Fake News, Real Poems: Quickfire Q+A with Alan Riach

Join us as Alan Riach, author of What the Sea Gives, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!
What is a quick-fire Q&A?
We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.

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What is your favourite thing about being an author?

Oh, it’s the exercise of the imagination. It’s when you have the space to be away from everybody and everything else in the whole world, and all of those things are with you, but they’re not with you when you write. And you know, sometimes you hear people say, ‘Well, being an author is a very lonely thing.’ I love that. I think that gives you a space for your own mind to work through whatever is in it. If you have a facility with words, and if you love words or language, and if you understand, even if you don’t understand, the thing is magic. Words are magic. Words are things you do not understand. Magic is what you don’t understand, and it’s only if you can get the space and the time to let your brain be in that place, to let your mind be in that place, that you are enabled to be an author.
I think whether it’s a poet or a novelist or an author or a thinker, you know, a critic, or a literary historian, any kind of author at all, really, it’s that freedom. To say that that is my favourite thing about being an author makes it sound kind of facile, but I think it's actually profound.

It’s also because you’re not tied to a commercial priority. It's not genre fiction. I mean, I love genre fiction, and I love some aspects of crime fiction or various different kinds of genre fiction, science fiction also, but if it’s commercial, if the commercialised selling is the priority, then you have those dictated parameters to observe, and you’re writing to an agenda. Different agendas apply if you’re writing poems or particular forms of writing or authorship, but within certain understandings, your freedom is assured, and that I think is one of the best things about the gift of writing.

It’s not always something that you can dictate because if your mind is free to do that, sometimes the language will take over. Sometimes, if it’s fiction, it might be the characters who take over, or if it’s poetry, it might be an impulse to rhyme or to use language in a certain way, or to dramatise it or heighten it in a certain way. Those impulses might sometimes not even be at your behest. So you follow them, you transmit them, you pass them on. But I think being allowed, and allowing yourself, and sometimes having to carve out the space and the time, defensively, as it were: that’s the thing. But once you're there, that freedom is such a valuable thing.

What is something that you take everywhere with you?

Well, a book. Just about everywhere I go, I’ll have at least one book with me. Could be of any kind. I might say that I would take everywhere with me my identification card for United Network Command for Law Enforcement. This allows me to present myself as a man from U.N.C.L.E., which of course is a TV series of such antiquity that hardly anybody remembers it now, but. But it’s not true. I don’t take it with me anywhere. I suspect that it’s probably worth a lot of money on eBay or something like that. What else do I take with me? A material object might be a book, usually a notebook and a pen, or a pencil. And the intrinsic optimism of curiosity. That’s what I think I should take with me.

How do you celebrate finishing a book?

It depends on the point of finishing it. So, particularly with Luath Press and Gavin, and the detail and time and concentration that is given to a book, after it’s been handed in, in terms of typesetting and proofreading and going over the mechanics of making it right on the page. There’s finishing a book in terms of writing it and then there’s the whole process of seeing it into print, so that when you see the hard copy of a book it’s very different.
I remember this with Scottish Literature: An Introduction, when the book appeared Gavin had a box of these big, substantial, 700-page books in a cardboard box for me to pick up. The only way I could do that was to get them in the boot of the car, which meant driving up the Royal Mile and going down into the close, and then reversing in, turning the car in the small yard where the press is located, just off the Royal Mile. I just happened to have a big car that day, and finding a way to reverse in, with half an inch to spare on either side, then opening the boot for us to get the box in, that was a moment of real celebration. It was kind of tight. You know, I didn't go and get a drink immediately, but the sense of it being, I’ve got the books now. There they are. I’ve been working on this for such a long time, and here it is. Seventeen years. That moment of seeing the book for the first time is a finishing moment, and it’s almost as if the physicality of that drive and that event was a celebration in itself.

Normally, when there’s a book launch or if there’s an event, the enjoyment of other people is hugely important and satisfying. The fact that other people are now reading it, it belongs with them, and their responses are their own, and the book itself is there for other people. I feel the feeling of satisfaction and happiness that other people will be reading it to their benefit. It’s no longer about me at all. I’ve put everything I need to put into it. It’s for other people to take out from it what they will. That in itself is a celebration.

