagine someone else

    will tend the hem, the torn sleeve.

    Someone else will pry open 

    the dog’s jaw for his evening pill. 

    Our throats are in constant need

    of shelter.


    I’ve sublet a room   

    to a poet who does not know 

    the price of milk but is ready 

    to lay down her spear and surgical

    instruments, to worship the roots

    of this labyrinth. If there is rain

    and soil, onions will grow. After 

    a day in the field, the poet and I 

    sit around a fire to sing. It is a way 

    of letting death know we mean to hold

    on. The threshold stays warm. We flick

    at night with a fly-brush, cheat insects

    of their audience with a chorus 

    resurrected from silence. Think 

    of the performance of this lament

    as our hunger, of the armchair

    in the corner, our repose. 

    Underneath, is a footstool 

    that hides.


    What is the interplay in your life between dance and poetry? Is it an entirely fruitful one or can it be said to be in any way antagonistic?


    Poetry came first, but in a way, poetry only came into being once I had dance. They’ve never been antagonistic, unless you count yearning for one, while you’re engaged in the other? But that feels such a natural way of being in the world. Both require a kind of vulnerability and strength – the making of your own vocabulary. When I’m in a lazy mode, which is my most natural way of being, I wonder at both the worlds of poetry and dance, the capabilities we don’t imagine for ourselves. 


    How do you find the business side of your writing life? Many writers I know struggle with invoices/tax/the admin of it all? But then I think that can also be a cliché and many writers be surprisingly scrappy and hard-headed?


    I studied business administration and communications before ditching it for poetry, so I can get around economics and accountancy alright, but that’s not to say I thrill in it. I move in waves. Sometimes I’m terribly productive about everything – to-do lists and all. Other times I want to be left alone to watch the flowers. 


    The UK government has recently said that poetry should be optional at the GCSE level – a significant demotion in its importance on the curriculum. What is your view on that and what do you feel the impact will be?


    One of my first jobs was to teach an introduction to poetry and fiction class to students at Johns Hopkins University. It was a required class, most of my students were pre-med or engineering. I like to think as a result that in future dentist waiting rooms, there may be a volume of Elizabeth Bishop lying around, or that someone designing a bridge might dip into the poems of Imtiaz Dharker for inspiration. I don’t know what the UK government’s motivations for demoting poetry are, but I hope usefulness was not a factor. Everything is connected. I can’t imagine any kind of life that doesn’t need the intuition and imagination of poetry.


    What sort of role does poetry have in India – does the government encourage it sufficiently or is there tension in your country also on that score?


    Well, our current prime minister unfortunately published a volume of poems, called A Journey.  Historically, tyrants have had a thing for poetry (see Mao, Nero, Stalin, Mussolini Bin Laden), which gives poetry a bad rep. Poetry as I remember it in school was rather fossilized and distant. I think at the college level, there have been serious efforts to rejuvenate and decolonize the syllabus. In schools, I fear they may still be standing up in front of classrooms with hands clasped, reciting “charge of the light brigade.”  


    Was there a particular teacher when you were younger who turned you onto poetry?


    Yes. Her name was Cathy Smith Bowers. I took one of her classes as an undergraduate in college, and it changed my life. 


    What’s your favourite poem about the workplace?


    I read this as a work poem, because I love my work, and my work is poetry.


    Love is a Place by EE Cummings 


    love is a place
    & through this place of
    love move
    (with brightness of peace)
    all places

    yes is a world
    & in this world of
    yes live
    (skilfully curled)
    all worlds

  • Friday poem: Arrogance by Omar Sabbagh

    The Arrogance

     

    Even the motes of dust he petitions

    to be friendly faces.  And the undulance

    of his desire, the dancing of the waves that mint

    the rhythm of his workaday experience,

    was always to be seen and viewed smaller

    than the truth, the world at large, like the horror

    that inhabits it – its beastly denizen – told taller.

     

    Even the motes of dust seem to suit him

    and the sparse girth of his calling, the drum

    of each moment in his mind the drum

    of the page that whitens as it blackens

    before him.  In short, the sum of his arrogance

    might be found in a space between dance and sense

    and sound; a poet, after all, is only a man

    in the mirror, making sense of what he can’t.

    -Omar Sabbagh

  • The English Teacher: A poem about mentorship by Diego Murillo

     

     

    The English Teacher

     

     

    There is always one latent in your life,

    who will shape you to your own advantage.

    Mine was Balkwill. Chaucer-fat. Quotation-rife.

    Flushed with good booze, and dying in a rage.

     

    Rushing to complete his time, he came in

    for the lesson, ranted in despair about his death.

