An Interview with Jamie McKendrick

The poet discusses his new collection, Drypoint, and memory, mortality, and everything beyond.

Ben: Hello and welcome to Words That Burn. This week I have an interview with a very special guest, English poet Jamie McKendrick. Jamie McKendrick is one of Britain's leading poets

and the foremost translator of Italian poetry into English in the UK.

He joins me this week to discuss his new collection, Dry Point, from Faber and Faber.

It's a series of verse that explore

memory, mortality, and everything beyond.¹

Hi Jamie, how's it going?

Jamie McKendrick: Hi there, Ben. Thanks for asking me here. Yeah, it's my eighth collection of poems, as in eighth volumes of poems. And it's why I gave it the title Dry Point. There's a poem in the collection, as is often the case, called Drypoint. Just a word about what drypoint is; some people will know it. It's an etching technique where you directly work on metal with metal or with a diamond point.

And you see, it brings up a burr in the metal surface. So it's a less complicated form of etching than using acid, other chemicals, or ground. I've always been interested in etching. I got introduced to, luckily, the use of an etching studio when I was about 20 in an art college. And so I didn't actually use drypoint then, but I just used normal etching techniques.

But I think some of my work, because I have a sideline in doing painting and drawing, quite a lot of my work has, well, particularly of late, and I also write on art. I have written on art anyway. So I'm interested in the parallels. In this book, it's not really at the forefront of the collection, but there is a poem about an insect engraving, and there are a few other references here and there.

So the visual arts and I had a book way back called Ink Stone, which had a similar way of dealing with the materiality of artwork. Ink stone is a Japanese or Chinese stone that you grind into ink and stick on to get the ink, which then makes the painting. That's a little bit of background.

There's a difference between the materiality of working with a medium, like etching, which is physical, and a poem, even if there's an implied analogy. It's an imperfect analogy.

Ben: When we talk about that, because, as you said, there's a little bit of reference to the visual arts here,. It's even peppered into some of the poems, like Saint Jerome and self-isolation, where your speaker, St. Jerome, makes a reference to himself as posing for painters because he's such a renowned subject. Yeah.

Jamie McKendrick: In a very irritable form. Actually, I think there is something to do with that poem because St. Jerome translates the Bible into Latin. And I think translation is another theme that figures throughout.

And I suppose you could think of the visual world as a translation of the word as well. And the last section of the book was actually first published as a collection of poems, each of which had an illustration, which I did, called The Years. So that's the last section. So there is, if you like, an ongoing complication with the visual and the verbal, yeah.

Ben, you have a real talent for it. Evoking some very specific visual ideas through language. I think it comes through quite a bit in this collection. I suppose this collection is a testament to mortality and the passage of time—a lot of the time I found when I was reading through it. So do you think there's significance in choosing Dry Point as the title for it?

Do you think, in particular, there's a connection there for you related to those things and the idea of memory and. marking the passage of time, or is it just one of your favourite poems that you wrote for this collection?

Jamie McKendrick: It's not necessarily one of my favourite poems, but it's probably a problematic title. It certainly seems to divide people, especially those who don't like it. A very good Northern Irish poet said it was terrible, and he said, Dry, that's a bad word. And point is surely the point of poetry; there's no point to it.

As much as I appreciated it, I stuck with the title. Yeah I think it's more to signal that kind of interrelation between the title—I mean, between the technique and the writing. I think you're right. There are elements that. have to do with memory and mortality.

Ben: I mean, I don't think it's fair to critique someone's choice of title for their poetry collection, but everyone's a critic anyway, Jamie, and I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I thought it was quite good. I thought it fit quite well with the themes of the collection.

Jamie McKendrick: Yeah. The only difficulty is that maybe it is a very particular technique. And so it might not resonate for people, but, um, you can't cater for anyone.

Ben: That's a good segue when we talk about catering for an audience.

In places in this collection in particular, there are a few poems that specifically deal with the writing of poetry and the craft behind choosing your subject or finding something that resonates with you. One of the poems that I really felt. jumped out at me in that regard was neither fish nor fowl,

Jamie McKendrick: Yeah, yeah, that's pretty head-on in the relation just as another such poem, but from way back, Dante's friend Cavalcanti, Guido Cavalcanti, wrote one of the first what you might call meta poetic poems, which is that the actual speakers of the poem are the physical equipment of writing, as in scissors and quills, so they're actually speaking on behalf of the poet to try and persuade his beloved to have pity on him.

