A Monday afternoon, 22 March, in Peter Porters study. He picks up a postcard sent by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and reads: Your nomination will be published on 18 April, in the Oxford Gazette. Porter sits on a sofa, Liu on a chair, face-to-face. The conversation starts.
Liu Hongbin: You have been asked by a few Oxford dons to stand for election as professor of poetry in the election on 15 May 2004. How did that come about?
Peter Porter: There has always been a tradition that the professor of poetry at Oxford should be a poet him- or herself someone who may not be academically disposed towards poetry, or a great critic, but basically a practitioner. In general, though, since about 1955, almost all the poets who have held the post were also quite distinguished critics.
You and I have of course done a lot of critical writing of a more journalistic sort. I reviewed poetry for the Observer over the last twenty years as its main poetry reviewer. But I am not an academic critic of poetry, I am a writer of poetry, and Ive been writing it for over fifty years.
But I feel that the whole tradition of the professorship going to a poet is a very good tradition. At present, the only other person who has been nominated for the task is not a writer of poetry but a very, very erudite and distinguished critic of poetry, Professor Christopher Ricks. But he is not a practitioner of it, and this is somewhat to break the tradition in Oxford which has always emphasised, since about the time of the second world war, that the poetry professorship should go to a poet rather than to an academic critic.
Liu Hongbin: As far as I know the previous two people were elected unopposed, and perhaps the same is likely to happen again?
Peter Porter: It may be that my standing will liberate other people, and other candidates will come forward. If I hadnt agreed to stand, this might not have happened.
Liu Hongbin: That might make the election more democratic?
Peter Porter: Its a curious kind of job. Its not an academic post: you dont mark papers, you dont really do seminars. The chair stands for poetry, and tries to interest people in poetry. So you give lectures and talks, and personify or embody, if you like, the art of poetry, and encourage poetry-writing amongst undergraduates rather than teach in a academic sense. This was particularly the case when W.H. Auden assumed the post.
Liu Hongbin: Do you think that kind of post is a chair of Babel, as in the title of one of your collections of poetry?
Peter Porter: I wouldnt think so. Babel was a disastrous circumstance where nobody could talk to anybody because they all spoke different languages. I think all literary conferences tend to be rather Babel-like, in that people chatter to each other but dont always take in very much what people are saying.
But Ive heard lectures given by Oxford professors of poetry, and a lot depends upon how you see poetry, whether you see poetry as having a firm academic basis in literature, or whether you see it as one of the areas of creative entertainment.
To me, poetry is essentially something to be read and to be written. Im not interested in its promulgation by critical insights. I think everybody who reads poetry has his or her own critical take on it. But thats not the same thing as a counterproductive orthodoxy which is maintained by an academic establishment.
I think its good to recognise that poetry is actually written by people outside of universities to bring that idea back into universities, so that university people dont think that, because they are the custodians of poetry, they are necessarily equipped to understand it better than people who are not but who are simply involved in it.
You can be quite cynical about this. Philip Larkin, the great English poet, remarked once that he thought a poet in a university - not teaching an academic post but just involved in talking to undergraduates - was about as welcome as a cow that turned up at the headquarters of United Dairies. In other words the university job is to bottle the milk, the cows job is to produce it.
Liu Hongbin: But on the other hand I cant even remember how many collections of your poems have worn the Oxford University Press jacket and your name has been entered into the Oxford Reference Dictionary. The Nobel Prize literature laureate, J.M. Coetzee, has said in an interview that he likes your poetry very much. You have a permanent home in the heart of the English language!
Peter Porter: Well, thats true in one sense but not another. The university does final control over Oxford University Press but the publisher is run separately. Between 1970 and 1988, nearly all my poetry was published by OUP, though I did publish some other books.
Liu Hongbin: And your last collection of works amounted to 800 pages.
Peter Porter: Thats right, that came from OUP. But in 1998, suddenly the Oxford University Press decided to stop publishing contemporary poetry.