    The next day he swept through, played Beethoven –

    the Ninth – from start to finish. Nodded – left.

     

    In those days, it meant little. How could we see

    past youth to bear witness to him dying in such glory?

    We told ourselves it was how the world was framed:

    to the wise came decay; to the brilliant, shame.

     

    Yet to suspect all this – the passion he held

    in that last summer of his, though dissolving in his palm,

    was to long to join him in whatever he loved,

    and do it ongoingly. This is how we all link arms:

     

    When he died we knew that we’d been chosen.

    In his each and every fantastic literary whim –

    Hardy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wilde, Owen –

    he’d lived. We would too – and if we could, live like him.

     

     

    Diego Murillo

  • Robert Halfon on poetry and the national curriculum: “We don’t want a society of Mr Spocks”

    Robert Halfon reacts to the government’s decision to make poetry optional at GCSE on the national curriculum

    I’ve been asked lately about the Department for Education’s decision to make poetry optional on the national curriculum. I don’t think poetry has as much prominence in parts of our education system as it should – in some ways that’s understandable because of all that’s gone on during Covid-19.

    I understand the government’s concerns – that children are being left behind and not learning. I also understand those who worry about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the predictions that 28 per cent of jobs might be lost to young people by 2030. There’s a natural recognition that the curriculum has to adapt and change. 

    But what the government doesn’t understand is that poetry and literature are one and the same. In my view, you can’t promote one subject over another: literature is actually just as much about learning poetry as reading books. I hope this is just a temporary thing – though it’s undeniably becoming a more widespread assumption in our society that poetry isn’t seen as important.

    “Of course, the Department for Education will say that it’s a temporary measure, and designed to take the strain off pupils, but the danger is that a temporary measure becomes precedent. “

    It’s a good time then to remind ourselves of the value of poetry – sometimes it can almost be like a puzzle. You have to think more, and it trains your mind in a very different way. If this changes suddenly became permanent, I think that would be very worrying.

    And of course, culture – and I include poetry in this – has an absolutely important role, not just in the economy but in our society. It shapes our lives. It’s not just good for our learning; it’s good for our mental health, and expanding our horizons. We don’t want a society where everyone is Mr Spock. 

    At the same time I do firmly believe that whatever degree or study people do they should do work experience alongside. If you’re a poet, why wouldn’t you do a placement at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum? There should be practical work experience alongside the process of expanding your intellect. 

    The reason I mentioned Robbie Burns is because I had to learn him for a school competition. I have these bad legs and I didn’t lean on anything at that time. I remember standing up and my knee cap would always shake up and down. But I remember learning the first two or three verses of A Red, Red Rose by Robbie Burns – and my kneecaps just shaking in front of the whole school. 

    I’m sometimes asked if my reading has affected my career in politics. What I read goes into my subconscious. It helps me when I’m writing articles – I may think of things and quote things, or use metaphors. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily directed me towards change of policy. It infuses my thoughts and permeates like a kind of beautiful stew in cooking for a long time – and it always tastes much nicer on the second or third day of eating it.

    But mainly I read to relax – and I’m happy at the moment as I’ve just read some very early stuff from Tolkein – not just The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but also The Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion, which his son, Christopher Tolkein gathered together after his father’s death. Tolkein was not just a great author but also a great poet: if you read Beren and Luthien, you’ll see what I mean. 

    “There’s an unwritten story: the importance of Conservatism in 20th century art”

    But if I’m honest I don’t read enough poetry. I tend to read books more than verse. But when I do read it I like it. I particularly like poetry that tells stories and also poetry which rhymes – especially Philip Larkin, though I won’t quote my favourite poem, This Be The Verse, since this is a family publication. He was a Conservative of course, as was my other hero, the painter LS Lowry. That’s an unwritten story – the importance of conservatism in 20th century British art.

    And again work was important Lowry actually began doing pictures when he was collecting rents in Manchester. Thinking about it, Lowry and Larkin, working in the library in Hull, might almost be the embodiments of my apprenticeships agenda.

  • A new poem by Martin Plantinga: Between Jobs at Il Palagio

    Between Jobs at Il Palagio

     

    At the point between work and leisure,

    rote hours retain their claim in the body,

    and will not yet be shed:

    they live in the bone, as a signature

    of what was necessary this past year and more.

    Flip-flop-shod,

    without anything particular to do,

    I keep appointment with the vineyard path,

    walking the patterns of the olive shade,

    the ancient curves of Tuscany

    the best the world has come up with,

    my sole calendar the mountain’s tracery.

    Toil had this missing in its addictions.

    Toil took me away from…what exactly?

