Between Anger and Prayer: Camille Ralphs in Conversation

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Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet, Camille Ralphs, as part of a consecution of interviews, the first published in The London Magazine in 2017.

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So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate

and fix me at my birth, and make my due my expiration date?

Why was I lapped in aprons, and not limbo’s fair-welled farewell wave;

why was I milk-fed, milk-toothed, given weight?

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(from ‘Job 3:11-26’, published in Liberties, spring 2024 and then in After You Were, I Am)

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Shoshana: Luke Kennard, in his review of After You Were, I Am in The Telegraph, writes that ‘a careful and stricken theology emerges’—

Camille: —stricken, stricken is a key word.

For him or for you?

l think he’s right, it is stricken.

Is there a theology you’re creating here? For example, there’s something that’s directive in ‘after St Francis of Assisi’.

‘Cursed are we who know it’s hard to save the world from everyone

who wants to save the world. You do have to be good’

(‘after St Francis of Assisi’, After You Were, I Am)

That’s also in conversation with another poem.

Mary Oliver?

Yes.

That’s what I figured. Is the first ‘Job’ the most personal of the poems?

Personal? All of these poems are an attempt at sublimation, to some extent, and finding a way of talking about whatever I’m potentially feeling without boring myself, or without feeling self-indulgent. And those poems in the first section, they’re ostensibly prayers or choral versions of prayers, with lots of different voices, and different inflections, and idioms, in them.

But they’re different to normal prayers as well. In that, a normal prayer is an attempt to impose order or coherence on chaos. Conflict resolution for the powerless. Even if it doesn’t actually result in fixing whatever’s happening. These sort of do the opposite. They’re more destabilising, they don’t patch up the holes in the self, and all of these ideas, they sort of drive things further apart, or smash things together in a way that draws attention to incompleteness.

I read the line ‘my daily bread and I are toast’ as my daily bread and I ate toast.

[laughs]. I mean, it’s more surreal. I quite like that. It’s tonally different, but it is funny.

I think that the first ‘Job’ is the most ‘I’, in terms of — what’s the term — the ‘actor’, the protagonist? What is it in poetry?

The speaker.

Yes. You’re complaining.

You think the speaker is me here?

Well, I’m wondering. It’s difficult because obviously I know you very well.

Well, yes, let’s consider that. I think you might be right actually.

There are these personal injections, ‘I would snooze all my alarm’.

‘After Ignatius Loyola’ would be another one. They’re probably partner poems, in a way. They’re both bemoaning, but I think you’re right. I think that the first ‘Job’ is raw, more raw. It’s the angriest one, I think.

I wanted to ask you about that too. In the first London Magazine interview we did, I was asking you about Malkin, and why you had undertaken that particular theme and concept [of the Pendle witch trials]. You said that there hadn’t been enough anger in the considerations of that suffering. How much does anger come into your writing?

I think it’s more frustration. Feeling like that something needs to be done but you aren’t convinced that you’re the person to do it, and you aren’t convinced that anyone else is the person to do it either, because you don’t really feel like anyone is trustworthy.

With Malkin, there was this understanding that something had happened that had been looked at, but not in the correct way. I think what you said in the interview was that it hadn’t been undertaken with the correct anger. When you talk about the first ‘Job‘ poem being the most angry, is that a similar undertaking?

No, I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?

Do you write prose?

I do write prose sometimes.

I’m thinking about the Dee sequence — would you ever write a novel? Short stories?

No, I don’t think I would. It doesn’t really appeal to me. Because there’s something about the intensity of the language in poetry. That is the reason I’m in the game. It’s partially for the narrative and the character, I suppose I do have that interest as well. And I did write novels when I was younger, I wanted to be a novelist to begin with. But ever since I started doing poetry, that’s been it, really. I could see myself writing a novel in verse someday, I don’t know what form that would take. I couldn’t really see myself writing short stories, that doesn’t feel right to me, but you can’t rule anything out, in ten years time, I could feel very differently.

With this collection, there are moments, particularly in the Dee sequence, when I feel as though I’m reading it as prose, and not as though it’s poetry.

Well, in the Dee sequence as you may have read it seven years ago, you may remember—

—It changed

—It changed a bunch of times, but the first version was translations of Dee and Kelley’s Claves Angelicae that were very bitty, and almost Prynnite. And they had these footnotes appended to them, and the footnotes were these David Foster Wallace— or Nabokov— style prose narrative footnotes that go into detail about what was happening in the world of Dee and Kelley at that time. And as the poems developed I realised that they’d be better if I actually incorporated the footnotes into the poems, and had them as long dramatic monologues.

So, in some ways theatrical.

In some ways very much so. In some ways, a one-man King Lear.

What is prosody?