Peter Porter is the author of over sixty books. His most recent collection of poetry is Max is Missing (PanMacmillan, 2001)
Since then Ive ceased to be an Oxford poet in that sense. But as I was published by OUP for all these years, I consider myself to be a kind of ex officio alumnus of the university though of course I never went to the university as an undergraduate, nor have I a degree from the university. But Im connected to the university in the sense that for the greater part of my publishing life I was published by the universitys own press.
Liu Hongbin: And also books about your life and work have been published by OUP.
Peter Porter: But only the OUP in Australia, not its British branch!
I feel that the point is that, while some of the people who are nominating me have university positions, they are predominantly writers of poetry rather than expoundersof it. So my candidacy represents something of a different emphasis from that of Professor Ricks.
Id be the first person to acknowledge what a brilliant critic Professor Ricks is. He has a high university profile as a critic, which I dont have, and also, during the 1970s and 1980s, he was a very good popular journalist, reviewing for magazines like The Listener. So its not that he lacks the common touch. My aim in this candidacy is to try to bring the emphasis on what poetry is about back to the writers of it and the readers of it, and not the critics.
Of course, I would also stress, as Auden and various others have pointed out, that we owe it to scholars to get good texts. If there were no good scholars, a lot of the poets of the past would have vanished. I can think of two poets particularly, Christopher Smart and the Earl of Rochester, both of whom owe their present standing to the assiduous labours of scholars who managed to assemble their works from what were basically fragments. We certainly owe scholarship a great tribute for putting the texts together, and making them available.
But there is another thing I would emphasise something particularly interesting for undergraduates, I think that a practicing poet is producing the material which the next group of scholars is going to use.
Poetry of intelligence and feeling
Liu Hongbin: The Independent would like to see a professor of poetry in the footsteps of Auden. Edward Mendelson said in an email to me that your poetry is very Audenesque. I think your stature in poetry is rather Audenesque.
Peter Porter: Perhaps it is a bit a lot of people think that its been influenced greatly by Auden, and my admiration for Auden is tremendous.
Liu Hongbin: Also one of the people who nominated you, John Fuller, is a great Auden scholar.
Peter Porter: You could say there is a kind of school of Auden, and I certainly would be proud and happy to belong to it. But on the other hand, one doesnt necessarily write like the people one admires. The influence of Auden could be seen in my work but Im a very different person to Auden, and I dont have anything like his range and his quite remarkable psychological insights and his sheer scholarship and knowledge. But I share with him the idea of what poetry should be, I think.
Liu Hongbin: Recently some critics said, forget about Auden, late Porter is the real thing. They suggest that you have already overtaken Auden in many aspects.
Peter Porter: No, thats certainly not true, I certainly wouldnt feel myself in any way in competition with him. Perhaps Ive got something of the same kind of approach to poetry as Auden, but thats all.
My vision of going into this position would be that all my life I have tended to be a non-official sort of person, and if I get this Ill still be non-official. But it would be quite interesting to find myself propounding the idea that poetry is in fact written by people who also read it not necessarily by people who examine it and criticise it, or categorise it as scholars do.
During the 1960s, I know a lot of people felt it was their job if they were practical contemporary writers when they went to university, to take the undergraduate side against the staff and be hostile to academic study. Im not at all hostile to academic study. I like working in universities. But I dont like working in universities on formal curricula. I prefer to be someone who just talks to university students and looks at their work and helps them if possible, or makes some kind discrimination about it, to be available as someone who can be asked and consulted. I wouldnt in that sense get in the way of the proper academic study of poetry Oxford has a very elaborate English faculty to look at the discussion and formal treatment of poetry.
Liu Hongbin: But it seemed to me that the collection of your essays, Saving from the Wreck, which included your British Academy lecture, demonstrated your poetic and intellectual calibre more than if you were to receive the professorship.
Peter Porter: But its not something which could stand up against the vast array of papers being published all around the world in every university. We mentioned Auden, and he was a very great critic in a way that Im not. But the kind of criticism I write is not unlike the criticism Auden wrote. That is to say, its journalistic, not formal literary criticism. Anyway, I dont think the best critics have always been scholarly. For example, Ive an enormous regard for William Empson a great scholar, but also an eccentric person, in terms of what he liked and didnt like.
