Nick Laird & Zadie Smith Talk to John Mullan

welcome to the stage Nicola thanks very much I think maybe this is the first event this festival where the two people on the sofa don't feel weird about it thanks very much for coming I know that you're right Portugal is probably going to be a bit disappointing actually but I kind of feel if it was England Brazil you'd all still be here this is a kind of book loving our aandhi small I know that and for a book loving our Indies for what could be a better event than having Sadie and Nick here and provokingly their two most recent books as if requiring us to have this event have the same title feel free they're both cool feel free Nick's book of poems and Sadie's book of essays and it's kind of you know we have exam questions which they compare and contrast and I mean you know it is it is a it is a demand to do that and we thought what we do is that each of them will do a short reading to give you a taster at the beginning and Nick's gonna read first though now ask him a question just maybe one question provoked by his reading and then Sadie will read from her book and I'll ask her something and then we'll enter into full interlocution yeah okay so Nick hi so I'm delighted to be here right around the corner from my house and to be zitties hype man so I said today I was gonna read this poem feel free and she said no don't read that that won't work but anyway don't me to read a poem about my mother dying last day which I felt would have been a kind of diner on this warm day so this is a poem called feel free and it mentions Harvey here's our son and Catherine who's our daughter and it's in three short ish parts the mentions and Argos this isn't relevant but the Argos is the one on Cricklewood Broadway not Kilburn high road so feel free to deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface with earth I like to do this in a number of ways I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed the weight of my person refigured and I like to hang above the ground thus snorkeling hammocks alcohol I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy and to that end I set aside a day a week Shabbat to not act having ceded independence to the sunset I will not be shaving illuminating rooms or raising the temperature of food if occasionally I like to feel the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural tension I walk off a Sunday through the high fields of blanket Borg saxifrage a few thin belted Galloway's round in Lock Mullen to stand by the form of beauty upheld in a scrubby acre at Craig and Dev ski what I do duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires of yellow feather moss and powdery white lichen I like then to stop Christ and press my back on a hoisin of actual rock coldness which lives for a while on the skin and I like when I give you the night feed Harvey Paul you're concentrating on it fists clenched eyes shut like this is bliss - I like a steady disruption I like it when the solid mantle turns to shingle and water rushes up it over and over in love my white noise machine from Argos is set to crushing wave but I'm not averse to the presence of numerous and minut quanta moving very fast and unison occasions when a light wind undulates the ears of wheat or Hessian sack of pearl barley seed is sliced with a pocketknife and pause I like the way it signs pattering on stone I like how the starlings / month eco here and separate their bodies into one cyclonic Symphony and I like that the hawk of the mind catches up their purse pulse call arc I like the excitation passing as a shutter ripple back and how the bag is snatched rolls slack straight falciform mouth in bulbing a pumping heart I like to interface with millions of colored pixels depicting attractive people procreate in on a screen itself dependent on rare metals mined by mud great children who trans up he trudged up bamboo scaffolding above a grayish red lick of Belgian mud I like how the furnace burning earth instills and me reflexive gestures of timidity self-pity and deference as a walk across the kind of surfaces grass say or sand unable ever to meet with my eyes the gears of the Sun three I could imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be to the same human a woman the first marriage working well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it's you know mutually convenient and I can see that I like the fact were super cool star matter even if I can't envisage is anything other than warm and bleeding the thing is I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate an immune responses by the thick safety signals of national anthems cleavage family photographs country lanes large-eyed mammals fireworks the King James Bible Nina Simone singing the twelfth of never cave paintings coffins dolphins dolmens but I like it also when the fat impasto of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist with a claw hammer and the glimpses caught the what you couldn't say entanglement I like spooky action at a distance analogizing some little thing including this long glance across the escaliers or how you know the song before you switch the station on when a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits one meets the superposition of two being twinned and this repeats tickling your back Catharine to get you to sleep I like to lie here with my eyes closed and think about my school friends houses before choosing one to walk through slowly room by sunlit room I think a northerner on an accent sand Vantage isn't it if you're going to be a poet can I can I ask you that's the the title poem of the color yeah can I ask you why you called it feel free the poem of the Buddhist poem yeah the poem that everyone I suppose it's about like finding ways to feel free within constraints which is sort of is also about what poetry itself is about kind of coming through constraints into a kind of sweetening or Felicity and so it sort of seemed the whole book in a way I was writing into that title was sort of about different forms of freedom and constraint and hi I think when you get to our age and we're 42 like you feel some very crushed by your children and also by your dying parents um it can be a difficult enough time of life so I'm you know the middle of what it McNeese say the middle stretch is difficult for poets so trying to find ways of them kind encountering that and I was just thinking when I was when I was hearing you read it when we were all know that when I were we were all hearing you read it I had it in front of me as well and like there's there's quite a lot of the poems in this collection not all but quite a few have a pattern on the eye which is you can hear sometimes when you read it out but sometimes you can