Autumn Journal

"I think it’s a brilliant example of the public poem. There are obviously such potential dangers that you risk if you are going to write very political poetry or poetry that’s tied down to specific events or times, because the danger, of course, is that once that event or time passes, then poetry that is so intimately connected to a specific public event would lose its significance. But I love Autumn Journal ; I love MacNiece, he’s a hugely important writer and I feel very proud that he came from Northern Ireland. I think Autumn Journal is such a superb tour de force in terms of its negotiation of public and private themes. Yes I do, absolutely. Autumn Journal has a big time frame, moving towards war and everybody knows that’s what’s really going to come. It’s connected in a very well-read, well-considered way to the European situation, but it’s beautifully woven with his own doubts and his own personal nightmares. It’s also filled with fantastic quotidian detail, the barrels of oranges and apples, and it has this fabulous singing, rhythmical, jazzy quality to it which is both exhilarating when you read it, but it’s also part of that unstoppable march towards the cataclysm. It’s double edged. I actually don’t think I can pick one over and above any other because they are all of such a high standard; they really are one utterance. Yes, I discovered him when I was 18 and I read him compulsively through university. Yes, I would, absolutely. He’s held in huge regard here, much more than in England. I’ve spoken to a few people and they say, ‘Oh there’s just no comparison to Auden,’ and they’ve all been English, and the people I know who love him have all been Northern Irish! He’s one of these poets who can take on these huge themes and write well about them. It’s very hard to write about abstract nouns and it’s something I tell my students all the time: ‘Don’t put any abstract nouns into your poems, it won’t work. Just write about things you can count or fit in a wheelbarrow.’ And he does it, he can hold that high discourse, also because it’s so balanced and counterbalanced in precisely observed detail. He can do that mode and make big statements and get away with it. I think it’s something they’re really either doing themselves or not and you are just guiding them. You can’t teach talent, but I think you can teach technique to a certain extent. I think you can certainly teach a shorthand which years of reading by yourself get you to the same place. I edit their poetry all the time and they may or may not agree with it, of course, but I think there are things you can say which will immediately make their work better. It tends to be a hallmark of the image of poetry to use a lot of words like tenderness, love, joy, sweetness, sadness and not ground it in concrete objective things in the world and to be completely subsumed with concerns about self-expression. With undergraduates, I’m mostly trying to steer them away from that direction and to just experiment with voice and writing about what they don’t know. I’m very fond of getting students to write haikus. To sit down and write something you have observed is actually about sublimation of the self, it’s not about self-expression."