A Dizzying Range of Meaning

Transcript of episode

Transcript

Host: Seán Hewitt
Guest: Kit Fryatt

Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

Kit Fryatt begins

I think it's about, you know, what is truth? You know, truth is words. You know, it's hot air, as Falstaff might have said, you know. So the truth is articulated in the same words as flattery.

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Seán Hewitt
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.

Kit Fryatt’s dynamic blending of ancient and modern poetry offers a roadmap to moments that seem familiar and feel a bit uneasy. He’s written four books; the latest, Book of Inversions, co-written with Harry Gilonis, is based on ancient and early modern Irish originals and will be published this year. He lectures at Dublin City University. Kit Fryatt is our guest today on The Glimpse.

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Seán
Kit Fryatt is an innovator. Even when he is working on versions of medieval Irish poetry, his method is to invert, to turn the words upside down, to generously and richly throw the wealth of language, both inherited and new, into an unlikely dance. In his poems, experiments with form and meaning create an immersive sense of secretiveness and association: a place for the mind to play. I love them because they seem so unlike a lot of poetry. These are not poems that come with designs on us, or poems that are content with a single throughline of interpretation. By turn satirical, foul-mouthed, and tender, ancient and modern, Kit's poems work at the cutting edge of what language can do. Kit Fryatt, welcome to The Glimpse; it's very good to have you here.

Kit
Thanks very much. Thanks for having me on.

Seán
You're very welcome. Kit, I mentioned there in the introduction your Book of Inversions, which I've been lucky enough to read. I was rereading it again recently, and in the intro to that book, you lay out quite a defiant but playful mode of writing which you describe, or by way of Ezra Pound describe, as, “in a way, impolite,” whether that's to critics or academics or to quote-unquote “respectable poetry.” I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about that impoliteness, or impoliteness as a way of approaching poetry?

Kit
Well, I have to say, first of all, that Harry wrote the introduction, really. That's almost all his work. But I'm glad you mentioned Pound, because I think anyone who does that kind of making versions—I hesitate to say translation, because I think there's an expectation of, perhaps, lucidity. There's certainly an expectation of fluency, both in the sense of knowing and being fluent in the language from which you're making a version, and that's mostly not terribly true of a lot of the work that I've done. And Pound is the great enabler, I think, in modern times, at least, of that kind of work, because he was famously a huge chancer who, you know, translated out of Chinese but didn't know Chinese. He's a difficult forebear. I think he's certainly impolite in all the colloquial senses. And his sort of poetic edgelordism is often very uncomfortable. And, you know, it tips over from edgelordism into, you know, kind of the fascistic politics that he espoused. So he's a really problematic forebear to have, but he is, at the same time, enormously enabling.

Seán
Yeah, that's the thing with modernists. A lot of them are difficult forebears.

Kit
A lot of them are fascists. (They laugh.)

Seán
I love the idea of him as a chancer, or as, in some ways, poetry as benefiting from taking a chance on things, you know, not quite playing by the rules, or being a little bit playful with the rules. I want to talk a little bit about that, you know, versions or translations and what they're for and what draws you to them. I especially would love to know about your process for making versions of poems in a language that maybe you don't speak. Like, how do you go about that?

Kit
So it was quite frequently collaborative. I've done this sort of work with Kimberly Campanello, for example. A sequence that appears in Bodyservant is the result of collaboration on Stephen Fowler's "Yes But Are We Enemies?" project with Kim. And I found both in working with Kimberly and working with Harry that they're much more scholarly than I am. I really am a chancer.

So under Harry's influence, I spend a lot more time with the dictionary. I spend quite a lot of time with various English and Irish dictionaries. I spend some time with the existing versions, the existing translations, James Carney, Geoffrey Squires, and I talk to people who do have a real fluency in Irish, and then I ignore them, because they tell me, “You can't possibly say that.” And so, yeah, it's quite an organic process, I think, in the sense that I don't have a set process, I think, and a lot of the versions have come out of different circumstances. I think for me, one of the reasons I do this is that it gives me something to work with, to start with. I'm very bad at that Romantic thing, inspiration. So a lot of what I do comes out of already-existing text.

