Jamie Cameron

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Near-Life Experience, Rowland Bagnall, (Carcanet Press, 2024), 88 pages, £11.99
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The first thing that struck me about Near-Life Experience was the coherence of its theme: the title, the dedication, the epigraphs, the poems, they’re all preoccupied with the question of what it is to look, to see and pay attention. This also connects with much of what you have written for our magazine. Where did this fascination with the relationship between looking and language start?

I’ve always been interested in different kinds of looking, whether at landscapes, people, artworks, etc. The odd thing about looking is that it always seems to be the same – as in, with the same two eyes – but actually, we look at things in very different ways. I’ve been taking pictures with the same camera for about 15 years, and I like the idea that all the photographs I’ve taken (maybe tens of thousands) have all been passed through the same lens, that however different or dissimilar they seem they all have that in common. But the way we look at someone’s face is different to the way we look at, say, a painting, which in turn seems different to the kind of looking we perform when staring out the window of a train or going to the cinema or keeping one eye on the traffic while we’re driving. I’m interested in these differences, especially when it comes to some idea of attention or attentiveness: what does it mean to pay very close attention to something, is that even possible, what exactly do we think we’re doing when we are “paying attention”, what do we think (or hope) will be revealed, etc. – these are all questions I think about, or questions I can’t seem to shake. It’s possible that writing – trying to be exact with words – helps you to feel you’re making progress, describing things as best you can. But language often fails at being accurate (if accuracy is even the aim), so I’m also interested in the things that writing can and can’t pull off.

How do you think that has progressed from your debut A Few Interiors to this collection? To paraphrase James Wood do you think you’re becoming a more ‘serious noticer’?

The poems in A Few Interiors are often about glitches, errors and making mistakes – seeing something incorrectly, optical illusions, misjudgements and missed connections – and they seem to enjoy exploiting or indulging in these moments. Rather than fixating on things going wrong, I wonder if the new poems are interested in something like the opposite, responding to misapprehension with attempts at focus or consideration – a kind of repair? I often worry about being forgetful and having a bad memory; sometimes I catch myself trying to pay ‘more’ attention to something as a way of making sure I won’t forget it, really straining to remember. This always strikes me (retrospectively) as a strange and pointless thing to do, as I still feel like I don’t remember things that well and don’t have any way of knowing if these attempts are having any impact: if you forget it, you forget it. I like that James Wood phrase. He writes mostly about fiction, but ‘serious noticing’ seems a good way to start thinking about poetry’s relationship to things like memory and attention, too.

I love the painting on the cover. You’ve spoken about your interest in visual art. Reading this collection, I thought a lot about Henri Cartier Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ and the notion of capturing the present, and how different art forms attempt to ‘outlive’ themselves. What do you think unites poetry and the visual arts?

I love the painting on the cover, too. It’s called Flight or Freeze and was painted by a friend of mine, the artist Mariota Spens. I wrote an essay about it for the Carcanet blog, which I won’t rehash here, but I think a lot of what I find of value about painting and the visual arts is present in that picture: ideas of stillness and motion, ‘reality’ vs. ‘unreality’, and Art’s version of Nature, which is exactly the same, except in all the ways it’s different. I’m glad the poems seem to be about the present/‘decisive’ moment; I’ve always found photography analogous to writing poems (in some ways at least), particularly that idea you mention of the present making it into the future, outliving itself – Jorie Graham’s poems seem to know this to the point of managing to do it backwards, seeming almost from the future. The question of poetry’s relationship with the visual arts is a big one, which I won’t try to answer, though I do find it helpful to think about their shared attempts at keeping or preserving something, making it last a little longer. I often think this when I see an actual bird or animal appearing in a film, accidentally caught up in an artwork they don’t know is being made; it’s like they immediately become the most ‘real’ thing in the movie, revealing everything else to be fake.

On the other hand, then, do you think there is anything that poetry is able to do that visual art isn’t?

I’m not sure about that, but I find the dialogue between them useful. I find myself drawn to poems and poets who find themselves drawn to works of art, whether trying to describe or recreate them in language (which isn’t really possible) or simply using them as touchstones, launchpads or analogies. It’s curious to me that a few poets I really admire – James Schuyler, John Ashbery – made a living writing about visual art. In fact, some of their writing I like best is their respective art criticism, which seems like an extension of the poetry. I wonder if writing about art in prose, which I sometimes try to do myself, helps to develop a descriptive muscle, like drawing or sketching, a practice you can then make use of somewhere else. I’m reminded of the painter Fairfield Porter – a close friend of Schuyler’s – who said ‘The best criticism is simply the best description.’ One thing poetry might be good at is describing things.

There are several moments in these poems where the images enter the realm of pop culture, the internet, video games, virtual reality. Reading lines like: ‘I delete myself, returning to a previous save point’ – I couldn’t help but think of some of Luke Kennard’s work. You worked with him on your PhD at Birmingham – how has your time there shaped your writing?

