Following the November release of Salt Moon Guillemot friend, poet and composer Philip Lancaster catches up with the poet David Harsent to discuss this new collaboration with his son Simon.
Philip Lancaster: In your new book from Guillemot Press, Salt Moon, your poetry appears alongside photographs by your son, Simon Harsent. The photographs are as engrossing as the poetry, capturing something akin to the atmosphere of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings; their textures and their light. So often your poetry uses human stories as a starting point, be they real, imagined, historical or mythological, and it seems unusual to find something visual perhaps providing the impetus for a book. How much of a role did they play in the birth of Salt Moon?
David Harsent: Some while ago I published a collection called Marriage, poems that traded off the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his mistress, model and, eventually, wife, Marthe de Meligny. There was, of course, a narrative to the relationship but, for the most part, the poems were prompted by Bonnard’s paintings. I developed a theory that I called ‘the mysteries of domesticity’ that has to do with subterranean equivalents of the quotidian: a deeper narrative that registers along the nerve-endings, that works off image and texture and music. So, for example, in the ‘normal’ way of things dinner is simply dinner; in another version of that, a different understanding, all food is a sacrament.
The difference between my responses first to Bonnard’s work, then to Simon’s, is that the photographs in Salt Moon offered nothing to narrative. Simon and I have worked together before. I wrote poems for three photographs he took: of the icefield, the ocean and the rainforest; three poster-poems. This was a commission from World Wildlife Australia. Later, I wrote a poem to accompany a photograph (one of an astonishing sequence called Into the Abyss) of a woman who has just crashed through the surface of a body of water and is holding beautiful, angular, poses while the seethe of bubbles from her sudden plunge flow past her towards the surface. The image was part of a group exhibition and was later taken for a promotion by Sydney Opera House who asked for a poem to accompany it.
There was no immediate response of that sort to the Salt Moon images. Simon showed them to me some years ago. They haunted me, I was moved and fascinated by them, but I felt no impulse to write about them. It simply never occurred to me. Then, much later, and I don’t know why, it did. As soon as the impulse was there, I had the bare bones of a narrative built round images provoked by the sea, the sea at night, moonlight striking the sea.
PL: Your theory of the ‘mysteries of domesticity’ is perhaps something that poetry, at some level, does naturally. It is the art that is almost uniquely suited to exploring those deeper levels and nerve-endings.
Naturally, Salt Moon is full of reflections; words and ideas that reverberate throughout the book. Those who follow your work will undoubtedly see on the surface some echoes of previous publications: the near-elemental salt that gave its title to one of your most recent collections, and, in the first poem of Salt Moon, a mention of ‘a bird’s idea of flight’. However, Salt Moon is so very different to these. Indeed, Salt and Salt Moon seem formally to be polar opposites: the engrossing small windows onto lives and ideas in Salt, and the intense and expansive focus on the sea, the sea by night, and that moonlight striking, across 13 sections of four 3-line stanzas, with very short reflective interludes.
Was there some liberty in being able to build and develop an idea so intensely, and was it important to give something so expansive the formal backbone it has? (while never feeling formal); and are the echoes of previous works intended, or are they ‘just’ further layers in the growth of ideas and fascinations that develop and evolve across a lifetime?
DH: There are constants in my work, yes. They return unbidden and I don’t resist them. They define me and so define my work. That emphasis is revelation – to me, that is, but also, perhaps, to the reader. A lifetime’s work is not disparity but focus. Painters and musicians come back, again and again, to images, subjects, motifs. Picasso once said that, were all the steps he had taken in life represented as dots and the dots joined, it would give the shape of the Minotaur and, indeed, he finds the Minotaur again and again, or it finds him. (In my case, it would be the hare.) Maybe it’s easier – more immediate, less apparently measured or mannered – to revisit image in paint or music, but to me those intermittent re-discoveries are naturally occurring events. Harrison Birtwistle was once asked what he felt he had brought to modern music. He said, ‘Well, I tried to do something with pulse.’ It sounds almost dismissive but, in truth, describes an undertaking that informs every compositional encounter. I suppose my version of that would be, ‘Well, I tried to do something with the lyric.’