     

    Now a cockerel screams,

    and renders me leftwards-turning,

    towards a portion of what I’ve needed –

    and which I so suddenly see,

    it is as if I never held a job nor will again:

     

    indiscriminate wildflower, poppy and daisy,

    bank-grasses –

    and most of all, the wind playing in all that,

    incarnate, and whipping the light,

    or the light catching it, just ever so slightly,

    in the gaps between the flowers,

    and the heart quickening its pace

    at something it’s seen, and knows again,

    having not known this in so long –

    that there is a kind of bell that hides in nature,

    which we’re meant to hear, and even obey,

    and I move on, a new role triggered within

    which shall keep me busy

    this side of things being tethered to the temporal.

     

     

  • Post-Lockdown Opera Rehearsal, Holland Park: A new poem by Sebastian Richter

    Post-Lockdown Opera Rehearsal, Holland Park

    Summer will not sing more beautifully than this.

    Verdi, I would guess, epiphanic and sudden,

    grows out of the open-air rehearsal marquee

    superimposing tone on neutrality:

    the boy’s football match finds its drama,

    an elderly couple, their inveterate hands linked,

    becomes first courtship, perhaps beside the Arno,

    when a music like this went off in their minds.

    The eventual concert, tense with the burden of money,

    will intervene between listener and music

    with the distractions of formality,

    but now, the soprano gilds the pigeons with sun,

    the drinks in the café are all ambrosial,

    and we are taller, that much stronger, for this music.

    Sebastian Richter

  • Sophia Thakur: “TS Eliot would’ve loved Instagram poetry”

    Interview by Emily Prescott

    Sophia Thakur spoke alongside the sound of a harp on stage at The Ned hotel. In melodious tones she recited memories of dead friends who sleep with soil in their mouths now. She rhymed about the injustice of how black history is taught on the curriculum.  She talked about self-love too. 

    As the 25-year-old poet performed, she made expressive hand gestures and looked graceful in a Cinderella-style blue tulle dress. Her look was almost ethereal, until you clocked her shoes: Bright pink crocs. 

    Thakur’s outfit that evening captures her poetic style well. She is elegant and polished but undeniably practical and unpretentious. 

    “I’m on the right side of history with these,” she joked to me backstage, pointing at her shoes. “Already on stage you’ve got the nerves and if you’re wearing heels, you can fall. It’s just not worth it for vanity’s sake. About six people can see my feet so I’m completely fine to wear Crocs,” she said. 

    Indeed, her poetry is unpretentious. She relies on YouTube as a medium for self-expression and doesn’t think much of those who think being a poet means being a middle class man stuck in a rigid form – or the 18th century for that matter. 

    “You have your purists who believe poetry is this one thing and has to look like this which is fine and fair – and look, I’m not angry with them for it,” she says. “I think there’s a spectrum and for me it’s so important to identify poetry as just the simple act of communicating.” 


    In Thakur’s case, this act of communicating has been startlingly successful. Thakur has not only graced the stage at Glastonbury but delivered Ted Talks and appeared regularly on mainstream television. Her debut book Somebody Give This Heart a Pen became a global bestseller before it was even released and on the back of her success she has also worked with creative teams at numerous corporates including Nike, Samsung and MTV.

    ​So did she enjoy her education? Thakur says she did enjoy studying poetry in school but felt the “academic” approach wasn’t necessarily the best way to explore poetry. 

    “I fell in love with poetry via spoken word. I think in school we took quite an academic approach to something that’s meant to be so emotive and like feeling charged. I didn’t get an avenue to love it, I just got an avenue to learn it in school,” she tells me. 

    After school Thakur pursued an academic path and did a degree in politics. She’s still very much engaged in political discussions now, particularly when it comes to the national curriculum. 

    Indeed, her new comic-strip style children’s book Superheroes: Inspiring Stories of Secret Strength, was recently published by Stormzy’s imprint Merky Books. It is a response to the fact she only saw black people in history textbooks “in chains”. 

    In her poetry she tries to change the narrative that is taught in schools about black lives and Britain’s past. “If the only time we hear about blackness in school and anything black at all is when we’re thinking about slavery or when we’re thinking about liberation, then the only stories we have are Nelson Mandela’s or Rosa Parks’s or whoever else,” she explains, seeming to tail off.

    Then she continues: ”We then grow up in a world that perpetuates that narrative where the headlines related to black people are quite negative… It’s just really, really upsetting and I think a lot of these ideologies and ideas do stem from the first seed that is planted in us which is black is weak and lesser and white was dominant and is dominant.”

