An Interview with Camille Ralphs

The poet discusses her new collection After You Were I am and granting empathy to the distant past.

WTB Interview with Camille Ralphs

*This interview has been slightly edited for clarity

Ben: Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week, I'm excited to bring you an interview with poet and editor Camille Ralphs.

Camille's work has been featured in prestigious outlets like the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

Her debut collection, After You Were, I Am, is out now from Faber and Faber, and she has very kindly agreed to come on and discuss it with me today.

The poems of the collection centre around the lives of various historical and mythological figures.

Their lives are usually relegated to the back pages of history books.

Each of her poems breeds life into historical accounts and fills them with an empathy that seems to connect a reader with their distant lives almost immediately. Coupled with that, the fact that her use of language is both

technical and electric, it creates a collection that teams with life on every page.

Ben: Hi Camille, thanks for coming on the show.

Camille Ralphs: Hi Ben, thanks very much for having me. It's great to be with you.

Ben: , I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this collection. I think it's absolutely amazing, I really enjoyed this. I think it's a really dense meta-textual poetry collection. Anyone who reads this poetry collection is going to immediately be hit by your love of history or your fascination with Elizabethan history and Elizabethan Gothic in general, which is very evident throughout the collection. I was wondering if you could share what draws you to that period in particular

Camille Ralphs: Yeah, of course, it's very good of you to have noticed that; not everybody pins it down, but there is a definite Elizabethan thing in me.

Ben: Okay.

Camille Ralphs, which is about the Elizabethan occultist, John Dee, who was the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth the First and spent much of his time travelling around the continent with his scryer, trying to contact the angels, uh, because that's pretty Elizabethan Gothic, I think, and this draws on his spiritual diaries.

So just one poem from the beginning of that. I think that actually was a good poem to choose because it highlights a few of the things that really interest me about that period. It was a time of great social and economic change because, on the one hand, England was expanding. These were the beginnings of the so-called British Empire, a term that was actually coined by John Dee in one of his books.

And on the other hand, it was essentially still a developing country. Those were what one scholar, James A. Williamson's, called narrow and needy times. And we remember them as a golden age, in part because of the literature produced at that time, when the English language was finally settling down a bit.

And what a poet called Samuel Daniel said was that the treasure of our tongue was being carried to distant shores as well. Of course, we have Shakespeare from that time in particular. I think there's a lot of Shakespeare in my work, as there is in that of a lot of poets.

Ben: He's the unavoidable inspiration, I think, for a lot of English poets who go a little bit further back into history.

Camille Ralphs: Yes, he's the sort of bogeyman that you have to face up to in some way or another. The best way is to just incorporate him.

Ben: You picked a really interesting figure in John Dee, though. He is such an international man of mystery, which might be the wrong term for an Elizabethan aid to the Queen, but he really is this enigmatic kind of figure and your collection in particular, especially the third section, which is all about John Dee I suppose we probably shy away from the occult side when we talk about John Dee in a modern context.

But one of the things that your collection never does is shy away from the occult or the strange, and you think it comes across wonderfully. One of the things that I noticed while you were reading there is that the pace of language in your poetry really moves at lightning speed; you have a real command of combining sounds, phrases, and a little bit of alliteration in there, and you seem to take a real joy in the language that you play with in your poetry.

Was there anything in particular that drew you to that kind of wordplay?

Have you always played with language in that way?

Camille Ralphs: I think the great thing about language is that it's just full of windows and doors. And as Emily Dickinson writes, I dwell on possibility of fairer house than prose. More numerous for Windows, superior for doors. And her work is famously ambiguously punctuated. And one of the possibilities is poetry in particular.

What it brings for us, as you've just suggested, is the musical; the way that poem sounds can echo a feeling or else can entertain or distract in the same way as some songs do or, some, other kinds of music do. There's also. The etymological, the word play aspect, as you say, sort of historical side of things.

I'm especially drawn to that, uh, because, as you've observed as well, I'm interested in history and in English because this land has been invaded so much and has done so much invading. There's a lot of history in the languages, borrowing from other languages. . This is what Geoffrey Hill calls the language's verticality, or it's, you know, accumulation of other stuff.

An example I like to use for how history shows up in the words that we use every day is how we still use Anglo-Saxon words to refer to the animals we farm, like pigs, chickens, and cows. But we use the French words to refer to those same animals when they appear on the dinner table as pork, poultry, or beef.

And that's because of the Norman invasion and the subjugation of so many of the existing peoples of this island at the time. And there are a lot of different strategies for incorporating that sort of thing in poetry, most obviously through wordplay. , and a lot of poets. are also doing it in more subtle ways, like Zafir Kunyal, for instance, who is very, very good at this in his work.

