StAnza 2014: Q&As with Jenny Lewis and Graeme Hawley

As this year's StAnza Festival continues, we follow up our feature taking a look at this year's highlights with a series of exclusive Q&As with the performers, writers and organisers of Scotland's only international festival of poetry. We continue today, presenting our full interviews with Jenny Lewis, a poet published by Carcanet, Iron Press and others, and Graeme Hawley, a regular on the Edinburgh spoken word scene, multiple slam champion, and host of the National Library of Scotland's Tricolour events.

JENNY LEWIS

Your event at StAnza engages directly with the theme of War Poetry – can you tell us a bit about your work, and your thoughts on the legacy of the poets from the First World War?
To me the poetry of the First World War is of the utmost importance. For a start they were the first poets to ditch jingoism and cover-ups and tell the truth about war. Wilfred Owen explained it in a letter to his mother in 1916 – ‘All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful.’ And in the preface to his intended collection of poems in 1918, he made his famous remark, ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ I think that is the key to all good war poetry, it must somehow humanise its subject-matter so the reader is moved and if enough readers are moved there’s a tiny chance that something outside the poetry might change, even if it’s only to shift public opinion slightly so that a few less bombs are dropped or lives ended.

I think the First World War produced some of the greatest poetry in the English language and was struck by this while I was still at school (about age 13) and first read Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Greater Love  – a kind of epiphany for me –

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure…

The way Owen uses language, the muscularity of his diction and, especially, his use of half rhyme (which comes from the Welsh tradition) turns each poem into an echo chamber which intensifies its emotion to almost unbearable levels. Although I also love Thomas, Blunden, Sassoon, Gurney and the other First World War poets I do think Owen is the greatest. His poetry has had a huge influence on my own experience of poetry and being a poet.

My father was Welsh and fought in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) with the South Wales Borderers. He was wounded at Kut al Amara in January 1917 and invalided to Deolali in India. Whether it’s fanciful or not, I think my love of poetry and connection to language comes through my father and the Welsh side of my family – although I never knew my father because he died when I was a few months old and we never went to Wales as children so it’s something that must be carried in my DNA.

One of my poems in Taking Mesopotamia, The Call Up, is dedicated to Owen and these lines from it include references to his poem  ‘Spring Offensive’ and to conversations with his sister Mary. It starts by describing how

                                   our sons ran out of the pavilion

shining in their whiter than white whites, their bats held high:

we waited in the long grass, our shoes drowned in buttercups

as they faced over after over, the onlookers cheering: at least

it wasn’t France, we said, its boulevards cobbled with skulls…

Your event also engages with more modern conflicts, like Iraq – can you tell us a bit about the themes you will be exploring?
My sister and I found an album of about 60 photos that my father had taken in Mesopotamia – the Bridge of Boats at Qurna (to get troops, mules and supplies across deeply flooded land), hospital ships on the Tigris, many portraits of fellow officers and orderlies, the odd camel and the South Wales Borderers' camp at Kut al Amara which shows his shadow in the foreground – the nearest I can come to touching him. I had, and still have, a great longing to go to Iraq and trace his footsteps. I carried out a lot of research at the National Archives, Imperial War Museum and South Wales Borderer’s Museum (now the Museum of the Royal Regiment of Wales). Some of the officers in my father’s album were mentioned in the War Diaries and it gave me a shock to see them, smiling in front of their tents and nearly all smoking pipes, and then read the dates on which they were wounded or killed. 

I was reading some of the early poems at an event where the Iraqi poet Adnan al Sayegh, now living in exile in London, happened to be in the audience. He was delighted to hear a British poet writing about Iraq. We became friends and now translate each other’s poetry. I interviewed him at great length, trying to get a feel for what it was like to live in Iraq and grow up, as he did, on the shores of the River Euphrates.  As well as Adnan, I interviewed many British and Iraqi poets, soldiers and commentators including women soldiers and American marines. At the time I was also writing a play for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford – After Gilgamesh – inspired by the ancient Mesopotamian epic. It looks at war and the abuse of power by leaders, which involved a great deal of further research concentrating on copious news footage and verbatim reports.

