‘You don’t want to land it’: A Conversation with Declan Ryan
by Matilda Sykes
I first met Declan in Oxford, where he was the tutor of a residential poetry course. I’d read Crisis Actor a few weeks beforehand, then continued to re-read it. I liked, and envied, his ability to present the necessary artifice of poetic language within such a natural, easy register. It was a pleasure, then, to discover the same tendencies in Declan himself. There is, I think, a distinct texture and rhythm to Declan’s phraseology, a very particular DNA. In this conversation, as in all our conversations, I find the way he says things as compelling as the things he actually says. We caught up in a nicely gloomy recess of The Dove, Hammersmith — the most ‘old-man friendly’ pub I could think of in the area — and talked about line-endings, losers, dignity, the valorisation of pain, and the drive toward direct speech.
Why Crisis Actor as a title? Was it the favourite poem?
I actually had the title before I wrote the poem. I’d been sort of faffing for a long time, the book hadn’t quite cohered, and I had three quarters or five eighths of it. I knew I needed a few other bits to make it a coherent thing. I came across the title, the phrase, somewhere. You know, these weird American conspiracies. I thought the phrase was interesting – I liked that it was an ugly thing. I’d been reading quite a lot of [Frederick] Seidel, and he’s often got these quite confronting titles, so I thought that might work nicely as a book title. You don’t want to over-labour it, but I liked the idea of it being something that spoke to the ugliness of the moment in which the thing is being done — because the poems aren’t ever particularly political or of the moment in that sense, I thought maybe the title could be. In some ways it summed up this weird post-truth era. So, I liked that, but, usefully, for my purposes, it had two other nice strands; it was the first way I could see any coherence between the boxing and the non-boxing ones. It felt like a bridge between them. They’re moments of crisis in a lot of ways, and boxers themselves are kind of actors in a crisis. It felt like a hopefully not too on the nose way of doing that.
And then for ages I’d wanted to write an elegy for [Ian] Hamilton, even though I’d never met him. So a weird sort of elegy I suppose. I found a couple of things that helped me in with that; one was getting the title [‘Crisis Actor’] in for that poem. I thought the title would work quite nicely for that poem because I’d wanted to use some of the interviews that I’d done for the PhD. That idea from something Alan Jenkins said, ‘You were able to cope with crises — not his own so much’ , that’s always really stuck with me, so I thought that could also be a bridge. And then I remembered that Alun Lewis poem to Edward Thomas, that idea of the poem being an elegy but an elegy to someone you don’t know, and so that became the title for the Hamilton poem. And then I thought that if I’m using that line, I could just use prose, direct bits of the interviews, which I’d wanted to do for ages, for years, in writing a poem about him, but I hadn’t been able to find a way in. So, I think that once I had that — the title and the poem — I could see it then as a shape, rather than just a word document.
What was the chronology? Did the boxing poems come before or after the personal poems, or was it looser than that?
The boxing ones came together quite quickly, when I was doing the PhD. A lot of this stuff’s fairly old. First year of the PhD I wrote this prose poem — just prose really — about boxing and boxers. It wasn’t something I thought would necessarily be anything, but it had this weaving in of the more personal: little anecdotes and stories about fighters and then more personal stuff. It couldn’t quite cohere, but I showed it to [Andrew] Motion who was still about at Royal Holloway at the time. He suggested lineating the more interesting bits, not getting hung up on a formal decision. Lineate them and see if they can live as poems.
So, I got three or four out of that. Then I wrote more than there is in the collection — another five or six — but some of them really were terrible. I can’t remember how many are in the book – there’s a couple that got euthanised. Yeah, a few died along the way. When they became a sequence of poems, the ordering principle was Joe Louis — there was a lot more of him. Him starting out unbeatable, his career going on, his fight with Max Schmeling in the thirties.
There was a poem which I took out which was him right at the end of his life in a wheelchair at ringside, this Las Vegas celebrity greeter. Sort of meant to be the chronology of boxing in that century through his life. But then I thought it doesn’t have to be just one person all through his life, this Johnny Appleseed, so I brought in the young undefeated-eds. But they probably got written within a few months of each other. They were kind of a block, and they’re some of the oldest in there. The more personal poems were done later on. Some really late on — there are about four or five poems that went in right at the end that were needed for balance. Final little lunge at the end to get it seen off.