Ben: It's interesting that you make that observation about how English has been made to choose between which influence it's going to use for which aspect of its daily life. I guess for a poet like yourself, you're always in control of what you choose.

Poetry is one of those forms in which every word counts. Every word is intentional. Every word has a weight to it. There's no waste, necessarily. Would you. Have any advice for aspiring poets and how they can kind of push themselves to experimenting with language or how they can go about finding broader vocabulary for their work?

Camille Ralphs: I think there have been a lot of different ways of approaching form and innovation in form and language throughout poetic history, and there'll be more in the future as well. , but my own—a lot of my own explorations and discoveries came about when I did a slightly mad thing. A handful of years ago, I enrolled myself in this idea W.H. Auden had for his Daydream College for Bards. Hang on, I've got the info somewhere. He said that at his Daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

With thousands of lines learned by heart, library would contain no literary criticism, and students would be writing parodies all the time. And courses in prosody, rhetoric, and comparative philology, which you've interpreted as sort of etymology, really would be required of all students, and they'd have to take other courses as well and look after a garden and some other stuff.

Um, and I decided to do that. I wouldn't recommend doing all of that to anyone who's not totally obsessed, but there are a few things that I took from it that I think are useful to anyone who, um, has similar goals and interests to me. I would say, first of all, don't be afraid of form, and don't listen to anyone who says it's conservative or restricting, because it's actually conservative and restricting to accuse things of being conservative and restricting.

Forms are received. To some extent, sure, but once you've got one, it's yours, and you can do what you want with it. It's only as conservative as what you put in it. Secondly, Auden's right about languages, unfortunately, and he doesn't mention Latin, but Latin is very, very helpful if you want to write English poetry, because so many English words have Latin roots because of that whole Norman invasion thing, and other moments as well.

And knowing those roots as well as some bits of old English will make it that much easier to be playful with modern English. , which is after all your main tool and your main material. And the book I'd recommend for that, as someone who didn't learn Latin at school but had to pick it up as an adult, is Wheelock's Latin, because it contains quotations from all of the Roman poets that you might want to read.

know about and engage with. Finally, I'd say, you find your voice by copying others. If you parody as many great poets as you can, taking what works and leaving behind what doesn't, you will also notice that there are some things common to all of those parodies that you're writing. There are certain interests or stylistic ticks that pop up every time, and those are you, and that is how you sort of identify yourself, even in how you engage with other people's work.

Ben: I had actually never heard about the W. H. Auden thought experiment. I guess the perfect school for birds. That is exactly what I'll be doing after this interview. I'll be digging into that. That sounds incredible What ancient languages did you choose for that one? Not to put you on the spot, but

Camille Ralphs: Latin was the first one I did, and I've ended up doing some Hebrew as well.

Hebrew is a very, very good one to try because it's, um, it's full of puns. It's a connection to the Hebrew Bible, which comes up a lot in the book and in my work in general.

Ben: Yeah. So I suppose that's a great pivot point to the first section of your book, which is filled with, if not religious, verse. I don't think it's fair to call it that, but it is religiously inspired. Would that be a fair way of putting it? You spoke a little bit there about parody and copying great voices.

You have a number of poems in the collection. after famous figures within the church over many, many centuries. And each one is an investigation or dissection of aspects of how faith was used and is still around today. I suppose that's your linguistic drive again, coming in there, where you're looking at how words kind of linger around in modern culture but the first section is really fascinating for anyone who was around that writing or around that culture. I'm Irish, so Catholicism and catholic rhetoric are everywhere; it's unavoidable so reading that for me was really, really interesting because there's a lot of echoes of.

I suppose it was more my childhood than my adulthood at all. Can you tell me a little bit about which figures you chose and why you chose them, or what drew you to certain people to write after in the first section?

Camille Ralphs: Gosh, yeah, um, I actually wrote a lot more than this originally. There were probably about, oh my god, I don't know, maybe 50 odd, different voices that I tried out, and these are essentially the ones that I found most interesting in the end. The Job poems, I think, were inevitable because the Book of Job is just one of my favourites and one of the most fascinating books of the Hebrew Bible; similarly, Ecclesiastes, everybody knows the whole there is nothing new under the sun thing. Um, that's definitely very true; as Beckett said, only last century, the sun shone, having no alternative to the nothing new. I think. Really, this is just for me; this is what the creative process is. You know, trying on different voices is what everybody does, whether they admit it or not. And I've just done it in a very obvious way here, drawing on, in some cases, things that I've heard in my childhood or elsewhere in my life because I was raised Catholic and I studied theology for a while.