Yeah, but the poem Neither Fish Nor Fowl I could read that. That would be amazing. I have an idea; if I can find it, wait a minute. It's Neither Fish Nor Fowl. Sometimes mending a poem can feel like, Sorry, I couldn't read it because of the light.

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Ben: So, I absolutely love this poem. I wonder if you would take a few minutes and just explain what the significance of it is for yourself and how it came to you because it has quite a turn there, from simple fishing to almost the culling of the turtle.

And I'm just curious as to the significance there.

Jamie McKendrick: Yeah, I'd have to say that the unpleasant culler in that sense is not me necessarily, but more likely an unsympathetic critic who sees no point in the fact that it's neither a fish nor a fowl. It doesn't have fins or feathers, which is a kind of form of criticism, but the poem isn't taking sides with the poet against the critic.

It's leaving; it's not presuming because the poem might start off going in one direction and then turn into something else altogether—an injured turtle instead of a fish. But yeah, of course, the idea of fishing, and it is something that comes, crops up later too. In the case of a heron, the idea of fishing does have an analogy, for I never fished or have fished only once in my life, but I think that the process is that you're waiting on the arrival of something.

In this case, you're trying to save something. So maybe, if the analogy holds, you're saving a bad version and trying to salvage something from it. Then it turns into something else, and then it gets killed by someone else. Does that make sense?

Ben: Yeah, absolutely; it makes perfect sense.

Jamie McKendrick: That's how I would see it.

Ben: So, a question I often ask of poets when they come on and do interviews with me is, How do you collect your poetry? Because you spoke a little bit there about salvaging. Some of the stuff. Do you have a notebook, man? Is it kept in the archive on your phone? How do collections come together for you overall?

Jamie McKendrick: Oh, right. I missed a part of the question, but I think I've understood it. I tend—yeah, I don't use a computer or a phone. I'm still in an older mode of, I don't like Cavalcanti use a quill, but I do use the Biro and Okay. It's usually some old paper on the back of an old envelope. Often a tax envelope, which I haven't opened.

So, it's written on nasty brown paper, so I don't get any stage fright. In microscript, so no one else can read it. And then it goes through quite, I mean, unless I'm dead lucky, and that's quite rare, it goes through a lot of stages before it's put onto before it's printed up. I used to be, in the good old days, a typewriter, but it's easier to make the small adjustments on the screen.

So I have moved on to the screen. Is that the answer? I mean, is that an answer to what you asked? Absolutely. I do have notebooks, but they're very intermittent. But they're very useful because sometimes I fail to write a poem. And then I can go back and suddenly see how you can, how it can be at least improved.

Some people just don't have that bother. They just get it right the first time. I think they're rare and wonderful creatures who somehow have it all in their heads and don't have to scribble on a piece of paper. But I think people find their own way of working. Mine is quite laborious, but I quite like the idea of writing.

I think Ted Hughes says somewhere that people should use the pen. I'm not being prescriptive, but I think there is some link between the hand and the body, which you have where it's tapping on a keyboard, at least for me. And, of course, you're using your hands.

Ben: It's a perfect answer to that question, Jamie.

That was exactly what I was looking for in that particular case. I mean, speak again a little bit in the collection at different times about the process of poetry, and you said yourself there that it was a little. Your own process is a little laborious when it comes to refining a poem down to a finished product that you'd like to.

To put it out there, and one of the things that I've noticed is that you mentioned a little bit earlier as well, the first meta poetry or intertextuality in certain poems were friends of Dante and things like that for you. Intertextuality seems to be a common kind of tool that you use to bring out the best.

in your poetry. I was wondering, when it comes to that kind of intertextuality, when it comes to mentioning other poets or poems, like a Purloined line from Paul Bowles.

Jamie McKendrick: Purloin from Paul Bowles. Yeah. I think it's probably a common thought, but a poem enters into dialogue with not just the living but also the dead.

