Art by Biba Klico
Camille Ralphs on poetry, difficulty and history
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‘Most of what one wants to know,’ writes Geoffrey Hill in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing the second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (1989), ‘including much that it hurts to know, about the English language is held within’. Hill holds that with great words comes great responsibility; ‘sematology is,’ for Hill, no less than ‘a theological dimension’. Camille Ralphs — poet, critic, and editor at the TLS — epigraphs the closing section of her new book After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) with Hill’s words. Ralphs’ first full-length collection is dense and strange, but definitely superb; to read its cunning linguistic chicanery is to live that canny epigraph from Hill. To my delight — and mild surprise —Ralphs agreed to meet with me after a lecture she gave at Kellogg College, Oxford to chat about poets past and present: the way they work, think and do.
Ralphs is a poet paddling in history. Her Kellogg lecture bore the dizzyingly suggestive title ‘“An instrument and a human being”: The poet in history’, and her book’s three sections nail these historical colours to the mast: (1) The Book of Common Prayers; (2) Malkin — a series of dramatic monologues on the 1612 Trials of the Pendle Witches; and (3) My Word, Ralphs’s midrash on diary entries from Dr John Dee — Queen Elizabeth I’s revered court astrologer. However distinct the sections’ styles feel, they share a single focus: history. In the last two sections, this history is early modern, and all the figures named in the first section — except Scottish Quaker hymnist Margaret Cropper (1886-1980) — died much earlier. I was surprised, then, to hear Ralphs’ lecture on the poet in a history that almost perfectly overlaps with Cropper’s dates. ‘Yes,’ Ralphs confessed, ‘it was predominantly a twentieth-century bunch.’ After modestly admitting that Kellogg required the title far before the lecture was written, Ralphs snuck in a quick ars poetica — ‘my concern is not plainly for the poet in history, but for the poet among history.’— a conviction that directed our remaining conversation.
No page in Ralphs’ book is without its definite historical moment. Ralphs’ meticulous addendum on the Malkin sequence is a treasure-trove of such erudite specificity as Pendle Hill’s elevation: ‘557m’; all the witch trial dates at the Lancaster Assizes: ‘18-19 August 1612’; and a dramatis personae with a brief biography on each woman. I asked Ralphs where she first came to the Pendle witches: ‘I studied in Lancaster for a while,’ Ralphs replied, ‘and Lancaster Castle is where the Pendle witches were tried.’ ‘Pendle Hill,’ she continued, ‘is not too far away.’ Ralphs then visited nearby Clitheroe, where one witch was born — ‘there is now a statue to her there.’’ Ralphs felt the seeds of the Pendle project were ‘in the air’ and had always been ‘on [her] radar in some way’. There seemed a tension here between Ralphs’ scrupulous inspection of history — conducted, one feels, in hiking boots — and our conversation’s breezy carousel, rolling past moments in and out of the present.
The same feeling rolls through the book’s longest sequence, My Word. I couldn’t resist asking where Ralphs found Dee. ‘In my thinking about angelic language,’ Ralphs returned, ‘how people defined and thought about it.’ Ralphs anchored this interest in Claves Angelicae (c.1584), literally ‘Angelic Keys’, which Dee and his alchemical sidekick Edward Kelley wrote together in Enochian — ‘the language of the angels.’ When Ralphs took the Oxford Creative Writing MSt she worked on a translation, with ‘some mad David Foster-Wallace style footnotes’. On returning to the project — youth’s bulletproof imperviousness somewhat softened — Ralphs’s vision clarified: dramatic monologues seemed the best way to get at exactly ‘what kind of person does what Dee did.’
The difficult demands Ralphs makes of herself are demands that her book makes on its readers. Defending her work’s ostensible difficulty, Ralphs gestured again to Geoffrey Hill. ‘It is more democratic to just go for it, to say the thing you mean,’ Ralphs recalls from a Hill lecture, ‘than it is to dumb it down, to assume that your audience is incapable.’, Ralphs’ book adopts and adapts Hill’s deep generosity to readers. The challenges that Ralphs poses in After You Were, I Am are ‘a sign of respect’, and if the trickiness signs respect, it also stimulates a slow, meditative reading that does not end when the book is closed. In the two months I spent with the book I found that there were always tabs open in my browser with definitions; ‘colporteur’, for example, is a favourite.
Ralphs’ deep reading buttresses the broad vocabulary and imagination on display in her work. In The Daydream College for Bards (2022) — published in a box-set edition by Guillemot — Ralphs undertook W.H. Auden’s rigorous curriculum for aspiring poets codified in his essay ‘The Poet and the City’. It marries learning languages — ancient and modern — and memorising ‘Thousands of lines of poetry’ with studies in mathematics, archaeology, cooking and gardening, to name just four. Over lockdown, Ralphs fled London for her parents’ house, and enrolled in Auden’s poet university. When not tending to her rainbow chard and Tuscan kale in the garden, Ralphs produced poetic imitations of everyone, it seems: Berryman and Hopkins, Spenser and Christopher Smart. Ralphs includes many of these imitations in her Book of Common Prayers.