Gosh, I've lost my train of thought. Where was I before I said I was Catholic? I just completely shocked myself out of it. Oh, it's

Ben, I am so sorry to have brought up Catholicism and shocked you out of your kind of thought.

Camille Ralphs: Where am I?

Ben: I think you were going to probably read one of your poems. You had mentioned Job there

Camille Ralphs: Hey, that's yes, I was on about Job, and what I was about to say was that the creative process was playing on playing on the nothing new essentially. That's what it is. It's putting old things together in new ways most of the time. , and it's helpful that there are a lot of interpretive gaps in some of the texts that I worked with here.

So for his job, for instance, his name means enemy in Hebrew, but it apparently means one who repents in Aramaic. So there's an immediate ambiguity there that you can choose to pick up or put down. And there are a lot of puns in biblical Hebrew in general. which part of it makes it appealing to me, but that's a longer conversation.

I will now read that Job poem, and this is Job, 42, 10 to 17, and in these verses of the book of Job, where Job has been tested by God, essentially, in spite of being an incredibly faithful and well-behaved man. God gives Job back everything that had been taken from him while he was being tested, and in the biblical original, Job seems to have no problem with this.

Ben: Think of all the poems in that particular collection. I find the final lines of that poem absolutely devastating. I think there's a wonderful humanness that you managed to bring to a figure that I had always considered to be, if not mythological, then a symbol within a book, if that makes sense, but you do have it in the midst of all your wordplay and your deeply researched poems, is it?

There's a massive amount of empathy you really feel for Job at the end of this, having been put through essentially hell by the creator that he devoted himself to, and I think it's heartbreaking. You seem to have the ability to bring that empathy to a lot of figures within that historical context.

Do you think about these people beforehand? Do these questions emerge for you as you're researching them? Are they questions you've always had, or do you find that empathy comes very naturally into your poetry as you're writing?

Camille Ralphs: I'll just say something about the Job poem first and why that possibly comes across as so, so human and real. The thing about them—they came back bringing groceries, and they said this is what a bad trip feels like—came about entirely because I was talking to a guy in a smoking area years ago. And, um, he told me a story about how he once, um, hang on, he once took, he once took acid.

And his brother went to the shops. And while his brother was away, he became absolutely convinced that his brother had died. , and when the brother came back, he was saying to him, No, no, no, you've died. You're dead. You're dead. , and this was a sort of horrifying experience for both of them and one that he didn't necessarily have to recover from.

So that kind of thing plays into a lot of these poems. There's stuff from my life and people I've spoken to, and things that people have said to me just worked into a lot of them. I think you're probably referring particularly to the poems about the Pendle Witches when you're talking about empathy, because that's the really hard stuff.

The Pendle Witches, for anyone who doesn't know, were tried in Lancaster in 1612, and as a result of the Pendle Witch trials, ten people were hanged. Empathising with anyone who's been through suffering like that is pretty much impossible, I think. And I felt and feel a very large responsibility to the people I've written about, to the point that I'm sometimes twitchy when anyone compliments the poems, which only feel half me and half mine.

But I was very committed to the writing of them, and one of the poems in particular, called Jenet Device, is in the voice of a nine-year-old girl who acted as a witness against the accused and raised numerous accusations of her own, including against members of her own family. That poem, um, is a particularly mad example of this, and I was so involved in those stories.

Because I had initially taken it, and I'll read it in a minute, I'd initially taken it in a different direction entirely. I had portrayed her as a sort of disgruntled and vengeful child who felt she deserved better than her family. And while working on it, I had this terrifying episode of sleep paralysis where something visited itself on me or appeared to and said, that wasn't how it was at all.

So, as anybody would in that situation, I rewrote the poem.

Ben: That's fair. That's very fair.

Camille Ralphs: Yes, I think so. And she hasn't troubled me since. So, I think, you know, she's okay with this version of it. I'll read it now.

Ben: So again, it's just that I may have spoken too soon. And I said, the other one is devastating. This one might be more devastating in its own way, because it's, I suppose, because you could never, once you knew the age that she was and what she was asked to do, you could never hold that against a child

and you realise how she must have been coerced and suffered and to name her own family or even just be a child, I guess, and make up stories like any child would do.

Camille Ralphs: And then in an unbelievable way. Yeah.

Ben: The Pendle Hill sequence, the second sequence of this collection was an absolute education for me. I had no idea about any of it. So it was a fascinating kind of spotlight into their lives, and what these women went through really is a fascinating look at an obscure part of history. At one point, you would have heard the term witch and gone, Oh, well, they did it. They're evil. I feel like your poetry really humanises these women and shows that no, it was a ridiculous, awful thing to have gone through in some cases for a ridiculous crime, like making a horse. drop dead,

Camille Ralphs: Yeah, which arguably she didn't do anyway.