The interesting thing is that opinions differ widely on the subject of the recent Iraq War. For example, a Christian Iraqi exile I interviewed says that Britain and Tony Blair should wear an eternal badge of shame for following the US into the war, while many other Iraqis I have talked to are less sure, seeing the toppling of Saddam Hussein as a great benefit but at the same time asking – ‘at what cost?’

Where do you stand on the debate over 'page versus stage'?
I address this question constantly because I write for theatre and also perform myself. I think some poems lend themselves to performance. For example, I’m currently working on a new version of the Epic of Gilgamesh and because that has a strong narrative, powerful characters and rich dialogue and language it absolutely lends itself to stage performance. More reflective poems can be better expressed through reading from the page as this simulates the private, one-to-one reading experience which has great intimacy and which I personally greatly enjoy. For example, notice how many people at a poetry reading sit with their eyes closed, listening to the music of the words, rather than watching the physical enactment of the piece. Also, I’m not very good at learning lines!

Who are some of the other poets whose readings you will be looking forward to at StAnza?
I feel very honoured to be among such incredible poets and to actually have been invited read a poem at the launch on 6 March with Brian Turner and Louis de Bernières. Sadly, I’ll miss Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside, two of my all-time poetry heroes and the JOOT Theatre Company which sounds interesting and would feed into my own work as a writer with the Oxford Youth Theatre.  I hope to catch Sujata Bhatt and Louis de Bernières on Thursday, David Constantine’s lecture on poetry from the Great War and Brian Turner and David Constantine’s event later that evening. I am disappointed to miss King Creosote at the festival finale on Sunday, I’ve seen him onstage with my good friend and co-songwriter Vashti Bunyan and he is great.

GRAEME HAWLEY

You've just released a new collection in the form of an album, Sleeve Notes by 56n. Tell us about this project.
I got obsessed with the idea of my poetry turning up somewhere else, other than a traditional poetry pamphlet. I thought, that would be quite good, to listen to music whilst you were reading something, as long as the music didn't distract you from reading. So we produced the poetry in sleeve note form, and created some music to go with it. We used a digital piano, and then mangled the sounds. There are samples of wine glasses, ticking clocks... The album took two years to make, and was eventually mastered by Iain Cook of CHVRCHES.

You are traditionally a performance poet – how will your StAnza performance present the pieces from Sleeve Notes?
I thought all the way along, 'I could do this differently,' just read the poems over music, like Young Dawkins would, but I quite like reading stuff and hearing it in my own, internal voice, because then you put all of your own inflections into it. I've done poems before where I thought they were serious – they were intended to be serious, and people laughed all the way through. And vice versa – I've done poems that were meant to be funny, and people don't find them amusing. This way, you get the text, and you get the music, and you can hear it in your own head, how you want to. I'm trying to make it as free for them as possible.

Where do you stand on the debate over 'page versus stage'?
It depends who you see perform. Jem Rolls, everything about his poetry says 'stage.' If you've read that in a book, it wouldn't have been anything like as enjoyable or understandable as it was to see it performed. I'm not so good at these kinds of distinctions – you can think one way, and then you see someone who blows it out of the water. A lot of the people who I really like seem to straddle both camps – you can read their stuff in a book and enjoy it, you can see them perform it on stage and enjoy it. So I do think it's an artificial distinction.

What are your feelings about the importance of StAnza as a festival?
StAnza's significance has grown and grown. A lot of work goes into it. I'm impressed by the organisational, behind-the-scenes stuff. It helps to have a professional, well-marketed event that tells people: 'This is to be taken seriously, it's to be enjoyed.'

Does any of your work engage with this year's themes?
No. I would be a hopeless Laureate!

Which other poets will you be keeping an eye out for at the festival this year?
I always like seeing Sophia Walker. But you never know who might be the person that surprises you the most.