The mechanics of poetry. Prosody would be metrical bits and pieces, the measures of a piece.

Why do you need to be so good at it? 

What?

Why does it have to be so clever?

That’s a strange way of putting it. Sure, sure. I think, first of all, when I’m composing the work, I tend to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, as I think Ezra Pound says it. And like poets like Dylan Thomas, I’ll almost play with the words and bounce them off each other, and allow one word to suggest another by its sound, in some cases, as much as meaning. I’m very, very fond of the weights of words and the way they feel, I almost feel the texture of them in my head when I’m writing.

But with form, Auden once said something like, blessed be all metrical forms that free us from the fetters of self, and force us to have second thoughts. So sometimes your first thought is not the best thought, right? And if you’re working with a particular form, especially one that has, to your mind, some relation to the material (for instance, the echo poems here have some relation to the echoes of history), then you are forced to rethink yourself, and find something new to say that might be different to your original intention, but it’ll end up feeling somehow more true.

And you can get in your own way a little bit. You can just end up spouting about a particular cause or an idea that’s dear to you, and it helps you to kill your darlings. It helps you to sort of chain up your darlings in the form and then drown them. Don’t quote that.

How does the process work? Do you have the idea, and then you find the thinker, and rework in response to them? Or, it’s more like, I’m going to take this idea that’s been percolating and find the thinker to express it?

I’m a person of extremes. When I commit to a project, I really commit to it. And I will end up writing hundreds of poems on a given theme, or you know, thousands of lines. In the case of the prayers section, I think there were maybe eighty originally, all of them taken from the Oxford Book of Prayer, or something like that, of different traditions and different thinkers. And in each case, it was a matter of looking at things, and then making them more specific to my experience of the world. My understanding of this world, the world as it is now.

And that was the central theme that you wanted to undertake.

The way the world is now, the world that is everything that is the case, or something. But the actual composition of it, you know, they were not perfect first time around. You leave them in a drawer for ages. I cannibalise myself very frequently. So that lines that seemed to belong in one poem, turned out actually to belong in another one, and that poem got killed and the lines got moved over into some of these. And also in some cases, if the line was just not very good, I might go back to an old notebook from years ago when I was just free writing, or writing poems without any particular intention. And think, ah, there’s something there, that works. Use my past self here to finish unlocking this, and more editing and reworking until it actually feels coherent.

So with the poems that were in a drawer – were you working with an editor? Or did you have an idea of some central theme?

It was really just what was good. I didn’t have an editor, it was just me at that point. I did have an editor later on, of course, but at the point I was choosing which poems to proceed with, it was just me looking at them after a while, and going, that one’s crap, but it has some good lines in it. That one’s rather good, but this bit needs fixing, and that sort of thing. But also some of them, some of them do just stand out. So the ‘Job’ poems, for instance, I knew from the start that they needed to stay because I feel like Job is a constant presence in this book. Less so in the Malkin poems, because I wasn’t thinking about Job as much there. But there are Job references in the Dee poems, definitely.

I wanted to ask about divine language and human language. It seems like some of the poems that you’re translating are coming from the earliest forms of their language. Is there something about eldest languages being more divine?

I didn’t think about that, you know, but plausibly. The language which Dee and Kelley understood to be closest to Adamic, or divine language, was Hebrew. So I guess the older the language in their view, the closer to God. But no, that wasn’t deliberate.

And where is God in this?

God?

Yes. Are you putting into place your own personal theology?

I was at one point in my life a secular humanist. For a good while, because I was angry at God. And I used to go to international humanist conferences and do sort of miniature communal living experiences in Brussels and Eindhoven. Temporary, temporary, very temporary, you know. You’d all do chores and drink lots of Belgian beer together and talk about how God was dead. But then I went to do Theology at Cambridge thinking it would just be an interesting thought experiment. And what I came to realise is that science is as limited as any other human endeavour. And you cannot disprove through logic, something that lives, if indeed it does live, outside of logic.

Pessoa once described himself as a ‘mystic of agnosticism’. I think that’s probably about right for me as well. I think it’s interesting. I said earlier about not being able to trust people, but I didn’t mean that psychologically. I did. I did mean it psychologically. But I also mean it physically and metaphysically. You cannot trust your senses any more than you can trust so-called deductive logic, any more than you can trust your feelings, or your memories, because all of this is constantly being under and overwritten by you yourself. You are constantly getting in the way of yourself. God is nowhere, but also potentially everywhere. That’s the thing.

I think everywhere.

Potentially everywhere.

You’re using these specific voices in, like you say, the interpretation of the world as you see it now. I can’t think of any way better to say this than have you considered that many of these are male voices? Not including the Malkin poems. Is it something that you’ve thought about?