I really admire Luke’s writing (and productivity), especially his collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie. That title always makes me think of the end of The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s boat crashes into the sky, the edge of his TV show life. Another connection between literature and visual art might be the creation of artificial worlds, some of which seem oddly real but where the rules, on closer inspection, turn out to work a little differently. I’ve just been trying to write about William Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective, which is a good example. But I suppose I’m interested in virtual reality and video games for the same reason, the way a painting or a film invites you to participate in a world that’s similar/different to your own. I was recently speaking to Luke about the Looney Tunes character Roadrunner, who manages to run straight through the 2D tunnels painted on canyon walls by Wile E. Coyote. This happens in Nintendo’s Super Mario 64, as well, which I played as a kid, where you enter the game’s different levels by making Mario jump into paintings. My PhD project wasn’t exactly about this – I was writing about poetry and the present moment, by way of D. H. Lawrence – but I expect it’s all related somehow.

Talk to me about the title, Near-Life Experience. It’s perfect. Do you remember when that came to you? Was it the title of the poem first or did it emerge in response to the collection as a whole?

I have my editor, John McAuliffe, to thank for the title: the collection originally had a different name, more to do with time, which never seemed quite right to me. John suggested that the poems felt more connected by some idea of working out how we relate to our experience, how we fit in, which I agree with. Both of my books are named after a poem that already existed in the collection: this seems easier (and maybe truer?) to me than trying to come up with a clever title linking everything together.   

There are some great standalone lines in this collection. I won’t list them all, but there are moments in ‘The Sure Season’, ‘Eight Studies of a Hand’ and ‘Double Vision at the Sink’ that really stand out. Is there a poet that you often find yourself returning to for individual lines more than most?

I’m glad you think so – thank you. I’ve never really thought about that question of individual lines before. A persistent piece of evidence I cite as proof of my bad memory is that I’ve always found it difficult to memorise lines of poetry, including my own. But I am drawn back to certain poets – more as a way of refreshing or re-setting myself, I think, putting petrol in the tank. A lot of these are American, and possibly the usual suspects (Stevens, Bishop, Ashbery, Graham), though I’ve been reading Douglas Crase and Jana Prikryl pretty often in the last few years, and Schuyler, of course, who just had his centenary.

You’ve mentioned ‘memory’ a few times now. Poetry is unique in its relationship to memory in the sense that you can own a poem in its entirety by memorising it – there is no buffer between the poem and your memory of it, which differs from when you recall a painting or a novel, for example. But your poems – and some of the influences you’ve mentioned – don’t strike me as the kind of form-heavy poems that we might conventionally consider memorisable. They are often long, complex, their sound-play is oblique rather than neat.  You say you find it difficult to memorise poetry. Are there different ways for poems to exist in our memories? 

The first thing that comes to mind is a question of trust. That our memories so often turn out to be unreliable certainly complicates matters. The idea that some poems can be owned or memorised without a buffer is reassuring to me, so long as you feel sure you haven’t slipped up without realising – though that phrase “without realising” may be part of the problem. Poetry has form as a tool, here, a way of patterning language and experience, shaping it to something graspable. My own poems don’t always adopt obvious or familiar formal arrangements, I guess, but they do try to arrange like images and observations – a system of a different kind. Something I’ve thought before is that reading poetry sometimes feels like passing through a landscape or terrain, like moving through a country that you have a vague sense of already. You recognise the odd rock formation or hillside with a feeling of familiarity, even if those things seem to have changed since you were here before. I often think this when I read John Ashbery, who seems supremely un-memorisable to me. There’s something almost topographical about his poems, especially the longer works – you have a sense, when you read the poems, that you’ve been here already, though it all seems new and fresh again. This is something about poetry I find interesting, a tension between the linear, forward momentum of a given poem and the cyclicality of starting over. It’s like the poem is suspended, somehow, in present tense, always happening ‘Now’, which brings us back to photography.

Final question, we like to ask our interviewees what they have enjoyed reading / watching / listening to recently? I don’t suppose you’ve caught the new Planet of the Apes (2024) yet?

I haven’t seen any of those new Planet of the Apes films, actually – though the original I remember watching quite a few times as a teenager. I just saw Alice Rohrwacher’s film La Chimera, which I thought was excellent (not least because I’m interested in archaeology, which is like memory, too) – I’d like to see her other films. At the moment, my reading is largely determined by what I’m writing on. I’ve just finished essays on the poetry of Graham Foust and Oli Hazzard, so I’ve been reading them a lot. Now I’m spending time with Lavinia Greenlaw’s Selected Poems and Bernadette Mayer’s fantastic Memory and (for fun?) I’m working through a book of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which I’m finding curious – he seems interested in setting individuals in contexts that don’t quite suit or match their way of thinking and then seeing what happens to them, like a kind of experiment. As for listening, I recently went to hear Adrianne Lenker play in Copenhagen, which was very beautiful, and I’ve been enjoying a Neil Young album (Carnegie Hall 1970) where he keeps stopping to tell the audience they’re clapping out of time.
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Rowland Bagnall is a poet and writer based in Oxford. A Few Interiors, his first collection, was published by Carcanet Press in 2019. His poems, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and Los Angeles Review of Books.