Everyone’s been watching a lot of sports lately. Do certain sports feel more amenable to poetry?
In its simplest way, the reason I ended up writing about boxing was just to write a prose sequence out of interest. A little way in, I think I ended up writing about it more pleasingly in an essay, but I was trying to write I think about my dad a bit, and about this kind of idea of it being quite a stripped back, bare, exposed thing. It’s one of these places that one can be fully immersed in. There’s very little room for contemplation.
Do you think it lends itself to imagism more than other sports?
Maybe it’s just because it’s an individual sport. I love football. I think with the football there’s a bit more room to hide. You can be — God love him — Harry Kane, and you can go missing a bit in a team, in a way you can’t in an individual sport. You know, I haven’t written about tennis, it’s not really my sport, but there are analogies with that. You really are just on your own. Anything where you can’t hide, where you can’t slip into the crowd is quite interesting. And again, by its nature, it’s so stripped back, so unadorned, which lends itself to being a bit of a blank canvas onto which you can project other stuff. It sort of becomes elemental. But you don’t want to sentimentalise it too much. When you read interviews of boxers and look into it properly, they’re completely unsentimental — it’s just a job, just a fight.
I was really struck by your line-endings in the collection — they’re often off the cuff, designedly throwaway. I’m thinking of that ‘etc’ in ‘Bar Italia’, and ‘watch this cherry tree convulse into winter, what, / seventy times maybe’ in ‘Mayfly’. Louise Glück said that ‘The love of form is the love of endings’. How easily do your endings arrive?
There’s no hard and fast rule or anything. There’s a lot of drafts. With ‘Mayfly’, if I remember rightly, that came out of this weekend festival with Will Burns, who I mention in the back of the book, good mate of mine. He had this poem I really love, an elegy for the country musician Townes Van Zandt, and he uses a line from one of his songs, ‘Pancho and Lefty’: ‘out of kindness, I suppose’. And so he uses that in the elegy:
He played his last show
to a half-empty Borderline,
out of kindness I suppose.
I really love that gesture, that kind of re-thinking as it happens. You don’t want to be too definitive, you don’t want to land it. You want to leave it in the air. I wanted to end on a turn, rather than something declarative.
Not ending on a mic-drop.
Yeah, it’s really hard to pull that off. Often you want to get out while the going’s good. There’s that James Wright poem that people always trot out [‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota]: ‘I have wasted my life’. It’s very hard to pull off that really stand alone, detachable idiomatic thing. It’s so easy for that to feel phoney.
I also think that, now, because a lot of poetry is posted on Instagram or Twitter, more attention is paid to soundbites, tiny fragments, quotable phrases. Not in a Samuel Johnson aphoristic way —
– but it is an aphoristic instinct, isn’t it.
Yes. But often it’s what literally fits in a re-post, re-tweet for poetry journals and archives.
Yeah, there’s a bit of an instinct away from that. But I generally like in poems things that sound like they could be spoken, conversational. You hope it's memorable. That’s Gunn’s line, I think: ‘Poetry as Memorable Speech’. Something you could say out loud without having your perineum retract. It isn’t just poems, it’s anything with designs on it. If you feel they’ve got designs on you, like a hand in your pocket saying, ‘this is important’, ‘look at this’, it’s horrible, immediately. Just makes you cringe, as you would in life. Someone making a show of themselves and making a big fuss is embarrassing. I think embarrassment is really a lot of it. It's not that you’re not deadly serious about it, but you don’t want to look like a berk. I suppose the cringe reflex is in all that stuff. It’s all these things. You want it to feel a bit naturalistic, earned, genuine, all of that, but also you don’t want to ta-dah. It just doesn’t feel true to life.
Which is funny because, to my mind, the end of ‘Mayfly’ is, in a good way, a ta-dah moment.
The hope is to do something in between, to turn it a bit on a lathe without departing too much away from the conversational tone. This partly comes up in reviewing — I read a lot of stuff and obviously it’s often stuff you don’t end up writing about, for good reason. But when someone is doing a poem at you, there’s nothing worse.