The compositional shifts in Simon’s photographs – the way light is gathered or spread by a dark sea, the shapes that are made by the sea’s movement, the way photography both traps and releases that movement, the images that are thrown, how the eye is held by the held moment of light-and-dark, of light-on-dark, the apprehension of movement before and movement to come – all this gave rise to the rhythm of repetition in the poems. The musical effects of ostinato and appoggiatura occurred to me – those hints that are glances back to future moments, each a new moment held in a moment revived.
Like the hare, moon and sea are everywhere in my work. But then moon and sea are crucial in the collective human imagination and human imagining: part of the life of the mind, part of an inner life. It’s a surprise, perhaps, that Simon’s salt moon photographs took a while to provoke me. The narrative grew slowly, as if the moon might take years to draw one movement of the tide. Where the particulars of the narrative came from – how they developed – is nothing more nor less than the commonplace compositional delirium in which images arrive and integrate.
PL: I don’t think it is at all mannered, that revisiting. Time brings continued thought, and new perspectives and contexts; and just because a book or poem or a piece of music has been ‘put to bed’ doesn’t stop the growth of ideas, nor the use of previously explored ideas to lend weight to, or place, new thoughts.
Being myself a musician, your talk of music – mention of ostinati and appoggiaturas, the use of the rhythm of repetition akin to musical motifs, as well as mention of Harrison Birtwistle – fascinates me. Music plays an important part in your poetry, in frequent snatches of song, thought, felt or sung by your protagonists, the bringing in of its language, or in the verbal music of your poetry. This latter seems especially ripe in Salt Moon, with a beautiful use of sound; in the subtle shifts and transformations of the words when spoken aloud.
You are not a musician, but you work very closely with musicians: a regular collaborator with Harrison Birtwistle, writing several operas together, as well as other works including the song cycle Songs from the Same Earth (poems published in Fire Songs); and you have also produced libretti for other composers, such as Sally Beamish and Huw Watkins.
How much has working with composers influenced the music in your work, or has music always been an important part of you and your poetry’s being?
DH: I didn’t mean revisiting in the hope of gaining new perspectives; I was thinking, rather, of emphasis, of sending the reader back to an image or a thought: you might say repeating, or referencing, a particular colour in the poem’s palette.
Music is a big part of my life, yes, but music itself doesn’t have any compositional effect on my work. I was once asked what I look for in a poem (stupid question). My response was to say that if I couldn’t hear the music it probably wasn’t a poem, a reply that was met with puzzlement and hostility. Music in poetry has to do with word-choice and rhythm; rhythm has to do with the way you manage prosody: that is, how you configure the beats and the line-breaks and the pauses. Basic stuff, really, but too few people seem to know it, or want to know it. Strict metrical patters are always there, somewhere, at the back of things: an echo.
I often use what seems to me to be a loose metrical structure that works for narrative shapes and / or the burden of the piece (or you could say its temperature, its degrees of light and dark) and then come to realise that I have found a patterning that relies, in some way, on formal metre. (I guess my use of the word burden there is something of a giveaway.) To go back, for a moment, as a parallel, to the join-the-dots minotaur and the join-the-dots hare, Tam Lin and the Demon Lover and The Twa Corbies and Little Musgrave are so often playing in my head. Like my relentless tinnitus, I don’t hear them unless I’m thinking about them, but I’m never less than glad to be reminded. (The music of tinnitus is sometimes fanfare, sometimes as if in the string section a fluctuating note were being held to infinity, sometimes the uninterpretable voices of angels.)
PL: In my work as a composer, I am always wary of respecting a poet’s words. The act of setting a poem to music is tantamount to grievous bodily harm, imposing music on a work that was seen by its maker to be complete in itself, with its own hard-won verbal music.
When writing for musical setting, when it is poetic exploration rather than merely dialogue, do you make concession to the music? and how do you feel upon hearing your words set to music?
DH: I know what you mean by GBH, but I simply don’t see it that way. I trust the composers I’ve worked with (especially Harry, though him, perhaps, because we’ve worked together on so many projects and the evidence is definitely in) to use my words in a way that works best for their purpose: that is to say, for the purpose of the collaborative piece. There’s no question of making concessions to the music, because I don’t know what the music will be and it’s not my job to think about what the music will do. Or do to my work.
