Culture

TS Eliot winner David Harsent: "I wrote Fire Songs in a kind of fever"

The poet talks about poetry, climate change and his work with composer Harrison Birtwistle

January 23, 2015
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 Last week the poet David Harsent won the £20,000 TS Eliot Prize for his 11th collection Fire Songs. As well as being a poet, Harsent is also an opera librettist who has collaborated with the composer Harrison Birtwistle on works including Gawain and The Minotaur. He spoke to Prospect Books Editor Sameer Rahim about his early poetic influences and the importance of climate change—or the “heat death of the planet”—in his prize-winning book.

Sameer Rahim: Firstly, congratulations on winning the TS Eliot prize. It’s 50 years since Eliot’s death, and I was wondering how much he has influenced you?

David Harsent: I don’t think he was ever a direct influence but he certainly drew me to poetry when I was teenager. Reading The Waste Land certainly made me want to write poetry. I don’t think I ever wrote in imitation of Eliot, but he was a very important and influential figure.

SR: What about earlier poets?

DH: I first discovered poetry when I was 12 years old. I fell down the stairwell—quite a long way down the stairwell, in fact—and so I had lots of time to read. My grandmother brought me some books from the library, and there was a border ballad in one. I asked her if she could bring me a book of poems just like that. She came back with Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of Border Ballads. I was swept away by them.

SR: You’ve had a number of careers in your life: a bookseller, an editor at a publishing house, a crime writer. Is there one profession most conducive to writing poetry?

DH: When another interviewer asked me the same question, I said  “bank robber”. You need to pay the bills and put food on the table so all poets have day jobs. Some work as publishers, some teach in universities, which is what I do now. Some have more exotic jobs. They were all a distraction because if I’m writing a thriller, I’m not writing poems. If I’m standing in a bookshop shovelling books into a paper bag, I’m not writing poetry. Publishing was a 24/7 job—fatally distracting to me as a poet. At the time, a friend said to me “you like editing thrillers, you like reading thrillers on holiday, why don’t you have a crack at that?” I wrote a book called Crow’s Parliament under the name Jack Curtis, which came out in 1988. Making a living that way beat the hell of going to the office, mostly because I could organise my own time.

SR: You’ve edited a Festschrift for the editor and poet Ian Hamilton. Was he important to you?

DH: He was, yes. Ian had been watching my work while I was in the wilderness—literally as well as figuratively. For six years, I lived in a two-up two-down hovel in the middle of a field with an outside lavatory and no bathroom. I was writing poems and sending them out to little magazines. Ian saw these coming in at the Review and the TLS and took to some of them. He got in touch, published me, gave me critical notes—and we became close friends. I suppose I was his protégé for a while, though not the only one. It was suggested that Festschrift should be compiled and I mentioned this to Ian over lunch one day. He said: “Sounds like a job for you”.

SR: Turning to Fire Songs, I was struck that female figures are an important part of the collection—especially the Tudor Protestant poet Anne Askew who was burned at the stake.

DH: I was brought up a Baptist—went to Sunday school through my childhood. There was a picture on the wall of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World but also one of Anne Askew’s martyrdom. She was an example of one aspect of the destructiveness of fire.

SR: Fire is a prominent theme.

DH: There are four “Fire Songs” in the book. My editor at Faber asked how I came up with them and I said, “I don’t know, I wrote them in a kind of fever”. I had this image in my head of a man going into his garden and making a bonfire on which he planned to burn everything. I remembered there was an artist who, a few years ago now, tried to destroy everything he owned as some kind of artistic act. Obviously it was doomed to failure because he needed clothes and somewhere to lay his head. It’s an interesting notion, though I’m not sure you could call it art.

One of the “Fire Songs” is made of contemporary images which belong to 20th-century wars and persecutions, and one is a poem in which the personal comes in: a fictional account of a tragic love affair. The last of them is a black fantasy on the subject of Armageddon—global warming, or what my son refers to as the “heat death of the planet”.

SR: You’ve worked with the composer Harrison Birtwistle on a number of operas, and Fire Songs is dedicated to him. Could you talk about your relationship?

DH: Yes. Harry phoned me up out of the blue god knows how many years ago now—the 1980s, perhaps. He was reading Peter Porter’s review of my book Mr Punch. Porter had drawn parallels between my book and Harry’s opera Punch and Judy. It was that review that caused Harry to get in touch. He said I’ve got this idea for an opera, would you be interested? So we started talking and Gawain was the upshot. We’ve collaborated on seven pieces together now. There is a kind of meeting of minds that really works. At the time of The Minotaur, I said that if Harry and I had dreamt about The Minotaur it would be a different version of the same dream. Harry is just finishing setting a libretto that I’ve written called The Cure, based on an incident in the Medea story. It will be premiered at the Aldeburgh festival later this year and then come in to the Linbury studio at the Royal Opera House. I love working for the opera stage. My libretti and my efforts in poetry really have been my life.

David Harsent’s Fire Songs is published by Faber at £12.99