Seán
I wonder what it is about the medieval that attracts you. You know, is there something about the sensibility of the medieval, whether that's Irish or English?

Kit
Well, those would be very different sensibilities, I think. Yes, I think so. What is it? I think it's always seemed to me that the medieval world is a very living one to me. You know, I look back and I see people who are alive to me, who are sort of present. And I think there's something about language. Perhaps before and at that early modern period of change is an extraordinary mixture of the poised and formal and the very pithy and direct. I always felt like I can sort of feel people speaking through that language.

Seán
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, that the idea of a poised and formal and pithy and direct kind of intention with each other, or maybe not even intention, but one of them allowing or giving way to the other. There's something I really enjoy about medieval poetry as well, and there's that way that the poems can feel so different when you look at them, because, you know, the spelling is strange, or something about the syntax might be off, but when you start to speak them, they come alive because you realize something about the language, or you begin to hear them. And in that way, it's kind of like unlocking a sort of life.

Kit
Yeah, pretty much that.

Seán
That it's kind of secret as well, which, I love that feeling. Alright, you're going to read the title poem from your collection Bodyservant. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the poem before you read it? Or would you prefer to plow straight in?

Kit
Yeah, I'll say a little bit. It's sort of a composite, I suppose, of two medieval figures who were contemporaries, overlapping, and sort of two medieval places that I'm particularly interested in, the medieval Gaelic world and the Occitan world of the troubadours.

So the earlier figure is that of Giraut de Bornelh the troubadour, possibly the most famous of troubadour poems, “Reis glorios.” It's often called an aubade or an alba, and it is a dawn poem. And the second figure in the composite is a slightly later 12th- and early 13th-century figure, Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who is the founder of a great dynasty of poets. He was a murderer. He killed a tax collector. He was a crusader as well. And so the figure that I imagine the poem is spoken from the point of view of, a servant, a body servant, the figure that I imagine is somebody like Muireadhach. But that all kind of gets mixed up with the relationship between two men in “Reis glorios,” which doesn't get remarked on a great deal.

So this is “bodyservant.”

bodyservant
By Kit Fryatt

I sleep at the foot of the stair
the rough nights
of the bed
I know his sleeping breath and its feint
perhaps he knows mine
his lungs are congested
he is close to sixty
and I am past
this year
the middle of life
the fair hair he cut the night before we started
a four years’ pelt for Cairo
that would not shame the Magdalen
is gone as he said a stringy tonsure
it would be
when an attack wakes him I bring milk & ale
we have both killed men that
he might live to this pass
their grey shades stand between us
so he seems
insubstantial
he suffers as tall men do worst with his knees
his back
in the mornings he is agile like an anvil
as the mounting block he refuses
he and his wife had eleven children
and some of them live
far away
he misses
her hand beneath his head
he says
to put my hand under his head
would be worth the ransom of the son of the king of Cairo
but I’ve never been lucky
there was a lady
the guest of many important men
he visited her when she stayed with them
then I watched till dawn
I knew her name but never her face
she was a grey shape in thought
like a place where a painter meant
to fill in one of the three Marys
a grey form lying on
the body I know better than my own
its scar furrows
turn and turn about
the body to which I attribute
every scar on my own
lying on a grey form
until I called out
my fine friend
here comes the dawn
chief glory
glorious lord
here comes the
dawn

"bodyservant" from Bodyservant (Shearsman Books, 2018).

Seán
Thank you very much. I loved hearing you read that poem. I want to draw listeners’ attention to how it looks on the page as well, because it's maybe something that they won't imagine, although I think you could hear it quite well in your reading there, that it moves all the way from the left- to the right-hand margin, sometimes in steps, if that makes sense. The lines step across the page, and sometimes the lines are right-aligned, as well; there's like a small stanza that is right-aligned rather than left-aligned. Tell us a little bit about, you know, how you arrived at that form before we talk about the poem itself, if that makes sense?

Kit
Yeah, it just happened, I think, and I can't be very illuminating about it. It sort of moved itself, it tossed and turned across the page in that way, you know, that sometimes you just know how something's going to spread itself out across the page.