All I want poetry to do is to be intelligent, and to have feeling. I think the great fights that have been going on between the avant garde and the arrière garde, between pastoral and city, between what apparently needs to be done historically now, and what was done historically in the past all of these things are subject to discussion. But in the end, what we really need more of is people actually looking at the texts, reading the poems, reading more poems, and reading for their own pleasure. My job, if I should ever find myself the professor of poetry at Oxford, would be to draw as strong a line of communication as I possibly could with people who actually wanted to write poetry or wanted to read it and not just for the purpose of getting further degrees and promotions and PhDs and the like.
Also in openDemocracy: Liu Hongbin proclaims The Republic of Poetry, and we publish four of his poems in Chinese and English.
Against constriction
Liu Hongbin: If you find yourself in the chair, would you still feel that you are an outsider although as a poet you are perhaps more of an insider than anybody else: your poetry has already left a mark on the English language.
Peter Porter: It has a bit, but on the other hand there are lots of other poets who are far better known publicly than I am, and much more famous. Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Prize winner.
Being an outsider or insider has never really worried me. Its easy to describe me as an outsider, because I was born and brought up in a relatively remote part of Australia, in Brisbane. I didnt come from a literary family. In fact, I dont think my mother and father really read anything at all. But I was educated fairly well. Now Ive been here so long that I certainly dont feel like an outsider, but then I dont see myself as an insider either.
Liu Hongbin: How would you describe this, in terms of your relationship with the English language?
Peter Porter: Thats an insider relationship, it must be. All writers have an inside relationship with the language. I think its very important the insight into the language a writer has, as distinct from a person who spends his time just criticising a language. Of course its a bit confusing because a lot of critics are also writers of various kinds themselves.
The great thing that universities do is to keep the past alive. Im quite sure the faculty at Oxford can do that without my help! But I think its also important and valuable to recognise that the best bridge from the past to the present is in the writing of the people who respect the past, but work in the present.
Liu Hongbin: I wonder if your humility could have played down your importance in the world of poetry?
Peter Porter: I dont think Im humble; its not a question of humility; its just a recognition of other peoples attainments and achievements.
Theres a famous biblical sentence: in my fathers house are many mansions, and that I think is the truth of the case. Literature is a huge domain, its a vast land of activity. Im also very interested in other arts, particularly music, sculpture and painting in the iconography of painting, how things look and what they mean, its symbolism, in fact. I think its all interwoven.
For me, poetry is all about the kind of processes in life which we go through. Thats to say Im not a pure poet: I dont feel that the only real interest in poetry is language, in itself. Im not a Mallarmé! It would be nice if I were, because there is a kind of purity in that. Nor am I interested in poetry only for its sound. But its an enormously complex matter, what constitutes a fine poet, or a fine poem, and I think that the longer you live the more you become uncertain in your own mind as to what truly constitutes poetry.
I think one of the tasks, if I were to get this job, would be to try to point out to people the sheer complication, the sheer width of experience involved in the art of poetry, and to avoid feeding into the historical pattern whereby you just think that some things inevitably lead to other things, and so on. Theres this huge onward march of historical inevitability. But I would like to stand up for all kinds of different poems, and persuade undergraduates to read as widely as possible.
I want to get away from what I think is the very diminishing concept encouraged by some schoolmasters, journalists and sometimes academics that you can just dismiss the majority of writing in the world, and say, well, you only need to know this or that person, setting up a constricting canon which says these are the only poets to care about.
I would regard my job as to try to point out that there are a lot of poets you ought to be interested in, or could be interested in, and not to keep narrowing the canon, narrowing what ought to be said, in order to produce a fairly ruthless orthodoxy.
My home is my imagination
Liu Hongbin: Interviewed by a journalist, you once said, my home is my imagination. Do you still feel that?