But yeah, it’s also great fun if you can get together with some friends and have a drink and read a few poems to each other and relax with it. Because there’s also the tension that leads to the actual creation of the work, and wherever it is crafted, there’s also a conscientious, very self-conscious aspect to it, beyond the spontaneity of it. But then when it’s published your relaxation with it, with other people and with the poems, that aspect of it is very celebratory and I’m very glad to be able to have that in my life. 

What was your favourite thing about writing this book?

This book particularly, oddly, was revising it. In my previous books of poems, the poems have been arranged in sections – a section on Scotland, a section on international locations, a section on family. In my last one there was a section on the coalescence of the 2014 referendum and the death of my parents. Moments of great hope, moments of considerable despair, grief. So those discrete sections were there in the first draft of this new book that I put together more than a year ago, and then Gavin had suggested that if I could pull it together promptly about a year ago now, then or less than a year ago now, then it was it was conceivable we could get it published within the year ahead. That meant that I had to look at it all again and very, very hard and very, very quickly, and that was really good work. I mean, I felt very happy, satisfied to do that work, because it meant very quickly recognising if you’re going to make this into a book, some of these poems you’re still playing around with them, they’re still in process, or they're still work in progress. Put them to one side. You might use them. You might not, later on. But what’s the core of this book going to be?

And then doing away with the sections that I had thought would be the structure of the book. And most poetry books don't have sections. And I thought that would be fine. Let’s just have one coherent book, which can be read from start to finish, and there are groups of poems within it, and some of them are versions or recreations of translations of other poets. Some of them are based in – as in previous years and with previous books – particular locations, whether it would be Scotland or America or Italy or India, but there are also fundamental themes in this book, and one is that encapsulated in the title, What the Sea Gives. So it’s a kind of endorsement of the generosity of the world of what life might actually provide, if we if we allow it to and if we are receptive to it.

And alongside that, there's one called the forest floor, which goes back to the idea of the Caledonian forest and the regeneration of nature. So these are not poems of despair about the climate crisis and the disasters that human beings are putting upon nature, they’re rather poems in which nature and the natural world can be not just celebrated but understood. That mortality is part of the nutrients of the earth, or that the sea is full of dangers and terrors and risks, but it’s also a provision that can regenerate itself if we stop doing some of the things that we’re doing. That aspect of it was really important, and reconsidering the book as a whole, not as a series of discrete parts, but as an entity in which all of these parts could reflect against each other.

How would you describe the tone or mood of this collection?

It varies. It’s various. Well, it begins with domestic love, so it’s indoors, it’s closed, it’s hopeful, but it’s also about mortality and ageing. It’s also about the fact that I am now closer to the hour of my death than I am to the moment of my birth. So, facing up to that and saying okay, let’s not dwell on it so much or sentimentalise it or be banal about it. But how does that relate to your understanding of experience of what you’ve encountered and your understanding of human potential, your own potential and others and the potential of the world?

So it’s both domestic, indoors, internalised, but also opening out to an international context. I guess you could describe it in seven movements or shifting through seven tones or moods or areas. It opens with personal contacts, reliable things, whether actual encounters, or appreciations of music or art or writing or political legacy, things that are still turning us outwards. Then there are two poems that you might say are central, the core of the book, ‘Seatangling’ and ‘The Forest Floor’. After that, there are portraits of various people, friends, people I knew or have known, writers, or composers and artists whose work I know well, and I do rely on to reassure and replenish me when I need them.
Friends and great works of art, I think, have this in common. They can make you laugh and you can learn things from them you would never have thought of by yourself.
Then there’s a small cluster of poems coming out of the COVID lockdown period, relating to our family circumstance, fortunate as we were, but threatened as all of us were at that time. What can you rely on in such a condition? It did prompt the question. And here are a few answers.

The fifth mood or tone moves through various places, it takes particular locations as the prompt, in Scotland, India, Italy and America, mainly. And the sixth group of poems you might call the nightmares, and the central poem here is about the great composer Tobias Hume, who was also a mercenary soldier. That ambiguity or ambivalence, where this wonderful, melancholy, beautifully sustained music is being composed by a man whose business was killing, with a legendary weapon of mass destruction in his invention, or maybe just in his imagination. This was intriguing to me, and it connects Scotland to Poland in ways I’ve always found fascinating.

