Seán Hewitt: The Glimpse.
Kit Fryatt: I think it's about, you know, what is truth? You know,
truth is words. You know it's it's hot air, as Falstaff might have
said, you know. So the truth is articulated in the same words as
flattery.
Seán Hewitt: Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host. Seán
Hewitt. Kit Fryatt's dynamic blending of ancient and modern
poetry offers a road map to moments that seem familiar and feel a bit
uneasy. He's written four books. The latest, Book of Inversions,
co-written with Harry Gilonis, is based on ancient and early modern
Irish originals, and will be published this year. He lectures at
Dublin City University. Kit Fryatt is our guest today on The Glimpse.
Kit Fryatt is an innovator, even when he is working on versions of
medieval Irish poetry, his method is to invert, to turn the words
upside down, to generously and richly throw the wealth of
language, both inherited and new, into an unlikely dance. In his
poems, experiments with form and meaning create an immersive sense
of secretiveness and association, a place for the mind to play. I love
them because they seem so unlike a lot of poetry, these are not poems
that come with designs on us, or poems that are content with a
single through line of interpretation. By turn satirical,
foul mouthed and tender, ancient and modern, Kit's poems work at the
cutting edge of what language can do. Kit Fryatt welcome to The
Glimpse. It's very good to have you here.
Kit Fryatt: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me on.
Seán Hewitt: You're very welcome. Kit, I mentioned there in the
introduction your Book of Inversions, which I have been lucky
enough to read. I was rereading it again recently, and in the intro to
that book, you lay out quite a defiant but playful mode of
writing, which you describe, or by way of Ezra Pound, describe as, "in
a way, impolite," whether that's to critics or academics or to quote,
unquote, "respectable poetry." I wonder if you could start by telling
us a little bit about that impoliteness, or impoliteness as a
way of approaching poetry?
Kit Fryatt: Well, I have to say, first of all that Harry wrote the
introduction, really. That's almost all his work. But I'm glad you
mentioned Pound, because I think anyone who does that kind of
"making versions," I hesitate to say translation, because I think
there's an expectation of, perhaps lucidity. There's certainly an
expectation of fluency, both in the sense of knowing and being fluent
in the language from which you're making a version. And that's mostly
not terribly true of a lot of the work that I've done. And Pound is
the great enabler, I think in modern times at least of that kind
of work, because he was famously a huge chancer who translated out of
Chinese but didn't know Chinese. He's a difficult forebear. I think
he's certainly impolite in all the colloquial senses, and his sort of
poetic edgelordism is often very uncomfortable. And, you know, it
tips over from edgelordism into, you know, kind of the fascistic
politics that he espoused. So he's a really problematic forebear to
have, but he is, at the same time enormously enabling.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, that's the thing with modernists. A lot of them are
difficult forebears.
Kit Fryatt: A lot of them are fascists.
Seán Hewitt: I love the idea of him as a chancer, or as, in some ways,
poetry as benefiting from taking a chance on things. You know, not
quite playing by the rules or being a little bit playful with the
rules. I want to talk a little bit about that you know, versions or
translations and what they're for and what draws you to them.
Especially, would love to know about your process for making
versions of poems in a language that maybe you don't speak like,
how do you go about that?
Kit Fryatt: So it's quite frequently collaborative. I've done
this sort of work with Kimberly Campanello, for example. A
sequence that appears in bodyservant is the result of
collaboration on Stephen Fowler's "Yes, but are We Enemies?" project
with Kim. And I found both in working with Kimberly and working
with Harry, that they're much more scholarly than I am. I really am a
chancer. So under Harry's influence, I spend a lot more time
with the dictionary. I spend quite a lot of time with various English
and Irish dictionaries. I spend some time with the existing
versions, the existing translations, James Carney, Jeffrey
Squires, and I talk to people who do have a real fluency in Irish,
and then I ignore them. Because they tell me, you can't possibly
say that. And so, yeah, it's quite an organic process. I think, in the
sense that I don't have a set process, I think a lot of the
versions have come out of different circumstances. I think for me, one
of the reasons I do this is that it gives me something to work with. To
start with, I'm very bad at that romantic thing, inspiration. So a
lot of what I do comes out of already existing text.
Seán Hewitt: I wonder what it is about the medieval that attracts
you. You know, is there something about the sensibility of the
medieval, whether that's Irish or English?