tend and there's one pattern with your which you use more than any other I think which is the pattern this of this poem which is the three line stanzas so it's that part of the same kind of attempt to get freedom and constraint together in there in the same on the same page I think in terms of form certainly I'm always trying to move around in different forms but in this book it's in this long three line tercet a lot of this stuff was sort of held together by it and I I do believe that like that a form is kind of useful for report that kind of extends the thought and interesting ways if you fire the form then the rest of it kind of follows so that yeah it's talked about all that is personal soon rots it must be packed a nice assault and the full form is also like that for me so can we yeah there's some other things about the poem I want to ask about but but maybe I can leave it to later and yes do you think she's getting bored okay yeah okay so should we go over to the other side of the sofa okay thank you what are you gonna read I'm gonna read from a book called feel free I feel the need to explain it basically what happened is that Nick wrote wrote that poem which was in The New Yorker I think a long time ago and I read it obviously and then I just liked the title and so I Manny actually happened before with on beauty as well which I believe was also poem and I Nick yes becoming apart so I nicked it and then I thought that we come to some kind of accommodation but in the end we just kept but what I like about it is so my recollection is different okay but what I like about is in the end both I mean the books in complete different form well Nick just said about packing something and ice and salt obviously prose is different from poetic form but I I think a lot of the ideas are the same in the end I mean that's probably inevitable because we live in the same house but I I noticed that and that there's that there's a similarity and idea of how to feel free within constrictions yeah so I'm just gonna read two pages of NSA called joy and it might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy but maybe everybody does this very easily all the time and only I am confused a lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure arrived that by the same road you simply have to go a little further down the track that has not been my experience and if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life I wouldn't be at all sure did exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage it's not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives perhaps the first thing to say is that I experienced at least a little pleasure every day I wonder if this is more than the usual amount it was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable I don't think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out food for example any old food an egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has a genuine power to turn my day around whatever is put in front of me food wise will usually get a five-star review you'd think that people would like to cook for or eat with me in fact I'm told it's boring where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort don't say that was delicious my husband warned you say everything's delicious but it was delicious it drives him crazy all day long I can look forward to a popsicle the persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calm for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth and though it's true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns we don't have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that's so readily available especially here in America a pineapple popsicle even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle my other source of daily pleasure is but I wish I had a better way of putting it other people's faces a redheaded girl where the marvelous large nose that she probably hates and green eyes and that sunshine complexion composed more freckles and skin or heavyset grown man smoking a cigarette in the rain with a soggy moustache combined with a surprise the keen eyes snub nose and chair of mouth of his own eight-year-old self upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular cat-eyed teenager in skinny jeans and stacked heel boots a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt last night's makeup and its silky Pocahontas week slightly askew over his eye he was such a down the streets plats flying using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk miss Tang but off duty I add this for clarity but my husband nods a little impatiently there was no need for the addition my husband is also a professional Gawker so that but that bit of the essays about your pleasure in things but kind of the essays about something a bit different isn't it it's about a more painful and pulsating and rarer thing yeah I'm joy I was kind of interested in the idea that a lot of things that we choose in life are hard to choose because they're not they're not in the same measure as you know consumer goods or lifestyle choices in that in the obvious case they don't bring you an immediate amount of pleasure obviously children of the primary example but if you're offered that deal how would you like not to sleep for five years how would you like to spend loads of money except to accentuate it all looks terrible and I was just interested in the idea that elemental things in our lives have been kind of shifted into a basket called lifestyle and once you put it there everything looks really unreasonable but but if you accept it as this kind of extremity which a joy is a good word for it then then it makes a bit more sense and in this essay I guess after whenever I go from reading one of your novels to reading your essays the thing about your essays is even when they kind of started off sometimes as reviews I mean when I write a review which I hack out sometimes it's a it's a very sort of austere thing right bom-bom-bom and if I occasionally put the word I in I would I would you know right I would then kind of walk around the block a few times and talk myself out of it really and that's absolutely different between England and America I mean yeah you found this to know that there in in American journals this eye is allowed and when I first got to America I thought it was completely outrageous you know in principle but look how I've got into it isn't it isn't a liberation though because your novels I know the most recent one was the first person but but but novels seem so much about removing yourself or giving you're at least giving the book over to others and is it that the writing essays including reviews if they start that way is us of is it's a kind of liberation