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At the age of eight, Lavinia Greenlaw jumped through a fastened window while running away from her mother. She was in a friend's house. "There were three French windows and I knew one was open but I chose the wrong one," she says. "I hit it so fast that when I landed I only had two cuts on my knees. The thing I remember most was how glass bends before it explodes. I remember being mid-air and held. It felt like the world was giving me a chance to catch up with what was happening."

Greenlaw used that slow-motion leap at the end of her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover - her teenage heroine crashes through glass to escape a fire. She later revisited the incident in her excellent short poem "The Falling City". While her new novel, An Irresponsible Age (Fourth Estate, £15.99), contains no such stunts, the characters seem similarly suspended between two states, numbed by another kind of shock.

Juliet Clough and her adult siblings are coming to terms with the accidental death of their brother. The Cloughs appeared in Greenlaw's debut novel, living in the same village as Mary George. Now they are grown up and settled in London. It is 1990. "I was interested in the period between the 1980s and the millennium when things were in a state of hesitation,"Greenlaw explains. "It seemed a good period in which to explore the notion of a family suddenly being compelled by change and not knowing how to handle it." She also wanted to consider "how people can remain children in their own heads when they're in their late twenties and early thirties, even when they have children, are married, have jobs."

Juliet, Clara, Carlo and Fred are frozen in their allotted roles, still behaving in ways they should have outgrown. Because they can't bear to address Tobias's death, they distract themselves, embark on hopeless affairs, disappoint each other.

Greenlaw understands the dynamic of large families, being one of two sisters and two brothers, close in age: "When the four of us get together we fall into place." She adds: "One of the things that sustained me through my childhood was a sense of identity with my family. It provides a kind of machinery. You think you can dip in and out and come back to it. But when your parents split up or your siblings go away, suddenly the machine stops and you have to become your own machine."

It's no surprise that Greenlaw applies an industrial image to something so organic. As a poet, her work shows a fascination with science and technology, time and space. Although she is wary of romanticising science, co-opting it into her poetry always seemed natural.

Not only was her father a doctor; one brother trained as an engineer, her second has a PhD in astrophysics and her sister is an immunologist. "So, I'm very much the village idiot", she says, laughing. It was a household where literature, art and scientific ideas were all discussed avidly. Six years ago, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts granted Greenlaw a three-year-fellowship. She has also been the Science Museum's resident poet and hasn't shied away from extraordinary commissions. She was asked to write a series of poems on mathematical concepts like the impossibility of the square root of minus 1. Recently, she wrestled with the theory of relativity for a poem commemorating the centenary of E=mc2.

Both Greenlaw's poetry and fiction use autobiographical elements. Her parents, seeking change, quit London in the 1970s and plumped for a village south of Chelmsford. Greenlaw assumed life would be the same "but with trees and fields". She got a shock. Sent to the local comprehensive, she looked different and spoke differently from everyone else. Added to which she had a peculiar name. "I spent seven years just wanting to get back to London."

And 1973 was a year of power-cuts. The "absolute black, countryside night" was something Greenlaw had never before experienced. When she suddenly became acutely shortsighted too, "It was as if every aspect of my vision was closing down." She smiles. "Short-sight has really formed my character. I don't expect to notice things around me, so I remain quite within myself".

Yet her vision can be laser-sharp, her work displaying a talent for moving between the abstract and the keenly observed. Weather, landscape, the natural world are all exquisitely evoked.

Light is a constant preoccupation for Greenlaw. In the new novel it "shoves" and "bounces", but on a drab winter morning, "The movement between London night and London day was more like a prevarication than any clear shift." In the poem "Blue Field", light mesmerises. Greenlaw became inspired by trips to the Arctic. "You get this amazing twilight where everything goes blue", she says. "I felt very, very alive there."

How different from her experience of Essex with its flat landscape and open skies. "Parts of Essex are wonderfully beautiful," she says, "but parts are just dead, somehow. I did feel subdued by it." Much of Greenlaw's adolescence involved waiting hours for buses or trying to hitch lifts. "I think of Essex as a place you can't get out of easily."