I included as many women as I reasonably could with the resources I had. The thing about this book is that it’s about fallibility and the failure of ambition. And men have had more scope historically to be ambitious and to fail in that way. So if you’re going to find somebody’s words to play with, they’re probably going to be a man’s words. I think, you know, there’s something to be said for the fact that I’m a woman.

But you think about that when you write?

No, I don’t think about it. Elizabeth Bishop refused to contribute to anthologies of women poets and God forbid, to anthologies of gay poets, and I’m the same. You want to play the boys at their own game, you want to prove that you’re on the same level.

But to go back to the world as it is now, your cultural references, when you specify to our time, are often economic.

Well, they’re the things that are running the show.

In some ways, sure. Why the economy?

Because it’s everywhere. Because it quietly dominates everything. Everything is economics, to some extent, everything is an exchange. And also it’s all fucked up, isn’t it. It’s the reason that everything is all fucked up, because people will prioritise economic freedom and economic security for themselves over almost anything and anybody else.

I feel that this comes out most in the Common Prayers.

Well, yes, that’s it. These are canonical or poetic prayers rewritten from a modern angle. Whereas it wouldn’t seem appropriate to put these things in the Malkin and the Dee poems. There are occasional references, there are financial references in the Dee poems. There’s a reference to the cattle markets of Krakow. I could have not mentioned the market. I could have not placed such an emphasis on Kelly’s money-grabbing tendencies and in the poem about the looting of Dee’s house, I could have not played so much with the words for Elizabethan coins; crowns and angels.

This book is split into three sections, you wrote Malkin first, Dee second, and Common Prayers last.

Though Dee was being edited last, I think,

Why did you choose the way it is?

Like why is it organised in this order?

Yes.

Because the Common Prayers, they’re more approachable. Not you know, that it’s un-intimidating, but it’s less intimidating than the stuff with the spelling, let’s say.

I think it’s very intimidating because it’s unbelievably erudite.

Less so than the Dee poems. And also the reason it ends with the Dee poems is because the ending of the Dee sequence is so heavy, so poignant, so sad, It’s the only way to end the book really. ‘It’s time to go’ feels right as an ending. ‘And you: my word. It’s time to go.’ (‘19 December 1608’). Given the whole book is about the failure of words, of communication and ambition.

I wanted to ask about Malkin, and why you chose to include it? Was it ever a question that that would be part of your first book?

The version of Malkin that is here has been changed, a little bit. There are some lines that have been changed, some words that have been changed, and there is one poem that has been changed entirely. ‘John Bulcock’, the poem that appears in Malkin, and the poem that appears here are entirely different. The one that’s in Malkin is very sort of Dylan Thomas, very abstract, sort of lightning and the dead, that kind of thing. Whereas the one that appears here is more of a human voice speaking to you, which is what I wanted to match the rest of the sequence. I knew when the pamphlet came out that that poem wasn’t quite right, but I was too close to it still to fix it. And with the benefit of hindsight, I fixed it.

There are things about Robert Frost I want to bring in.

Why Robert Frost?

It’s the way he talks about play in this essay. It’s a book in a cardboard box somewhere in my house. But I wanted to ask about play in terms of form, play in terms of pattern, the general playfulness of it. Play in terms of performance—

—in terms of performance, maybe, but that’s just as a mask. I think there’s irony, I think there’s naughtiness. But it’s protective, and deflective, and a way of engaging with serious things.

But play doesn’t have to be a way of making something lesser, play can be a way of making things palatable.

Maybe that’s happening. As I say, the performance aspect is definitely there. They play in a very serious way. It’s a very dark humour, black humour really.

What’s the black humour saying? That we’re all fucked?

Yes. That you cannot rely on any aspect of us really, you shouldn’t assume anything.

No redemption?

Not that there’s no redemption, just that there might not be. There might not be.

What would you say is the most positive poem in the collection?

‘Rig Veda’ at the end of the first sequence. It’s the only one that suggests a positivity to calmness. The one on the facing page is also a bit less brutal than some of the others. It suggests an appreciation of the problem, rather than the avoidance of the problem. The problem being the great inheritance of human error.

Economically?

Everything-ly. But especially as it appears in language, I suppose. Language is the main one. The medium of the poet, the sort of artefact to which we all contribute.

What are your thoughts on the Beatles?

The what?

The Beatles.

I like the Beatles. Why?

Have you seen the film Two of Us? It’s a fictional undertaking of this real encounter between John Lennon and Paul McCartney post Beatles breakup. Paul McCartney is touring the U.S. with Wings and goes to visit John Lennon. And the film is just a guesswork of what happened that night. There’s a debate between John and Paul on this subject. John’s take is that it’s the artists’ role to look at the world as what it is; to see the damage caused, and to face it, and accuses Paul of just wanting to write silly little love songs.