after that exercise it stylized obviously have Nick in the next room and poetry we sometimes have residing but it's always about I poems are full of I everywhere this kind of song of self and I spent a long time writing in a very distant third person but I guess even the eye of the essays is not you know it's it's stylized it's it's not really intimate I don't I don't think I write very intimately particularly I think sometimes the readers though think that they you know think that it is a special kind of yeah it's a special gift and a special pleasure to read your essays because they may not think they're getting your deep itself but they are being taken into your into your confidence I mean it you do you even do that stylistically you know you sort of say yeah go you can go off and have a look at that now if you want to come back later I'll wait I just when we were in college i I've really loved my degree but I felt often in an English class there was no space to express something that readers feel instinctively which is you know affection love desire you know all these things were kind of not to be spoken of so I felt when I wrote my essays I wanted to include them maybe that's a maybe that's a sort of one of the probably many baleful effects of academic training once upon a time essays were things that I don't know how to little Virginia Woolf wrote which were full of them if one of my students sticks I in an essay well I don't think they ever do I need no no no I think it's really that's really good training but it took mention hazlit and wolf those to me are ideal you know they're at the height of the essay and nick that the poem you read as you explained before you read it has got your has got one of your children in it and you your kids crop up in some of your some of your essays Sadie as well and you joke about it the yoke of parenthood but they they seem quite a kinetic principal in there in both of your writings you take that one yeah well they're always there I mean every time I opened the door there behind it really so and they're really noisy so you know yeah but once upon a time that once upon a time that was weird I remember somebody there's some interviews are printed interview I think where somebody was saying to Sylvia Plath you put your but keep your baby oh yeah poet yeah she said well that's what I spent my you know a lot of time doing or something right but I think that wasn't that's I don't think Tennyson was changing nappies no I think it was but that's different and you were saying that you're writing about Dickens and he's a good example of someone with a huge amount of children and then these kind of idealized children in in the books like you've never met a real chore it's really fascinating despite having ten of them in the house yeah and then these toxic relationships in real life with his actual yes yeah what he certainly met them in real I mean it yes yeah and and and you're right zadie about about I I asked you about I in in your essays I mean I most of your poems have got I in in this collection there's a bit of a shock to everybody in the tent when you read the line that poem about how you're planning to get married five times [Laughter] well you know the I in the poem is not the I obviously but well I think sometimes it is and actually it's a it's much more complicated than just saying it's the the Speaker of the poem I think the way I think about poetry is a kind of I think of it like if you go that we talk about diving in that poem like scuba diving and you have to equalize the pressure in some ways and I do think of poetry this is Wallace Stevens line about the violence from within the kind of the violence without so that this idea of an interior life coming up to meet exterior life and I think of poetry as a kind of way of equalizing the pressure so some of the stuff that comes out and the poem is a way of kind of countering external reality and some degree in some of the way that you do that is by exploring the different kinds of AI that exists within you I think and and what the poem that sadly told you to read but you didn't read and and some of the other poems in in the collection are clearly very personal and you sure yeah and they're about your mother's deadly about your relationship with your father yeah and well I mean I do like I felt that more and more of poetry as a kind of so that the department there that's really about going to see my mother I was flying over this poem called the vehicle in the tenor which is the two parts of a metaphor but I had a weird experience after I'd written that poem where and it never really has happened that I I've gone back to that poem again and again and read it when I felt in despair or grief or whatever and it was a kind of I suddenly sort of realized that what I what the poems have been doing for you know for me for 30 years is forms of kind of dealing with things I know that taking us 50 years notice that writing is therapeutic I don't think right but to see that like in a way to kind of master the emotion or at least meet the emotion head-on or find ways of containing it or memorializing it or whatever the thing is putting it down in words is definitely a kind of form of dealing with things so it became more naked and obvious to me certainly in this book than in Prior books which seemed more exploratory this was definitely conciliatory yeah is it sort of a just that kind of Nelnet so to come into nostra Vita sort of thing because because coming up in the book as well you know I see that coming up in all the books of our peers like like Nicole Krause is novel is called yeah dark forest you could find all in all these books written by people of our age in the same year there's the same metaphors you know my first line of Dante's Inferno the same dark forest again but I think about that thing that Larkin said about he would make a poem like a machine to replicate a certain the most whale of love lyrics and so whenever you read this poem that particular way of being in that particular motion was memorialized and kept but in his case it's also about and I recognizes myself emotional avoidance so instead of sure feeling joy or you can just write an essay about it so it's just kind of contained in the essay as a separate issue and I think that is a big part of writing a kind of control freak reader but other people just feel things and obsess with it as a kind of repetitive behavior like that you go back to the site in some ways and there's a there's a one my favorite essays in in the collections ladies the one about about Bart do your bathroom that's a kind of so you that cuz several of the essays in your piece that kind of go back quite a lot in time and as sort of bits have shards of memoir in