Groundless He Talks (extract)
An interview with Jeremy Hooker by Jacqueline Gabbitas

Published by Brittle Star magazine in 2004

Jeremy Hooker was born in the south of England and has spent much of his adult life living and working in Wales. He is a poet and academic. He has eleven collections of poems, his most recent being Adamah (Enitharmon 2004). In April 2004, he gave a lecture on Poetry and Spirituality for The Poetry School in London, when Jacqueline Gabbitas was delighted to meet up with him for this interview.

JG: Could you tell us a little bit about your influences?

JH: I think the question of influence is a very interesting one because one can feel strong affinities with other writers without being influenced by them. I would say, as far as I’m aware, the strongest influence on my writing has been Richard Jefferies, through his particular way of looking at the world. Then Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and later David Jones and, to an extent, the American tradition especially William Carlos Williams and George Oppen.

But to what extent these have been an influence I find it very hard to say. I think once I was reading the Americans I received some influence from imagism and objectivism, but I would also see that as a development of what I found in Jefferies. From David Jones, I received enormous stimulus in respect of confidence in the way he was dealing with certain subjects.

It’s not so much a matter of influence but more of finding in other writers confirmation of what one is naturally inclined to do, sort of imaginative support more than influence.

JG: It’s interesting you mention the Americans, because one of the things I’m really attracted to in your poetry is its expansiveness and the generosity in its scope. It’s something I find present in much American poetry.

JH: Well, I received very beneficial supportive influences from the Americans, as well as from David Jones and from the Welsh literary tradition. I discovered a number of major Welsh poets, unfortunately in translation because I have no linguistic gift, and was moved and influenced by their commitments, their seriousness.

JG: Do you think it’s the connection with nature that’s attractive?

JH: It's the connection with nature, but I think it's 'the larger self'. George Oppen said something like, 'One wakes simultaneously to oneself and to the world'. It's what Wordsworth called the 'poetry of relationship and love'. One discovers the world and the self simultaneously. I’m interested in that kind of experience and a poetry in which one achieves that self-transcendence and becomes aware of a larger reality of which one may be part. Again I go back to Jefferies. One has a sense of connection to the life of nature, but it is a much larger world than the world of one’s own domestic experience, one’s own 'small self'. The sort of writing I most admire is that which opens out, people like Melville, Whitman and John Cowper Powys. What you call generosity – I think that’s a good word - William Carlos Williams has that supremely and it’s not just related to nature - it’s also related to people and reality in all its dimensions. A philosophical influence that I encountered was Martin Buber and his philosophy of relationship, ‘I and thou’.

JG: In Welsh Journal, you talk about trying to get away from the ego. We see a lot of ego in poetry being written now and, of course, we’re encouraged in workshops to draw on our own experiences. How then do we step away from the ego? It seems to me that we need the self reference as a starting point but that it doesn’t need to be the sole world of the poem.

JH: Yes, I agree with that entirely. As a teacher of creative writing, I’ve always tried to direct writers outside themselves, but it’s a question of making a connection. As a young poet, I lived through the period of confessionalism; when a number of poets had taken their own lives and there was a tremendous emphasis on mental instability and torment. I found that disturbing and dangerous and it was something that seemed to me an emphasis upon the small self and its entrapment. For me a function of writing is to liberate the self into the world.

JG: Do you think in contemporary poetry there’s still a lot of writing from this perspective of the self?

JH: Yes, and you try to encourage students to see beyond themselves, but one also has to encourage self-expression. I think it’s necessary, especially when poets are beginning to write, but one would hope that they would be able to connect beyond themselves so that the self doesn’t become a trap. That’s what I think is a risk for a writer and perhaps especially for poets.

JG: You talk about your writing coming from a position not of ‘language over all’ but of ‘silence under all’. I’m intrigued by this idea.

JH: That’s quite possibly the biggest question of all, because I think it impinges on phenomena such as the religious and spiritual and sacred reality. I have been described as a religious poet and I would accept that, but I wouldn’t specifically want to hold forth on that subject because it would risk the grandiosity and the kind of vagueness that I would want to avoid. I believe there are poets for whom language has the priority, who have a passion for words, perhaps even are intoxicated by language. That’s not the kind of poet I am. I’m more attracted by a sense of underlying silence. Of that, within reality, which is the ground of being that sustains it. It’s something one may be aware of, without finding it easy to talk about. One wants to use words like ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ with the greatest reservation and hesitation, but the great traditions of religious thinking and literature, east and west, west and east, are tremendously important to me. The idea of silence relates to a certain meditative cast of mind doesn’t it? A contemplative mind. Now the word ‘ground’ – I find it easier to talk about the word ‘ground’…

JG: I’m glad because I was going to ask you about ‘ground’.

JH: (laughs) My first book of essays was called Poetry of Place. Solent Shore and the poems I wrote set in Wales, were very much concerned with places that I explored in various dimensions: geological, historical, personal, social. In the earlier days, the word ‘ground’ for me had a material substance; it was the actual shingle and mud of the shore, the earth, soil and trees of the New Forest, and it still does have that meaning, but I think that what has happened is that I have come to think more of ‘ground’ in the metaphysical or ontological sense of ‘ground of being’. What underlies it all? Does anything underlie it all? (laughs) Is the material all that we have or does it open onto another dimension that is metaphysical? And at the same time I have become more conscious of a certain groundlessness.

JG: This is interesting especially in light of the poem ‘Groundless She Walks’. When I first read the ‘Seven Songs’ sequence in Adamah, I wasn’t sure about what was happening with it.

JH: Nor am I.

JG: (laughs) It’s not a bad place to be in! (laughs) Coming from the very tangible, very earthy poems that we have early on, to this sequence, is a huge distance to travel as writer and reader.

JH: Yes, but this is also an opening out beyond the smaller self, you know. In my case it would perhaps be the male self; this is an attempt to expand beyond that. I became interested in the concept of androgeny, that every human being is constitutionally both male and female. I have been drawn to what certain women poets are doing, such as Wendy Mulford and Lorine Niedecker. I have found elements within feminist thought and writing over the last twenty or thirty years enormously stimulating and for me, probably what women have been thinking and writing have been the most exciting ‘opening-out’ during my lifetime.

© Brittle Star

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