Kit Fryatt: Well, those would be very different sensibilities. I
think, yes. I think so, what is it? I think it's always seemed to me
that the medieval world is a very living one to me. You know, I look
back and I see people who are alive to me, who are sort of present. And
I think there's something about language, perhaps before and at that
early modern period of change is an extraordinary mixture of the poised
and formal and very pithy and direct, yeah, I just felt like I
can sort of feel people speaking through that language.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know that the
idea of a poised and formal and pithy and direct kind of intention
with each other, or maybe not even intention, but one of them allowing
or giving way to to the other is something I really enjoy about
medieval poetry as well. And there's a way that the poems
Can feel so different when you look at them, because you know the
spelling is strange, or something about the syntax might be off. But
when you start to speak them, they come alive because you realize
something about the language, or you begin to hear them. And in that
way, it's kind of like unlocking a sort of life.
Kit Fryatt: Yes, yeah, very much.
Seán Hewitt: That is kind of secret as well, which I love, that that
feeling. All right, you're going to read the title poem from your
collection, bodyservant. Do you want to tell us a little bit about
the poem before you read it? Or would you prefer to plow straight
in? Yeah,
Kit Fryatt: I'll say a little bit. It's sort of a composite, I
suppose, of two medieval figures who were contemporaries overlapping
and sort of two medieval places that I'm particularly interested
in, the medieval, Gaelic world and the the Occitan world of the
troubadours. So the the earlier figure is that of Giraut de
Bornelh, the troubadour, possibly the most famous of troubadour poems
"Reis glorios." It's often called an Obaid or an Alba, and it is a
dawn poem. And the second figure in the composite is a slightly later
12th and early 13th century figure Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who
is the founder of a great dynasty of poets. He was a murderer. He
killed a tax collector. He was a crusader as well. And so the figure
that I imagine the poem is spoken from the point of view of a
servant, a bodyservant. The figure that I imagine is somebody like
Muireadhach, but that all kind of gets mixed up with the relationship
between two men in "Reis glorios," which doesn't get remarked on a
great deal.
So this is bodyservant. I sleep at the foot of the stair the rough
nights of the bed I know his sleeping breath and its feint
perhaps he knows mine his lungs are congested he is close to sixty and
I am past this year the middle of life. the fair hair he cut the
night before we started for Cairo, a four years' pelt that would not
shame the Magdalen is gone as he said it would be a stringy tonsure
when an attack wakes him I bring milk and ale we have both killed
men that he might live to this pass their grey shades stand between us
so he seems insubstantial he suffers as tall men do worst with
his knees, his back in the mornings he is agile like an anvil as the
mounting block he refuses he and his wife had eleven children and
some of them live far away he misses her hand beneath his head he
says to put my hand under his head would be worth the ransom of the
son of the king of Cairo but I've never been lucky there was a lady
the guest of many important men he visited her when she stayed with
them then I watched till dawn I knew her name but never her face
she was a grey shape in thought like a place where a painter meant
to fill in one of the three Marys, a grey form lying on the body I
know better than my own its scar furrows turn and turn about the
body to which I attribute every scar on my own lying on a grey
form, until I called out my fine friend, here comes the dawn chief
glory glorious lord here comes the dawn.
Seán Hewitt: Thank you very much. I loved hearing you you read that
poem. I want to draw listeners attention to how it looks on the
page as well, because it's maybe something that they won't imagine,
although I think you could hear it quite, quite well in your reading
there that it moves all the way from the left to the right hand
margin, sometimes in steps, if that makes sense, the lines step across
the page, and sometimes the lines are right aligned, as I do. There's
like a small stanza that is right aligned rather than left aligned.
You tell us a little bit about, you know, how you arrived at that form
before we talk about the poem itself, if that makes sense.
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, it just happened, I think, and can't be very
illuminating about it. It sort of moved itself. It tossed and turned
across the page. In that way you know that, that sometimes you just
know how something's going to spread itself out across the page.
When I see slightly unusual alignments on the page,
particularly, I suppose, when I see things that are aligned in columns
or things that are indented the same amount, I always want there to
be a kind of vertical axis on which you can read that as well. So I try
to do that. The little bit about hair, Muireadhach is obsessed with
hair. He's one of poetry's great trichomoniacs. John Milton is the
other one, I think. And he wrote about cutting off his hair before
he goes on crusade. And he writes about the Virgin Mary's hair in
great detail. So I wanted that to work a little bit, sort of a little
bit vertically, as if, almost as if it is hair as well.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, there are moments in that poem, and I think
we've had a bit of an insight into into how it was put together, but
there are moments that are almost seem to me like little holes in the
poem or something to look through into another bit of a story that's
then not fully given. And you know, there's backstory kind of glinting
through the poem. And I wonder, are erasures or rearrangements
important to the drafting of a poem?