I guess and one of the ones which is most memorable is one which is about the bathroom what the bathrooms like and that's a kind of way of if if you wrote poetry you definitely written a poem called the bathroom with it and that's what I've always kind of been jealous of in poetry I think a lot of prose writers are that that it can encapsulate and imprison something that way for me the essay is the closest to that novels are much messier you know you're never the containment is never complete you know you're not in total control a novel is a very long stretch to try and write something good a long piece of prose with something wrong with it essay is a kind of more hopeful and contained thing and I do notice the poet's read their own poetry with pleasure yeah I think it's very unusual for novelists to sit down and saying oh time to reread London Fields there are one or two there are one or two I went I did a thing Howard Jacobson was reading her and clearly he would have been there all day really yeah you don't loved it and Edna O'Brien so she doesn't even need to read it she just but you say that about the novel but one thing that comes up lots of times in the essays is a kind of not sustained it's sort of flickers back with the flickers into the into the light and then back again about novels I mean one of the things you get from from reading the essays is that or you say somewhere my soul area of expertise reading novels but you write them as well and and the idea that the novel is a place to kind of well to feel free to us maybe as a reader as much as a writer to escape assumptions you usually have the loyalties you usually profess that yes that but also maybe escape full stop by talking to Nick about that Francis buffered but I love Francis Pope a British writer no I'm not actually that one the yeah and he has this little introduction where he says the weird thing about reading and I'm sure a lot of people in this room have the same feeling is that basically it is an addiction people who read the way we read and I'm sure a lot of people here read when you can't go to shops without eight books in your bag and all that nonsense but it's one of the few addictions which is socially acceptable so what's buffered is playing out in case his sister died when he was very young so it's a huge trauma in the house but the fact that he wanted to sit and read a book all day nobody had a problem with it you know and his question is well is there something problematic about it about these children you want to do nothing but read and to always be have something between them in the world a book you know you used to the critique in terms of screen looks also a kind of - but I mean that's why I sometimes feel a kind of I felt it a bit when in the essay in this volume about Facebook well I find myself going absolutely agree with that you know then oh dear and because I when I was in it when I was a teenager you know novels were all they were you know you grew up in Wiltshire I was absolutely zero and then now I might I'm reading new cast forms and they've all kind of gone to Ecuador or you know I mean I don't know and they've all got the diddle diddle diddle as well I'm saying I'm suggesting Nick that kind of an early love of fiction is born out of a kind of set of boredom boredom but I think with the screen his idea of the novel as a kind of screen the difference I would make between that and the kind of contemporary screens we're dealing with it it's just maybe like a qualitative thing you know yeah and I don't deny that novel is a kind of act of emotional avoidance also a thing to put between you in the world but when you're we talk about our mutual friend back there the quality of that screen or of that illusion it has so much depth or so much they can gather so much meaning from it that for me it is an excusable sin you know but it's certainly the case if reading was this enormous the improving thing writers would be angels and you know yeah social idea and it's not the case right they have all the normal call they do although some readers want their novelist to be kind of good better people than normal people right exemplary or yeah you're on you're having to sign morality clauses now that that hasn't happened to me and what it went is there I mean is it too crude to say that when you're because I wanted to talk a bit about your most recent novel as well modern gods is it too crude to say that when quite a lot of the time when you're writing poetry it's you and when you're writing fiction it's all given over to characters it's maybe a wee bit of a simplification like there's quite a lot of my sort of life in modern guards that sort of Northern Irish half yes not the pub and you can you know have you been to New Guinea because the novel is set in a in an island called new Ulster which is sort of off the coast of New Guinea base yes there is a new island and a new Britain but there isn't a new I haven't been to probably gonna I've been to Fiji and you can do a lot of stuff on YouTube and in a way like I wanted it to be it's meant to be a kind of contrived flip of ulster and then this new Ulster so it's kind of meant to be like almost a fever dream or whatever so I wasn't too concerned about it being exactly right yeah and and Ulster's in the poems as well me and if only for the best kind of place names in the lexicon you must think at least I've got those in my quiver I mean these are just places that you know me but yeah they do so I'm good you can't really outrun your home and I've just I've just made that a documentary Brian he'll like a poem film thing about the troubles and I've just like written that hopefully that last piece of fiction about it and hopefully sort of the last poems about it because I'm sort of you kind of want to like not keep returning to it but it's a kind of original wind that you end up going back to so like as I spend a lot of time then Ulster and because I'll start refuses to kind of move forwards and lots of ways it's impossible not to write about it I mean lyric poets I think in general go back to childhood that's sort of all there is almost I think writers in general yeah and one definition of a writer might be someone who's unnaturally preoccupied with the first 15 years of their life right that seems to me defining everything Springs from it right and in fact the very the very plot of modern gods at least the first half of it is about an axe act isn't it about one of the main characters going back and there she is she's in New York you might have thought she was free she was free yeah but she's she's she's dragged back yeah yeah that's the kind of Irish I mean that is quite a common Irish narrative sort of trope don't you think that well I mean there you know