Peter Porter: I feel quite at home in London, as a matter of fact, but if Im in Melbourne or Sydney I feel quite at home there too.
Liu Hongbin: Is this what you mean by being an air plant?
Peter Porter: Ive seen myself as an air plant Ive got an Australian accent, all my early experiences were in Australia, therefore naturally so much of what I refer to automatically springs from there. But Ive spent more than fifty years in England, and although the English language is all over the place, England is, curiously, something of an ancient home of the English language.
Ive never worried about a sense of being rooted in one place or another about my roots, in that sense. So yes, Im an air plant.
You know I often think it perhaps sounds ridiculous that even if I were on my way to execution or guillotine, I should still be interested in things that were going on around and about me, because the things that are fascinating in life go on being so. You dont, if youre wise, restrict your concerns to some particular canon. Theres so much bewilderment amongst modern readers about what poetry is. But, notwithstanding my great interest in particular poets of the past, especially for example from Robert Browning back to Shakespeare, I would think one of my chief jobs at Oxford would be to try to help people make up their mind what they thought about contemporary poetry.
Liu Hongbin: Do you think there is such a thing as ownership of the imagination?
Peter Porter: No, not really. The language is owned by anybody who can use it well. Thats my view. I dont think it applies to one country. I dont think it applies to one class of educated people or uneducated people. It seems to me that a lot depends on how satisfying the eloquence of language is to you. Fortunately language is a tribal thing, nobody can own it, its owned by anybody, it doesnt have any prescriptive provenance, its something anyone can use. But its our role to use it as well as we possibly can.
Liu Hongbin: So do you think as a practitioner of poetry that you could still be yourself, if you were elected, without falling into the trap of serving other peoples expectations?
Peter Porter: That wouldnt be too much of a concern because its not a full-time academic job. The main duties would be person-to-person communication, talking to individual students, or giving lectures which will be public statements. It might be hard work, actually. But certainly I dont think there would be any danger of it squashing my own efforts.
I tend to produce forty original individual poems each year, only a small proportion good enough to print, or good enough to be printed in a book. Sometimes you write with much greater facility than at other times. You can go through a bad patch when you dont feel like writing anything. Auden used to say that he felt sick if he didnt write for a number of weeks. (Unless I write something good, anything, good, indifferent or trashy, every day, I feel ill.) I think thats true, if a little exaggerated. I wouldnt be frightened of suddenly finding myself drying up, simply because I was in a slightly different, rarefied atmosphere. I dont think that Oxford is such a rarefied place anyway.
Poetry now ranges across so many different sorts of society, and there are so many people writing in English at the moment such a wide distribution, so many apparent chances for people to be at variance with each other in contemporary poetry. So factions emerge, there are schools of poets, predominances of style style wars.
But I would like to try to introduce the concept of poetry as individual: each person makes up his or her own mind about who the good poets are; and I like it to range across different styles, not be partisan to one kind of writing as distinct from another.
Whatever my own personal preference about what writing should be if, for example, Ive been doing a writer-in-residence job, and someone shows me their work Ive always tried to see how that work could best be made excellent in itself. I wouldnt try to convert the person to a way of writing I thought would be better. Any kind of tutor in poetry, or in any art for that matter, is there to realise the full potential of the style and quality and understanding of the artist, not to superimpose his or her own preferences. Naturally, you hope youll encounter work by undergraduate poets that youre able to support completely, because it seems good.
But you wouldnt want to start a crusade. You wouldnt want to say writing one way is bad, you must write this way; and you wouldnt, for that matter, want to use your influence in a combative way to fight corners to fight individual ways of writing. We know all too well that there are many embattled styles in the world today whose proponents believe they alone possess the truth of the matter. Its almost as bad as politics and religion in that sense. There is so much bigotry, so much hostility, so much warfare.
Of course, nobody can be free of bias, but there is a lot of common ground as well, and that common ground really is centred in one thing: is it well done or is it not well done?