During that period Greenlaw read her way through her father's shelves of American and Eastern European poetry, and wrote too. Salvation came from an unlikely source. "I can remember going on a school trip to Basildon shopping precinct - which must be the greyest place in England - and seeing the cover of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, this lurid yellow and bubblegum-pink cover. The word 'bollocks' had been taped over but what shocked me was not the word but the colour - it was electrifying. In Essex. I couldn't believe it."

With her freshly-dyed pink and black hair and "dead men's suits", Greenlaw was frequently mocked in the street but felt liberated by her new identity. Some years ago, she did a reading in Chelmsford and several of her old mates attended. "There was a definite clanking of chains as they came up the stairs," she says, laughing again. "They asked me if I was still with the boy I was going out with at 16."

Greenlaw wanted to capture this era in her debut novel. Two recollections triggered it: the vault through the window, and staggering across frozen fields to a party. "They were very physical memories which I thought would be a poem. And then this figure appeared, this girl Mary, and I thought - it can't be a poem, because she's a character."

For the writer, the different demands of prose and poetry soon became apparent. While Greenlaw can't compose a poem on screen ("It's too immediate and fools you into thinking it's finished"), she can write prose that way and "push on with it, however painful. You can't make a poem arrive. You have to wait for it to come." She edits everything with a pen: "I need to be writing to be thinking."

Greenlaw thought it was important to find a prose style "not too dense and - dread word - poetic." When someone commented that her novel wasn't a poet's novel she was delighted. "I've always wanted to tell stories and my early poems were quite laden with narrative."

In poetry, the poet is often the character. Does that make the poetry more personal? She pauses. "Probably, yes. A poem conveys an experience in the form of sensation. It's concentrated; to be read over and over. It took me a long time to get used to the fact that you can hold a poem in your hands all at once while the novel is something you have to travel through. I was unnerved by that loss of control and perspective, which is partly why it took me eight years to write Mary George."

An Irresponsible Age isn't exactly a sequel; as a story, it stands alone. Juliet, a walk-on in the first book, stuck around in Greenlaw's head. Here, Juliet launches into an affair with the handsome, older Jacob, a writer whose strong wife looks after him even though they are separated. Juliet sums him up as the type who refers to his "wireless" and uses words like "quiddity" in conversation. He looks blank if anyone mentions popular television but always manages to namedrop terrifically hip bands. His is a carefully contrived artlessness.

Absence is a recurring image in this novel, from Juliet's PhD ("Framed Departure: the Empty Metaphor in Post-Iconoclastic Netherlandish Art") to the white spaces in the A-Z where London's Docklands are under development. The Cloughs, of course, are defined by Tobias's absence. "When somebody dies you are supposed as a family to pull together but we're often blown apart by these things," says Greenlaw. She wanted to show how death affects us, "how protected we are before that moment." Everything trivial seems to vaporise. "It's an exalted state. We think we're going to learn from it, will never go back to operating on a surface level but we do."

Will there be a third book about Mary George and the Cloughs? Greenlaw reflects. "I've a feeling I'm going to look at those characters again ten years from now, when they're in their forties". As we get older, our lives may become increasingly locked down but, "However much we think we see what's coming, we really don't."

 

Lavinia Greenlaw, the British novelist and poet, remembers the first time that pop music let her down. Like many surly English teenagers in the late '70s, Greenlaw was entranced by Joy Divison's Ian Curtis -- a gangly, disturbingly intense singer whose morose lyrics were matched by his pained gyrations onstage. But when the epileptic and severely depressed Curtis hanged himself in 1980, leaving behind a wife and child at age 23, something snapped in Greenlaw's heart. As she writes in her new memoir, "The Importance of Music to Girls," "I realized he was not [Goethe's] Werther, but a man in pain. I wasn't twenty-three but seventeen, and I was a girl."