there are only so many stories and one is a stranger arrives and the time and the other one is you you know you go on a journey so that's a kind of conflation of both of them do you have a habit of leaving and then writing obsessively about where they've lived well Joyce said the quickest way to Tara which is the in turn in for Alex where the tar is by a Holly head right to get to the heart of Ireland you have to leave it and and it is certainly true that you get perspectives on a place when you're far away from it you have to get itit kind of right the radio frequency in order to hear it properly but the novels actually I mean it's it really it doesn't tackle a tackles the the violent recent history of Northern Ireland really right full-on I mean it's not Lansing is it it's no so it comes from an actual I had a cup of tea with my friend Colin few years ago and Colin said he'd been working with a guy for two years and then this guy got married and then the next day on the cover of the sunday life which is the sort of Northern Irish paper and it turned out this guy had was it was was a mass killer had been involved and one of them was famous and a terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland and the wife didn't know right knowing the wife didn't know that's fiction what she tries what she could have known real life the woman I think they know but Colin didn't know a lot of the people he knew this guy and had worked with him for years had no idea and the guy had killed six people for protests for Catholics and two Protestants and in the gray steel killings which is the time in 1993 when the guy two guys went into a pub in gray steel in Derry and shouted trick-or-treat it was just before Halloween the night before Halloween and they were wearing Halloween masks and and then they just shot all these people and so the guy only ended up serving like two years and was laid out under the early-release scheme so I wanted to think like what northern Islanders had to swallow since the Good Friday Agreement is sort of astonishing like I know lots of people who have had to live next door not actually next door but like a field away whatever from someone who's killed her husband and his ended up serving a year in prison door or even my local MP front see Malloy option fiends the guy who stood against him in the election Francie Malloy was the prime suspect in his father's murder and so the whole thing is really I think it's very difficult to kind of explain in brief especially to someone you know he's been sort of born and raised in England perhaps so I wanted to sort of think about it listen also the idea of identity politics we did that already I waited for 20 years for Northern Ireland become more like the rest of the world and then what happens is the rest of world becomes more northern you recognize that to use ad yeah I mean i lured my no only through Nick but having gone a lot I just think the thing which fascinates me about in the poem's tube also in the novel is the idea of a civilized sheen underneath underneath which there's this roiling drama you know interpersonal historical and not too far under the surface to and that always strikes me extraordinary and it took like a kind of live civil war all times and I never really been anywhere like that I think until I I met Nick yeah and it I mean there's look it's produced quite a lot of good poetry I know that's a terrible buddy it has produced a lot of good poetry a lot of electric poetry are you aware of that when you write in this in this collection about Northern Ireland and there were other poetry yeah about that yeah of course I mean Sheamus was not just a friend of mine but also you know the sort of first poet that I'd really read and engage with Seamus Heaney and I think put good poetry tends to produce good poetry I'm whenever I was a lawyer I moved to Warsaw for a year and one of the reasons was was because of polish poetry and these small countries like Poland say in Northern Ireland they seem to keep producing the stuff so I think the work tends to produce good work it's a dialogue with and even on the very obvious basic level of saying this thing poetry is a worthwhile way to spend your life it's something to engage with it's not ludicrous or I think it was lightly embarrassing English consider it do you think that's true I think appeared to ponen like we've been a toilet and seen five thousand people in the streets to listen to Szymborska you know yeah just extraordinary like this public forum that means so much to so many people I thought he's different anything I think the culture has a very schizophrenic relationship to poetry actually because on one side I think it is valued but in another side it's it's not on the financial scale of value obviously at all like it doesn't sell any copies and and people don't really like it or understand it and a kind of a scared and a bit annoyed by it Krauss but at the same point they want it to be there they just don't have to engage with it when you get married in the kind of intimate cruxes of people's lives they do turn to it no it gets on I mean I'm always surprised that when a poet I thought nobody much had heard of dies and there they are in the news something I mean fleetingly perhaps but still I don't know we have a grand tradition here yeah but I don't know I I always felt a kind of because it's so elemental poetry and so direct that there's something in English spirits shows away a little bit the other day and there's someone the guy was saying or my son's a poet like with kind of she [Laughter] isn't it the shying away that makes the poetry though a bit I mean that that that not maybe not risk this is not really this is not necessarily about your poetry but that a kind of you know that's in some really interesting and good poets it's the reticence or awkwardness that makes it that gives it the voltage right it's also just in a culture where the language is so direct at the moment almost everything is modeled yes spoken word is in the direct monologic construction back and forth that makes all literary writing seem bizarre you know antique and strange and indirect and unnecessary nuts that's for everybody but I guess approaches the intensification of the idea that what you want to say is ambiguous or so the idea that this thing is complicated that in itself is out of fashion but the kind of contraction or compression of language and at the same point this kind of expansion of meaning I kind of ramification of meaning you know hard in the age of Twitter but one of the things one of the things you obviously both like in your writing it's very pronounced in your poems Nick it's in the title and in some of your previous titles too is taking these bits of language