So, some of the translations are from the very long dead: Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Dante. It might seem a bit presumptuous to scatter a book of your poems with the immortal dead. But nevertheless, those voices that you hear have made an impact on you. And of course, you could hide them. Or it could be a discreet reference.

But sometimes I quite, and in this book and maybe in my last book, Anomaly, I quite like to foreground that sense of other voices. Maybe there's quite an excess or an abundance of translations here. But that's contemporaries as well. I mean, there are two contemporaries I translate from Italian poets Antonella and Eda.

And Valerio Migrelli, whom I've done books of, but I've just put one each for them there because they're voices that I've had that have entered the acoustic range. And I've had to find a voice for their poems. So there's that. But then, okay, taking the Paul Bowles, it's quite; it's just a line that struck me when I was reading his novel Let It Fall Down.

Or is it Let It All Fall Down? Anyway, he's purloined that title from Macbeth. It's when the murderer says to Banquo, about the rain, let it fall down. So he's been a bit intertextual, even with his title. Anyway, it's a line that it was rather fun to be lost like that, like this, which I just repeat as a kind of refrain, distorting it and moving it across the poem.

It's a kind of slightly dreamlike lockdown poem, I guess. It's just people wandering in a landscape that is depopulated and feeling lost, but pretending it's fun. Yeah, so, then another poem, just to give a different type of example, is Close Enough, which is a poem dedicated to Bernard O'Donoghue, the Irish poet who lives in Oxford.

But that was actually just occasioned by a telephone call, which again relates to Dante, because both of us were translating a canto from the Comedia. And he asked, quite reasonably, does Earth take a capital letter? And there is an answer to that. But the poem just then meditates on what it means to give a capital letter to the earth.

And in the kind of slightly difficult context of the Dante. This sounds really scholarly, but in fact, a lot of the voices that you get in poems are not necessarily literary, as in that case, but they're the voices of people on the bus or whatever, just the voices around you.

And in other words, what I'm saying is that intertextuality is part of the nature of a poem. But of all art forms, I mean, just looking at a contemporary American painting. And it made me think of a man—an early Manny picture—and sure enough, that happened to be true. I checked with somebody who knows her, and it is a fact that the art just continually enters into that.

And it is just dialogue with the past. I mean, I mean, there is a counterargument. You want something new; you don't want to just reiterate what's said. It's got to be something that you're doing with that.

Ben: I think interpretation at that level is almost essential in poetry today. I always fall back on that phrase—there's nothing new under the sun.

It's all been there before, and you can either copy secretly or you can be an honest poet and wear your influences on your sleeves. You know what I mean?

Jamie McKendrick: Well, well, yeah, I mean, I have no difficulty in declaring it, but then, sometimes no, sometimes I've put in, like, in my last book, there was a reference to a very famous Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound. Poem about faces in the metro. And a question came back in the process of it being published. Did I need to signal that? And I said, No, it's too famous. But, yeah, then you get hit for plagiarism, I guess. But, I mean, you just have to make a call. Whether it's so much, so current, or not, and actually, it can look a bit patronising if you sort of footnote every obvious reference,.

I think if it's slightly obscure to me, I think it's worth signalling.

Ben: It's a good rule of thumb to follow, I suppose, when you're in the habit of it. Picking up little bits and pieces from famous works, established works, and things like that. It's funny when you were talking there; you spoke a little bit about; sometimes it's a voice of the immortal dead.

Sometimes it's a. A chat on a bus, as you go, and it put me in mind of one of the poems in the collection that comes quite early on, but it's Nugget, and you draw a parallel between, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong here, Jamie, and you're welcome to correct me at any point, but you draw a parallel between the work of Aussie gold hunters on a reality TV programme and kind of finding poetry or little bits of poetry.

And it's funny the way you spoke about borrowing a little bit here, borrowing a little bit there, certain lines cascading into a bigger poem, conversations with fellow translators, and things like that, but do you feel that Nugget as a poem is about that kind of experience of mining for little nuggets of poetry, as it were, or is there something else going on in that poem?