For Greenlaw, Curtis' suicide was a lesson in how music shapes a person's identity but can't erase fundamental truths about who they are. "Music has a dangerous sense of grandeur. It was a mistake in thinking that this man was an impossibly glamorous, tortured artist," Greenlaw said by phone from her home in London. "In many ways he was, but I didn't understand what that meant until he hanged himself."

In time, Greenlaw saw how such revelations signaled the turning points of growing up. They inspired her to write a memoir that would demonstrate how music can rescue a young girl from the sicknesses of adolescence while it also, in the end, becomes only a shorthand for the true challenges of young adulthood.

The memoir is laid out chronologically in vignettes of Greenlaw's life as an adolescent pop fan from the '60s through the '80s. There's the adorable (how the decision to be a Donny Osmond fan warranted the utmost seriousness at age 10), the poignantly musing (do girls who like boys in suits love the Jam, or did Paul Weller make skinny ties hot on guys?) and the genuinely rueful (when a friend overdoses on pills and Greenlaw wonders what music can cure a coma). As in her novel "Mary George of Allnorthover," the minute details of an Essex village teenager's life take on an almost fantastical quality through fine-bore reminiscences.

"I was writing this awful torrent of memoir and decided the only way to make anything out of it was to focus on specific memories so precisely that they opened up into something about broader experience," Greenlaw said. "I tried to not make it about my growing up with music but about anyone growing up and how music can formulate that for them."

"Importance" isn't stridently about being female, the way that a Nick Hornby or Chuck Klosterman book can feel like it's aggressively about nerdy boys. Greenlaw's insights, like the particular relief she felt in gender-neutral insults like "punk" as opposed to "slag," come off as nuanced realities.

"I really didn't intend to write a book about the whole girl aspect at all," Greenlaw said. "But it became a book about how I tried to be a girl and how I was really bad at being a girl and had to in the end give in and accept that I was a girl. I was quite naive that I didn't foresee that it would be cast as some sort of counterblast to men writing about music."

What "Importance" does do is show how pop music is a perfect vessel for a teenager to explore an ever-shifting sense of self. Greenlaw's perpetual horror at her own record collection every time a genre goes out of style is a recurring joke. And a self-conscious episode when her ironic punk fashions are mocked -- she's in America, visiting friends, at the time -- is an example of a post-'60s social climate in which young women reaped the benefits of feminism but weren't quite sure what that meant for them as individuals.

"I thought it was possible to not be a girl, to just 'be.' My generation grew up in the '70s thinking the war between sexes was over and won," Greenlaw said. "I thought I could be exempt from the whole gender thing and didn't really notice that I was the only girl in the record shop hanging around in my raincoat talking about Martin Hannett and the digital delay on Joy Division's 'Atmosphere.' "

"Importance" ends in the '80s, and a lot has changed in the interplay of gender, sexuality and pop music since then. Younger readers who grew up with Missy Elliott's avant-garde bawdiness, Liz Phair's lo-fi breakup wisdom and Paramore's feminist revision of stadium emo may wonder why Poly Styrene and Debbie Harry were such particularly inspiring figures for Greenlaw.

Jessica Hopper, a Chicago-based music writer currently writing a field manual for teen girls starting rock bands, notes the "glut of nostalgia for that era of music" coming largely from male writers and critics like Michael Azerrad and Simon Reynolds, who are documenting the punk and post-punk era. "We owe it to girls today to give a full picture of how it changed women's lives" as well, Hopper said. "Someone will always say, 'But Kira Roessler was in Black Flag.' People pass off exceptions as if they were the rule."

A Universal Bridge

THE most moving passages in the book are often ones that, like Curtis' death, underscore how music is merely a means, not an end, to learning about others and oneself. Her main love in the book falls apart when they realize that music might have been the most prominent thing they shared: "Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory . . . we lay in each others arms but all we did was listen to music."