When I met you on that poetry course there was a lot of reading go on. I remember some people enjoying it, and others really not. When called on, one poet said, ‘It’s like getting up to be shot’. It was a bit. I’ve been thinking about Denise Riley’s Clark lecture series in which she draws out the tension between the poetic career and the solitary circumstances of production. She refers to Rilke’s ‘works of art are of an infinite loneliness’.
It's a big problem.
Is the cringe/embarrassment aspect part of that?
Yeah of course it is. I think it’s a real problem. [Ian] Hamilton was talking about this in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and it’s only got worse. The idea that you’re expected to be simultaneously a Rilkean creature of contemplation and thought, and then at the same time a high-earning, go-getting achiever. The idea that it’s assumed now that you want any of that stuff — not really, I just want to be left alone. If I were any good at that I wouldn’t be doing this.
Do you feel you had to find a USP?
No, that’s awful. I think the hope is that you sort of fumble your way through to being genuine in some way. Mick Imlah wrote years ago about his first book that ‘your obsessions will reveal themselves over time’. You don’t go looking for it necessarily. When you sit down and take stock of what you’ve written you go ‘Oh right, well a lot of it’s about this sort of thing’ and it’s organic. I think the idea of trying to weaponise. . . well, anything, really, is awful. There’s this language of marketing that’s absolutely. . .
Do you like doing readings?
Not really, not really. I don’t hate it, but I would very happily live the rest of my life and never give another reading. I don’t write to read. I know exceptionally good poets who are also really good at, and really enjoy, reading. It’s not a cut and dried thing, but personally it doesn’t figure in my writing. I don’t think ‘This will go down well in a reading’. I write for the page. A lot of the things I write that I end up keeping I hope are in conversation with things I’ve read. I read in private and write in private. I don’t connect it to my being in the world. And what I understand about what Riley’s recently been talking about is the idea of the poet being an avatar of their work. What happens if you write a dramatic monologue? Do you have to be responsible for it, why can’t you just say things artfully that work in the poem?
Definitely. You introduced me to W.S. Graham, and there’s one line in ‘Thermal Stair’ that catches this idea: ‘the poet steers his life to maim himself somehow for the job’. Seamus Perry hates that from Graham, the idea you need to have a ‘really bad life’ to generate content. Instinctively I want to laugh Graham’s idea off, but I wonder what you think, considering your collection so often treats failure?
I mean that’s definitely one of those things I wasn’t conscious of. Originally ‘Losers’ was going to be the title, but then I partly used it for a pamphlet. Then there’s that epigraph ‘I prefer losers. They’re more self-aware.’ That was definitely something that was in my head a bit, the idea that . . . well — sweeping political statement, but — that one is trained particularly in the current moment to strive for these grand successes, that you’ve got to be brilliantly functional, thriving, operate brilliantly within the current system. I’m not really interested in that. Maybe sometimes it does shade into self-defeat, but I’m much more interested in the people who can’t necessarily thrive in what’s a pretty lousy system.
Poets?
Maybe. But I mean I’m thinking of someone like Denis Johnson, Tom Waits, those people who write about figures on the margins, the underdogs. There’s maybe a sense — probably ingrained from the Hamilton stuff, [Jonathan] Rendall again — that they’re out of place or out of time, aghast at what’s happening around them. Like: ‘this won’t do, why are people doing this’. You can be a bit of an outlier. I think the danger is that — again, talking about sentiment with the boxers — you can sentimentalise them. You know, ‘I’m this or that character’. But that’s not interesting either. You have a duty to not run open-mouthed towards everything while still trying to accept things as they are.
I remember reading an essay by Mark Greif which he talked about at the LRB, and he said, ‘The duty of the essayist is to assume that common knowledge is wrong and go from there’. And that’s not just orneriness, there’s something in that. The assumption that seems to be increasingly creeping in is that all these things we believed to be bad and shameful and the opposite of art are now considered brilliant: ‘You should earn loads of money, you should advertise’. No. It’s shit — it was shit then and it’s shit now. This idea that ‘All bets are off, we’ve all got to make a living’ — no, you have got to live of course, but you can have some dignity. You know, you don’t want to have to go full W.S. Graham and live on nettle soup in a caravan but at the same time there is a certain freedom involved. And, of course, there’s less opportunity to be free the more responsibilities you have to other people, but if you’re someone who is relatively unencumbered you can choose not to live in a way that makes you feel. . . And you know, you don’t want to fetishise it, but there’s nuance in everything, you know what I mean.