idioms sometimes cliches that we all use and sort of I don't know letting them detonate or something that feel free where you're talking about we've both taught you've both talked about why you use that that for your two titles and about freedom and constraint because I think of that idiom and I think of somebody asking permission to do something you know they say well can I have an or live feel free and and of course it's kind of it's a paradoxical it's one of those areas definitely part of the job of a writer is to make you to revivify dead language and to make you examine language closely which is you know it's the easiest way of doing it I think is to play in the kitchen the job gets harder as the dead language expands later most of us are spending our daily lives in dead language day and night tabloid language TV language advertorial mukbang with just before becoming heroes reading this last volume of karlovy now Scott's but struggling here's this beautiful description of part of what poetry does is that when you look at the world you language separates everything into form so you know you're in a tent and here are chairs and there are people it's a sofa in there some writers sitting up here but without language without the separation of concepts that's not what's here at all there's color light shape form it's completely wild the world is wild and part of your job of language is controlling it so you could say the tables not a part of the woman the cup is separate the water is something else that's one way of conceiving of reality but it's not the truth it's just the practical truth so one of the things that poetry can do is dismantle the language you use every day just to function in the world and try and see again and for me that long poem feel free is about that like looking at things as if the language was already made for you at all times and what about novels because one of the things that well one of the things Hill collection did is I bought a book which had very ready to I don't like buying books are like scrounging and I managed to do that very successfully that you saw me you saw me in operation and it was it was what it was but I did actually buy a book I haven't read yet by pater Stan oh yes and is it called seven years yeah and I and I bought it because actually you were writing about it and it sounded fascinating but also you were writing about it in a way which are things characteristic of the collection of essays as something that it seemed to sort of sidestep all the proper kind of expectations of this character yeah what this character should be like how this character should behave and I think you said somewhere at the end that you know it's a novel to make you doubt your own dogma something I love that know what I mean one of the things now Scott was saying I don't disagree with them is that novels are part of the social force world you know that they're wonderful and they're lovely but thinking about someone like Dickens the only world he's dealing with is the one that exists between people there's nothing elemental in Dickens there's no real death or there's no Eternity there's no real sense of God or it's about how we relate to each other in our social lives how funny is how absurd it is how tragic it is below so I love novels for that because they're fun and they make you think and they make you organize your social world but every now and then another like Peter stems that to me there's a bit more you know that's a bit more than say oh this is how people are these days or this is the way our country is at the moment does something much more you know existential that you're reading so you feel like you're reading about existence not just about you know life in London or whatever it is life in London is my area I don't complain about that is my area okay well life in London it's time as we're this is life in London so we should we should give everybody here or some of the people here a chance to ask Nick and Sadie things I think we've got have we got some mics well there's a lady there who's just brilliant okay you know she's the one who gets the drink you've got a five minute interval in the play and she's the one who gets thank you very much thank you so much for coming back it's really hard to think of the word free without thinking about freedom without thinking about what's going on both here but also of course America where you know live I think most of the time yeah I can I just wondered given that poetry and novels can be such a the supreme ways of escaping the horrors of life and living whether there's also a sort of responsibility to address what is going on around you and I just wanted whether you guys given that you have both written so eloquently about actual life as it is being lived and brexit and how that affects Northern Ireland everything else how you so feel the role of poetry in fiction where they are at the moment in this crazy world in which we're living whether the arts [Laughter] No what did you do that so I actually quite I think you have to engage with things but I also feel like the act of writing in itself is the detail is a political intervention so whenever you complicate the received narrative that you get when you turn on the television by saying that this is what it is actually like for one person in the place that in itself makes everything sort of infinitely more complicated and in itself suggests that these sort of blank platitudes are not acceptable so I think the art itself has worth if that's what we're saying and I think you have to engage your turn yeah I I just I I think poetry makes nothing happen including prose in that definition but I have a kind of wishful thinking that people who do make things happen activists politicians serious young people you can have some effect on their minds so it's a it's a sick entry it's a very kind of Hail Mary pass I guess I'm imagining when I'm teaching that the people I'm teaching might go on to be more useful than me but I might be able to do something with their minds a fairly early stage that's how I think I know that I don't have an activist mentality and so I might be is my bit but it's quite a small bit okay I've got a quiver full of questions but I'm out you don't want to impose them on you yes this gentleman there can we make for the mic to come to you sir I can ask city do you consider yourself still to be Northwest London or America well you know I'm still obviously I don't really want to put you on the spot no no I don't mind I consider myself British and black black British and I guess a New Yorker as well yeah I wouldn't I would restrict it to the to the Manhattan neighborhood session with a Lydian cancel rise West who said you were always Northwest the American