"Then I thought music and books could change things, and I suppose I don't feel that now," Greenlaw said. "What I learned when writing the book was the loss of self-sufficiency. Then, if I had my books and records, I would be all right. Now I certainly need more than that, I need people."

By the end of the book seven years later, when Greenlaw is bringing her infant daughter home from the hospital and a surprise visit from Daniel prompts a recollection of treasured LPs, memories of music become a way to remember and to repurpose old memories.

Rob Sheffield, the Spin writer and former Rolling Stone editor whose memoir "Love Is a Mixtape" explored how music helped him reconcile with his wife's death, agrees.

"I had loved that Stylistics song 'Big Girl Now.' I had listened to it with Renée and I figured I'd never listen to it again," Sheffield said. "Then Ghostface sampled it, and that gave me the Stylistics back. Music carries such a history with it, you never use it up."

Some of the particular cadences of Greenlaw's experience -- the fevered genre allegiances, the LP sleeves as talismans -- might seem foreign in today's everything-all-the-time music culture. She wonders if something got lost. "For me, each phase has accumulated as a kind of autobiography. Sometimes I think young people are moving too fast, not absorbing anything," she said. But Greenlaw understands that the most crucial -- and empowering -- thing about being a young music fan is how it gives you the space to come into your own self, whatever that might be.

"My daughter was playing a record by Panda Bear recently, and I went and downloaded it secretly," she said. "There's nothing more annoying than your mother walking past your bedroom and smugly saying, 'I've got that on vinyl.' "

S. E. Venart: In the Fall 2001 issue of the Paris Review, Billy Collins, being interviewed by the late George Plimpton, opens the interview by describing his preferred writing tools in great detail. Writers are not often asked to describe their tools; I guess it’s assumed that a pencil is a pencil and paper is paper. This couldn’t be farther from the truth; writers spend entire evenings poring over Levenger catalogues or studying directions to certain pen shops on side streets in Edinburgh. Could you tell me a little about your preferred tools?

Lavinia Greenlaw: I once borrowed the perfect pen from the poet Sean O’Brien and have been looking for it ever since: black ink, the finest possible nib and assertive enough to calm my wayward handwriting.
I carry three or four pens, in fear of being stuck without one. You can always write on the back of a bus ticket but you need something to write with.
My notebooks have to be unlined and roughly A5 size. That is the space I am comfortable working in. The paper has to be off-white and reasonably substantial, but not watercolour quality or I feel pretentious.
My favourite notebook was French and something like an old school exercise book. It had dark brown card covers and yellowish pages. I went through several before it was discontinued. They still make them in other sizes but they are just plain wrong for me.
I cannot use anything fancy. When I taught at Amherst, I discovered the town has made a cult of the notebook: leather-bound, Italian handmade paper flecked with gold leaf or autumn leaves, covers embossed with Great Thoughts. Although writers are particular about their tools, they go about the thing with a certain kind of avertedness which the fancy notebook would pre-empt.
The physical act of writing, its rituals and arrangements, is inseparable for me from the mental one. I cannot write poems on a computer, nor prose by hand. To write fiction, I still have to leave my desk and take to my bed with my laptop. I’m sure it has to do with years spent curled up with a notebook. It just won’t work otherwise.
I also depend upon several pots of tea.

SV: It’s interesting that you use the computer to compose fiction but use paper for poetry. I wonder what part of the brain decides these things and makes them habits. You also write for the Guardian and the TLS, and recently you wrote a libretto, Hamelin. How do these types of writing fit into your laptop-versus-paper habits?

LG: The libretto started out in a notebook, but I found giving it a formal layout on screen helped me to shape it. I could compare the length of different scenes and judge the accumulation of words (important for an opera) better once they were on printed pages.
Reviews and essays are done on the computer. I make a lot of notes, which are often (deliberately?) illegible, and then set to and end up saying things I would not have thought of until I started bashing the thing out.
I think, with all these things, it’s a question of scale, construction and momentum. I often scribble diagrams. A computer helps me write quickly and comfortably but not to see what I’ve written. I can only read and proofread on paper, with a pen in my hand. It always surprises me that many of my students never print anything off; they do seem to have little eye for detail as a result.