When I see slightly unusual alignments on the page, particularly, I suppose, when I see things that are aligned in columns or things that are indented the same amount, I always want there to be a kind of vertical axis on which you can read that as well. So I try to do that. The little bit about hair—Muireadhach is obsessed with hair. He's one of poetry's great trichomaniacs. John Milton is the other one, I think. And he wrote about cutting off his hair before he goes on crusade, and he writes about the Virgin Mary's hair in great detail. So I wanted that to work a little bit, sort of a little bit vertically, as if, almost as if it is hair as well.

Seán
Yeah, there are moments in that poem—and I think we've had a bit of an insight into how it was put together—but there are moments that almost seem to me like little holes in the poem or something to look through into another bit of a story that they're not fully given. And, you know, there's backstory kind of glinting through the poem. And I wonder, are erasures or rearrangements important to the drafting of a poem?

Kit
Yeah, I think so. I mean there, I suppose, the erasure is the lady herself. When I was writing that I was thinking about and looking at something else that I love: the wool paintings in medieval churches, very few of which survive in Ireland, by the way. More survive in England, and still more in continental Europe. But there's one I was looking at a picture of in an English church, which I think was probably meant to be a scene of the rolling away of the stone from Christ's tomb. And at some point the painter had meant to put in the three Marys, but he never did. So that was one thing I was thinking of in terms of erasure.

And the other, I suppose, is that in “Reis glorios,” the important thing is the relationship between two men. And I think this makes Ezra Pound very jumpy when he translates it, and he adopts a very uncertain tone. Giraut begins every stanza with “bel campanho”: “fine friend,” “beautiful friend,” even. And then there's the refrain, “Et ades sera l'alba,” “and here comes the dawn.” And Pound does away with that. He's very nervous about the whole thing. This is a poem about a man waiting, standing watch for his friend who is getting up to adulterous shenanigans inside. But the relationship is between these two men. And the watcher addresses his friend as this beautiful companion, says he's the best, he's the greatest companion he's ever had. It's a real David and Jonathan poem, actually, it's a real sort of surpassing the love of women kind of thing, and Pound can't take that at all.

Seán
You can feel that coming through in your own poem as well, I think. You know, there's a lovely lift at the end, that “my fine friend,” “chief glory / glorious Lord,” you know, and it kind of reminds me of something of what you were saying before about that. You know, there's a sort of formality or reserve that seems to heighten the directness of the poem, if that makes sense. You know, there's something about the language here that feels formal, but in feeling formal actually admits more erotic potential, perhaps than it would if it were solely direct, solely, you know, sometimes we expect intimacy to be given to us, or the erotic to be given to us, in a sort of unabashed way. But sometimes when it's “bashed,” when it's reserved and in some way shrouded in formal language, it sometimes is even more erotic or has more potential for this sort of intimacy, because it seems secretive or subtle. And there's something in that kind of secretiveness that makes us lean in and listen in a different way.

Okay, Kit, I could talk to you a long time about the medieval world. I think it's time for a break, and when you come back, you're going to read one of my favorite poems. I'm so glad you've chosen it. It is a poem by Thomas Wyatt, and it's, I think, a very secretive and erotic poem. Okay, so we'll take a break and then we’ll come back.

Kit
Okay, fantastic.


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Seán
Welcome back, everyone. So, Kit, the poem you've chosen for us is one of my favorites. It's Thomas Wyatt's “They fle from me.” For those of our listeners who haven't read Wyatt before, can you tell us either a little bit about him or about the poem?

Kit
Yeah, okay. So Thomas Wyatt was born in the early 16th century, 1503 or 1504, and he was a courtier at the court of Henry VIII, a very dangerous place to be. Somehow, he survived, to die young nonetheless. He dies suddenly after a lot of kind of diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing. He had a fairly thankless diplomatic career, but he's known perhaps most for his activities at the court of Henry VIII. He's an interesting figure because he managed to make the transition from Catherine of Aragon to Anne Boleyn. He was also very close to Anne Boleyn, and he spent some time in prison, possibly at the time of Anne's execution, he… there's a phrase in one of his poems which is often taken to indicate that he witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers whilst himself being in prison. So his poems are often read in that dark, paranoid atmosphere of the Reformation court of Henry VIII as that cataclysm was happening, you know, that thing, which means that we can't go back, in some ways, to that medieval world.

