Hebridean Thumbnail 1
fo cheò
islands buried in the sky’s white sands
Andrew Philip
(fo cheò: 'mist-covered')
Today I'm delighted to welcome my first ever virtual guest,
Andrew Philip. I bought his collection
The Ambulance Box back in May when Salt launched their Just One Book Campaign. It's an impressive first collection, assured and purposeful. Nothing idles; the language sings, as alive as his curiosity about the world. His training as a linguist shines through in the precision of his words and his scrupulous awareness of the contingency of everything. This is a book full of questioning, with no easy answers. The salves in the Ambulance Box are astringent.
Note: Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press —
Tonguefire (2005, sold out) and
Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008) — and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library “New Voice” in 2006.
The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems. It is dedicated to Aidan Michael Philip, the poet's son and first-born child, who died shortly after birth in 2005.
Andrew blogs at
Tonguefire. You will find links there to many of his poems and essays, and a Scots glossary.
Since June, Andrew has been on a demanding virtual tour explaining himself to other bloggers. I add to their number with some nerdy questions of my own.
Welcome, Andy, and congratulations to you and Judith on the arrival of Cerys Ilona!
Q When I read the first poem in The Ambulance Box
, I thought "here's a man who knows what he's doing!" and was immediately hooked. But as a writer myself, I know it probably took some courage to open with a one-liner. Is there a story behind that? AP The first poem in a book is obviously an important one, and I spent ages agonising over which was the right piece to place first. I wasn’t happy that any of the poems of more normal length worked as openers and I wanted to thread the Hebridean Thumbnails — the one-line poems in the book — through the collection, using them to link what felt like different sections, so I bit the bullet and put one of them first. I was pleased with the way it worked so I’m delighted it hooked you. I suspect some people will love that approach and others not, but I think it invites readers into the more contemplative aspects of the book from the word go.
Q You have mentioned working with Rob Mackenzie to hone each other's collection before submission. You have quite different styles, and have each produced sharp and distinctive collections. Would your collection have been very different without these exchanges? How do you rate mentoring, workshops and colleagues in your development? AP It wouldn’t have been so tight at the submission stage, that’s for sure. Rob’s comments were particularly useful in helping me to decide what poems to leave out. There were also a couple he gave me the confidence to include. For example, I felt that “Berlin/Berlin/Berlin” was a strong piece but was uncertain about how well it would come across to most readers. Slightly to my surprise and much to my delight, Rob rated it as one of the best, so I kept it in.
Creative friendships and relationships like that are surely important to all artists. I’m not a member of any formal, regular writing workshop or writer’s group, so such relationships are particularly important to me. I send poems for comment to people I trust and I’ve learnt a lot that way. In the end, you have to trust your own judgment, but a good critical reading by a fellow poet can help to identify strengths or problems you knew were there but couldn’t quite see. In fact, that person needn’t necessarily be a poet; my wife is generally my first reader and often makes astute comments even though she reads very little poetry. You need people around you who will tell you when they think you’re writing rubbish, even if you don’t always agree!
Although I’ve not been in any formal mentoring scheme for my writing, I’ve benefitted enormously from the advice and encouragement of the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. The fact that someone of his stature would take my work seriously was an enormous boost, especially in the early days of constant magazine rejections. But I might never have come across him had it not been for Roddy Lumsden, who encouraged me when I was a student. I happened to be at Edinburgh University at a good time: Matthew Hollis, Sinéad Wilson and Andrew Neilson were active in student poetry at that point, and Roddy took an active interest in our work.
Q You use a lot of formal devices in your work. Is constraint an ignition, or is it a brake? AP A good constraint is probably both. Even if it isn’t part of the initial impetus for a poem, it can ignite further lines and images at the same time as helping to shape the material. After all, constraint is an integral part of all art, no matter how free. Even aleatoric art involves constraints of some kind.
Q So how does a poem start? AP Generally with a word, a phrase or an image. Sometimes a formal device suggests itself and then sparks the words and images, but I can’t get down to work without a linguistic hook of some kind.