SV: How do poems come to you? Do you uncover a poem in the process of writing it, or do you have sudden flashes of inspiration and fully formed poems, or both?

LG: I never go looking for ideas for poems. When one arrives, it is as a sensation, which I can best describe as a sense of connections being made. Sometimes there is a phrase to go on immediately; otherwise it might take a while to emerge.
This sensation may be equivalent to your “flash of inspiration” in that it is unprompted and mysterious. As the poet Michael Longley once said, “If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” Occasionally, the poem arrives entire but more often the idea waits years to find its missing part, and then becomes something altogether different.
The first words I have might belong anywhere in the poem and, although it’s rarely obvious, they bring with them the form and music of the whole thing. I don’t mean that they will be metrically ready-made, but that their metrical character is inherent rather than imposed.
All the matter is there in that first phrase, but it can take a long time for it to be revealed. I write more words, so the thing accumulates but the experience is more one of taking away—exposure, refinement, focus.
So it is working towards something rather than making it. It already exists but has to be reached through language. This is where it gets exciting because words spring their surprises.

SV: You spoke about the importance of detail. Do you enjoy crafting your work?

LG: I enjoy the revision stage. Once the poem has been netted, so to speak, I have part of it down on paper but the writing goes on in my head, often when I am walking or doing other things. Words, lines, emerge and are felt, tested. I know the right words are there somewhere, the gaps can be filled (I know there are gaps), but how is another question. Sometimes, they won’t emerge, and the poem has to be abandoned.
It is an odd balance of concentration and inattentiveness, the active and the passive. What is missing is felt not known; again it is a sensation and cannot be articulated or even imagined. This brings to mind Robert Lowell’s description of Elizabeth Bishop’s process—her extraordinary combination of practicality and perfectionism, getting it organized but knowing how to wait: “Do / you still hang your words in the air, ten years / unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps / or empties for the unimaginable phrase— / unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?”

SV: Elizabeth Bishop has been noted by critics to be an influence in your work. How do you feel about this?

LG: I am pleased that someone might detect the effect of Elizabeth Bishop in my work. She is the poet from whom I’ve learnt most. I go on learning from her. I have long been preoccupied with questions of vision, and so was thrilled to discover a poet who could (as she said about Gerard Manley Hopkins) make palpable “the releasing, checking, timing and repeating of the movement of the mind.”
This makes it sound as if she reduces everything to slow motion and single frame, whereas, however patient and precise she is, the excitement of her engagement is sustained and is vitally present in the finished work. There’s a rare sense of something having been completely grasped yet brought to us while still thrashing about—as if Lowell’s phrase “casual perfect” were a special Elizabeth Bishop tense.
Yes, she would wait for the “unimaginable phrase” but she would also go after the truth of the experience, even if it meant getting her hands dirty. By this, I mean she would pursue exactness beyond aesthetic comfort, which most of us find far harder than we’d care to admit.

SV: This mix of restlessness and patience, inquisitiveness and engagement can be found in your poetry. It is a curiosity that is not quite innocent, sometimes wise beyond its years, sometimes humble. I’m thinking of the first line in “Guidebooks to the Alhambra”: “Things change, become home and we must leave them.” This line is a hard, grim truth, a one-line sermon. It reminds me how one precise line in a poem can be like a puzzle the reader unpacks, and once unpacked the words can make us see something—some part of our lives, for example—in a new way. Pound’s “make it new” and all that. This is all leading to a question about curiosity and the poet. What part would you say curiosity about the world plays in making poems?

LG: I am more interested in wonder, which Heidegger distinguished from curiosity by its quality of unknowing. My poem “Against Rhetoric” concerns this—the moments when we come up against the limits of comprehension and articulation, and have to feel our way into something and then find a way to describe it.
Curiosity is flattering and reassuring; it is about saying “I know something new,” rather than “This is new.” It gives us more to talk about and less to think about, whereas wonder renders us speechless.
I like the way poetry acknowledges this fumbling towards sense in the ever-emergent qualities of its language.