    On people who criticise using modern mediums such as Instagram and YouTube as a way of sharing her poetry and having these kinds of conversations, she says: “It’s really embarrassing because I think art if anything is the truth of the time and the truth of the time is this. This is how we communicate now, this is what poetry is now… oh and TS Elliot would’ve loved Instagram poetry.” And with that, Thakur heads off, Crocs and all, into what I’m sure will be a successful future.

  • Lily Lewis:“I want to be rich, famous and thin – and if I can’t be that I want to help”

    Lily Lewis:“I want to be rich, famous and thin – and if I can’t be that I want to help”

    By Emily Prescott

    Lily Lewis is marching me off to buy a coffee with her pooch, Betty. It’s the kind of small strutting dog that looks as though it’d be most at home in a designer handbag. It suits Lily, the strikingly beautiful, effortlessly glamorous artist daughter of former Groucho Club chair and hotelier, John.  She tells me she rescued the dog from a puppy farm after its owner died during the pandemic. This seems rather typical of Lily too. 

    For instance, Lily used Safe Spaces, her portrait exhibition which featured mistreated Hollywood stars from the 1930s and ‘40s, as a way to raise charity funds.  “I called up Refuge and said, ‘I’m going to help you and there’s nothing you can do about it,’” she tells me in a melodious voice that sounds like cigarettes and money.  And so she did. During a private auction of the portraits attended by the likes of singer Ellie Goulding and her art dealer husband Caspar Jopling, Lily raised around £70,000 for the charity.  “I have a platform and it would be seriously remiss if I had an opening and just had a drinks party for people I already know, who come from a position of privilege,” she says dutifully. 

    I attended this private exhibition a few days prior to our interview where I bumped into actor Claire Forlani who had tears in her eyes while viewing the work. Lily tells me she met Claire during a holiday in Italy which was attended by the likes of director Sir Nicholas Hytner, prime minister Boris Johnson and his then wife Marina Wheeler. While everybody was being “unbelievably grown up” the pair bonded over their inappropriately fervent love of truffle. 

    Lily recalls with a mischievous giggle: “In the evenings we’d have a huge plate of pasta and someone would come around with white truffle and a white glove and expect us to say when. Claire and I got to about four fists of this stuff each and we’d go ‘no, no, keep going’. At the end of the weekend they basically brought a ball between us, and a spoon.”

    In my day job as a Diary reporter I encounter a lot of posh, society girls, who regale me with similarly ludicrously luxurious anecdotes but there’s something different about Lily. She is intelligent and talented and I get the impression, although she is part of London’s elite, she feels like an outsider.   

    As is the case with most interesting people, she didn’t get on with school.“I hated it,” she shudders, “every dog has their day and I’m glad mine wasn’t when I was 16”. She recalls her parents being called into the headmaster’s office as a teacher had started a petition for her and her siblings to be removed from the school. 

    After school, Lily studied textiles at Central St Martins but left after a few weeks as she hated this too. “I thought it was quite pretentious and there were a lot of people who hadn’t been great artists trying to break you because they had been attempted to be broken themselves. I am not a very likeable person to people in positions of authority. I would be terrible in an undemocratic republic. I would definitely have been burned as a witch,” she cackles. Instead, she attended Kings College London where she studied English Literature and then did a masters in Psychoanalysis.

    There’s a cliche that people who study psychology are spurred by an interest in their own atypical brains. Indeed, Lily fulfils the cliche that cliches are often true and tells me about her atypical brain and synaesthesia. “I can sort of see colour and I can smell sound and my senses get mixed up… If someone hits a loud noise I see colour. I am a big fan of opera and that’s one of the reasons why.” She also tells me about the breakdown she suffered in New York. She moved there with a boyfriend  and around Halloween time she told him she was popping back to the UK to pick up her stuff, she left and didn’t speak to him until February. 

    But she doesn’t think any of her emotional struggles have made her a better artist. “I don’t want to perpetuate the image of the artist having to be miserable because I don’t think that’s true. There’s a process of egg laying which is natural and uncomfortable. If there is a project that will end in a product I will get myself into a state where I am deeply uncomfortable in order to be able to produce it. Creative constipation is very different to struggling with mental health,” she insists. 

    Key to her success, she says, were her parents. Not only did they refuse to apologise for her being different, they also raised her and her three siblings in a hotel. They were all encouraged to be interested and interesting. The hotel was frequented by famous characters such as actors Tim Curry and Gary Oldman. She recalls sitting on Bond star Piers Brosnan’s lap as a little girl with him drawing pictures and telling stories.  “Everything is a story. People tend to communicate with children in stories and so I met so many people that everyone had a story for me.” 