Seán
Yeah, they're so evocative of that world and time. They seem to have a kind of candlelit, shrouded darkness around them. Would you read “They fle from me?”

Kit

They fle from me
By Thomas Wyatt

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
With naked fote stalking in my chambre.
I have sene theim gentill, tame, and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.

Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
Twenty tymes better, but ons in speciall,
In thyn arraye, after a pleasaunt gyse,
When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her armes long and small,
Therewithall swetely did me kysse,
And softely said “dere hert, howe like you this?”
It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;
And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
And she also to vse new fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely ame served,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.

Seán
Thank you very much. One of the things you know I love about Wyatt is there’s a sort of codedness or something to the poems that leaves you unsure quite exactly what is going on. And I think the first thing about this poem that I still have a question about is right at the beginning, “They fle from me,” you know; he doesn't really tell us who they are. It seems, in my head there, they appear like deer or creatures or animals. You know, that they once took bread from his hand. The line “That nowe are wyld and do not remembre / That sometyme they put theimself in daunger / To take bred at my hand,” this admission that the speaker of the poem is quite a threatening character in some sense, you know. If these are wild creatures, they put themselves in danger to be near him. The idea of you yourself being a danger, it's quite a startling admission.

Kit
Yeah, yeah.

Seán
In that poem, you know, you spoke about the proximity to the court here, and this poem comes with its rumors attached to it now, as we have it, and I'm right I think in remembering that there is a rumor that this is a poem about Anne Boleyn, have you heard this?

Kit
Yeah, it’s very difficult to know. With Wyatt it’s difficult to know when he wrote the poems that he did. It's odd. I love these poems. I'm not terribly interested in connecting them to the court politics or the personalities of the time. And I sort of realized this when wading through biographies of Wyatt. I'm actually not interested in this.

What interests me, I think, is that, that cataclysm of the Reformation that you know in 1516, if you like, just before Luther posted the 95 Theses, England is the most pious Catholic country in Western Europe and known for their piety. And 20 years later, for reasons which don't have a great deal to do with religious conviction, they're going through this cataclysm. A few years later, you know, another 20 years, and the fabric of Catholicism is being destroyed. And I think Wyatt fascinates me, in that sense, because he straddles an old world and a new in terms of his court affiliations. And in terms of his religious ones, he seems to have been quite a convinced Evangelical. But he's very, he's very secular also. When he writes to his son, there's, there's not very much, there's only the merest sort of, kind of conventional nods at religion, which suggests, again, that he wasn't, you know, kind of one of the new hot gospeling kind of Protestants, either, and that kind of interests me.

Seán
Yeah, yeah, there's something about these poems that seems quite surprisingly secular. I remember, when I read this at university, it was after a long term of medieval poetry in which I had to kind of marshall an armory of biblical knowledge to kind of access what was going on in these poems. And then when we arrived at Wyatt, I felt a sort of modernity in them, because, because they seem so secular, which is strange, considering the world that they came out of.

This poem seems to me, in a way that many of Wyatt's poems do, to be about change or changeableness. You know, here he starts off with various visions of different times. You know, it encapsulates a lot in this poem. We have kind of an aftermath. Then we have this one special moment, and then we have this, this phrase that I got stuck on the first time I read this poem, which is her right “to vse new fangilnes.” Which again points towards, not necessarily fickle, fickleness, but a changed method.

You know, these characters seem like people who have methods and designs on each other. You know, they seem deliberate in the way that they go about conducting an affair. Which I think kind of leads into the sexiness of the poem: they know what they're doing.

In the second stanza, what struck me this time when you were reading it was the—the erotics of the poem seem surprising to me in that second stanza, because it is the woman that catches the speaker, and “When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall, / And she me caught in her armes long and small.” That idea, originally, we have an image of a man as predator, or as potential predator, these wild animals that might be, put themselves in danger to come near him. And then in the second stanza, he is happy to be caught. You know, there is a sense of abandoning one version of a character and one kind of gender relation in that stanza. Do you think that's true?