Someone’s great aunt left Eastern Europe in a hurry and fetched up in London. One day, she was travelling on the Underground when an inspector approached and asked to see her ticket, which she couldn’t find. The inspector asked, ‘Where have you come from, Madam?’ and she replied without hesitation, ‘Minsk!’

It’s a charming anecdote - telling in a fuzzy, visceral way but on its own, not enough. It stayed in my head for 10 years and I would prod it now and then, and wonder if it would ever reveal more or meet up with what it was missing. For me, a poem often only gets going when the initial idea collides with something else.

I’ve never been to Minsk but the name, like Casablanca or Samarkand, does not arrive empty-handed. It sounds like an essence of Russia: pine, ice, vodka and rye; samovars, railways and fur; Soviet apartment blocks, gangsters and monumental statues of Lenin. Anyone who has been there will waste no time in telling you how Minsk has been repeatedly obliterated and rebuilt. It’s a place that gets caught up.

And I got caught up in Minsk, first of all for the sound of it and then for that great-aunt’s story, which finally bumped into another of her family’s stories and became a parable about the place we believe to be missing from our lives, a place which we cannot get back to and which might never have existed.

This is a book about leaving and arriving, and what we try to build on the way. It begins in childhood, when we have the gift of not looking back, of never wishing we had done or said something differently. It’s also about how we leap ahead or lag behind, and are rarely altogether here, now, in the present. The final section is about place as a blank page – the black and white of Arctic midwinter and midsummer. On the way there are many staircases, a couple of parachutes, the occasional leap of faith and burst of flight. There are words with runaway meanings like ‘zombies’ or ‘Minsk’, and words I’ve tried to keep still and peer through.

All that I’ve said about place - about meeting, connecting, building and leaving behind; about being brought to light and being happy to go back into the dark - I am saying about poetry too.

LAVINIA GREENLAW

Copyright Lavinia Greenlaw 2003

Good poets are preternaturally curious, and Lavinia Greenlaw has one of the most powerful senses of curiosity in contemporary poetry. The history of science, landscapes, 17th-century and contemporary art, photography, and the Penguin Pool at the London Zoo are a few of the things that she has converted into thoughtful poems. Poetry must also provide a way of comprehending subjective experience: it starts, as Greenlaw says, ‘with our nerves’ – which could be a materialist way of saying ‘soul’. The tension between facts – the external world – and how they affect ‘our nerves’ gives Greenlaw’s work its power and urgency.
‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’, the title poem of her second book, won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 1997. Her most recent book, Minsk, was short-listed for the 2003 Forward Prize.

Craig Burnett: When I read Minsk (2003), I was reminded of the fantastic scene in Barton Fink (2001) in which the head of Capitol Films, Lipnik, talks to Barton about writing: ‘ … I’m not one of these guys who thinks poetic has gotta be fruity. We’re together on that, aren’t we? I mean I’m from New York myself – well, Minsk if yo’ wanna go way back, which we won’t if you don’t mind and I ain’t askin’.’ Besides the coincidence of Lipnik’s hometown, what are the pitfalls of going ‘way back’ and how did you resist becoming too sentimental in a poem about homecoming? Why Minsk?

Lavinia Greenlaw: I haven’t seen Barton Fink, but I will now. Minsk is a runaway name with its own life, about which I keep discovering more.
My starting point was a lost life – mine with someone, which then extrapolated itself into his great-aunt’s lost life in Minsk. She ended up in London and one day was stopped by an inspector on the underground and couldn’t find her ticket. He said ‘Where have you come from Madam?’ and she replied ‘Minsk’. Perhaps she and Lipnik were related.
I want to make clear that I resisted this poem for a long time, thinking it just a cute anecdote. Over ten years or so, it made itself clear as the place we think we’ve left behind and can’t get back to, which might not have existed in the first place.
As I said, it’s a runaway name – like Casablanca or Rio. Just the sound of it – crisp, chilly, inscrutable – brings to mind vodka and snow, iron and curtains, redundant statues, inescapable forests, frozen fields and endless apartment blocks. Typographically, it’s damn near perfect, too.

