The Cocoon will be hosting a series of guest posts by philosophers who write fiction or poetry. The aim of this series of guest posts will be to explore how we can express philosophical ideas in formats that go beyond the standard academic article or monograph. By looking at the work of philosophers who do this, the hope is also to demonstrate that philosophy is much bigger and broader than narrow norms of professionalization suggest. We will feature blogposts by established academics, as well as graduate students and academics outside of the tenure track. Our first guest post is in the form of an interview, and features Sophie-Grace Chappell (Professor of Philosophy at Open University), who tells us about her poetry.
How long have you been writing poetry and fiction and other non-philosophical writing?
Longer than I’ve been writing philosophy. The first philosophy I tried to write was A Theory Of Everything, a complete metaphysics, a catalogue of all existents, when I was about 9. But that lasted about three pages, and it was a one-off, because I went to the town library and discovered that Aquinas had beaten me to it; most annoying. And before that I had already written lots of non-philosophy.
I had various ambitions as a small child, including joining the “clever men at Oxford” that Mr Toad compares himself to in The Wind in the Willows. Specifically, I wanted to be Oxford Professor of Greek. I didn’t start wanting, intermittently, to be a Philosophy professor till I was about 16. And even when I did encounter the formal study of philosophy, at Oxford in 1984, one of my first main objections to it as a subject was that it wasn’t creative—it was about criticising, not making; it was pulling things apart, not putting them together. As an undergraduate I didn’t like that about philosophy; but then, I didn’t like it about lit crit either. It took me a long time to see, first, how criticising things is valuable too, and secondly, how, anyway, writing philosophy can be creative. And literary criticism as well.
Whatever else changed, I always wanted to be a writer. So, from the beginning, I wrote. From about seven onwards, when I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there was lots of sub-Tolkien stuff, both prose and verse, and I invented maps and languages like Tolkien too. My made-up languages were probably better than my made-up worlds. But surely this is one of the main roots of being a writer—parallel in its way to one root of being a musician, I suppose. You read things and you think “That’s marvellous, could I do that? Or anything like it?”
Probably it was partly Tolkien’s fault, and partly the Lake District’s, that as an adolescent trying to write poems I got stuck on the Romantics, all cloud-capped crags and babbling becks and trumpeting torrents. I was, in James Stephen’s wonderful phrase, bleating articulate monotony. I needed, of course, to do something more than mere imitation. And I couldn’t find a voice of my own that wasn’t sub-Wordsworth or, worse, sub-Tennyson or sub-Tolkien.
When I was in the sixth form, so between 16 and 18, three things unstuck me. One was Mel Shewan, an English teacher at school whose persona was Geordie working-class down-to-earthness. Via Dylan Thomas, and William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes, and R.S.Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, and Coleridge and Keats and Shakespeare and Yeats and, yes, even old Wordsworth and Tennyson, Mel Shewan helped us see that poetry is neither swords-and-sorcery, nor a stuck-up fop in a floppy shirt swooning over a snowdrop. It’s elemental, it comes from the dark places within you, from the cellars or Minotaur-labyrinths of the psyche, from the gut. But it’s also real, and this-worldly.
The second thing was the Mersey Beat poet Steve Turner, whose sharp, witty, hip, up-to-date, and (again) down-to-earth free verse showed me that poetry can be completely contemporary, unpretentious, straight-talking, streetwise—and funny, too. (I love comic verse, and I think in general it’s not taken seriously enough. The best comic poets are never just comic: Michael Rosen, Wendy Cope, Hilaire Belloc, Betjeman, Kipling, Pope.)
And the third was seeing Tony Harrison’s Oresteia at the National Theatre with my parents—my 19th birthday treat in November 1983. That was one of the two greatest theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. (The other was the English Shakespeare Company in Southampton in 1989, all the history plays, Richard II to Richard III in a single day.) Harrison’s Aeschylus was a revelation to me of what a translation from the Greek can be. Again, it’s elemental, it’s verse from the gut, studiedly proletarian, very psychically immediate and powerful. And about as far from Gilbert Murray, God help us, as it’s possible to be.
I’ve been writing poetry, on and off, ever since. I haven’t really kept up other kinds of non-philosophical writing. There’s been a little writing about mountaineering, but only the odd bit, and what I wrote when for example I described this climb was really a prose-poem. If that doesn’t sound too pretentious. All I mean is that I wrote to get it across what it felt like to be there, and to climb that; like most things I write, the narrative subserves the feel, not the other way round.
