Between February 2024 and March 2025, the poet Peter Sirr (PS) and I (COR) engaged in a series of written interviews about Peter’s work. The conversation below is centred on his 2023 collection, The Swerve.
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COR: In ʽThe Gleaners Walk Towards Where the Sunlight Isʼ, you hold a number of comradely “conversations” with Buson, the eighteenth-century Japanese poet and haibun artist. Itʼs striking how totally and evocatively your two worlds blend together in this series. Buson buys scallions in the market, and you find yourself reaching for a recipe youʼve long kept pocketed in your mind; a repairman shuffles across Busonʼs roof, and in your writerʼs room you hear his steps (“Does he know how much I relish the disturbance?”). How did you settle on the hybrid form here, mixing quotations with your own responses? Thereʼs a brilliant immediacy throughout.
PS: It all started with reading Buson’s ‘Eighty-Seven Hokku’ in an anthology of Japanese poetry, From the Country of Eight Islands, and being very taken with the voice, and then wanting to have an imaginary conversation with Buson, to enter his world but also incorporate it into my own. For me poetry is always at some level a conversation, and sometimes, as here, there are very specific addressees. What I appreciated about Buson was the evocative but also sometimes surreal precision of the images and I wanted to incorporate some of those into my responses. It’s a forensic kind of seeing, even when it seems throwaway or casual. Things like ‘A butterfly settles on the neckplate of a warrior in ambush’ or ‘The gleaners walk towards where the sunlight is’ or that last one, ‘I buy scallions and go home through leafless trees.’ Each of his hokku is presented in the anthology as a single line, and that was definitely part of the formal inspiration, the desire to take some of those lines and run with them.
COR: Iʼve not read anything quite like the title-poem in this book. With its trailing lines and descriptive authenticity, it recalls Elizabeth Bishopʼs ʽThe Mooseʼ; but thereʼs also an emotional intimacy to it that feels distinctive, as well as a cinematic quality to the way it draws together such a wide scattering of childhood memories into a single sequence and story. It is, in its way, a deeply drawn love poem. Was it difficult to write (formally or in any other way)?
PS: I wrote it very quickly, in one big burst, and after that revised it a little, but really very little, chopping a few lines out. A lot of things just came together, the memory of the primary occasion of the visit to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Day when my father was sick and my mother wasn’t that long driving, skidding on the road, and then remembering all the summers my sister and I spent on that farm, how vivid it seemed to us – the people, the landscape, the animals. The postman eating his dinner in the kitchen and relaying all the news. My uncle cursing the church and all its doings. It seemed important that it should be a headlong rush, a single extended sentence, an attempt to get everything in. That was the formal challenge, but again it developed naturally rather than being planned in advance. You’re right about it being a kind of love poem, rooted in memory – love for parents and relations who aren’t here any longer, for a place that meant a lot, a way of life. So it was a kind of hymn to vanished people and things.
COR: You once said, in an interview in 2005, that “the poetʼs only responsibility is to produce the best poetry he or she can, and to follow the drift of their own sensibility. Poetry is necessarily a social art in that it is a communication with others, but this doesnʼt mean the poet has social obligations to any particular group.” Do you still hold this view, or would you qualify it today? While of course I agree that poets shouldnʼt be compelled to write according to a prescribed political programme, I wonder if we end up in risky territory when we remove ethical considerations or communal concerns from the creative process. In this collection, poems likeʽStepsʼ or ʽSaltʼ seem to me responsible in the sense that they are actively cognizant of the inhumanities of history; I value them, and return to them, because of the compassion they shelter and the painful realities they face.
PS: I know we dealt with this in some of our earlier discussions so I won’t labour it too much here, but my position hasn’t changed that much in that I’ve never believed a poet is obliged to do anything or answer to any particular group. Apart from anything, that would be extraordinarily vain – poets who think large numbers of people care about what they write flatter themselves. Not even small amounts of people read poetry – we’re talking about a couple of dozen in any country. Poets’ only obligations are to themselves, to their own impulses and imaginations, and they may very well choose not to deal with the contemporary political scene or with the big moral and ethical questions of the day. I didn’t write ‘Steps’ or ‘Salt’ because I felt it was my duty to write them, they came naturally out of the anger and frustration I was feeling at the time about senseless killing and vicious wars. And part of me feels I have no business writing about something I have no direct experience of, that it’s delusional to be writing about Ukraine or Gaza in the comfort of your own little bubble. But sometimes you just write something because you feel it at the time, and you shouldn’t resist that impulse either. You hope that your imagination is open to the whole spectrum of human experience, you hope not to be confined by your own limited experiences. I can’t help noticing, of course, that many poets address themselves somewhat programmatically to particular issues contemporary or historical, but for me it always seems willed and forced. The job is more complicated than that – you need to dig a bit deeper. Indignation or even empathy are not enough, they have to hitch a ride on the deeper impulses and insights that go into the making of a poem.