Kit
Yeah, I think so. The first stanza casts the speaker as huntsman. And I think the reason we think of deer is perhaps because of who so is to hunt. And, you know, we think of him as the, kind of the huntsman of that poem. He's also sort of self-deprecating about his abilities, and when he actually catches up to the deer then she is marked out, not, as not for his use.

I was just thinking, as we were saying, how secular he is, but he's also an interpreter of the Psalms, and then they're very, very sophisticated interpretations. I think he's, yeah, he's, he's an innovator. I think that the idea of change is not something that's just happening around him. It's something that he is doing, both in, you know, in all the new things that he brings into English poetry, but here as well. That change between the huntsman of the first stanza, and then he, suddenly, he is sort of enmeshed in a net, it's one of the, one of the changes. And yeah, nothing is stable in this world, everything is transitory and mutable.

Seán
Yeah, yeah, mutable seems, seems to be the word that encapsulates so much about this poem. You know, when I was reading this—and I should say the version that you read from there was kept in its original spelling. And to me, that adds a sort of richness that is lost when it's glossed into modern spelling. Why did you send us the original version?

Kit
Yeah, for precisely that reason. I don’t think—he's not quite modern, and most anthologists make a decision, right, about when, when to start modernizing. And sometimes it happens from after Chaucer, you know, after sort of Middle English. Sometimes it happens with Shakespeare, sometimes it happens with Milton. But I think even, well, almost well into the 18th century, modernization often takes something away, some kind of texture from writing of all kinds. And I think, you know, even a text like the one I sent you has punctuation added. There's no punctuation in these poems as they're written in the manuscripts. And that, that brings with it a kind of, an even more dizzying kind of range of meaning, because the only resource for pause, for, you know, kind of breaking, is the line break itself. There's no internal punctuation at all. The capitalization is, is wild (They laugh) and sparse, you know? That's something I'm really, really interested in, is the line and the line break, as poetry’s really, poetry’s really chief resource. That's what poetry is, you know.

Seán
In some ways, putting it into modern spelling, and even punctuating it, is kind of putting manners onto a poem that is so much livelier without those impositions.
One of the things that I love about this poem is the kind of quite startling insistence on truth, which seems strange, almost, but you know, when you get to the start of the third stanza—and I think even the stresses here are interesting—there “was no dreme: I lay brode waking.” You know, even the “I lay brode waking,” you have to kind of stress every bit of that. So it's pulling your attention to the fact that this is not made up. It's not a, it's not a facet of the imagination. Why do you think that's so important to Wyatt or to this poem?

Kit
I think because, I mean, he, he lived in a world which was continually being pulled between kind of truth and necessity. I think we're still very much in the world of the court which is haunted by the specter of flattery, “favel,” as, you know, the medieval, you know, the Middle English word is, and you have to do a certain amount of that. You know, you have to tell all these kind of politic untruths, but at the same time, you have to preserve yourself from being thought of as a flatterer. I mean, Wyatt was known, even among people who are very proficient at playing this game, as someone who was eloquent, who was a brilliant speaker, and yet he failed at almost every juncture. He failed in his diplomatic missions. Or we can think of him as a great success as well. I mean somebody, somebody else who, who was perhaps less adept at verbal games would probably have, have gone to the scaffold. Which he didn't. So.

Seán
I mean, yeah, it's language and rhetoric as, as a life or death situation sometimes in that instance.

Kit
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's about, you know, what is truth? You know, truth is words. You know, it's hot air, as Falstaff might have said, you know. So the truth is articulated in the same words as flattery. Words are all we've got, which is sort of the predicament of the poet.

Seán
Yeah, “words alone are certain good,” or not, as the case may be. Kit, all right. Thank you so much for talking with me.

Kit
Thank you so much, Sean. It's been a great pleasure and great privilege. Thank you.

Seán
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt

Kit’s poem "bodyservant," from his book Bodyservant, published in 2018, was aired with permission from Shearsman Books.

Thomas Wyatt’s poem "They fle from me" is in the public domain.

Coming up next week, poet Martina Evans weighs in on the power of a cat and why Frank O’ Hara’s poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” inspired some of her work.

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The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.

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