Jamie McKendrick: That's, that sounds like good reading. Perhaps I should read the poem. So, so it makes sense, even if I don't, that it's dedicated to Michael Hoffman, his very Distinguished poet and translator, contemporary. There's a reason for that that I won't go into, but it's called Nugget. And it's a sort of mini-sequence in the book which has to do with the gifts of the Magi.

So, it's Nugget, as in gold, Frankincense, myrrh, and Balthazar, one of the Magi. Okay, so Nugget. And the reference to Marquez is García Marquez, the Colombian writer, who is a magical realist. He happened to just dislike gold intensely, as do I. And I wouldn't have it about him. Anyway, so, but it's a symbol, gold, I suppose, which, whatever you feel about it, is bloodstained.

Has a kind of poetic and artistic symbolism.

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Ben: Yeah, so again, I really enjoy the way that you seem to have a real knack or talent for layering two things that you would almost never put together, two images that you would never coincide with, writing poetry and mining for gold, but you strike a wonderful balance between both things.

But one of the things that jumps out at me when I hear that poem and when I read that poem is what kind of. Doss and mess do you think poets leave behind them in general?

Jamie McKendrick: In my case, it was a lot of mess. But yeah, maybe there's hope that the poem itself might mitigate some of that mess and dross.

It might be quarried out of dross, but something, possibly gleaming, arrives out of it. And also, I mean, because it's set in lockdown, maybe other people like me were watching crap reality TV. I certainly was. But I got rather fascinated by the Australians out in space.

red desert desperately looking for tiny bits of gold. And then, yeah, leaving just a mess behind them with the earth movers and various mechanical bits of digging equipment. I suppose, yeah, it's not just poets that leave a mess. I think it's part of the human condition. We all leave a mess. But Yeah, so there's a kind of ecological concern there, but I, I think, yeah, I think it's not, as I say, not just poets, but there is something about, like, the common The commonality between the gold diggers and the poets, I guess, is that it's a quest, really, after something, whether it's a pearl of great price or a poem.

It's something; it may be dogged by failure, the fact that you may be just missing it by an inch or a mile; had you taken another turn, you might have found it. So it's pessimistic, but it's meant to be a little bit light-hearted.

Ben: It comes across with a real sense of humour when you read it. I'm glad to hear that I didn't miss the mark myself when I was reading it and came across that. It's funny that you talk a little bit about a quest there. I always associate. Quests with myth, fable and folklore, and it seems to be a real focus of yours to bring some element of mythology, especially classical mythology, into your work.

And I was just wondering, because there are quite a few poems that centre, if not entirely, around mythology; they have figures from myth appear, or you have some translations. Famous mythological texts like the Aeneid and things like that. I was wondering where your love of mythology has come from and how does it factors into your poetry as you're writing?

Jamie McKendrick: Yeah I suppose mythology has a kind of wide span. I think there's a bit of religion being referred to. Maybe in quite a secular tone, but I mean, the Gifts of the Magi, For example, I remember somebody when I was in my 20s saying to me, must have been quoting religion, this man's attempt to get in touch with the weather, which certainly is witty but reductive as it does now.

And yet, it's not without some truth. I mean, if you live in the vicinity of a volcano, as I did for quite some years, there's an awesome power there that you might feel, I don't know, inclined to personify or appease. There's one poem called Report to the Anthropological Society, which is set on the flanks of Vesuvius.

And so. The big exterminator is there, with a huge population in its vicinity. So, yeah, I mean, I suppose the volcano is associated with Hephaestus. And, yeah, I guess you can't; if you have, I've done the odd bit of translation from the classics, but I don't really have much. Classical learning behind that, but in this case, and in another poem from way back I did about Palinurus, who is somebody, the helmsman in the Aeneid, who gets washed up on the shore of Italy and gets stabbed by the inhabitants.

Polydorus in the poem Myrrh is killed here, but not quite in the same way. He's a treacherous king of trace that gets rid of him. Podo is the youngest son of Priam. Yeah, I haven't really answered your question. That's okay. I guess mythology is about telling stories, and the poems are bound to have some overlap with mythology, whether they're utilising.

Ancient mythology, or creating their own, or turning the old into something different.

