In March 2024, Camille Ralphs’ debut collection After You Were, I Am was published by Faber and Faber. It is a collection where ‘charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world’, from the opening metaphysical rewritings of poems and prayers to the Pendle Witch Trials and the diary of Elizabethan magus John Dee.
After You Were, I Am followed the Daydream College for Bards box set published in 2023 by Guillemot Press, featuring four connected pamphlets that respond to WH Auden’s proposed ideal education for poets. They are split into ‘Constraints’, ‘Imitations’, ‘Translations’ and a ‘Journal’.
In the following interview, Elliot Ruff speaks to Camille about the Daydream College for Bards and its intersections with After You Were, I Am.
ELLIOT: In the Daydream College for Bards how are you adhering to form, and in what ways are you attempting to transform and deform?
CAMILLE: I think the thing about received forms is that, like any human tool and expressive symbol that we have, they’ve evolved over however many centuries of usage and each one has established itself as ideal for a particular task. For instance, if you want to write about obsessive thoughts you might lean towards a villanelle or terzanelle, and you could say you’re adhering to that a little bit. But you might also tweak it in some ways based on other things that you’ve tried and that have worked in your experiments. Although I do think some adherence to form is necessary: in the same way that you wouldn’t play a wedding march on a kazoo (unless you were doing it with great ironic skill), you wouldn’t compose a heartfelt elegy in limericks. Or if you did, people would be very upset and confused. Something I think about quite often is how Byron switched from the serpentine Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the ottava rima in Don Juan, which is sharper and more predictable and therefore better suited to comic timing, and how that enabled him to slide into the satirical voice for which he’s probably best known now.
E: How did you choose who to imitate, or at least who to spend time trying to imitate? Are there any poets who are inimitable, either for yourself or more generally?
C: I think I chose the poets I wanted to imitate based on a few different motivations. The first being if I have an affinity to them already and just want to try my hand at their kind of thing - with Hopkins for instance. Another being if I admire their work but have some distance from them, and wonder why that is and whether I can possibly approach the kind of thing they do, and that was the case with someone like Adrienne Rich. Or in some cases if I felt like I hadn’t read enough of their work and I wanted an excuse to get to grips with it better and to sit with it and to get inside it in some way, as was the case with my slightly mad John Skelton imitation or some versions of Tennyson and Jorie Graham not included in the pamphlets. There were some imitations I struggled with, like cummings where I found my sensibility wasn’t really suited to his. And I think there are, of course, some poets who you wouldn’t try or if you did it would be a bit silly. Just as Western philosophy consists in a series of footnotes to Plato, English literature consists in a series of footnotes to Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer. Although we’re all imitating them at all times to some extent, for anyone who tries to write a new Shakespeare play … good luck. I did try to write a version of a new, short Chaucer lyric, but it didn’t work out. There’s the language barrier there as well as the attainment gap – it’s very very difficult to do that kind of thing.
E: The poems in After You Were, I Am seem to occupy a space of many voices speaking at once throughout history. I’m wondering if you feel your approach to poetry through historical voices came about from practising with those ‘Imitations’, ‘Translations’ and ‘Constraints’?
C: I think the interest in history is quite long-standing for me. The poems in ‘Malkin’ and ‘from the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’ sections were written, or at least drafted, before I did the Daydream College. But my interest in history, and the poet as a conduit for history, comes from a respect for the legacy of people who came before, and for what they put into literature and language – language that we use without thinking about it, full of other people’s contributions at all times. That definitely contributed to my wanting to do the Daydream College for Bards project. There’s a quotation from G.K. Chesterton where he says ‘tradition is the democracy of the dead’, which ‘refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around now’. Which is a humbling thought. But a useful one.
E: This educational structure, as you point out, is similar to the one that informed many writers of English literature’s first “golden age”, but it’s unlikely to be similar to how most contemporary poets are going about learning poetry.
C: I think it’s often not young, contemporary poets’ fault that they’re not being given this kind of guidance. In the teaching of poetry at the moment there seems to be a lot of emphasis on inspiration and expression, and not necessarily that much on composition. This isn’t true of all poets and teachers of course, but I’ve heard horror stories of teachers telling their students off for asking about form or telling their students they shouldn’t read anything from more than fifty years ago. It feels to me almost tyrannical and self-protective; a way of avoiding being challenged. I think younger poets would probably benefit from knowing about this kind of thing, even if they weren’t interested in it, and at least thinking about doing it and seeing what might be missing in their own work.
E: Was there anything that made you reach for Auden’s system?
C: I’d read that essay years ago and it had floated around my mind as an ideal. Then when lockdown happened, I just had no excuse anymore. I had to do it. I also thought about the way other poets do things quite a lot, and I mention a few of them in the journal. Robert Lowell camping out on his mentor’s lawn. Theodore Roethke writing various imitations for eleven years, trying to get himself into shape. Quotations from poets like Walcott talking about how imitation is the best way to find your voice. But it all seemed to me to just support Auden’s idea.
E: When you started the Daydream College, did you have any notion of publishing the process?
C: I started working on the project because I had this terrible inner critic that wouldn’t leave me alone, and if I tried to write poems in any normal way, I just wouldn’t be able to do it. I thought overwhelming that critic with quantity would be a good way to shut it up and potentially draft some publishable poems along the way. When I was writing the journal it did strike me that this is the kind of thing that might be a good memoir at some point, but it was a little too niche in the end, I think. As writers’ journals are, it was a bit repetitive and a bit too much about me. So, I decided the best thing to do was to have a more bespoke version of the publication - the version Guillemot produced, which contains a selection of the most useful or curious entries from that journal.
E: The diary seems important in both books, as poetic form in your Dee poems and as the first section of the Daydream College text: has this always been an important practise to you?
C: Yes definitely. The writer’s notebook (these days supplemented by the writer’s Notes app) is an absolute necessity because there are so many ideas or reflections that you could completely lose if you didn’t write them down. Often things come in handy later on, or you go back through things and find something that sparks with whatever you’re working on at the moment, and it comes together in a way you don’t expect. It’s also very important to have a reflective practice in poetry, as much as in life, to figure out what didn’t work, why, how you can make it work next time, and whether there’s any skill or knowledge that you don’t have and that you could benefit from gaining. It’s a good way to tease out big questions slowly and allow things to cohere over time in surprising ways.
E: On the Faber podcast you say that you ‘find writing a normal lyric poem very difficult’. Was this something you found during this process? Did the Daydream College open a way around the lyric poem in any sense?
C: When I said, ‘normal lyric poem’ what I meant was a poem that seems to spring from the hand unbidden and the watchful heart of the poet, and that looks in a unified and conventional way to be of that writer when it’s on the page. I struggle with that because I struggle with the idea of a unified self. I think I’m probably more a sort of human vapour, possibly a flammable one, and there are lots of different versions of me that would like to try themselves out in life and on the page. I think the Daydream College imitations appealed in part because they’re another way of wearing masks. And when you are forced into another person’s identity or style for a moment, you are essentially forcing yourself to look at a particular aspect of yourself, or your lyric self, more closely and singularly.
Daydream College for Bards was originally published in a limited edition box set that sold out very quickly. The text is now available as part of our Offcuts series, available here. The images presented alongside this interview from the original box set edition