I think over the years you build up this ability to distinguish whats well done from whats not well done, even in styles which are not particularly yours; and you develop the skill of being able to judge how effective something is, even if it is being effective in a department which is not necessarily attractive to you.
I remember when I belonged to a group of young poets I found it quite helpful to talk to them. I dont think I necessarily changed my approach when they found what I was doing difficult to follow, or not attractive. But learning how other people saw my work helped me to focus on how much I myself knew what I was doing. I think that is something which could be offered to undergraduates. It can be very lonely, being a writer, and having someone to talk to can help a person clarify his or her own course.
Also in openDemocracys fertile Arts & Cultures domain: Lost in translation: the narrowing of the American mind by K.A. Dilday (May 2003); Cold Mountain up close by Candida Clark (January 2004); Osama and Afghan cinema, an interview with Siddiq Barmak by Maryam Maruf (March 2004); and Dissolving history, poems of Mick Delap (April 2004)
Peter Porter: three poems
These are from Peter Porters book, Max is Missing For a biography of Peter Porter, click here
Last Words
In the beginning was the Word,
Not just the word of God but sounds
Where Truth was clarified or blurred.
Then Rhyme and Rhythm did the rounds
And justified their jumps and joins
By glueing up our lips and loins.
Once words had freshness on their breath.
The Poet who saw first that Death
Has only one true rhyme was mad
The Leader of the Boys Brigade.
Dead languages can scan and rhyme
Like birthday cards and Lilac Time.
And you can carve words on a slab
Or tow them through the air by plane,
Tattoo them with a painful jab
Or hang them in a window pane.
Unlike our bodies which decay,
Words, first and last, have come to stay.
Scrawled on Audens Napkin
All the liberal decencies are stained
By hubris of imagined innocence.
Equality, Socialism, Pacifism,
Vegetarianism we try so hard
But never can forget our armature
Of blood. Even the Church is compromised
And paints a Heaven for its celebrants
Where sins are washed away and the stern God
Of Judgment romps in playing fields.
Yet Manichees are silly too despairs
Another wish-fulfilling innocent.
Mankind is always hungry, so eat up
Your dish of Paschal meat, pillage the fridge
For sausages left overnight, sink doubt
In one of Chesters savoury messes
We eat our way to Paradise, if thats
What an afterlife of unreformed desire
Is called. Our all-inclusive sacraments
And our condign obscenities are tooth-
embrasured; Piety and Sacrilege
Make temples of our stomachs; eating
And shitting are Baptism and Burial;
King Herod is Sous-Chef at The Ivy, though
We dont eat lovely kiddies but we do
Insist that for a species whose most holy
Act is swallowing its God a well-made
Omelette is a Christian deed. We watch
Le Jongleur De Notre Dame perform before
His plastic Virgin. The Mass of the Innumerate
Is our rendering unto Science the things
Which are Sciences. My pre-prandial prayer:
Give us this day our daily greed lest we
Forget were made in Thy Most Famished Image,
Lord of Banqueting Awaiting us,
A Concert Champêtre of wise gluttony,
Two saints, Apicius and Caliban,
Uno barbaro appetito happy to
Defy the runes before a decent dinner.
A Butterfly Stampede
Softest of Gods creatures ganging up
on a loner, toiling stoic
terraces of olive trees
can they be Furies
these companiable shutters?
Could they brave shades of time, so little
and so desperate? Or quiver through the air
in serious rhapsody?
In history will souls
recall these flimsiest of comrades?
Swarming butterflies at altitudes
above the wasps, serving in an airy tongue
the primal plebiscite:
quick go words which match
the needs of mannequins and mites.
In theory these could be that whelming
catalepse of one foot stamping some
disasters timbre
be calm, O urban mind,
such are just farfalle mustering.
A ghost of city man, he cared today
to save a spider from a shiny bath
so let him cool himself
with fans of butterflies
and pick a grape for Tantalus.
O Nature! O Conspiring Mind! O Capitalising
Poetry! Rise on the thermals of a swarm
of butterflies.
Hadrians little soul has multiplied
to blot out death as soon as laughter.