Well, you know, Yeats said that the only two subjects worthy of consideration for a serious mind were sex and the dead. I’ve been very concerned with the dead up to this point.

Oh, that is a cliffhanger. I do want to ask you about your next collection because—

Oh god, I’m not saying it’s going to be full of sex.

It should be full of sex. But you’ve implied that it might be more stupid, more light—

—I think what I was getting at there is that there may be room in the new book for some silly little love songs.

But do you not worry, with playing with yourself?

Playing with myself?

Yes, when you’re undertaking against yourself — as in, the first thought is not the best thought — being in conversation with yourself, and these voices of theologians or mystics, but simultaneously in conversation with the heritage of English poetry: Geoffrey Hill, Donne, Rossetti. That can be exclusionary. Do you worry that it’s exclusionary?

No. Geoffrey Hill wouldn’t have worried either. He would have said that if you dumb yourself down, you’re being less democratic than you are if you say what you really want to say in exactly the way you want to say it. And arguably, you know, some poets are much more abstruse than this. I don’t think that this is by any stretch incomprehensible, I think it requires a bit of energy.

It’s hard to get into your heart in it.

Well, tough. Maybe I don’t want people to get into my heart.

But you’re a poet who makes ‘a living out of [your] pain’ (‘Job 3:11-26’)

Long pause. [laughs]. I don’t really. That’s a nice phrase, isn’t it, but I don’t make a living out of this work.

[laughs].

Certainly don’t make a killing out of it.

But there are different ways to be clever, there are different ways to make a conversation, and would you want to try to do one that was more, like I say, stupid?

It is going to be more ‘approachable’. Definitely. Or at least most of it is—

Can you give our readers a hint.

I can. So I talked a little bit earlier about history and the confessional. You could reframe that as like the interpersonal versus the intrapersonal, and I’ve thought a lot over the years about the idea of the self. Which I struggle to believe in, to be honest with you. I don’t know if there is a self. I feel like there’s probably more of a hole in the ground with a net and some leaves over it, than anything you could call a self or a soul or whatever. I decided to investigate this, in a similar way to what I’ve been doing with sublimating all of my feelings through these other figures. Now I want to think about style as well, because style is the ultimate expression of substance. I want to ask which aspects of my style are me, and which are fashion or furniture. And to do that I decided to break myself up into seven-plus different heteronyms or perhaps alter-egos. So a bit like Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, or Paul Valery’s Monsieur Teste. When I say I’m sort of breaking myself up into them, I always tend to be more one of them than I am any of the others at any given time. But they’re all always present, always there, just some of them are less appealing than others. Less palatable to me, less publicly tolerable.

How do you feel about those people being really fully your imagination, and not having any historical background?

Oh yes, they are they all going to be fully my imagination. They’re actually me. I mean, based on my influences, because that’s how you build a self, how you are. But they are all me.

Have you got any drawings of them?

Drawings? [Laughs]. Gosh, no, I don’t have drawings. They will all have names. They’ll all be writing very different kinds of thing. I don’t necessarily like all of them. So it’s not a comfortable process.

Why seven?

Because a book can only be so long. Seven is the number I’m playing with. But it just feels like that’d be a good number. Besides, I tend to write a lot of poems for any sequence I write. If I took ten from each of them, we might have seventy pages. That’s a collection of poems. It makes sense. I mean, I might make more of them, and then just choose seven, or I might choose more than a few of those. But that’s sort of the base.

Would you be able to choose a number that’s totally profane, like four?

I hate the number four. Four is the number of stability. Four is the boring number.

What else was there? Oh, Mary Oliver.

I don’t want to sound like I hate Mary Oliver. I just hate the way people seem to love her because it’s mostly comforting stuff. And I’m not convinced that poetry should always comfort you. Geoffrey Hill has that moment in one of his Oxford lectures where he talks about how poetry is not to be enjoyed, necessarily. ‘The angel of poetry says sod off.’

You’ve used Morse code in previous pamphlets. Are you using any secret code in this?

You’ve just given the game away by telling people about the Morse code. I don’t know if people necessarily figured out where it was happening. But yeah, there’s some Morse code in there. There aren’t any new coded moments, though.

You know I once told someone I loved them using Morse code.

How do I tell people I love them? I write poems about them after the fact.

Oh yes, that’s true. Who are the poems in this book about?

These poems aren’t about anyone. They’re about me, and about God. By which I mean they’re about everyone, or they wish they were.

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Camille Ralphs is a poet, critic and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her debut collection After You Were, I Am was published by Faber & Faber in March 2024. 

Shoshana Kessler previously ran the independent printing press and publishing house Hurst Street Press, and recently collaborated with Camille on the limited edition publication of Common Prayers, illustrated by the artist Lulu Bennett.

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