Harry was once asked why he had worked with me so often. He said, ‘David gives me what I want.’ He wasn’t talking about words that can be easily bent to music’s purpose, he meant that we think alike, that our sensibilities – when we’re collaborating – seem to match. I don’t expect my rhythms or line breaks or syllabic structure to be in any way reflected in the way his settings work. I know there are librettists who complain of their lines being bullied, of structures being taken up and re-made. My view is that the libretto, before it’s set, is waiting on the music. Once set, it’s transformed – part of the piece – opera, oratorio, song cycle – which is a different thing and to be differently judged.
The libretto can be had separately – as a pamphlet or pages in the programme; there, it is (let’s say) a verse drama. When incorporated, its sculptural definitions change and modify; are changed and modified. It applies in all cases, not least when poems are set. Of course, it’s possible to take against this piece or that because the music itself might be thought indifferent. Britten’s setting of the Lyke Wake Dirge [in the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings] (for example) is banal.
The collaborative process isn’t (perhaps I ought to say ‘shouldn’t be’) a matter of appropriation, but of creative compatibility. When writing for the opera stage, Harry and I talk at length about the structure of the piece, but never make any reference to words and music as separate events. We have ideas about the dramatic patterns, about characters, about motive, about certain turning points in the action; in short, about how the piece will develop as operatic drama.
I was talking, once, with Don Paterson – and Don’s a musician, of course, as well as a poet – on the subject of poems being set. He said, ‘How could someone set this poem – I’ve already set it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you have. But it won’t be that person’s intention simply to re-set it; they’ll want to make use of it.’
To consider this in the light of Salt Moon: I can’t imagine Simon complaining that my poems don’t reflect his intentions when he took those photographs, or match what he felt. My point is that the best collaborations are developmental. (Reading back, I notice light and reflect making themselves felt. There might be something in that.)
PL: You have mentioned already the compositional shifts in Simon’s photographs; ‘the way photography both traps and releases’ the sea’s movement, and the rhythm of repetition that they brought. Salt Moon presents 28 photographs alongside, and framing, your poems. Thinking about that transformation: are the poems particular to their photographs, arising from long contemplation of both the individual images (seeing such as the hagstone) and an ordering of those photographs into a narrative sequence? What was your process in this, and how did the images prompt and build that narrative?
DH: The short answer is, that didn’t happen. No single photo gave rise to (for example) the cliff-top house, the bird, or the Black Madonna. The poems – a narrative sequence – came about as a response to the photographs as a whole: to their mood, you might say, or to the mood they provoked in me which, as I’ve said, developed slowly. (No pun intended, but I’ll allow it, as with burden and light and reflect. Puns of that sort are little electric connections across the synaptic terminals.)
Simon has the most extraordinary eye. His vision is compelling and his reaction to image and object intense. All art (that of significance) is obsessional and vision is everything. I referred to the sequence he called Into the Abyss – a kind of underwater ballet, pas seul; but to make mention of just a fraction of his output: there’s GBH, a series of portraits of one-time football hooligans, then portraits of Mafiosi taken during Simon’s years in New York, then a series called The Beautiful Game: shots of football stadia, an example of startling compositional innovation that tells a story of class-divisions, but also indicates the fierce loyalties in football; another series was shot (at not inconsiderable personal risk) in a favela in the Philippines. And there’s Melt – Portrait of an Iceberg, a truly major undertaking that involved Simon tracking icebergs from the moment they calved from the icefield and recording their sculptural transformation as they travelled and melted in open water. It’s an extraordinary set of images. Quite why it was Salt Moon, as opposed to any of these, that moved me to write is a mystery: the kind of mystery on which poetry depends.
Simon and I are both enormously grateful to Guillemot Press for taking on Salt Moon and making it such a beautiful book.
PL: And I am grateful to you for taking the time to talk about your work. Thank you, David – and thanks to both you and Simon for what is in every way a truly beautiful book.
Salt Moon by David and Simon Harsent is available to buy here.
Sonata by Philip Lancaster will be published in 2021.
Many of the photographs and photographic series by Simon Harsent mentioned by David can be seen here.
Salt Moon is published by Guillemot Press. The other works by David Harsent mentioned here are published by Faber & Faber.