I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist; not sure why, perhaps because of this prioritising of feel over narrative. When you write a novel you show, not say, in the sense that you pare down the description of feeling to let it emerge from the story. And when you write a film script you keep going past where a novelist stops paring down and pare down even further, to make space for the actors and the camera-work to fill back in. It’s not like that with poems; with poems, essentially it’s all there on the page. Poems come naturally to me. Novels don’t, and I imagine a screen-play would still less, if I ever tried to write one.
Maybe it’s also a lack of long-distance stamina. Apart from the translations, my poems tend to be short; if I write something long, it’s probably a philosophy book. On the rare occasions when I’ve tried to write a novel myself, what I write never stands up even to my own scrutiny; I reread and I think “No, people don’t talk like that or act like that; your take was so naïve, and I’m not sure what’s changed since you wrote this, but somehow, now, you know better than that.”
Or maybe it’s because, with a few exceptions (Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, A.S.Byatt, Evelyn Waugh, John Updike, E.M.Forster), I don’t myself much enjoy “the modern novel”. I love Dickens and George Eliot and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo and Moby Dick, but most things after that just bore me. Also some very canonical novels, in particular those of Hardy and Lawrence, I actively detest. It’s ideological, I’m afraid: I think both Hardy and Lawrence, in their very different ways, had quite preposterous world-views. And their novels are nothing without their world-views. One would, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, need a heart of stone to read the dénouement of Jude the Obscure without roaring with laughter. Which at least beats Sons and Lovers, where there’s not a laugh to be had in all its 350 pages of portentous, lugubrious, tortuous, ill-digested adolescent angst. Can’t be doing with it.
Also—the feel/ narrative contrast again—the things in modern novels that I do enjoy are very often the lyrical set-pieces: Moby Dick is I think the greatest American novel for just this reason, for Melville’s fantastic set-pieces. But then when I read the purple passages I’m going “Why not take away all this plot-flannelling, all this he-said-she-said yada-yada, all the tedious logistics of getting X and Y from A to B as the plot boringly requires, and just cut to the chase already? But you know, when you get to the chase, the fact that it’s typeset as prose is merely accidental: the chase is actually a piece of poetry.”
What have you written?
About 150 short poems, some very short indeed, nearly all of them less than 25 lines long. A handful of translations of lyric poems by authors like Catullus—one of my first loves—and Horace—whom I think you get to love as you get older, he’s so saturnine, so cynical, so funny, so worldly, and so sad.
On a much larger scale, I’ve written translations of the Oresteia and of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and of Aeneid Book One. I suppose the Oresteia is my most substantial achievement as a poet; it was an awesome and humbling experience to live with it for about three years, and I was genuinely sad to complete it. But I have replacements. In fact I’m now engaged in two long-term translation projects at once—the Iliad and the Divina Commedia. It’s a great way to spend the evening. Certainly beats watching TV. Or reading Sons and Lovers.
What are the venues where you’ve published it? Do you have links?
In the orthodox Faber & Faber sense, I barely have published. Philosophy is hard enough to get published, God knows, but poetry is much harder. I’ve been trying for 30 years to get a collection out, and I’ve only just succeeded—I’ll be signing a contract shortly with Ellipsis Imprints, a small press based in Durham, for a collection of about 65 poems called Songs For Winter Rain. Most of my stuff is already on the internet, though, at https://www.academia.edu/10435047/Poems . And here for all the translations I’ve done—quite a lot of them actually: https://open.academia.edu/Sophiegrace/translations-of-classical-texts .
What is the relationship between your poetry and your philosophical work? Is there any connection?
As I said in another interview recently, “Everything I do is connected to everything else.” See next answer…
What makes you write a poem?
I think there are four basic reasons to write poetry. First, to create an art-work, an aesthetic object. You want to make something hard, crystalline, resistant, other; something itself, something with a life of its own, something with inscape, as Hopkins would say. And something beautiful, and something permanent: exegi monumentum aere perennius, said Horace, and indeed his work has outlasted bronze. Something that will outlive you. An object that is out there; an objective object. Something that is both very clear—the audience can see at once what it is, what it says—and also in some ways mysterious or opaque: you can’t see everything that’s there in it at a first look, maybe not even at a hundred-and-first look. It’s an icon, it intrigues you, it draws you back, you can’t stop thinking about it. In all their very different mediums, the best art-works are like that, I think: rich and strange, both clear and obscure at once, both readily available and strangely self-contained. Each in its unrepeatable way adds something to our reality. And a poet wants to make—another one of those. Only different from every other one that’s ever been made before.