    Through her career as an artist and poet, she has continued to share stories.  Perhaps it’s this heightened awareness of narratives that has contributed to her own quirky character. Often she speaks in aphorisms that make her sound like she’s playing a part in an Oscar Wilde play. Though her refusal to reveal her age seems to hold an outward looking awareness of the pressure of narratives rather than a Dorian Gray-esque vanity. “Do you have to put that in there? I don’t want to say,” she squeals when I ask her the question that all journalists have to ask. “I don’t think anyone needs to know it. I often find everyone always asks how old someone is to relativise what they have done in their life. I have never been keen on saying what age I am, it’s just so arbitrary.” 

    But she does think about getting older and of course, she factors in how she can continue to do good in the world. “I fully intend on training to be an art therapist because I have arthritis in my right hand and I am ambidextrous but there probably will be a time in which I am not able to paint any more or maybe not to the level I want to. I also want to help work in prisons.” 

    “My aim is to be rich, famous and thin and if I can’t be that I want to help,” she laughs. 

  • The Poet at Work VI: Gareth Writer-Davies

    The Poet at Work VI: Gareth Writer-Davies

    This week we feature the brilliant Welsh poet Gareth Writer-Davies. Gareth was a Hawthornden fellow in 2019 and has been repeatedly recognised for his rich, witty and reliably enjoyable poetry. As ever, we produce his work poems, kindly written for Finito World, after the Q&A.

    Tell us about the relationship between your work and your poetry.

    I would say that my various careers have given me structure, an ability to hit a deadline. Serious artists and writers know that you need to “turn up” so that if inspiration hits you have the tools to hand whether that be an easel and brushes or pen and paper. And of course the workplace provides material, not only in the people and tasks but also in the idiosyncratic jargon and sometimes the locales. I’m a big fan of poets keeping themselves engaged in other work, it makes the brain take diversions and supplies contrasting stimuli. Whether the work be a library or bank or steel mill (all places where poets have earnt their money whilst continuing to write) a writer should be part of the world wherein the people dwell.  

    Conversely, what role did your love of poetry have in giving you confidence in the workplace? 

    I always felt confident in my written work and that I can make myself understood. It also helped me to put the workplace into perspective in a way that perhaps a deeply religious person might also. Work is not nothing; it takes but it also gives and to have something beyond what might be quite a mundane series of tasks provides motivation as well as ptting food on the table! 

    The government has recently said that poetry should be optional at the GCSE level – a significant demotion in its importance on the curriculum. What is your view on that and what do you feel the impact will be?

    I don’t think is a good idea. Especially when we are surrounded by so much poetry in the form of lyrics, rap and even advertising; whilst not everything in a poem should be studied to death (the feel of a poem, something that is not quite defineable is part of its purpose and charm) these forms need to be unpacked and understood in terms of motivation and where they are leading us. These are good brain tonics, experiments in form that enhance structural thinking and teach us empathy for others. These are important in all jobs and are too important to discard.    

    Was there a particular teacher when you were younger who turned you onto poetry?

    I did not come from a bookish household, so I had to be something of a self starter. I had relatives who as working class  Welshmen would take their turn at a family gathering to recite poetry they had written, my Uncle Edwin being particularly good. He was a milkman and a teacher to me. In school there were several teachers who inspired, introducing me to Eliot, Shakespeare and Milton; their example of keeping the faith in poetry was important to me.  

    What’s your favourite poem about the workplace?

    Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop

    WORK 

    I’ve made up mortar and laid bricks
    I wrote a poem in couplets

    I’ve torn down trees and planted seeds
    I plucked a metaphor from weeds

    I’ve tried journalism 
    I used my imagination

    I’ve been a salesman of many things
    I know meaning

    I’ve taught class and been taught a lesson
    I continue my education

    I’ve worn uniforms and three-layer masks
    I stick to my task

    These are a few of my occupations 
    They gave me this poem

    GARDENING WITH A CHAINSAW

    I wanted to tell her that chainsaws rarely work 
    spending ninety per cent of their time 

    being fed oil, the torque strengthened

    the plug scraped free of soot and the chain adjusted


    only then
    do the wood chips fly like confetti

    as trees kiss the vertical goodbye 
    waving, swaying, then crashing to the shagpile forest floor  

    the desire to cut and chop, make something from the wild
    lingers


    we gather cabbage tops, think on the big gesture of a copse
    projects 

    passed on 

    like a half-built shed or a thrown bouquet


    the chainsaw bides its time as it leaks upon the shelf   
    teeth grinding 

    upon the oily tongue of blade
    like a bull who’s just seen a cow

    I curate a smile, turn the key in the lock 

    walk out into the sudden garden of quiet devastation