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, I think so. I mean there, I suppose the erasure
is, is the lady herself, when I was writing that I was thinking about
and looking at something else I love, are the wall paintings in
medieval churches, very few of which survive in Ireland, by the
way, more survive in England and still more, in continental Europe.
But there's one I was looking at a picture of in an English church,
which I think was probably meant to be a scene of the rolling away of
the stone from Christ's tomb. And at some point, the painter had
meant to put in the three Marys, but he never did. So that was one
thing I was thinking of in terms of erasure. And the other, I suppose,
is that in "Reis glorios," the important thing is the relationship
between two men. And I think this makes Ezra Pound very jumpy when he
translates it, and he adopts a very uncertain tone. Giraut begins every
stanza with "bel campanho," "fine friend, beautiful friend," even.
And then there's the refrain, "Et ades sera l'alba" and "here comes
the dawn." And Pound does away with that he's very nervous about the
whole thing. This is a poem about a man waiting, standing watch for his
friend who is getting up to adulterous shenanigans inside, but
the relationship is between these two men, and the watcher addresses
his friend as this beautiful companion. Says he's the best, he's
the greatest companion he's ever had. It's a real it's a real David
and Jonathan poem actually, it's a real sort of surpassing the love of
women kind of thing and Pound can't take that at all.
Seán Hewitt: Now, you can feel that coming through in your own poem as
well. I think you know that there's a lovely lift at the end that "my
fine friend, chief glory, glorious Lord," you know, and it kind of
reminds me of something you were saying before about that. You
know, there's a sort of formality or reserve that seems to heighten
the directness of the poem, if that makes sense. You know, there's
something about the language here that feels formal, but in feeling
formal actually admits more erotic potential, perhaps than, than it
were if, if it were solely direct, solely. You know, sometimes we
expect intimacy to be given to us, or the erotic to be given to us in
a sort of unabashed way. But sometimes when it's bashed, when
it's reserved and in some way, shrouded in formal language, it
sometimes is even more erotic, or has more potential for this sort of
intimacy, because it seems secretive or subtle. And there's
something in that kind of secretiveness that that makes us
lean in and listen in a different way. Okay, Kit, I could talk to you
a long time about the medieval world. I think it's time for a
break, and when you come back, you're going to read one of my
favorite poems. I'm so glad you've chosen it. It is a poem by Thomas
Wyatt, and it's, I think, a very secretive and erotic poem. Okay, so
we'll take a break and then we'll come back.
Kit Fryatt: Okay, fantastic.
Cathy & Peter Halstead: We hope you're enjoying this second season
of The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff
Poetry Foundation. We're the founders Peter and Cathy Halstead.
Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we
do that in a variety of ways, through partnerships, our film
series, this podcast and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We
hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a
Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving
the page you're on. Thank you so much for listening.
Seán Hewitt: Welcome back, everyone. So Kit, the poem you've
chosen for us is one of my favorites. It's Thomas Wyatt's.
"They fle from me." For those of our listeners who haven't read
Wyatt before, can you tell us either a little bit about him or
about the poem?
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, okay. So Thomas Wyatt was born in the early 16th
century, 1503 or 1504 and he was a courtier at the court of Henry the
Eighth a very dangerous place to be. Somehow, he survived to die
young, nonetheless, he dies suddenly after a lot of kind of
diplomatic toing and froing, he was he had a fairly thankless
diplomatic career, but he's known perhaps most for his activities at
the court of Henry the Eighth. He's an interesting figure because
he managed to make the transition from Catherine of Aragon to Anne
Boleyn. He was also very close to Anne Boleyn, and he spent some time
in prison, possibly at the time of Anne's execution. There's a phrase
in one of his poems which is often taken to indicate that he witnessed
the execution of Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers, whilst himself
being in prison. So his poems are often read in that dark, paranoid
atmosphere of the Reformation court of Henry the Eighth as that
cataclysm was happening. You know that that thing, which means that
we can't go back in some ways, to to that medieval world?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, they're so evocative of that, that world and
time they seem to have a kind of candlelit, shrouded darkness around
them. Would you read? "They fle from me."