CB: The materiality of Minsk is great, like the line ‘The power cuts shut the short days down’ from ‘The Long Day Closes’, which reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sound patterns become independent of meaning, giving the poem a double life.

LG: I was about to say that sound is not independent of meaning, that it is part of meaning, but am also aware of how it can create, as you say, a double life, especially in a medium where the elements are more discrete, such as opera. The way a man sings a woman’s name can mean anything! I suppose that poetry pushes cracks between sound and meaning; it certainly uses sound to reach the reader where it matters, at gut level. Wallace Stevens said that poetry should be read on one’s nerves and it is as part if this visceral experience that sound provides more than meaning. Sometimes it is a metrical pattern, sometimes a consciously stretched or broken pattern, but a sense of pattern is always there.
More formally, the metrics of ‘The Long Day Closes’ are intended to suggest children playing in a ring: dancing faster, falling over, the circle breaking. The language is deliberately dense, setting up trapped echoes. Hopkins is a great model, and I only wish I could take the risk of his extreme density without producing pure silt.

CB: He said that ‘All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?’ Are you looking for a kind of beauty in your sound patterns, your ‘trapped echoes’?
LG: Two kinds! Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty’ (1877), with its opening line ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’, and also the beauty of pattern, which is one of heightening form and of things making their own sense.

CB: Could you talk about your interest in the visual arts – for example, your poem 'The Earliest Known Representation of a Storm in Western Art’.

LG: My starting point is perception: how we see, and our compulsion to map and measure the world (I am shortsighted and easily get lost.) Also, I am all for speechlessness and paintings are so nice and quiet!
The Earliest Known Representation …’ came out of a day spent slogging around Florence, looking at restored frescoes. One blurred into another until I saw what looked like a patch of damp – a panel labelled ‘The Earliest Known Representation of a Storm in Western Art’. It was very crude compared to the rest of the sequence and it seemed to me that while the artist had seen storms, he had no artistic precedent, no model. We need more (and less) than the truth in order to tell the truth clearly. I don’t mean that to sound so slick – it’s a constant negotiation and I am still fumbling towards what it, and I, mean …
I’m also interested in how hard it is to see the familiar, or not to bring the familiar to meet the unknown (the curse of analogy). While at the Courtauld Institute, I wrote about a 16th-century artist called Jacques de Gheyn, whose nature studies (mice, frogs etc.) are divested of meaning and restored to strangeness. He appears in my poem ‘Against Rhetoric’.

CB: In it, you call Jacques de Gheyn ‘indifferent’. Do you mean that in the rarely used sense of ‘impartial’? Was it his strangeness that attracted you to his work?

LG: Saying he was an ‘indifferent history painter’ is actually being kind to him. He was terrible. Despite all his independence and gifts and strangeness, he did not escape the conventional ambition of the painters of his age, and finally succumbed to it.
Van Mander describes how De Gheyn taught himself about colour by methodically setting out squares of different shades, which seems an astonishingly modern way to go about things in 1600. I do think he could detach himself enough to see beyond aesthetic harmony. His colours can be really harsh. The skin of his frogs is broken down into a crude mottle of pink, yellow and green, but from any sort of distance looks exactly like the grainy, elastic, tough, damp surface you’d expect. He painted a yellow and black snail into one of his still lifes which I didn’t believe in until one exactly the same crossed my path in Amsterdam.

CB: What made it so unbelievable?