Secondly, a poet wants to “limn the contours of reality”, in Quine’s phrase: to explore what’s actually out there, how things really are; to tell the truth. Philosophers and scientists do this too; all three are trying to photograph the same reality; but with different filters on their lenses. (That’s why I’ve never bought the philosophy-will-clip-an-angel’s-wings line. It’s not that philosophy and poetry aren’t in competition because they’re not in the same business. In a deep sense I think they are in the same business, especially in exploring our experience of value. But that’s all right, because they go at it in quite different ways.)
Thirdly, it’s to make an epiphany about an epiphany. You experience something wonderful or great or terrible, and you want to make that experience available to others, to get them to see the thing that you experienced, not first-hand but through the medium of art.
Fourthly, and more generally, you do it to memorialise, to preserve, to express gratitude for good things and to give some shape and dignity and perspective to sufferings and to bad things.
There may be other reasons too sometimes, but certainly these four.
How does it happen when you write one?
As Stephen Fry rightly says somewhere, poems aren’t made out of feelings. They’re made out of words. So you can have all the lyrical emotion in the world and you won’t get a poem until you find an outlet for the feelings: in words.
So there’s a form-content gap to close. You have the emotion or the experience or whatever, but you need the words, and the technical skill, and the knowledge of the tradition, of what’s already out there, to embody it. So I write down scraps and phrases that come to me, and I read a lot of poetry myself, and I look carefully at the technique of poets whom I love and admire: what’s their rhyme-scheme, what metres do they use, how do they unite sound and sense, form and content? And then one day it turns out that I can use that phrase to express this, and doing it like that will be something new, something surprising, something that works, and that no one has ever done before. And once you have a way in—a riff or a hook, as musicians say—you build the rest of the poem around that hook.
You kind of creep up on it, stealthily closing down the form-content gap, bit by bit. And then one day, perhaps quite suddenly, you see it, or you hit on it, maybe without exactly meaning to. You come up with something and you look at it and you slowly realise, ex post facto, the reasons why your subconscious gave you that; there is aesthetic luck involved, no doubt about it. You’re trying, like I said above, to make a thing, an art-work, and ideally it will be something quite unlike anything that else that has ever existed. You can’t have a plan for doing that; if you did have a plan, the plan would be doing it. You move in the dark, and you see where you get to.
That’s what it’s like to write a poem, for me anyway. Translation is different, of course, and in one way easier: you’re given the content, you just have to find the form. Translation is a wonderful exercise, a real privilege, and possibly a sacrilege. It’s about trying to do to your readers in English what the poem does to you in the original language. (If only one could translate English poems into English; but there, of course, at any rate since Chaucer, there is something of a barrier.) Translation is an act of homage, at least when I do it. It’s not trying to replace Homer or whoever, but to convey what he is to me. An epiphany of an epiphany again.
Who are your influences?
To call them my influences would make it sound like I’m claiming they’re audible in the way I write myself. That would be lovely, but it would also be either an admission of derivativeness in the bad case, or a pretty ambitious claim in the good case. But I can speak unproblematically of my favourite poets, the ones I dwell on and take as my masters. And I’ve already named most of them. I’m very traditional and canonical. In English, Shakespeare is absolutely central for me, and that other great master of the monosyllable, Yeats. Donne and Herbert and Keats and Rossetti and Hopkins and Dylan Thomas and Auden and Eliot and Larkin and Hughes and Harrison and Heaney. In Greek, Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Sappho. In Latin, Vergil and Horace. Then Dante and Rilke and Goethe.
So yes, I’m very traditional and canonical. But I’m also very aware that poetry is deeply democratic, perhaps more so than novels or play-writing because of the relatively low time-cost involved in writing a short lyric. Lots and lots of people write quite wonderful poems, always have and always will; even obscure poets like me. Google “Note” by Linnet Drury, which my daughter Miriam sent me recently. (It’s here, if you’re on Instagram.) Linnet is 17. She’s a schoolgirl in Oxford. “Note” is the best lockdown poem I’ve yet seen.
Who would you like to read you?