Ben: Yeah. When I look at this collection, , and it's your debut collection, did you have a process for putting all of those different narratives together?

Was there a plan when you went into it or is this a sequence of poems that have come together over time just naturally emerging or

Camille Ralphs: There was no plan, but it's, you know, any poetry collection by one author will tend to have a kind of cohesiveness, even if it is by accident, just because the poems are all written by the same person. And as I said when I was talking about how you'll find your own voice through parodies earlier,.

You will be common to anything you write in some way or another. There will be a recognisable through line. The Pendle poems were the first ones to come and I think that was about a decade ago now. So, they're very dear to me and, at the same time, very distant from me now. I studied in Lancaster for three years, and there are a lot of Pendle Witches related things around Lancaster.

There's the castle where they were held, there are signs that have a little witch on them, and not far away from there, there is, you know, Pendle Hill itself, and the surrounding areas, and I went to visit a friend, Some time after that and on the train back, I thought, Oh, well, you know, I don't know if there's really been, um, much work done creatively on the Pendle, which is Blake Morrison, has a similar sequence of poems.

I should say that I ended up reading after I'd had that idea. And I thought, okay. You know, this is, this is something that has, , has existing interest, clearly. But I wanted to look at it in my own way, in a more intense and, well, empathetic way, I suppose. Not to say his work isn't empathetic, but there's a poem in his sequence in the voice of one of the executioners, I think.

And that's fine. That's, you know, that requires, , empathy as well. But I wanted it to be focused entirely on, , the people on trial. . They were the ones I was interested in. The John Dee stuff was next to arrive. I cannot remember how I started working on this particular mad thing, because it started actually as a translation of the so called Claves Angelicae or Angelic keys, a bunch of prayers that John Dee and Edward Kelly, his scryer, wrote together to summon the angels.

And, uh, they wrote these in this language, Enochian, which looks a little bit like Hebrew, but, is allegedly an angelic language. And these, these, these prayers are just sort of mad. , and I'm not sure what I was doing, trying to translate them, but that's how that began. And I attached lots of footnotes to them, and then they became more.

Yeah, historically contextualised and turned into the poems that we have now. And then the prayers happened also by accident—the rewritings of prayers that are in the first third of the book. They began, in fact, with the Job poem that I read earlier, which started out as an Allen Ginsberg imitation.

And it made me think, maybe there's something in this. I like the idea of writing more, uh, more poems in this, in this style, in this area of interest. So, it directed itself; once the three sequences were either complete or nearly complete, it started to feel like they belonged together, and there were common themes in them.

Ben: Do you mind if I ask just because, again, you said some of the poems came to you 10 years ago, and some of them are more recent. How do you collect your poetry? Do you write it down in places and then just store it up or is it all digital? I'm always curious how poets kind of store their work as it were.

Camille Ralphs: I have, I'm terrible because I do both. It always starts out on paper and then it goes through various revisions there. There's lots of scribbling and joining of things up all over the page. I don't like writing on lines when I'm writing a poem. I tend to write in the corner of the page and then the other corner, and then sort of fill up the space and link things together, and then eventually take it to the word processor and then end up with, you know, poem draft, poem draft two.

poem draft corrected, poem draft edited, and so on, until it becomes an entirely different thing from what it was at the beginning. But you have those old versions, then you might realise at a later point, Oh no, there was something that I really liked in that earlier version, and I've cut it. Why have I done that?

I should restore it. And sometimes it will take months or even years for something to finally settle. And, also, the keeping of the notebook, all the scribbling in the corners of the pages, and so on, means that there is a potentially limitless amount of stuff that I can go back and cannibalise. If I find that a particular poem is missing something, or there's a line that isn't working, I can sometimes go back and have a look at what I've written before and, you know, haven't used it, and see if there's something that is appropriate that I can sort of slot in because so many of my concerns over time are so similar that that's not uncommon at all.

Ben: The collection itself is, I suppose, a testament to your way of writing, in that it's so varied and so cohesive at the same time. It has strong themes but it does touch on this broad swathe of mythology and history, the past and the present. I absolutely loved it. I think it's an amazing collection and I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on and doing this interview with me. It's been a treat to understand the collection a little bit better.

Camille Ralphs: No, not at all. It's very good to talk about it in depth and in detail, with such focus and such good questions. Thank you.

Ben: Thank you so much for coming on Camille Ralphs. That collection is out now, ladies and gentlemen, so you should go and get it after you were, I am, it's from Faber and Faber