I'll never be American I mean I we have an American child which is weird but no I'm I'm North West it was just a thought so thank you yes can you just sorry can you wait Thanks my mom's in the audience I'm cautious what I say here but I I would say well I guess like it wasn't Jen opinion I don't consider having suppose like writer children like a great boom maybe my mom feels differently but I I think I have no aspirations for them in that area it doesn't it does even cross my mind because like I connect writing with unhappiness so I don't really want my children to be unhappy merrily I'd like my daughter to be a doctor yes yeah so when we were choosing her name Catherine I was like that's a really good doctors yeah I mean my mom has is a writer a stand-up comedian actor and a rapper I know all right but yeah I don't I think of creativity is you know it's nice and everything but it's also just nice to be just we're trying to get the eight year old to read more booze and she's of quite resistant graphic novels they have they have no natural interest in the whole realm yeah as a parent of teenagers the notion that you could actually manage to improve you know there's a brilliant comic novel called tristram shandy about a father who thinks he can form his son's identity and yes it's not a possible project yes I would say we've been fundamentally left behind no you know we didn't we were we didn't do Facebook for a month or two you did we liked it six or seven years ago it's more like 10 years yeah I write on a computer that's kind of did Joe I don't know like I don't I think it's kind of antithetical to the today I think I need to be in a quiet space to read a poem and I find I don't have a smartphone we've never had smartphones either of us and but even if my laptop is near me when I'm trying to read like 20% of my cognitive capacity is gone I have to put it away in another room and but what I do all the time is I have freedom on my computer that program it clicks on at 10 o'clock it stays on - one that clicks on it two days until 5:00 and then it's 6:00 what is this I don't know it's ok Jonathan Frandsen young cyborg whom it is a natural thing and that's all cool it's just I I am NOT one of those side would be distracting do you think writing is a kind of addictive beasts yeah and like I know that we will just if we are online like a know will go past we've done nothing now is but the point is it's a gain and a loss I'm totally aware of all the things I lose not understanding the present moment not being in touch with the kids except to accept etc but the thing that I gained which I want is freedom inside my head to think interrupted so for me it's worth the change I absolutely get it for other people it's not worth the exchange they want to know what's happening today and they want to be right on top of it but I honestly find I don't like I even though we're not honestly wouldn't we don't know what's happening in the minute I get the picture what I get the general sense most of the time you know it's not that hard to figure out we go you know and if there's a con rolling Kanye story I don't know every beat of it but by the evening I know and so I I've not wasted nine hours I've only wasted 20 minutes at the end of the day by getting the summary of what occurred in the previous night but there is a to contend to contend I mean there is there is for the reader in your of some of your poems not not most of them but some of them is a because it really there's a poem I enjoyed very much called crunch okay and I say you say poem it's a kind of dialogue and it's full of some quite abstruse but obviously kind of proper noun type references it refers to something and it would have been a quite an exasperated poem to read if it hadn't been for Google I mean free Google I would have had to do what people used to have to do which that about Japan's cantos that has been a lot of time looking up stuff or they had to get a book by somebody else who'd spent that time but actually it's really good fun reading this kind of poem now because you can quickly find out what happened at Tunguska right so maybe writers kind of depend on things it's both things we are writing with the assumption that the reader is a cyborg absolutely when I'm writing springtime you know they're gonna watch every video and that's the point but I don't want to be a cyborg it's selfish on my part I'd also join it to say that you're using the Internet as an encyclopedia is one thing but that's not what people are using that's not what we're talking about it right if that was just the only thing the internet was it'd be an incredible research thing but it's not that it's a time psyche and a distraction and it sort of reduces all interest in a complicated argument into these two things banging against each other and like encyclopedic aspects of it obviously brilliant and useful for poetry but it's the other stuff it's the it's the screaming and the self-promotion and I can't I just I can't have it at all there's a question near the back and then yes if you keep your hand up you see then I yeah yeah [Music] some more weird like Bulgarian embassy yeah I remember that but yeah does the way you think about writing and how you want to write and how you want to say things how much changed I mean if you ask anyone what's changed between 23 and 42 you know everything I don't recognize that person or that novel or that way of thinking I just think that's the way it goes but I don't think I'm unusual in that it's such a long period of time so everything um you know everything about the sentence is everything about the conception of our novel is changes all the time but um Nick always says I'm too easily influenced is that fair today like a leaf in the wind of this I I do consider that a virtue for the most part you know I like to read things and be changed by them you're an enthusiast I am in please yes yeah and so so change is a kind of inevitable part of that because you're always reading new things and coming across new ideas and new approaches it's it's you are actually one of the sort of pleasures of the collection is you don't I don't if you write bad reviews or no no my bad reviews we just do them verbally to each other the book comes in we slag it off all day all night but then I feel that's fine I'm good I don't need to destroy somebody's day so I don't yeah batteries is not something I do more painful or embarrassing in some ways and I was just wondering if you had to choose I would choose novels actually even though I mean there was a period when we were both writing a novel and it was like a shame parade in our house I was ashamed you're ashamed there's just so much shame so they're very connected to shame you know it's an