COR: When you made the remarks I quoted above, you were referring to Pessoa, the Portugese poet who contained multitudes, inventing numerous imaginary personas and writing under their names. You translate a poem of his here, ʽA Birth in Winterʼ, and I know youʼve long held him in high regard (he appears in multiple guises in Bring Everything). Can we expect more translations of – or “conversations” with – Pessoa in future? What is it about him that fascinates you?
PS: I’ve been reading Pessoa practically for as long as I’ve been writing. Or, I should say, I’ve been reading Alberto de Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares and the multiple other heteronymns that Pessoa created. That’s his own term, and their creation is one of the great poetic achievements. It all started with Alberto Caeiro – Pessoa has described how on a specific date, the 8th of March 1914, he took out a sheet of paper and wrote thirty-six poems of ‘The Keeper of Sheep’ in a single go, “in a kind of ecstasy”. This was, he said, the triumphal day of his life, the great breakthrough that spawned the others, these poets who formed a distinct community, wrote about each other, were different from each other. Ricardo Reis the monarchist pagan formalist; Álvaro de Campos, the engineering graduate and freewheeling Whitmanesque manic depressive.
I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
That’s Richard Zenith’s translation of ‘The Tobacco Shop’. And Caeiro himself the keeper of thought sheep who said he had no philosophy, just senses. The first thing for me, the first excitement, was that subdivision of the unitary self into these somehow more than fictional characters. It offered a much richer horizon than the emphasis on personal experience and confessionalism that seem to drive so much contemporary poetry. “To pretend is to know oneself,” Pessoa said, and his whole life was spent in a trance of pretence. Self-extinction and self-creation were the two parallel drives which impelled him, as they did the heteronyms. For Pessoa, in fact self-extinction and self-creation were one and the same thing. He created his first heteronym at the age of six, the Chevalier de Pas, “from whom I wrote letters to myself”.
You mention that translation, and there have been others. ‘Lines for Álvaro de Campos’ was in Bring Everything, which is most extended poem I’ve written that engages with Pessoa, and I’ve also written about him. Pessoa pursues the levels of lyric poetry up a ladder of increasing depersonalisation and multiplicity and I suppose I’m fascinated by that journey.
COR: Have you seen Alice Rohrwacherʼs film, La Chimera (about a band of grave-robbers marauding the Italian countryside for buried Etruscan treasure)? I wonder if you could respond to this remark she gave in an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year: “Archaeology teaches us that civilizations die, that capitalism will one day end up in a museum, that my life doesnʼt belong to me but is part of a stratification that will continue when I'm no longer around.... I actually find that quite a comforting thought.” When I read this, I was reminded of your poem, ʽHistoryʼ, and of the archaeological sense of time and memory that suffuses your work in general: “History // bristles under the touch, the pages fly up, / the cities sink farther down.” Her film also has echoes of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which we spoke about in our previous exchange.
PS: Everybody in this house saw La Chimera and was greatly taken with it. I think it’s a masterpiece, brilliant performances – I thought Josh O’Connor was outstanding – and riveting cinematography. There were so many elements to it: the impoverishment of the present, that pillaging of the past, together with the sense that it’s always within reach and we’re still very much involved with it. Also the music and the folkloric feel of the bandits, the songs and the ghosts. It’s very engaging as well as disturbing. I’ve seen it a couple of times now and will be going back to it again soon. Like a book or a poem you keep re-reading. Alice Rohrmacher’s remark is entirely accurate, we’re all bound for the museum of the head-scratching future, our lives, objects and desires available to be marvelled at and puzzled over. That’s either comforting or distressing. I have no problem with the notion – we have no special privileges or exemptions, our present is a tiny speck in time, and not just capitalism but all political systems and castes, we’re all Etruscans on the way to our caves. And maybe poetry is a bit like this too, a kind of continual excavation, graverobbing, a pursuit of ourselves in images from the past. ‘History’ as you say very much plays with those notions and wanders from the present back to the pyramids, hitching a ride with the neighbour’s cat.