Extracts

A Journey with the Muscovites
Interview with Giles Goodland
Sweetcorn

The Waterlog

from Giles Goodland
interviewed by Geoff Sawers

Do you think poetry can really communicate to anyone?
Has it ever changed your or your friends’ worlds?

I would not write the stuff if I did not think so. It has certainly changed my world: I suspect that it changes everyone who has found themselves responding to a poem. A poem is as close as you get to being intimate with a total stranger. One day in the future when we have mobile phones implanted in our brains and communicate by thought with those around us, we will find that the poem is the only way we can talk to each other.

When you wrote ‘Overlay’ you were living in Australia, weren’t you? It seems a strange place to get very obsessive about Samuel Taylor Colehdge’s bowel movements. Do you fnd it changes your reading of ‘Frost at Midnight’ or something, where the thought is so ‘pure’, and beautiful, to think of him struggling with such a recalcitrant colon? I’m sorry if my questions are odd by the way. I have a bad head cold and I keep gefting dizzy and hallucinating.

I was staying as a kind of year-long guest in the house of my (then) three-year old daughter’s mother. Often I would take Madeleine to her day-care and would be at a loose end for the rest of the day, and sometimes on those days I would take a bus up to the University of Adelaide, and think, well, I am free to read whatever I like in this whole university library, no one is telling me I should read anything, and I slowly homed in on Coleridge’s notebooks. My poem ‘Overlay’ is pretty parasitic on these books. The sensation I got from reading them was of a sadness because Coleridge’s mind was essentially that of a modernist, you could make out an argument for the notebooks being the first great modernist poem, but he was trapped in a period before modernism, so he never realised that he had in fact himself written the great autobiographical poem he attributed to Wordsworth. The intention of ‘Overlay’ was to write that poem for him, to combine my mind with his in order to write poems which appear to happen at the speed of thought, as happens in notebook scribbles. The shit business, yes. Coleridge was obsessed with his bowels and wrote about them constantly because one effect of opium-eating is chronic constipation. But costiveness is also a metaphor for the way he wrote, the great non-finisher, the retentive who held on to his great ideas and found it increasingly difficult to release them in poems. Shit is a great and relatively unexploited metaphor. Coincidentally, while I stayed in Australia, I had no job permit, so the only way I could make money was to submit my body for medical research, which turned out to be largely to do with inserting different kinds of pressure gauges into my anus and measuring muscle pressure, a pretty disgusting business, but it paid okay. You need not if you are squeamish put that in the interview. I had not thought of a connection before, perhaps this medical work helped me see the importance of Coleridge’s dwelling in this area. How does it affect ‘Frost at Midnight’? That’s a difficult question; my image of Coleridge has become so changed by working through his notebooks, the way his mind works, that it is sometimes quite a shock to turn from them to his ‘finished’ works. I love his conversational style in some of those poems, there is little sense of strain, the effects come easily. But then, that was before opium had taken a hold o