Kit Fryatt: They fle from me that sometyme did me seke With naked
fote stalking in my chambre. I have sene theim gentill, tame and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre That sometyme they put
theimself in daunger To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge. Thancked be fortune it
hath ben othrewise Twenty tymes better, but ons in speciall, in
thyn arraye, after a pleasaunt gyse, When her lose gowne from her
shoulders did fall And she me caught in her armes long and small,
Therewithall, swetely did me kysse, And softly said, "dere hert, howe
like you this?" It was no dreme: I lay brode waking. But all is torned
thorough my gentilnes into a straunge fasshion of forsaking; And
I have leve to goo of her goodeness, and she also to vse new
fangilness. But syns that I so kyndely ame served, I would fain
knowe what she hath deserved.
Seán Hewitt: Thank you very much. One of the things you know I love
about Wyatt is there is a sort of almost codedness or something to
the poems that leaves you unsure quite exactly what is going on. And
I think the first thing about this poem that I still have a question
about is, right at the beginning, "they fle from me." You know, he
doesn't really tell us who who "they" are. It seems in my head
there, they appear like deer or creatures or animals. You know that
they they once took bread from his hand, the line. "That nowe are wyld
and do not remembre/ That sometyme they put theimself in daunger /To
take bred at my hand." You know this admission that the speaker of the
poem is quite a threatening character in some sense. You know,
if these are wild creatures, they put themselves in danger to be near
him. And the idea of you yourself being a danger is quite startling
admission.
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, yeah.
Seán Hewitt: In that poem, you know, you spoke about the proximity
to the court here, and this poem comes with its rumors attached
to it. Now as we as we have it, and I'm right, I think in remembering
that there is a rumor that this is a poem about Anne Boleyn. Have you
heard this?
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, it's very difficult to know with Wyatt, it's
difficult to know when he wrote the poems that he did. It's odd. I love
these poems. I'm not terribly interested in connecting them to
the court politics or the personalities of the time. And I
sort of realized this when wading through biographies of Wyatt, I'm
actually not interested in this. What interests me, I think, is that
that cataclysm of the Reformation that you know, in 1516 if you like,
just before you know, Luther posted the 95 Theses, England is
the most pious Catholic country in Western Europe, and known for
their their piety, and 20 years later, for reasons which don't have
a great deal to do with religious conviction, they're going through
this cataclysm a few years later, you know, another 20 years
and the fabric of Catholicism is being destroyed. And I think Wyatt
fascinates me in that sense, because he straddles an old world
and and a new in terms of his court affiliations and in terms of his
religious ones, he seems to have been quite a convinced Evangelical,
but he's very very secular also. When he writes to his son,
there's not very much, there's only the merest sort of,
kind of conventional nods at religion, which suggests, again,
that he wasn't, you know, kind of one of the new hot, gossiping kind
of Protestants, either that kind of interests me.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah. But there's something about these poems that
seems quite surprisingly secular. I remember when I read this at
university, it was after a long term of medieval poetry in which
I'd I had to kind of marshal an armory of biblical knowledge to
kind of access what, what was going on in these poems. And then when we
arrived at Wyatt, I felt a sort of modernity in them, because, because
they seemed so secular, which is strange, considering the world that
they came out of. This poem, seems to me, in a way, that many of
Wyatt's poems do to be about change or changeableness, you know, here
he, he starts off with various visions of different times. You
know, it encapsulates a lot in this poem. We have kind of an aftermath.
Then we have this one special moment, and then we have this, this
phrase that I got stuck on the first time I read this poem, which
is her right "to vse new fangilnes," which again, points
towards not necessarily fickle, fickleness, but a changed method.
You know, these characters seem like people who have methods and
designs on each other. You know, they seem deliberate in the way
that they go about conducting an affair, which, which I think kind
of leads into the sexiness of of the poem that they they know
what they're they're doing in the second stanza. What struck me this
time when you were reading, it was the the erotics of the poem
seem surprising to me in that second stanza, because it is the
woman that that catches the speaker, and "When her lose gowne
from her shoulders did fall and she caught me in her armes, long and
small." That idea originally, we have an image of a man as predator,
or as potential predator, these wild animals that might be put
themselves in danger to come near him. And then in the second stanza,
he is happy to be caught. You know, there is a sense of abandoning one
version of a character and one kind of gender relation in in that
stanza, do you think that's that's true?