Ben: I think you've probably again found a really nice easing into another major theme that I picked up from the dry point, which was that you do contrast the modern and contemporary with the ancient. Quite a bit in, in what you're doing and not only the ancient, but you do have the history versus the present quite often in, in what you're writing about.

And we spoke a little bit before we started to record here about how Liverpool, where you are from,. Very tied to this collection. I wondered if you'd just expand on that a little bit for me and talk about how the more recent history of Liverpool and modern Liverpool kind of feature within Dry Point.

Jamie McKendrick: Yeah, I guess, I mean, I've dealt with, or I've touched on, Liverpool throughout the seven or eight books, but in this particular case, there's one poem called War. Which is looking back to my mother's experience of being actually one of the first incendiary bombs dropped on her house, and luckily my uncle, who tried to get it out of the bath, was injured but not fatally.

So it's a little bit about that in the context that it was written or rewritten while the Russian invasion was taking place in Mariupol. So there is a connection that these historical analogies, I think, have to be treated with care. I hope I haven't overstepped the mark on that. But the other thing is, I guess, that Liverpool is a city of immigrants.

We're all a couple of generations or more back from elsewhere. I mean, they've been You know, for unhappy reasons in history, there've been immigrant communities in Liverpool for centuries. Obviously, the Irish connection is very big. We used to proudly call it the capital of Ireland. Then, Welsh, Scottish, both sides of my family, Scots and Irish.

But then, there's a Jewish community that's been there for ages—a Greek community. Cavafy spent some time with the Alexandrian Greek poet. There's a Greek Orthodox church. West Africa is the longest, and the earliest Chinatown in Liverpool is there. The West African and the Somalian waves of immigration.

And obviously, the black community from the unhappy connection with the slave trade has been there for longer than in London. It's not always a happy history far from it. There have been instances of dire racism. And we've seen another recrudescence of that in the last couple of weeks.

Being a place full of immigrants, it's also got a history of different people's living quite happily alongside one another. So yeah, I think that aspect—maybe it's more to the fore in other collections I've done—is a kind of returning topic.

Liverpool itself is a city. That perhaps doesn't explain much about how it figures in this book, but

Ben: I think it explains it quite well. You speak about immigrant communities there and sometimes the very unhappy history that comes with a city having a multicultural population. One of the really strong senses I got from this collection was an examination of the borders that we've constructed.

And I think the idea of the man-made construct of a border paling in comparison to the natural order of the world or the kind of nature's order to things was a huge thing that jumped out to me quite a bit in this collection. And you seem to, and again, you are welcome to correct me, but you seem to have an issue with this kind of.

Notions we've given ourselves with regards to ownership of certain things or rights to other things throughout the collection.

Jamie McKendrick: I think that's true. Just the most obvious example of it is the poem Muntjac, which I could read. Which does deal with the idea of borders. I mean, borders are going to stay with us.

Like the rich, they're going to cause grief forever. I mean, you've been in Ireland for about 103 years since a border was drawn across the island. And there's been a cause of continuing grief. And even now, for commercial reasons, it's become very problematic with the UK's extraction.

of itself from the EU. I think perhaps my last collection was more in the foreground of Brexit. But anyway, yeah, in the last few days, this was written before, obviously, but the last few weeks we've had more of that kind of sense of It's an unleashing of bigotry in the country.

Anyway, this is Muntjac.

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Ben: I think what I like most about that poem is that it challenges even the misconception of ownership through language. You say that the Munchak has knowledge of names that we don't know in, in either language, we don't have, but there is a kind of true line there that it can be perceived by the Munchak that we can't, and I think it challenges that notion that we have any conception of what people understand, don't understand, lay ownership to, don't lay ownership to. I just thought it was a lovely poem that gently stirs you to contemplate or reconsider it.

issues through a different lens.

Jamie McKendrick: There's a poem by Hardy called An August Midnight, which talks about various insects that arrive and walk across this page, and it ends up that they know the earth's secrets that know not we, or know not I. I'm sorry. So the knowledge of the earth's secrets is enshrined in Hardy's great poem.

And I've always liked that. It's the sense that we have a kind of curatorship of the earth, not ownership of it. And we don't know as much as we may think we do.