I do. And I think it’s interesting that the negativity can go both ways, that you can use negativity helpfully.
I think you can. You can look at things and say, ‘Well, you don’t really believe that do you’. Just to say it: ‘You don’t believe that’, to people who are very good at working out what is and isn’t expected of them in order to thrive in that set of circumstances. And you know, may God go with them if they’re happy in that. But you’ve got to go to sleep at night don’t you. I think probably a lot of people I wrote about in the book, at some crucial point a lot of them have that in common, the idea that they weren’t willing to not have that instinct of This is all awful, isn’t it? Why is everyone thinking this is great? This is awful. To at least question stuff. And again, you might come round and go Actually, everyone’s having a great time. But you look at the work, look at anything in any form, and there’s always stuff that’s interesting that’s going on that doesn’t get its moment.
We seem to come around, for good or ill, in whatever way we come around to it, to almost getting back to that fallacy that you equate success to virtue and reward. But no, there’s no correlation between our success and the value of the work. It feels like we’re valorising the wrong things — sorry, that’s a very broad statement.
No, not at all. It’s strangely a surprising answer. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear but it surprised me.
And I’m supporting Ed Sheeran at Wembley.
[Laughs] Excellent. Another poem I wanted to touch on, and which I was very struck by, is ‘Halcyon Days’.
I think that’s the last one, actually, that I wrote.
It moves so deftly through reflection to reproach to dejection, then takes on this surreal quality. That unreality is effective I think in part because the poem begins familiarly (‘Primrose Hill’, ‘the Heath’). I wanted to ask about the process of moving such a work, a personal poem, into the public space. What kind of personal cost or anxiety that brings with it?
No, I mean it’s totally fair. I think it was one which, like the Hamilton one, I ‘d wanted to try and find a way of writing. There were a few things going on in it. There was a formal way into it, like with the Alun Lewis poem which came from interviews. I don’t know much about classics but there’s the myth about Alcyone. The myth about kingfishers mating seven days a year. The structure is meant to be based on I suppose the Wikipedia version of that myth. In Greek mythology, Alcyone’s lover dies and comes back, and in her grief is turned into a kingfisher. Then every year they get seven days together. They both become kingfishers and get those seven days. The phrase ‘halcyon days’ is an actual thing in nature which refers to the Alcyone days in which a breeding pair of kingfishers have a chance to mate. That was my bowdlerised version of it at least.
So, I had that frame. And then there’s a little bit of the [Elizabeth] Hardwick and [Robert] Lowell letters in there, a few lines I nick from her. There’s one line where she writes ‘you not being here is impossible.’ I got really into that dynamic, apart but still in love. It was something I had wanted to write for years — so part of the impulse came out of life. The little [James] Salter epigraph about something that was a thing but not quite a thing [‘There’s only one time when you were perfect for loving in life, and if you miss that time, if you ignore it or pass it by, you’ve really missed something.’] So, the feeling is real but none of the narrative is real. It’s a fake narrative.
The sense of the speaker is slippery. Going into it you think you know what kind of poem it is, how to approach it, then that’s undone. Did you write it periodically?
No, it was written all in a go, but it took a while. There was a bit of back and forth over whether to leave the last part out. I kind of wanted it to be in there.
I think it’s great. Kind of Bishop-y.
Yeah, it goes weird deliberately. I think if it ended on the part before that, it would get out too early. One of those where you think, maybe this goes too far. But in that case, I’m pleased I left it in.
I wanted to ask about your Nick Drake poem.
At least he was a winner.
[Laughs] Indeed. This is pure curiosity, but do you write to music?