And it gets us to music, which is also a recurring theme in the book, composers, music, and language, the language of music and of libraries, the resources of the forest and the sea, of Mozart or Ronald Center or Joan Eardley.  

Towards the end of the book, there are very specific poems about Scotland, which are now removed from direct engagement with the political world – not that they ever were in any limiting sense – but now we’re going back to the 14th, 15th centuries, and bringing versions of poems from that era into a contemporary rendition.

How do these things apply outside of the immediacy of the pretty horrible nature of the political world in Scotland and internationally?

There are truths that you can find here, and that’s, in a sense, that’s the core of the book. What can you trust, and who can you trust? Fake news. Fake news, trust issues, and real poems – that sums it up pretty well. I think we’re surrounded by fake news. We’re surrounded by issues of trust, and maybe it’s only in in poems or in poetry or in works of art, and in particular people, that you can find it, reliable truth.

Also, you’re sensitive to the fact that interpretations of works of art can change, and that people change over time and can move their dispositions or be moved in their dispositions. The question of trust becomes both sharper and deeper, and more relativised. So it’s keeping all these things in play. 

Do you enjoy hearing how others interpret your poems, even if it’s different from your own intent?

Yes, very much. I’m always very curious. I’ve got the good fortune of a colleague at the University of Warsaw, Professor Barry Keane, writing an essay about this book. He has written about the previous two books, and this last essay, interpreting What the Sea Gives, I think it’s one of the most insightful of all the things he’s written.

Occasionally I do get essays or comments or individual emails from people who have picked up on a particular poem or book and comment on it. It’s very gladdening, very heartening to know that other people do actually read these things, because you publish them and then they’re out there, and it’s not up to me to intervene.

I remember talking to the American poet Robert Creeley about one of his most famous poems, called ‘I Know a Man’, and it refers to this man as John, it’s a very tiny poem, and he just says basically, ‘What are we going to do? The world is big and it’s dark out there,’ and his pal John says, ‘Let's buy a big car and drive, just drive,’ and the last line of it is just ‘watch out where you’re going’ and it’s a kind of Protestant kind of Christian poem in a way. Just be careful, you know, slow down. On the other hand, it’s saying, yeah, let’s go, let’s take a big bite. It's a big world.

So there’s that lovely little encapsulation of those impulses, and Robert Creeley was saying to me, he’d read an essay or a comment about this, saying that someone had read it and thought that John was a reference to John the Baptist, and that this was a Christian poem in a way that he had never imagined. And I said, ‘What do you feel about that?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s up to them. It’s not for me. It’s if they feel that way, then I don’t want to interfere with that. Just let it take its interpretation from the person who’s interpreting it’. And I kind of feel that way too. There’s a kind of famous notion that the author or the poet puts in meaning, but it’s the reader who draws out significance. One of the anxieties, I suppose, about writing, especially writing poems, is that you read them and you reread them once you think you’ve got them finished. You look at them and look at them again, and you’re trying to imagine how others will read this. And of course, you can’t, you can't imagine the range of possible responses that there might be, but you try and go through it. How would it be read if you read it from that angle, or with this in mind, or with this sensitivity, or with that disposition? And obviously, you can’t encompass everything, but you do try to make sure that what you’ve written is what you want to write. It’s what you intended. There is intention, and there is an intentional purpose, and you try and make that work. But ultimately, you cannot control it.

And I think that also is part of the tone of this book, What the Sea Gives. It’s that the sea is what is encompassing. Ultimately, you will not encompass it, and that sense of control is what you can do with an individual poem or with a collection of poems. But it cannot be overcontrolled. It cannot. Some poets, I think, I really get tired and impatient with those poets who write poems where you know what they’re going to write from before you start reading them. I mean, it's like predicted. It’s just this disposition at work again.

What I really prefer is poets who write poems where you don’t know what they might do with the language, or what might happen that you will never have read before, unpredicted, and at the same time, two, where they’re going to take your mind, and where their mind will take you.

I think those two things are different but overlapping: the movement of the mind and the movement of the language, in any poem, in all poetry, when it’s working. They’re integrated, but they’re different. Where the mind is taking you, and where the language is taking you. If you keep those things in play, I think you’re winning.

What the Sea Gives is out now.