We talked to Rachael Boast about the Book of Job, the attention on her first collection, and the hugeness of the universe. Sidereal, Boast's first collection, has won the Forward Prize for best first collection, shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection prize, and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
Your
collection 'Sidereal' is infused with themes of astronomy and the
universe. What techniques do you use to go about packing the
hugeness
of a theme like the universe into such neat, clean
poems?
The first technique I’d employ is to look down the wrong end of a telescope. If that doesn’t do it, the next technique, if it can be called that, is to think as little as possible about what I’m doing. Trusting the work is the starting point. Trust can be considered as much a poetic technique as the detailed meticulous work of getting the poem to come right. I trust that my mind is more expansive then I realise. Poetry is, among other things, an exercise in accessing what we don’t know we know; in training the mind to think clearly; in cleansing perception. Blake, for instance, experienced the hugeness of the universe in every small thing, and we could take that as including every event, every thought, every cell in fact. So perhaps, as they say, we are all made of stars, or at least the dust of stars. Overall, this philosophic stance, it would seem to me, is a prerequisite to any subsequent literary technique. When poems seem clean and neat, that’s because there’s been enough preparation. The rest is a matter of diligent work – the plough turned round.
Yours
is the only collection long listed for The Guardian’s first book
award, and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011. Do you
believe
that prizes like these help to give poetry more of a
voice in the
mainstream?
Certainly, but more so with The Guardian First Book Award, as that’s not solely a poetry list. When a book of poetry makes it onto that, it’s more noticeable and poses the question of why that doesn’t happen more often. However,I’m not sure how many people who don’t already keep track of these things would know about them. It helps that we have a paper like The Guardian on-board, especially for its Saturday Review, which almost always has a poetry book review, a poem, and sometimes a poet’s life in writing – and that’s without mentioning it’s substantial on-line presence. None of the other main papers even approach that level of literary coverage. A village newsletter has more poetry in it than many papers do. And that hasn’t always been the case. A friend has been trawling through Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, established in 1752. He’s told me that there’s a poem in almost every issue (including, later on, poems by Coleridge et al.), and it was only a four-page paper.
I
read in a previous interview that you wrote the collection alongside
your thesis - an exploration of the relevance of the Book of Job
to
contemporary poetry. How did writing your thesis impact on the
poems
in the book, and vice versa? Did you want to avoid or
encourage a
thematic overlap?
That overlap couldn’t be helped. The choice of theme grew out of my attitude to poetry, so in fact the poetry impacted on the thesis. Subsequently, the more I studied the thematic import of Job, and its antecedents, the greater the impact of those studies on the poems. In general, writing the thesis served as a means of consolidating thoughts on practice – and indeed, technique – and, being an exercise in endurance, as PhD’s inevitably are, proved useful in helping me to be realistic about how much work poetry requires. Once I’d accepted this, there was a new momentum that allowed me to go the extra mile for the sake of making what was to become Sidereal do justice to a long period of apprenticeship. The main theme of the thesis was proper maturation of the work; or, poetically put, the plough turned round – over and over again. So, yes, the overlap seemed quite natural.
Your
class with the Poetry School aims to place students’ work within
the context of a living tradition. How important do you believe
an
understanding of the poetry that came before and an
understanding of
the canon to be?
It’s a matter of respect to make an effort to understand what’s gone before. And some values don’t change. For example, the turning plough image is as apt as it is ancient, referring of course to versus. It’s always been known that what we sow we reap. It’s worth thinking of the canon in this way: what’s included in the canon is included there because it is great work – with the emphasis on work (although the reasons for undue omissions is another question). Poetry has its roots in the tradition of instructive literature; in the wisdom tradition. At the moment, many of society’s values are opposed to those of poetry. Quick fixes, gratification, rapidity – these are no use unless they’re integrated into a system of conservation and moderation. The function of poetry in society is an important one, a directing and a balancing one. Joseph Brodsky was always keen to highlight how poetry is ‘synonymous with economy’. In his essay, ‘How to Read a Book’, from On Grief and Reason, he writes, ‘being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation’. Verbosity, a form of wastefulness, becomes the opposite of economy. We live in an increasingly wasteful society. If we agree with Brodsky, just think how good poems can provide an antidote to wastefulness; in which case we have a social, and indeed ecological, responsibility to deepen our practice. If you place your work within the context of a living tradition that not only validates it, but encourages diligence – and a certain amount of digging deep in the field of human concerns.
Photograph by Jonathan Boast