Ben: I think that crops up quite a bit in your work. It was the poem that I was most taken with, and I just thought it was something that could only be a poem.

I'm always taken with poetry that could; sometimes you have novels and they could be films, and sometimes you have films and they could be video games, or whatever there's a translation ability to certain media. They could be carried across with little or no loss, but I'm particularly taken with poems that could only be poems.

One of the poems in this collection that I think does that very well is Alternative Anatomy, where you talk about a moth and they're perseverance through the world. The only reason I bring it up is because I think it resonates quite well with that hardy quote that you had about; they know the secrets of the world that we don't. You almost created a microcosm of existence for a moth, and it made me pause for a second.

And think about the real trials and tribulations that a tiny creature like that must go through in the world. And I suppose I don't have a question there, Jamie, but I just wanted to say that this is definitely one of my favourite poems from this collection. I was very taken with it.

Jamie McKendrick: I think the poem actually has a secret. I'm sorry, I'm getting more literary, but it has a secret kinship with the poem by Frost.

It's called Design, and in the end of it, it's basically the poem that's got this white heel flower with a white moth that comes unbeknownst, unaware of the fact that this waiting in ambush is a white spider, so it's the kind of deathly whiteness throughout the poem. And he asks this rhetorical question at the end They ask, what is causing this?

What but the design of darkness to appal if design governs a thing so small? So it's a kind of slightly demonic Darwinism, is that in Frost's case, the answer supplied is that, like the argument for the creator, if the designer of the universe was designed,. Such a a horrible concoction of elements.

It's not a very nice designer. So, in my case, I think I'd like to see that the moth is evolving its own strategies for avoiding the ambush, in this case of the bats. So, it's not quite as gloomy, though I love Frost's poem. It's finding modes of escape or evasion on the part of the moth.

In other words, if you want to look at it in evolutionary terms, there's armour built up on one side and defence mechanisms on the other. I think the poem is slightly more in sympathy with the defence mechanisms, but the two exist together.

Ben: It's a beautiful way. I mean, nature is everywhere in your poetry by the looks of things, Jamie, and you do a wonderful job of evoking it in both.

It's in the quiet dignity that it often has that we overlook, I suppose, as humans, and then also in the. The sort of nature, red and tooth-and-claw vibe that sometimes comes with that kind of poetry. You capture both sides of it quite well. I'm quite conscious of time here, Jamie.

I suppose we should probably draw to a close, unfortunately, as much as I'm enjoying the conversation. I don't want to take up too much of your time.

But I just wanted to ask you one final question to close us. If you were to give, and I don't want you to sum up your entire collection, but if you were to give one message of the many messages within your collection as a takeaway to readers, and I know you don't like to be prescriptive in the reading, what would you hope people might take away from this collection?

Jamie McKendrick: I think I'd really struggle to answer that. That's okay. It intrudes on the reader's role, despite my little attack on the critic in in Neither Fish Nor Fowl. Once you've written the poems, you leave it up to other people to either gaff them with a turtle spear or enjoy them.

I think it's that sense the medium is the message. I'm sorry, it's a cliche, but the poems. Once they're published in a book, they have a kind of autonomy which just has to be free of the intrusions of the author. And in fact, the author isn't always the best person to say because the word is refracted through other people's who are good enough to read it.

It's their consciousness that's affected or not by the poem. So sorry if that sounds a bit secretive. It's a genuine feeling that it's, I mean, I think I could sort of question a reading of a poem and suggest a counter reading. But I am just at this point a reader, not an authority.

Ben: I don't think that's a secretive answer at all. I think that's a perfect answer to the question, to be honest. Jamie McKendrick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure to interview you and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jamie McKendrick: Well, Ben, thanks a lot. It's been very nice to be there.

So, thanks and bye

This was my interview with poet Jamie McKendrick. You can find his collection, Drypoint, wherever poetry is sold. If you enjoyed this interview, please consider giving me a review wherever you listen. It really does help me to get the podcast out to more people each week.

1. Every effort has been made to transcribe this interview directly and correctly, however, some errors may rear their ugly heads in the transcript. Some edits have been made to the transcript for clarity. For the best experience, give it a listen before you read