Alyson Hallett

Alyson Hallett is a poet who lives in Falmouth. Her latest book, Six Days in Iceland, contains a mixture of poetry, photography and scientific text. This collaborative enterprise came about during a year-long Artist's Residency in the University of Exeter's Geography Department (funded by the Leverhulme Trust), when Alyson participated in a field trip to Iceland with a Professor of physical geography and a group of second year students. Alyson has also written short stories, and drama for Radio 4 and Sky Television. Her international poetry-as-public-art project - The Migration Habits of Stones - has so far involved siting stones with words carved into them in the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia. Alyson finished a practice-based PhD in 2010 and she is currently working as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter. 

Six Days in Iceland combines poetry, photography and scientific writing, can you tell us a bit about what inspired this fascinating collaborative project?

I was working as poet-In-residence at the University of Exeter's Geography Department In Cornwall. The residency was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, an award that is specifically designed to place artists In university departments that don't usually have creative residencies. I loved every second of it and felt very at home there. As part of the residency I was able to go on a field trip, and chose to go to Iceland with the physical geographer Professor Chris Caseldine and a group of second year students. I'd never been to Iceland before, and I was particularly keen to go on a trip with people who were going to be investigating the more scientific aspects of landscape.

I'd already encountered some amazing things about Iceland through the work of the North American artist Roni Horn, but nothing really prepares you for the immensity of it, the endlessness, the whiteness and the blackness. So much space it makes you reconsider what the word space might mean. Makes you recalibrate your place in among that space.

The poems just came. From the moment of seeing a large lump of lava In the hotel near Heathrow Airport, to sighting my first glacier. One after the other, they just kept on coming. I love it when that happens. When there's no effort. When the poems come calling and you have to get them down as quickly as you can.

It was really significant travelling with geographers - and I learned a lot through being with them. Each night, the students gave presentations on different aspects of Iceland's geography, geology and culture. I joined in with their explorations and experiments. I asked a lot of questions, and some of them were rather bemused by the presence of a poet on the field trip. I was an anomaly. This in itself led to some great discussions and a feeling of something Important happening, although at the time we might not have been able to say exactly what that was.

The book was Chris Caseldine's Idea. I gave him my poems. He looked at my photos and the photos of Sam Inglis and then said let's make a book. We'd planned a lot of things before the residency began, but a book wasn't on the agenda. I leapt at the suggestion - in many ways the book encapsulates what the residency was all about. It is polyphonic in the sense that it allows poetry, science and images to occupy the same space, to enter Into dialogue with one another, to be inclusive rather than being seen as diametrically opposed.

I could write about this forever - it's a fairly recent phenomenon to consider science and art as indecent bedfellows. A lot of work is being done now to bridge the divide, but there's still a long way to go. I find working with scientists deeply fulfilling - more often than not they are passionate about their field of study. The emphasis is upon experimentation rather than theorisation, and they are usually very skilled In collaborating with one another. In addition to this I found that the members of the geography department were unbelievably generous in welcoming me into their world. Professor Catherine Brace in particular, without whom the residency would never have happened.

You’re obviously very inspired by the landscape, how does your poetry happen, how do ideas for your poems come to you?

I hear something. A few words, a line. And then I get myself to a piece of paper, write down what I've heard and see what follows. In this sense it's not really an idea for a poem, it's something more visceral and unknown than that. I'm sent a little message from the nerve centre or heart centre or wherever it is that sends out messages - and then I see where it takes me. A little bit like the artist Paul Klee, only I'm taking some words for a walk instead of a line.

Walking is really important - as important as listening probably. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva said "I am not a poet, I’m a pedestrian." I'm inclined to agree with her. Sometimes I'm composing a poem as I'm walking - having to learn it by heart because I haven't got any pens or paper on me at the time.

Place, or landscape, is vital to my work and informs everything I do. Perhaps the land is a co-author - it was Chesterton who said that language comes from the fields and the seas, not from dictionaries and libraries.

I'm stitched into the landscape, and the landscape is stitched into me.

When you are working on refining poems into a collection, how do you go about that, and do you have a working routine at that stage? What do you look for in a selection of poems to link them together? Was this more difficult in the case of this book?

Six Days In Iceland happened all at once. I wrote the poems during the field trip and the obvious connector was place and being in that place. It was easy to draw them together when I was editing them into a book. The ones that didn't fit just fell away.

I'm a little nervous of there having to be a theme that links a selection of poems together though. With my first book, The Stone Library, I selected the best poems I'd written over five or six years. You get a feeling when you're putting them together. It's like composing a piece of music. You sense the fluency, which poems are happy to sit next to one another and the ones that won't fit no matter how much you want them to. I think the most important thing is not to force anything - if there's a clear linking theme then great, go with it. If there isn't one that's also great - one day you'll look at your poems and there will be a need or a desire to create a body of work. The word 'body' is really relevant I think - a body of work - you get the sense of building that body, composing something that feels whole.

I always get other people to read my work too - this is an innvaluable part of the process - often my own eyes are so close to the poems that I can't see what's going on.

Routine? What's that?

Do you have any ‘top tips’ for poets who are just starting out?

Go for it. Enjoy it. Make as many mistakes as is humanly possible. Keep going. Always keep going. Don't be afraid of filling up the recycling bin with poems that don't work, or versions of poems. Write and re-write.

I guess I'd put listening above most other things - listening to yourself, the white page, those whispers on the margin that catch you unawares. Give them your full attention, follow them and see where they take you.

And then you'll need a sense of humour and good friends for the long journey ahead. One poetry journal rejected my work fifteen times before finally accepting a poem. I suppose we call that perseverance.

How do you feel about poetry readings? Are there things organisers could do to make them a better experience for poets?

I love giving readings. The poems come to life in a different way. If things go well, there's always a moment of magic when the words take off and you feel the audience flying with them. Seamus Heaney once said that music prepares the silence for poetry to be spoken into. I like that. I've given readings with musicians, and it's great for the audience as well as the reader to be able to intersperse the one with the other.

The best thing that organisers can do for poets Is to pay them well, host the event well and make sure that plenty of advertising is done beforehand.

Do you feel that poetry in the UK is thriving, or do you find that it doesn’t have enough coverage?

Both. Poetry is thriving - there are some great poets around and much more poetry is being translated now which really makes a difference. But coverage is fairly minimal - unless there's a scandal of course - but I'm not sure that this is the most important thing. I'm more interested in how poetry and poets are valued in this country - our work makes a difference and I'd like that to be recognised more widely. On the whole most people only turn to poetry when there's a significant moment in their lives - a death, a birth, a wedding - and so maybe we need to consider how all of the less momentous moments of our lives are important too.

Is there a particular poet whose work has inspired you?

Around twelve years ago, after giving a reading, I met a man from New York in the kitchen of a grand country house in Somerset. After a long conversation, he suggested I might like the work of Jack Gilbert. I'd never heard of Gilbert, but dutifully went off and bought one of his books, The Great Fires. I haven't looked back. Such raw honesty. No tricks. A man who has dared to plunge into the depths of experience and bring back whatever he finds. Each time I read his work he brings me back to the centre. Back to the real task of writing good poems. Back to the need to search for whatever it is I am really trying to say.

The work of Denise Levertov has also been consistently inspiring.

At Cyprus Well we’re always watching the developments in digital publishing – and asking all our interviewees about it. How do you view these developments?

I think the developments are really exciting. I just wish I had more time to keep up with them!
 

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M.R. Hall The Disappeared

 John Haynes and You (courtesy Seren Books)