Oh, everybody. And not just everybody who already reads poetry. Everybody everybody. The telos of creative writing, of any writing, is to be read. And also, I’d like to be one of those rare authors who wins readers over to poetry. A lot of people, perhaps the majority, need winning over: they are as resistant to poetry as I am to the modern novel. They say things like “If you want to say this, why not just say it? Why does it have to be all dolled up in rhyme and metre?” Which is like saying “If Darcey Bussell wants to get across the stage, why can’t she just walk across the stage, in flats and slacks and a mackintosh? Why the tutu and the spins in the air?” Poetry is to prose as dance is to walking—unless of course the prose is poetical too, as the best prose is. To think of poetry as an amalgam of function and decoration is absolutely wrong. If you accept the distinction between them at all, and you shouldn’t, the decoration is the function.
Which poem are you proudest of writing?
Ha! The one I wrote last. When you write a poem it’s like laying an egg: you just sit there and gloat over it. At least you do if you think it’s any good.
Or maybe I should have said “the one I’ll write next”. I certainly don’t feel that I’m running out. On the contrary, I’ve barely started. There’s a lot to say, and I’m reasonably confident, these days, that I have the technical proficiency to say it, provided I concentrate and make space and stillness in which to write things, without distractions and noises off. And I’m very lucky, because most of the distractions I have to get past are no one’s fault but my own, like Twitter.
I don’t have one single favourite poem of my own, any more than I have a single favourite poem by any of my favourite poets. But there are about ten or fifteen that I’m particularly proud of, so they were the first to get picked for Songs For Winter Rain. The Box, Before An Icon, Song For Winter Rain, Two Pets, Elephants, Music Recalled, Vigil Of Easter, Spring Cleaning, some of the lyric translations. I’m very glad I wrote those, and pretty sure that each of them, in its no doubt small way, adds something to the world that couldn’t be there otherwise.
How do you balance these activities and your professional life?
I am very lucky, especially during this lockdown; my time is largely mine to command. The way a day usually goes at the moment is, I start by fussing over emails and work admin; then I read for two or three hours (I’m currently reading Plato’s Cratylus and Plotinus, Enneads 3 and Pierre Hadot, Exercices Spirituels); then I write some philosophy; then, early evening, I translate 5 lines of the Iliad (right now I’m near the end of Book 8) and 6 or 9 lines of Dante (right now I’m in the middle of Canto 12 of the Inferno). If I read poetry, it’s after that, late in the evening; though sometimes I read poetry first thing in the morning, in bed.
On the days when a poem, an actual new poem of my own, is on the go—which happens about ten times a year—I drop everything else until I’ve nailed it, or got as close as I can to nailing it.
A life of reading, thinking, and (if I get round to it) writing. It’s pretty much what I hoped for as a child, only, like I say, it’s philosophy and poetry rather than classics and poetry as I imagined then. I’m a lucky so and so, no doubt about it.
Go on. Read us one of your poems.
All right, then. This is The Box. Obviously, this is about the difference between living by vision and living by routine, and how hard it is to do the first, and how much we lose by doing the second.
Less obviously, perhaps: either it actually is a folk-tale from somewhere, or it really should be—maybe I’m thinking of the fortune-telling in wells and mirrors in Cold Mountain—that if you line up mirrors opposite each other, you will see your one true love away down the end of the infinite regress of mirrors in mirrors. That set me to thinking about the pursuit of the beloved in the mirror, the beloved who always flees and is never to be caught. And that came to seem to me an image of a life of empty, hopeless longing. And of the ways you might try and kill that longing, and of what would be left of you then if you succeeded, or near succeeded. And what it all came to, was this.
The Box
My love met me within a darkened wood
where no light was: I knew her by her hand:
but my grip slipped, her presence vanished, and
till dripping dawn I waited where I stood.
I saw my love upon a city street,
amid a thousand others gave her chase:
I found her longed-for look in many a face,
ten-score half-echoes, but not one complete.
I woke and washed and worried at my error,
a looking-glass behind me and before me;
ninety-nine times repeated there I saw me-
and then her image in the hundredth mirror.
But my quest and her trail alike turned cold.
I've put my memories of her in a box
to hide inside a drawerful of socks
and finger through when all grows stale and old,
and I have lost the living patterns of
her stance, her grace, her glance so once adored;
have settled for sure less not dubious more,
have lived as if I was not made for love.
When I began so filled with venturous fire
how comes my world to dust and grit and sweat?
Is real-but-paltry really all we get?
How can we live so wide of heart's desire?
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