Those imitations that do not appear in either book, however, still inform Ralphs’ architectures out of sugar’ in poems that are ‘simultaneously very light and very meaningful, with their own particular crumbly structure.’ For all her admiration, Ralphs knows that her work does not share the ‘lightness of cummings’. Ralphs cites Ted Hughes’ Crow (1970) as an early influence on the dark, brooding poetry she has come to write. ‘Some people don’t like it,’ she laments. Maybe it is ‘too bloody’ — she reckons that was Ian Hamilton’s gripe. Like Hughes and Hill, Ralphs is not afraid of writing ‘what it hurts to know,’ and the hurt of knowing has everything to do with wording.
Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carter leaves us a vivid vignette of the verbologist and his beloved Oxford English Dictionary in his study at Kirchstetten, Austria — ‘The most prominent feature of [Auden’s] workroom was a set of The Oxford English Dictionary, missing one volume, which was downstairs.’ I asked Ralphs if any books served her similarly, books she couldn’t live in a house without. Ralphs’ first recourse was to describe the thirteen-volume OED she saw at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace Museum in Bellaghy..Without forgetting the usual suspects — Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry, John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason and Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making — Ralphs admitted that it is The Pocket Oxford Etymological Dictionary and ‘a couple of books of word stems’ that nourish her large appetite for brilliant, baffling words. The King James Bible and Robert Alters’ English translation of the Hebrew Bible also rank among Ralphs’ indispensables.
Later, Ralphs added an enduring favourite of hers, Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), ‘the perfect toilet read.’ She finds in Auden’s ‘magpie-like quality for gathering things’ a dependable ‘world of wonders.’ Ralphs’ praise for Auden is no less true of her own book, which is a similarly sharp testament to a truly individual imagination. In Electric Light (2001), Heaney writes an elegy for Joseph Brodsky — from whom Ralphs took her lecture title — aptly called ‘Audenesque’. In it, he celebrates Brodsky’s knack for ‘revving English like a car.’ Ralphs revs the English language and then some.
Spelling is the major beneficiary of Ralphs’ foot-to-the-floor revving. In the book’s buxom back matter, Ralphs catalogues her wonky spelling’s fourfold intentions: (1) SEMANTIC BRIDGING; (2) VISUAL ONOMATOPOEIA; (3) INTENSIFICATION BY ASSOCIATION; and (4) SHOCK; ‘each of which,’ she coolly claims, ‘is present in the poems.’ The overriding effect, as Malkin’s cunning subtitle — an ellegy in 14 spels — demonstrates, is magic. The boy ‘Elizabeth Sowtherns’ regards in the poem that bears her name have ‘eyes … sofd as ash’. The stray ‘d’ hardens the softness it describes. Ralphs’s Oulipo intrusion on Isabel Robey’s monologue, too, demonstrates how ‘wrong’ spelling can expand sense —
fr m my cl thes and my dr pped
Os
Isabel, mumbling and afraid, drops her ‘Os’; the loss is plangently, classically styled as an apostrophe. The voice is powerfully her own. Among these clear, loud revs, there are moments when Ralphs is tickling the clutch. The definite article ‘th’ recurs throughout Malkin in moments of the speakers’ extreme smallness, which the dropped vowel performs visually.
Ralphs revs English literature as fiercely as she revs the English language. It is no surprise that she calibrates her unflinching attention on history through the energies of poets past, named either in the titles of the poems in The Book of Common Prayers or in the notes. This is, however, no Bloomian firing squad picking off influences, but something altogether more generative. Take Ralphs considers the preposition ‘after’, a word that prefixes (almost) every title in the book’s first section and constitutes Ralphs’ daring departure from John 8:58 (‘…before Abraham was, I am’) in the book’s name. ‘After,’ Ralphs supposed, ‘is a synonym for following.’ We follow people in time, ‘come after them’, or we ‘follow them in a procession’. Tellingly, Ralphs did not gloss ‘after’ as hungering-after-the-style-of. In ‘Job 42:10-17’, a Ginsberg-inspired Daydream (read: ‘hatchbacked tabernacle’), we get the nonchalant ‘After This is After That’, which points to Ralphs’ chief concern when writing among history — ‘Get yourself out of the way because yourself is just going to mess you about both on and off the page.’
In Lightning Field (1977), American sculptor Walter De Maria fixed 400 polished steel poles upright into a one-mile-by-one-kilometre stretch of New Mexico desert. He had his viewers move into a specially designed log cabin and wait for lightning to strike. The premise is a fitting analogue for how history enters through Ralphs’ book, which likewise mixes metric and imperial units. What separates the two, though, is that no one ever heard a lightning fork clink on De Maria’s poles, whereas Ralphs has a whole crackling lightning nervous system charging throughout, which brings the gods often God) down from somewhere above with electric clarity— and clarity is what Ralphs’ tricky tricksy poems are never without.
AUSTIN SPENDLOWE packets crisps.
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