LG: It was too vivid, painted and harsh for me to see as ‘natural’. It made me realise that De Gheyn’s strangeness is in part due to his confrontation with aesthetic convention, which infects naturalism and even the quasi-scientific documentation that he was undertaking, far more than we realise. Even this hardboiled age, we are looking for visual harmony, poetic harmony, a 21st-century kind of sweetness and light. De Gheyn was perhaps rare in his willingness and capacity to set this aside; like the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who has a way of reaching past all that and coming back with truth and wonder.

CB: What about ‘Bright Earth’, your A-Z of pigment, which is a mix of science and wonder? You must know Philip Ball’s book Bright Earth?

LG: ‘Bright Earth’ has a direct connection to Philip Ball’s book as it was commissioned by the Royal Institution to complement a lecture he gave there on the subject. I made it an alphabet because I wanted to concentrate on single words and their etymological reverberations and associations. To me, this tight concentration and breakdown was like trying to focus on a single shade.

CB: Words are even more elusive than shades, aren’t they? This is the double life I was talking about – the sensual and conceptual. They affect and depend on each other, but there is always a division – the ‘cracks’ that you mentioned – and experiencing that gap is one of the thrills of reading poetry.

LG: The sensual and the conceptual … both appeal because they go beyond what we can articulate; when you use words all the time, it’s good to be reminded of their limitations – also to escape them. Perhaps words try to fill the gap between the sensual and the conceptual? After all, words are not supposed to be an end in themselves, are they?
I agree about the thrill of reading poetry being one of getting caught between what we might call sense and sensibility. The same with writing it – the thrill comes from the need to make sense of what you’re doing, to work within the logic of the poem, to make yourself clear (by which I don’t mean direct); and at the same time and with the same urgency, the need to invoke and convey the feeling the poem started with – its impulse – and to keep it at the gut level I was talking about earlier.

CB: You’ve also worked with Garry Fabian Miller. His photographs in Thoughts of a Night Sea (2002), the book you did together, hit you at gut level because they seem impossible to articulate. How did you go about attaching words to his images?

LG: Garry and I discovered we admired each other’s work and he took a chance on me with this book. He knew he didn’t want a conventional text and my response to the images was to write as few words as possible.
The photographs are not made with a camera, but by shining light through a blue glass jar of water: visions of light and water which are not real but are made of light and water. We sat in his darkroom and then in his studio and talked, and I increasingly found affinities of process and decided to break it down, first into a list of words and then into the smallest possible texts which would lift off from those words and carry each barely discernible step of the making of an image towards the next.
As with ‘Bright Earth’, I focused on etymology, believing it to set off a deeper reverberation than we can sense in our minds.

CB: Aren’t you in danger of sounding ‘fruity’, as Lipnik calls it? Then again, it also reminds me of recent theories of consciousness that use quantum physics to understand how the human brain has some advantages over computers. Is it mysticism?

LG: All I mean is sound – not gongs or wind chimes or Mandelstam’s ‘buzz of the earth’. I was alluding to what you said earlier about the double life of language, and in this case wanted to make room for the less overt of the two. God, it’s so hard to talk about this without sounding ‘fruity’. You try it, Lipnik!
It was a response to the nature of this series of Garry’s work – it resists narrative and makes clear it is not actual, but the effect on us is to make the night sea out of this light and water, and to read it. I wanted the text to arrest the reader at the point of imposing these things. In that sense, it is either anti-mysticism or an admission of susceptibility to all that, a tantalised resistance!
My brother did a PhD in astrophysics, studying spectra around a cluster of stars, and I remember him saying once that it had been a good month, he had got a result: 25 million light years, plus or minus 25 million light years. The logic of this was so mysterious to me that it induced a feeling of awe that might have something to do with the mystical: a sense of my own limitations, Francis Bacon’s ‘broken knowledge’ which leads to a moment of wonder.
This is very tangled, but what I am getting round to saying is that yes, I think there is more to language, experience and thought than can be made sense of, but on the other hand, as Wallace Stevens said, poetry of all things has to be grounded in reality. It’s about sense and truth, and those are things which we recognise by instinct first. The intellect follows and must be sufficiently met, but we start with our nerves.