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, I think so. The first stanza casts the speaker as
Huntsman, and I think the reason we think of deer is perhaps because of
who so is to hunt. Yeah, and, you know, we think of him as kind of
the huntsman of that poem. He's also sort of self deprecating about
his abilities when he actually catches up to the deer, then she is
marked out not as not for his use. I was just thinking, as we were
saying, how secular he is, but he's also an interpreter of the Psalms,
and then they're very, very sophisticated interpretations. I
think he's, yeah, he's, he's an innovator. I think that that idea
of change is not something that's just happening around him, it's
something that he is doing, both in, you know, in in all the new
things that he brings into English poetry. But here as well, that
change between the the huntsman of the first stanza and then he
suddenly, he is sort of enmeshed in, in a net, yeah, is one of the
one of the changes and yeah, nothing is stable in this world.
Everything is transitory and mutable.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, mutable seems to be the word that encapsulates so
much about this poem. You know, when I was reading this, and I
should say the version that you read from them was kept in its
original spelling, and to me, that adds a sort richness that is lost
when it's glossed into modern spelling. Um, why did you send us
the original version?
Kit Fryatt: Um, yeah, for precisely that reason. I don't think he's,
he's not quite modern. And and most anthologists make a decision right
about when, when to start modernizing. And sometimes it
happens from after Chaucer, you know, after Middle English.
Sometimes it happens with Shakespeare, sometimes it happens
with Milton. But I think even well, almost well into the 18th century,
modernization often takes something away, some kind of texture from
writing of all kinds. Yeah, and I think, you know, even a text like
the the one I sent you has punctuation added. There's no
punctuation in these poems as they're written in the manuscripts,
and that that brings with it a kind of an even more dizzying kind of
range of meaning, because the only resource for pause, for, you know,
kind of breaking, is the line break itself. There's no internal
punctuation at all. The capitalization is is wild and
sparse. You know, that's something I'm really, really interested in,
is the line and the line break as poetry is really, poetry is really
chief resource. Yeah, that's what poetry is.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, you know, in some ways, putting it into modern
spelling and even punctuating it is kind of putting manners onto a poem
that that is so much livelier without those those impositions,
one of the things that I love about this poem is the the kind of quite
startling insistence on truth, which seems strange almost, but you
know, when you get to The start of the third stanza. And I think even
the stresses here are interesting. There "was no dreme: I lay brode
waking." You know, even the "I lay brode waking," you have to kind of
stress every bit of that. So it's pulling your attention to the fact
that this is not made up. It's not a it's not a facet of the
imagination. Why do you think that's so important to Wyatt or to
Kit Fryatt: Um, I think because, I mean, he, he lived in a world which
this poem?
was continually being pulled between kind of truth and
necessity. I think we're still very much in in the world of of the
court, which is haunted by the specter of flattery. Fauvel, as you
know, the medieval, you know, the Middle English word is and and you
have to do a certain amount of that, you know, you have to tell
all these, these kind of politic untruths, but at the same time, you
have to preserve yourself from being thought of as a flatterer. I
mean, Wyatt was known even among people who are very proficient at
playing this game, as someone who was eloquent, who was a brilliant
speaker, and yet he failed at almost every juncture. He failed in
his, in his diplomatic missions, or we can think of him as a great
success as well. I mean somebody, somebody else who, who was perhaps
less adept at verbal games would probably have have gone to the
scaffold, which he didn't.
Seán Hewitt: So, yeah. I mean, it's a language and rhetoric as a life
or death situation sometimes in that, in that instance.
Kit Fryatt: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's about, you know, what is
truth? You know, the truth is words. You know, it's, it's hot
air, as Falstaff might have said, you know. So the truth is
articulated in the same words as flattery. Words are all we've got.
Yeah, which is sort of the predicament of the poet.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, words alone are certain, good or not as the case
may be. Kit all right, thank you so much for talking with me.
Kit Fryatt: Thank you so much, Seán and it's been a great pleasure and
great privilege. Thank you.
Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host. Seán Hewitt.
Kit's poem, "bodyservant," from his book bodyservant, published in 2018
was aired with permission from Shearsman Books. Thomas Wyatt's
poem, "They fle from me" is in the public domain. Coming up next week,
poet Martina Evans weighs in on the power of a cat and why Frank
O'Hara's poem, "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,"
inspired some of her work. Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse
wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our
website, Brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast, We'd
also love to hear from you. Drop us an email at the glimpse poetry
podcast@gmail.com The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian
Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm your host, Seán Hewitt. Our senior
producer is Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and
mixing engineer. Editorial Director. Amanda Glassman is our
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Executive Director, and our co founders are Cathy and Peter
Halstead. Thanks for listening.