Q And how do you finish? How do you know when you've finished? AP That is a trickier question altogether! There’s no easy answer. It’s intuition as much as anything, and one you have to develop. I suppose that, at some point, the impetus leaves the poem and you have to give it up. I sometimes change my mind about whether certain poems are finished, but I’m unlikely to do an Auden and make significant revisions to poems that have already been collected.
Q Some of your poems are in Scots and some in English. Are you a different person in each case, and are you addressing a different audience? AP It may be that slightly different aspects of me come out in Scots and in English, as is the case in speaking any two languages, but I think I’m largely the same person. I don’t think of myself as addressing a different audience so much as addressing parts of my audience differently. For instance, what really determines how much readers enjoy “The Meisure o a Nation” is how much they get the references that make up the poem’s equations, not the density of the Scots.
Q As a non-Scot, I don't feel shut out from these, though I do feel a guest in foreign territory, without recourse to my usual conventions. So they are disarming in a way that an English poem wouldn't be. Is that a conscious strategy? AP That’s interesting. I wouldn’t say it was a conscious strategy, but it’s a useful effect. It’s more that I’m inviting non-Scots readers into the language and all my reasons for using it, which I’ve discussed to some extent in previous stops on this tour. In using Scots, English and Gaelic, I aim to be linguistically inclusive and I hope that the reader feels that spirit of inclusion.
Q Salt produce beautiful books. (I would say that wouldn't I, but even on an objective test they are outstanding.) How do you see poetry publishing developing, and are new media a threat, or a promise of a much wider audience? AP The ease with which writers can now make their work available globally, including through video and audio, is surely a great boost to their efforts to build an audience. Blogging has certainly helped me to widen my audience geographically, but I’m not sure whether it’s had an effect demographically.
If there’s a threat from the new media, it’s the expectation of free content that is associated with their use. How writers manage that without it destroying the meagre income from their work, I’m not sure.
I’m not convinced that e-books will ever replace the hard copy entirely, but they could open up interesting new avenues for enriching the audience’s experience of the poetry. If poetry e-books with embedded or linked audio and/or video became commonplace, that might be very healthy for the art. Perhaps Bloodaxe are already on the way there by bundling DVDs in with their
In Person anthology and the new edition of Bunting’s
Briggflatts.
Q Well, the free content on the Salt site certainly persuaded me to get this book! So what are you working on right now? AP I’m always reticent about talking too much about unfinished work in case it robs me of the drive to carry out the ideas. However, I feel like I’ve begun to hit my stride again with a sequence after a rocky patch for new work and am getting excited about what might come of it.
Q What are you reading right now? AP Mainly Yang Lian’s
Concentric Circles and Ray Givans’s
Tolstoy in Love. Ray is a long-standing friend and I read with Lian in London at the end of June.
In prose, I’m reading
Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, which is a translation of Julian’s writings by John Skinner. It’s one of those books that have sat on my shelf for ages until what seemed the right time.
Andrew, thank you very much for answering so generously. It's been a privilege having you here. Good luck with your new work - I am very keen to see what you do next.* * * * * * *
Catch up with Andrew's
Cyclone tour - highly recommended.
The Ambulance Box:
available from Salt at a 33% discount during August - see below. (Sample poems and podcasts downloadable free.)
A message from Chris at
Salt Publishing:
The Just One Book campaign continues with a further sensational August deal.
In order to keep Salt on track through the wet British summer, we're offering you another special deal throughout August. All Salt books are available from us at 33% discount yet again. That's a third off all Salt titles, and free shipping on orders with a cover price of over £30 or $30. Offer ends 31 August 2009.
Simply enter the coupon code HU693FB2 when in the store to benefit.
As before, all we ask is two things—
1. Buy one book. Or perhaps another one ... go on.
2. Pass it on. Share this offer with everyone who loves gorgeous books and likes a bargain (whilst saving independent literature).
http://www.saltpublishing.com