embarrassing form it's a bit ridiculous there's no reason for them but I'm just an essay is just a way of being a smartass and anyone can be a smaller so for me fiction it is more intimate where we have we got - yeah woody please hi I might be one of the few non-british in the audience and I've read your books before but I think I only really started feeling them when I moved to London so my question really is how do you feel you're perceived in other countries and how does that reflect on you or have you ever thought about you know you described yourself early as a London living toy a novel that you write what I think translation is weird right I mean trying to imagine what white teeth is in Polish or Korean you know it's it's quite hard to get your mind around and what the book means in that context but I guess I I don't I don't always have a clear sense I don't know there are laser language I know a bit better Italian so I have a bit more of a sense there but I don't know is the answer but like I can't you can't spend too much time considering it I think if you thought of yourself as someone you had to have an effect in all these different territories you go crazy I just focus on the book I'm writing when I teach a course called London in literature at UCL and we have quite a lot of affiliate students from the states and very often quite sensibly their approach to kind of texts is to go to the you know so they'll do it with Daniel to fir but they do do it with with kind of your novice so they'll go and kind of check out archway bridge or whatever it is someone Jim but Salman Rushdie's saying that apparently the bus routes in Midnight's Children are all wrong and he still gets letters from people please that's yours thank you yeah it's awful it's awful talking about something that you always have kind of post hoc rationalizations of it and even as you're saying it you think and that's not true so and I think it kind of calcifies into a kind of stopped response so it's so different right there was a period of while ago when Nick was doing a anthology with Tom Patterson the Scottish poet and I thought about the way that poets talk on stage and respond to questions and and but when you hear two poets talking together which I had to do a lot because they were discussing what poems are going on solidly on skype two poets talking together it's almost incomprehensible to an outsider you know it's like exchanges of lines very quickly just half a poem and then oh well that's rubbish and you don't know why and they're just going back and forth it's so different from the way poach is presented to the outsider which is kind of in Nice prose and explained it was like listening to a foreign language and there is always that gap I think between practitioners talking to each other in a kind of shorthand and then this other thing of translation we've got time for about one more question okay could we have well maybe two one there and one there and then we all go and have a drink and I wondered whether you could take us through um how you begin writing so if there's something that you're thinking about right how how'd you go about that process both as a kind of a poet and a prose writer it's completely different you have to go first up early so the poem comes Berryman talks about it like a chime and older and so I usually get a kind of verbal freshen a kind of like two or three words that seem to me just sort of interesting in some way you have a kind of spark something and then you kind of try and draw it out into a shape and a line and then it kind of becomes and that what you're sort of engaged with subconsciously kind of rises to the surface which makes it sound like a kind of steady process it's not at all it's not sort of a mess and you'll keep going back to it and but it tends to begin with some kind of interesting phrase or interest in words rather than like an image which I think some poets do start with but the the fiction for me begins with an image usually like a something that has interest to me and it's usually an image rather than verbal yeah it's the same in an image for the fiction but then I notice a difference that in our house poetry is or is on things envelopes it's on every you know lines are written here and there and you can see something growing or being circled around like open did one of the kids books yes at the end of the whole poem on the first page but you just written over the title page of this poor kids whereas with fiction I think it's much more like it's just much more in a straight line for me you know it's it's work I have a concept I sit down I make steady progress it's just it's much more in a straight line and I have a vision of what I'm doing and I just keep going in day after day with books that cameras like dreams for example but then there's still the legwork the boring of course yeah sometimes you get a like a plot idea or something which someone will tell you a story yeah yeah you're bringing the curtain down my god question but what have you been reading and enjoying thinking because that's always good to hear I'm just fully immersed in this final and now scarred I guess but before that we were both reading different books by a French writer called Emmanuel career and who's just incredible I think is really good he's unbelievably good I'm reading this thousand page novel and the early Christian Church amazing have to say it is terrific it sounds like it would be so boring it's so interesting and there's a book of his which i think is it extraordinary which is about a man it's a famous true story about a Belgian man who for 30 years had pretended to go to work every day and probably know his story in the UN I think and then it was found out as a doctor and in fact all he was doing is going sitting in his car and sometimes walking in the forest and when he got discovered he killed his parents his children his parents in-laws and his dog and it's just the most extraordinary book I mean it sounds like some kind of salacious to crime but it's actually about your sense of self and what happens when it's exploded and it's unbelievable but all these books are unbelievable I think okay well that's a that's a bracing recommendation to go away with into the vernal glades of Queens Park are you signing yeah so stating it we'll do a bit of signee thanks for coming I'm sure you'd want me to say thanks for that you

Channel: Queen's Park Book Festival

Views: 12,627

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

Keywords: Queen's Park, Queen's Park Book Festival, Literary Festival, NW6, Northwest London, John Mullan, Zadie Smith, Nick Laird, Modern Gods, Feel Free

Id: KoZ7ZsTnsIc

Length: 64min 5sec (3845 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020