No. I think that one and one other poem were the only commissioned ones. My friends, before they started Rough Trade Books, they used to run this magazine at Rough Trade, and they were asking people to write about an album that they’d pick from their list of classic records. I picked Five Leaves Left. I just did what I would do for any poem — did some research, watched a couple of documentaries. There’s a couple of lines in that that I stole, you know, things his friends said. But no, I can only write in absolute silence. Yeah, can’t cope with it.
Now in my head, that poem talks a bit to the Rendall poem and some other ones. Something’s expected of someone, and they even expect it themselves and for whatever reason they self-thwart, or they can’t do it. They can’t operate in the system in which they find themselves. I do find that interesting. Again, you hope you’re not valorising pain. I reviewed a biography that came out last year of him, and it’s not something you’d want to glorify. He was just incredibly depressed. It was defeat, not some stylish marker of brilliance that he dies — it’s awful. It’s a horrible thing. A young man dies young. So, you don’t want to sanctify that, but at the same time, you can understand the emotional undercurrent of this isn’t how it should be.
And you don’t want to be vampiric. I do think it’s a poet’s thing.
Absolutely. We were talking about Graham Greene earlier, and he said that thing about ‘the writer having the chip of ice in their heart’. It’s not a nice thing, but it’s true. There’s a dual energy isn’t there. The moral question and the artistic question. And with the things you write you have to make it as good as it can be, but there’s also the ‘well, should I be writing about this anyway? Is this a bit ghoulish?’
And maybe that question is itself the interesting aspect of the poem.
With the Drake thing, I don’t think I could have written that if I’d known him. For me he’s almost a character, and you’re writing almost about the myth and not the person. But if it were someone I knew, who’d died at twenty-seven, who I cared about, you can’t write that poem because it’s cold and dispassionate.
Fun ones. Favourite Ian Hamilton poem?
I think ‘Last Waltz’ is one of my favourites. He’s just interesting, his poems are interesting on their own terms. I think ‘The Storm’ is great, I like some of his later ones too. I love that distillation that he does, it’s a kind of antidote. Even now it’s a sort of purgative thing, all stripped back.
Do you feel you’re done with poems about boxing now?
Oh god yeah. I’d never do that again. My main fear really, a bit like you were talking about earlier, is about finding ‘your’ thing. I was just going to not put them in. I put them in a pamphlet and thought ‘it’s done’. I didn’t want it to be like ‘Oh it’s the boxing –––‘. It can so easily become ‘about’. The minute you’re in the ‘about’ realm, you’re in the research outputs realm rather than just, ‘it’s a poem’. I was a little wary of that. Also, if I remember rightly, when I was doing stuff on Hamilton I was reading about Lowell, and in his History, he writes about these emperors and wars and all that and classics. He’s got all that reading and all that breadth of input, and I don’t have that. So, the nearest I could get to that kind of historical palette was the fights.
Also, I always knew there’d be a lot of personal stuff in the book, because the sort of poems I write the most are personal poems, so it felt like a little pressure valve. Third person. A bit of narrative. A bit of not me. But with the boxing poems, most aren’t about the fight — they’re about the build-up, the aftermath, the repair. It's not punchy-punchy. You’re kind of outsourcing your narrative at that point. I wanted it to be more humanising than that. I think what drew me first to them was that direct speech instinct, a different set of poems. I like having that reported or natural speech rhythms in poems. And they’ve said really interesting things in interviews.
I remember reading an interview with Floyd Mayweather, a much more prominent boxer. They’ve got this weird thing in boxing where they often pay for each other’s funerals. When someone dies young, who fought but has no money, they’ll pay. It’s a weird little thing that happens. But Mayweather was paying for [Diego] Corrales’ funeral, or he certainly put money into it, and I remember he was interviewed about it, and he said, matter-of-factly, ‘I think about him sometimes.’ Around the time I was wanting to write about them I was reading a lot of Keith Douglas and some other of these Second World War poets. And that idea that you’re sort of faced with something awful and you’re saying it in the most matter-of-fact, undercutting way. Keith Douglas is brilliant at that, that tone: ‘Peter was unfortunately killed’. That throwaway, stiff-upper-lip tone. I like that.
Crisis Actor is published in the U.K. by Faber, and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.