Do you find any sense of division between academic and creative work?
I don’t think I do really. It’s a bit like the American Academy, when people are pointing out how absolutely all the published poets are in academic jobs. Of course, it works two ways now. To begin with, it was remarkable – Robert Penn Warren and people like that thinking they were academics who published poetry. What happens nowadays is that people like [Paul] Muldoon publish the poetry first and then they get put into academic chairs. So it’s an interesting kind of symbiosis. I’ve always found that dealing with literature all the time is quite a stimulus if you’ve got any inclination at all to write. I think it prompts you to write more. Muldoon says that the first piece of advice for anybody in creative writing is to read. You just have to find ways of writing what you read.
You have translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and your recent collection Farmers Cross contains several translations of medieval poetry. What do you find so stimulating about this period and translation?
I find the Middle Ages sort of suggestive. I think we’re at the same kind of distance from the Middle Ages as we are from other kinds of cultures and languages. It’s a kind of a time gap as well as a kind of space gap, or a culture gap. You’ve got to go back some distance before something seems different enough for it not to be just simple copying. Also I think it’s quite hard to be influenced by the immediately preceding generation, because that seems, by definition, old-hat. In writing about the here and now, you can’t just write about the here and now, you have to have some kind of perspective, there has to be some kind of gap for you to write across.
Are you writing academically at the moment?
I’m at last writing the Very Short Introduction to Poetry. My students are sick of hearing me talk about it for the last ten years, but I’m really doing it now. It’s a lovely thing to do, but it’s kind of impossible to say everything you can say about poetry in 40,000 words. I think in a way I was very keen on this project in principle, even though I’ve been very slow in doing it, because it does go hand in hand with the poetry bit.
Following your semi-retirement, do you feel nostalgic about Oxford?
No, I don’t. It’s a place where I’ve lived and been extremely happy, but I don’t feel that it’s the place that I belong at all. But then of course it’s not a place that anybody belongs really. Everybody’s passing through here. I remember at the end of my first degree, after three years here, thinking, ‘Well, cheerio. That’s the end of that.’ Then to find that you’re living here later on does seem very odd, because that’s not what it’s for. Some places you live in and other places you go to school in.
